What you've done here is called a fully-general counterargument. You should be suspicious of these!

If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right?

But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.

What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law. The entire history of regulation and international treaties consists of mechanisms that override local incentive gradients. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they work.

"The system itself is a tight feedback loop" treats the system as fixed rather than something humans have repeatedly modified. The question is whether we'll add the right feedback loops fast enough, not whether adding them is metaphysically impossible.

My original point stands: the bottleneck on MCB isn't that capital won't fund it. It's that the Alameda city council didn't know a field test was happening on their waterfront and NIMBY ... people ... made noise. Governance failure, not capitalism failure.

▲

bayarearefugee 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked.

None of these were done via capitalism, they were done in opposition to it.

And I know you weren't claiming they were, but the problem is all the power centers behind global capitalism have captured government (at least in the US) completely and are doing everything in their power to strip existing regulations and make sure the only new ones aren't in the name of the common good, but only to build moats for themselves.

It is great that we solved these problems in the past, but we are increasingly not doing that sort of thing at all anymore.

▲

akramachamarei 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's also worth distinguishing uncoordinated markets from ungoverned markets. Markets exhibit vast and sophisticated organic coordination without state prodding. I don't just mean to pick at this word "uncoordinated" but more deeply at the particular issue of near- or far-sightedness. Has it actually been established that organic economic coordination does worse at protecting "the future" than some particular alternatives?

▲

filoeleven 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The government is failing to control the problem because it got bought out by the capitalists who run the companies that continue to cause the damage. The law in the US explicitly allows this, though it's "decent" enough to hide it in a paper bag.

It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism gets off scot-free.

	▲	globalnode an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People will have to vote for non-captured candidates (good luck finding them) or protest in large enough numbers that the system will change. Those people will also have to be critical thinkers to a degree that they can consciously push back against the wall of marketing and propaganda pumped out by those in power with money. And they will have to self educate since governments generally don't teach people these skills while they have them in school for 12 or more years. From my point of view the future looks pretty grim but I'm certainly hoping to be surprised or corrected!