These authors neither understand capitalism or the nature of the environmental crisis. This is most evident when they talk about corporate responsibility, with complete disregard to both the actual written laws which prevent corporations doing anything other than maximising profits, or else the CEO is liable to be sued by shareholders, and the natural systemic laws of capitalism which drive institutions to extract and expropriate at the fastest possible rate, and when this rate is too low in one country, to relocate to the country which has relaxed all regulation and can provide the highest growth rate via gross extraction of natural resources and exploitation of people.
Capital must grow exponentially or perish, so if they're not extracting resources and expropriating labour faster than it can be replenished, it needs the state to create new capital to sell out of formerly commonly owned natural or man made assetts, in order to meet the 7% growth rate (roughly the fixed growth rate of bonds), which equates to 100% in 10 years, and 3200% in 50 years.
Capital needs to grow, so if the entire economy isn't growing fast enough for capital, it starts sucking up more from the fixed pie of capital/resources, and starts to consume the megre amounts of capital owned by the middle class and lower class. That's what's happening in the US because the overall economic growth rate is so low, yet the growth rate of capital must remain high or companies collapse and cannibalise themselves.All this despite the government's effort to borrow 1.5 trillion to stave off the hunger pains of the beast.
When that cash injection runs dry, the banks will consolidate capital in a stagnant economy to maintain capital growth, middle class capital is at risk. Obama could sell off as much public infrastructure as possible, but that only buys another while, the problem comes back again. The situation is unsustainable.
When natural capitalists argue for growth rates in line with natural systems, they STILL miss the point about what capitalism actually is and does, how private power is exercised in reality and how government is bought and sold by capital, with the sole purpose of increasing capital. There are so many insanely wide and gaping holes in the logic and arguments of natural capitalists. They just don't get it.
To illustrate my point, first I start by outlining the obvious perverse incentives of capital. Suppose a company had ownership/rights to a area of forest. Forests grow at close to 3% p.a. therefore the sustainable level of timber harvesting is 3%. But money in the bank grows at a minimum of 6%, and higher for financial and other capital investments, so the 'rational' thing to do under a capitalist market system is to clear cut all of the forest, and put this money in the bank where it will grow much more rapid than trees do.
This perverse incentive to trash the planet exists across the board. Economists which seek to rectify this incentive with regulations miss a few crucial 'real world' facts about capitalism.
1. Capital flight. Capital will automatically move to where it can expand the greatest, generally in those countries which do not seek to, or are incapable of regulating it's expansion. Investment becomes a race to the bottom, which country can decrease regulations the fastest.
2. The nature of private capital as private power. Wallmart has a larger GDP than Poland, and when Wallmart and the myriad of other corporate giants flex their muscles to lower the bar on regulations of capitalism, the system is entirely powerless against this level of capital.
Again it might not be in the interests of a collective corporate class to screw national regulations entirely, they have to live in that country too, however capital competes in a global setting and the race to the bottom in the race for highest profit is absolutely predetermined in the system's DNA.
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