What kills me is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. The longer they fight against change, the more people they will convince that capitalism itself is the problem.

↑ This, but without the /s.

In particular, we need to protect the free market by creating a carbon tax to compensate for fossil fuels' negative externalities and level the playing field for "greener" competitors.

Not taxing carbon is anti-capitalist protectionism.

That's a pretty shallow take on historic economics.

Capitalism had a role to serve as the transition out of feudal economics.

Now it's time to do better.

regulation falls off the wayside and leads into corruption

And vice versa! Corruption leads to lack of regulation. It's a shit circular dance that I feel like we're doomed to repeat regardless of the economic system we pick.

Make it and crosspost!

The problem is externalities. Companies have to be held responsible for their damage.

If governments held companies liable for the full cost of fixing their damage to humanity and earth I honestly don't know how many would be left.

Is there a c/toiletpaperusa?

They're yet another cancer on society...

The mothers days day after I had a baby, they sent me a book in the mail about a boy and a dog (I think the dogs name was Otto) celebrating mothers. It was weird but historically accurate. They said that one of the founding fathers mother was a good mother because she taught the founding fathers the bible. Im not sure what to do with the book... Donate it?

There are several ideas out there, but yes they generally require transitioning away from capitalism. The one I'm particularly fond of is called a "library economy", where we no longer commoditize anything that isn't consumable. Imagine instead of buying a wheelbarrow and shovel to do some yard work, you go to the gardening library and checkout the things you need. When you're done in about 3 weeks, you return the items back to the library.

In general though, any planned economy would be far more efficient and less wasteful. Imagine that instead of 30 different TV's with the exact same panel, there's 2 or 3 types of tv with that panel. The way Walmart operates is a perfect example of a planned economy.

Any system that has some growth built into it will eventually cause problems, it's just that some of them, like capitalism, are very efficient at getting us to these points faster. The best system for the climate was discarded long ago, as we moved out of the hunter-gather phase and discovered techniques in maximizing our energy into other things besides just surviving. Agriculture and all that it allowed were the first steps into taxing the earth's balance.