so so so many ecological problems of industrial civilization are literally just a matter of energy costs under capitalism, i'm not joking

not all of it, to be sure, but a lot, and a large chunk of the other stuff can be easily mitigated were it not for capitalism

a variety of problems that can be dealt with easily, from a technological perspective, but not from a capitalist economic perspective:

- plastics being mostly un recycled and dumped into trash heaps or the oceans

- deforestation for trees, lumber, cattle grazing

...

...

- top soil destruction due to bad farming practices

- aridification

- suburban sprawl

- global warming

- unchecked, massively damaging wild fires

- drinking water scarcity

every single one of these can be prevented or mitigated with cheap/free electrical power, but within capitalism, there are no incentives to make energy cost nothing, nor is there a good way to structure the economics for that to happen

but let's look at precisely why each of these can be dealt with, shall we?

it requires that you be willing to imagine for a second that electricity is essentially free, and that more importantly, that we can actually build solutions rather than give up out of despair

so:

Problem: plastics are mostly unrecycled and dumped into trash or the oceans

Cause: recycling plastics is quite expensive and isn't very profitable. in fact, it's a net cost, usually requiring government subsidization. it takes lots of time and energy, and thus money

but if energy were essentially free, we could apply known technology to use high power microwave plastic de-polymerization and reduce the plastic to simpler constituent hydrocarbons

that would produce raw stock for re-synthesizing arbitrary plastics

Problem: deforestation for lumber, and other consumptive uses

Cause: tree farming is effort, it requires labor and equipment and time, so when companies cut down new forests instead of farming trees, it's a matter of profit maximization

no capitalism, no motive for this at all

Problem: deforestation for cattle and farming (this is the bigger problem, bc lots of tree farming does happen already actually)

Cause: cattle grazing and farming require space and sunlight for the plants to grow, but land is finite

we can fix this by building up

vertical use of space via vertical farms and vertical ranches can dramatically multiply the amount of surface area available

it requires labor and effort and energy to make vertical farms and ranches work but lots of stuff can be automated and already is anyway

Problem: topsoil destruction due to bad farming practices

Causes: good soil management practices require time and effort and thus money, and so capitalist profit motive biases towards bad practices

without a profit motive there's no reason to continue it

additionally, if for some reason we decide that we need to optimize other things too and get back into that mode, we just can stop farming on soil and go vertical so it doesn't matter what the plant beds are like because it doesn't affect topsoil

Problem: aridification

Cause: deforestation and bad topsoil management

we solve those two problems and we stop the aridification they cause, done.

Problem: global warming

Causes: many, but the dominant ones are co2 and methane, capture or prevention is costly

major sources of co2 are cars and energy production, so cheap green energy would eliminate that. the methane mostly comes from cattle and decomposing trash which...

..can be captured if we didn't have to worry about cost of building the relevant capture infra, or for the case of cattle, vertical ranching makes capture trivial because it's in buildings

Problem: unchecked, massively damaging wild fires

Causes: global warming, monetary cost of doing forest management and fire prevention

we can fix this this problem by stopping global warming and by no longer needing to worry about money bullshit assuming capitalism is gone

Problem: drinking water scarcity

Causes: significant consumption of finite fresh water sources

this is trivial to solve with desalination but it costs money to build and run desal facilities. osmotic desalination is labor intensive in various ways, while distillation is...

...energy intensive. essentially free electricity makes distillation trivial, and no longer worrying about labor costs makes osmotic desal more feasible. either way the facility costs also vanish and we can just build more purification facilities as we need to

Problem: suburbs

Causes: many (esp racism)

this can't be SOLVED by abolishing capitalism, but it has myriad consequences, many previously mentioned ones (co2 from cars, damaging fire due to their proximity to suburbs, etc)

and these can all be mitigated as previously mentioned

additionally this thread doesn't discuss other solutions like dietary changes (reduction of beef consumption), or intentional deconstruction of suburbs in favor of urban living, etc, mostly because those are less easily tied to capitalism itself