What kind of electoralism is it, proletarian or bourgeois, idealist or materialist? Do they declare solidarity with the occupied third world, or do they sympathize with the naval gazing narcissism of the first world labor aristocracy?

The fact that Bad Faith believes "self driving cars are the future" and "we can go full clean energy without fossil fuels" tells us they're just merely woke liberals who don't know about the effects of resource extraction. How can you be a Marxist with less of an understanding of basic physics than papa Karl? It's impossible to be a materialist if you're as delusional as the Elon Musk death cult redditors

  • SpaceDog [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I'm not the OP, but here's the problem with basing your climate policy on "self-driving cars are the future" and "clean energy without fossil fuels".

    It's not that clean energy without fossil fuels is a bad idea, it's that if we are to clean up the energy system, we need to do it in a way that doesn't destroy the Earth in the process. And that requires a major change to the fundamental make-up of our society, not just changing the tech used in transport and electricity and continuing on business otherwise unchanged.

    Currently resources extraction is responsible for about 50% of global CO2 emissions, with metal mining responsible for about 20% of global emissions - even before manufacturing. Now, to electrify the car and van fleet of the UK alone, reaching the UK's electric car and van targets by 2050, would take double the current global cobalt production, almost all of global neodymium, three quarters of global lithium production, and half of global copper production (source: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/leading-scientists-set-out-resource-challenge-of-meeting-net-zer.html ) . Add on electrifying all the other countries, and you get a rise in metal extraction that would see armies blasting their way across the Earth scrapping over every last pound of metals left, and burning enough fossil fuels to turn the Earth into Venus.

    So clearly we can't focus on electric cars, because electric cars are a really inefficient way to transport people, and electrifying global car fleets would destroy everything.

    Instead what we need is a real green industrial revolution, where we decarbonize as much as possible every sector of human society as fast as we can, while growing carbon-negative industrial sectors as fast as possible to such that surplus carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as fast as possible.

    Methods to decarbonize human society include reducing the use of carbon-emitting activities such as transport, fossil fuel combustion for electricity, resource extraction, factory farming of beef, etc. We can also find carbon-neutral ways to carry these activities out. The example in the OP of electric cars are one way to decarbonize transport, but you can reduce emissions from transport much faster by switching out private cars for good quality public transport and bicycle infrastructure, while reducing the need for mass commuting in the first place. Getting people out of their petrochemically fueled cars and into petrochemically fueled buses is a very fast way to reduce the carbon footprint of their transport. But yes, we can have electric cars as PART of the solution in the mid to long term.

    Carbon-negative activities include carbon-negative building (e.g. a housing boom with carbon-negative materials like hemp-crete, bamboo and sustainable timber), carbon-negative fuels and products, biochar, regenerative agriculture and forestry. Note carbon-negative fuels in the mix - there are forms of biodiesel that can make existing cars, trucks and buses carbon negative. This works by sucking CO2 out of the air into the plant that is later used as a feedstock to make the biodiesel. A portion of the CO2 stays in the ground or is used to make biochar in the process, meaning when the diesel is burned, less is returned to the air. This means that existing diesel based vehicles can continue operating in a carbon-negative way, saving the construction of a new electric vehicle and its engine and battery.

    These carbon-negative activities can be used to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, while allowing some hard-to-change emitting processes (such as production of steel) to continue. A real green industrial revolution that brings global CO2 levels back to 280 parts per million by mid-century is within our grasp.

    But none of this stuff, neither the reduction of unnecessary consumption, transport, fossil fuel combustion, extraction, nor the ramp up of carbon-negative processes to pull the surplus CO2 out of the atmosphere, will happen if we continue with an economic system that is based on the seeking of profits by selling the surplus value created by workers. Resource extraction, fossil fuel use, and conspicuous consumption are some of the few profit-generating activities remaining for capital. The engine of capital requires the profits to keep flowing, and it requires people working to create the value from which those profits are stolen.

    Likewise, capital cannot tolerate the development of alternative carbon-neutral or carbon-negative industries that threaten its business models. So industrial hemp is still illegal in many places. Carbon-negative fuels are kept in a nascent stage of development. As fossil-fuels became increasingly difficult and costly to dig out of the ground, producers use government subsidies to keep them profitable and outcompeting the alternatives.

    Our world is dying. Capitalism is killing it. And that is why we need a global socialist revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.

    • abdul [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Is the reason we have those elemental needs because the technology requires it or because Capital requires it? Would an Authoritarian state be able to make it happen if concerns of profitability were cast aside or is it literally just not physically possible with the technology we currently have?