The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Capitalistic Greed That Fuels the Climate Crisis
Dear Diary. I like well written essays that present logical arguments because they make people think…really think about aspects of our world and how to improve it. The one I came across today entertains the idea that capitalism itself is exacerbating if not causing the climate crisis. It’s true that the capitalism model spurs society to greedily acquire more manufactured stuff, with that hunger ever growing stronger. Each manufacture good requires energy to make and transport, which puts more carbon in the air. Unfortunately, the world has moved on from true socialism, which would let people rationally pull back on wanting to acquire excess stuff.
I’m not a communist because I think that private capitalism along with government intervention is the best bet to fight for a stable climate. But large segments of the private sector, mainly coming from fossil fuel interests, is fighting against the green transition tooth and nail, which gives me pause.
George Tsakraklides has written a good essay that has persuaded me to come out more against laissez-faire capitalism. Here is that essay:
Replacement Economics: The Scam That Saved Capitalism
9/06/2025
Time is never kind to someone who can only pretend to save themselves. As humans continue to throw smoke and mirrors at the fireball of overshoot, all they can expect back is extinction.
If there was ever a chance of keeping this planet habitable it wouldn’t be through renewables, but through tackling the worst type of carbon emission there is: economic growth. The only thing renewables have managed to renew is capitalism itself: triggering growth in every carbon-intensive industry under the sun, while failing to even keep up with energy demand. In fact, were they to be deployed at the scale required to power 8 billion energy-hungry humans and their voracious AI data centres, renewables would decimate whatever is left of climate and environment. Like all technologies, renewables came at a monumental carbon and environmental cost simply for their manufacture alone. Scaling up renewables can only aggravate our existential dead end in much the same way that adding more lanes to a highway worsens traffic congestion in the long term: rather than questioning the number of cars on the road and the underlying social reasons, we blame the road for not being wide enough. In a civilisation seized by technophilia, new technologies always become the go-to solution: used to replace existing problems with even bigger future ones.
Failure is the wrong word to describe the fiasco of the so-called energy transition. Renewable technologies did not fail; they were intentionally mispresented, missold, mislaunched and misused right from the beginning by people who only cared about “shifting units” and wouldn’t mind selling off their children’s future, leaving them to walk alone into the blazing sunset of a barbecued Earth. Sustainability mobsters ruined the very last chance we had to avoid extinction. But hey, at least their shareholders got rich.
The problem with capitalism is that it monetises solutions to the extent that these solutions eventually become the problems. This is especially true for technological innovations: they are always advertised as solutions, but are ultimately sold as products. But a product is not a solution: it is merely the monetisation of a promise. As with every productised technology, renewables were products that were missold as solutions: they were marketed based on aspiration instead of substance, and promises instead of deliverables, much like whitening toothpaste. They became another branded industrial consumer product: endorsed, rubber-stamped and mass-manufactured, then sold hastily in as large a number as possible before customers can wake up, find out the truth, and realise the scam. No surprises there, this is how capitalism works. Once the sale of the “solution” goes through, capitalism doesn’t care whether the solution actually delivers on its original promise. The money is already in the bank.
The fairy tale of renewables that still reigns at large has stood the test of time thanks to an industry of misinformation that rushed to cater to a desperate need for delusion: there must be a way that we can continue to grow, destroy and emit but still avoid collapse and extinction. Let’s call this “the energy transition”. The investing, mining, manufacturing and building orgy of the energy transition that followed, was the capitalism-friendly alternative to degrowth this planet desperately needed. Global energy demand was allowed to escalate out of control, as scam green investors got in on the game. By investing in renewables, we invested in a sizzling hot future.
The more renewable energy this civilisation installs, the more it fails emissions targets. Rather than manage our escalating energy use, which is the real villain in the story, we have chosen to replace fossil fuel with renewable – but not sustainable – forms of energy. There is a term I use to describe the approach followed by the energy transition. I call it Replacement Economics: the profitable practice of pretending to solve issues by replacing the technology, rather than addressing the issue. Replacement economics defers issues into the future by using new technologies that eventually unravel and compound the problems they were meant to solve. We have done this numerous times in our history, and in fact, we are doing it right now on almost every sector: from healthcare to food, energy to transportation, education to communication.
In fact, replacement economics is about replacing entire economic sectors with new ones. The “renewable revolution” was never about renewables. It was a cosmetic rebrand exercise that replaced the shamed fossil fuel industry with a greenwashed face and brand-new gadgets, but keeping the same old tricks in place: greedy tycoons, corrupt lobbyists, and a green PR misinformation machine. This renewable industrial complex arrived just in time to replace all those disappearing fossil fuel jobs and give fossil fuel lobbyists and PR professionals a new scam to latch on to. The energy transition was merely a public image transition: from a carbon-intensive industry based on fossil fuel, to a carbon-intensive industry based on renewable tech.
More examples of replacement economics follow:
Our food industry replaced fats with industrially made carbohydrates in order to market them as “low fat products”. Of course, these high-processed carbohydrates became even more addictive than fats, resulting in skyrocketing obesity. So, the food industry had chosen to replace one ingredient with another, rather than tackle obesity itself, which is about how many calories people eat, how often, and where they get these calories from, which in turn affects their glycemic index. The consequences of replacement economics in the food industry were criminally disastrous and continue to be to this day: while obesity and diabetes have killed millions already, the criminals who should be in jail are still making billions as they come up with new processed foods each week. The replacement of fats with addictive carbs can be likened to the replacement of expensive heroine with cheap crack cocaine by drug lords in the 80s: industrial carbs were cheaper, more accessible yet just as addictive as fats. Made from dirt-cheap high fructose corn syrup, they could be added to just about everything and result in astronomical profit margins for food manufacturers. This profit scheme boosted the profits of both the food industry and pharmaceutical cartels that now had millions of new customers and patients coming from an increasingly sick population. A population that THEY made sick.
Just like the failure of renewables, the health disaster of obesity and diabetes didn’t just happen. It was planned, engineered, and strategized in corporate boardrooms. If sustainability professionals had any desire to tackle emissions, they would have embraced degrowth. If the food industry had any genuine intention to help society lose weight, it would have made natural foods. But this would have hurt the entire economy: consumers would purchase less, as natural foods aren’t as addictive. Health insurers would make less money as diabetes, heart disease and obesity would significantly decline. Gyms would lose customers as people would be much fitter. Psychologists would see far fewer patients with depression.
It is easy to see that this necrocapitalist economy thrives on making us sick. The tragic irony is that the most effective solutions to our biggest social, economic and health problems are also the cheapest ones. This is precisely why capitalism disables them.
Another example of failed replacement economics mentioned earlier is transportation policy. To address an increasing number of vehicles on the road, governments across the world have historically chosen to expand highway infrastructure rather than provide incentives for people to travel less, own fewer cars, increase their use of public transportation, restructure cities and a myriad of other ways in which the real issue, our increased mobility and population, could be tackled. The famous line “one more lane will fix it” emerged to describe the common practice of adding one more lane to a highway to relieve traffic, only to find out six months down the line that the traffic situation is back to square one, or even worse: the highway has become congested, saturated, blocked to a standstill yet again. Once you open the door to growth, the flood is unstoppable.
Electric vehicles have addressed neither traffic congestion nor the climate crisis. Brand new electric vehicles enter the market already burdened by the immense carbon footprint of their manufacture. Given that they run on electricity, the production of which comes with its own huge carbon and/or environmental footprint, it is doubtful how much, if any, of their accumulated emissions they manage to “offset” during their brief lifetime on the road. Once they’re dead, their batteries become an environmental disaster. There is still no effective, ecologically viable and sustainable way of recycling these batteries – a tiny detail which “green” car manufacturers forgot to tell us when they were prompting us to save the planet by buying an electric vehicle. Let me just be clear: these so-called “green” vehicles are a threat to the planet before they come on to the market, during their operation, as well as thousands of years after their death.
But even if they had the potential to offset significant emissions, in practice they never do and never will. Consumatrons get quickly bored with them and ditch them in favour of the next most fashionable car model, even before they’ve accumulated enough road time to do any “good” for the climate. In this throw-away necrocapitalist society every product must be wasted and replaced way ahead of its natural death. The Unhappiness Machine will always push new products to consumatrons just as it forcibly removes from circulation the ones already sold. The sooner products, people and resources are terminated ahead of their natural expiration, the steeper the profits will be, the richer the oligarchs will get, and the weaker our democracy will become. Elon’s Swasticars did not become fascist overnight. They were all along part of a system which breeds fascism and green fairy tales so it can boost its profits and keep fattening the oligarchs.
The “clean industries” which Green New Deal investors have fabricated simply do not exist. All technologies, however clean and sustainable they claim to be, have a voracious appetite for energy and resources. No industry, however new, innovative, efficient and “clean” can grow without a significant input of raw materials and a destructive output on society and the planet.
It would be foolish to believe that any new innovation could save this civilisation, given that each successive technological revolution left its own indelible scars on society and the planet. Technologies may change, but greed never does. We live in a stale paradigm of replacement economics whereby instead of radically changing how wealth is measured and allocated, each new generation simply switches the technology by which wealth is created or destroyed. The fossil fuel industry and many other industries need to end, but not through replacement economics. In the 80s the food industry lied to us, replacing fat with sugar rather than advise us to eat better. In the 2020s, the renewables industry replaced fossil fuel with Tesla cars, rather than telling us to drive less. No technology, however magical, can ever fix the dirtiest industry on the planet: greed.
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Listen to my interview for the brilliant Post Growth Australia, a podcast I highly recommend. The interviewers have really taken the implications of my book Beyond The Petri Dish to another level
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Saturday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
It is so exciting that you finally seen the light by publishing replacement economics. I’ve believed exactly the same that this Green Revolution is a hoax to enrichen the rich. And all those climate scientists who promote the Green Revolution via cutting down trees to produce their tones are part of the green industrial complex. I thought you the same but now it looks like you found a glimmer of light and will stop promoting the BS of more green products. Spread the word. And thank you again for finally having a thoughtful look at reality of good change which is using less.