We shouldn’t excuse these voters as merely stupid, like they’re just innocently ignorant or uninformed. They are deliberately malevolent, and vote specifically for cruel, terrible politicians because they, themselves are cruel and terrible people and desire such representation.

And they are not just supporting cruelty. They are cheering and screaming for it. They want more.

What's the quote? "A Republican would happily eat dog shit if he thought a Democrat would have to smell his breath".

Is it really controversial to say that most environmentalists want to protect ecosystems, not destroy capitalism? No, it's not controversial, it's just wrong. Must protecting ecosystems mean a hatred for capitalism? No.

You’re taking effects (slower pipelines, fewer logging permits) and making those effects the activists’ "true" goal. In reality, many of the people campaigning for stronger environmental safeguards are business-friendly too, such as 1000s of economists (and many Nobel laureates) have backed a carbon tax because it uses market forces to cut emissions.

Calling for long-term accounting of environmental costs isn’t anti-capitalist.

That's not a motive, it's a consequence. There's a difference.

Is environmental destruction a motive of capitalism? Of course not, and it would be crazy to say that. So why say the opposite about environmentalists?

This is an irritating strawman. I never claimed that no environmentalists have socialist views, or that the movements don’t sometimes overlap in policy preferences even when their motivations for such policies are wholly different.

My point is simply that the vast majority of climate advocates are arguing for policies that conserve and preserve what we have into the future, and that demand the long-term costs of many of our current policies and practices are actually accounted for vs. kicking that externality to the future public. There is no hidden agenda to upend society.

Many of the desires practices are growth-friendly fixes: carbon pricing, deregulating solar, advanced nuclear[1], electrifying transport, ceasing public subsidies for coal and oil. They aren’t campaigning to upend capitalism itself, but to adapt our economy so we can continue to thrive without cooking the planet, destroying ecosystems, and damaging long-term health of the natural world we rely on for life, not just recreation.

Pointing to a handful of degrowth manifestos or niche graduate programs doesn’t prove that mainstream environmentalism is really a Trojan horse for anti-capitalism. If you’re looking to debate climate policy, let’s stick to the proposals most people are actually pushing—and whether they’ll work—not whether some fringe authors happen to share an ideology.

[1] Not all environmentalists support this, I'll grant, but I don't know any who don't personally

> I don't know what you love and call capitalism

Private property and competitive free markets. I just don't like where they end up. I think they need a firm hand to keep from turning into a paperclip maximizer. Maybe that's impossible, but we can't know until we really try.

It's not like other systems have a better track record on environmental protection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

Exactly. To the extent that a politico-economic system is concerned with anything other than how the capitalist class can maintain control of society through control of the means of production, it is not capitalism. Of course, platonically pure capitalism is rare, and even relatively pure capitalism is mostly a thing of the past since most of the places it was present replaced it with mixed economies in the mid-20th Century, but that's not "kinder capitalism", but simply less capitalism.