it's obvious to naomi klein and to many others that capitalism is to blame for climate change; that's why it is a very convenient problem: because it obviously makes socialism ever-more urgent. but let me ask you this: how good were stalinist russia or romania, or maoist china, on greenhouse gas emissions, or environment in general? say you socialize all industry or something and prohibit people from driving cars or cooking hot dogs. what you would be doing is turning the economy over entirely to precisely the sort of people who run the government now. do you think, for example, that they'll be less concerned with economic growth than titans of industry are now? you want to put every center of power in the same hands. that is a realistic formula only for making every aspect of the problem worse.
we do not live in a capitalist world. we live in a squishy totalitarian world in which state and capital are interlocked at every location. they are pretty much equally implicated in climate change. handing more and more power to the state does not reduce the economic pressures toward expansion, etc; it just puts everything in the hands of a sclerotic bureaucracy. say you think fracking isn't the best idea we ever had. well who is responsible for fracking up pennsylvania? private companies operating in tandem with government agencies. correct? why do you think making the state the lone fracker would improve matters?
think seriously, in general, about the nature of the 20th-century fossil-fuel economy. who developed these resources where? interlocked state/private concerns. who controlled and exploited middle east oil, for example, and who does that now? who developed the world infrastructure for the fossil fuel economy, the interstate highway system, e.g.? to recommend nationalizing or internationalizing extraction or consumption is to recommend an even more rigid, uninterruptable, world-bestriding hierarchy. this won't even ameliorate the problem it is supposedly designed to address. as to its other effects: they don't bear thinking about.
putting all resources in the hands of the state is, if history shows anything, the very formula of corruption, and if you really do want your richest people and your bureaucrats and political flaks to be exactly the same people, this is the correct formula. on the other hand, if you want to reduce the exploitation of resources, etc, it's ridiculous.
