Late Capitalism — Michael Kerbow

Commentary (for AP Seminar summer assignment):

Kerbow illustrates his view of the climate crisis as being both caused by oil companies and capitalism, and leading to similar outcomes for humanity as the Chicxulub impact. I strongly disagree with this, especially the second point. Scientific consensus is quite clear that climate change does not pose an existential risk, while capitalism itself is not the cause of climate change. The obvious testable prediction made by that view would be that non-capitalists states were/are less harmful for the climate, which is false. I do agree that oil companies are partially to blame for climate change, but these negative externalities can be addressed directly via market solutions (e.g. taxes or cap-and-trade), which are more economically efficient than state-owned industry. In fact, state-owned industry would significantly increase the harms from climate change, as governments are much worse at shutting down things than private industry, in ways that are challenging to fix while keeping both democratic control of governments and having industry still be meaningfully state controlled.