“The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”

Utah Phillips

The deaths from climate change related Ice storms, floods, fires, heat waves and droughts are not due to "catastrophes", or "disasters" they are calculated, premeditated murders for profit.

Hunting billionaires for sport would make the world immeasurably better in every way

Class conflict is a problem for much of human existence.

Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

I think of giant monsters. Kaiju.

A normal ant is no problem. An ant the size of a skyscraper is a problem.

Money is the size here. A human with a billion dollars is a giant monster kaiju.

It ain't the species it's the size.

"most"?

Try "all". Everything always eventually comes down to someone, somewhere, trying to make more profit for themselves.

That's why "Follow the money" is the surest way to solve any crime.

We need a maximum wage

They are the symptoms, not the disease. Capitalism will always create them on a long enough timeline. It is streamlined feudalism.

If you have any type of head start under capitalism, for any reason, regardless if everyone profits, those who initially profited a little more will profit exponentially more at an exponential rate as time goes by.

The claim is that under capitalism, everybody is better off. But if they earn 1.1 times as much as you do, as the years turn into decades into centuries, you will have earned a fraction of what they did. That difference matters a lot, especially at scale.

If I get $1 and you get $100, that's a big difference between us, but not life changing for either.

If I get $1000 and you get $100000, that is a massive difference between us, trivial for me, definitely significant for you.

If I have $100000 and you have $10000000, we might as well live on different planets.

Capitalism doesn't take this into consideration. Sorry for the somewhat juvenile example, I'm very tired, and am going to have another drink now.

"the only minority group destroying our country are billionaires" as the bumper sticker on my therapists's car says... love her

Exactly. These creatures ARE our only real problem. More-less everything else, we could solve if they just...

...stopped being alive.

They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.

BINGO, SUMMED-UP The World on Capitalism!

Money. We need a new system of commerce. The quest for even more money is the longest problem we refuse to look at in human history. Excessive greed should be punished not aspired to. All we seem to do is turn to rich people for answers like they've figured out the world, when in fact they ignore the world and supplant a system called "the economy" over actual reality. We make goods and send them there to buy back their goods from over there to make people in the middle rich for doing nothing. Completely ignoring health, safety, the environment in the process, things that are real in the real world that we all experience and affect us. Make it make sense to me.

Oh dont worry, the earth will still spin. Life will go on.

Humans are fucking this up for themselves and wont be missed. [Beep boop, im not a robot]

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”

One could argue that the currency system itself legitimizes the amassing of enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny minority.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

One of the most carbon intensive things someone can do, especially in the developed world, is to have a kid.

If money was more equally distributed more people would have more kids.

So really the billionaires are helping with climate change.

/s

It is a little weird that this had never occurred to you until it popped into your head during a shower, but better late than never!

Yes. We're well aware.

On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We're in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There's some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we've become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It's not just billionaires, it's all of us.

Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they're not the ones releasing the gases. We can't just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We've reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.

Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we'd still have the climate change problem to tackle.

The love of money is the root of all evil

If money didn't exist there would still be a small group of people vying for power and the belief that they should rule over the rest or us. Money just made it easier.

don't underestimate the misery caused by idiopathic disease.

Sharing is caring

Or more to the point; money is the problem. Currencies are useful tokens that make trade more convenient. But systems have been built around the simple concept of a trade token that a person can have power over others by just having a bigger number.

But it's just a number. Most of the time a number that doesn't even represent anything real or physical. Just a number of a hypothetical thing(s) that has a certain hypothetical value because someone said so.

It is a bit more complicated than that

Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don't think it's realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn't renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That's been the story ever since. It's a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don't worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn't made with fossil fuels somehow. And it's too late now. We can't go back. We can't all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can't survive without fossil fuels.

tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.

Nah b....most of the misery in the world comes from people refusing to work on themselves.

If more of us owned our flaws and pushed to be better, we’d lift up ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities along with us.

Edit: just ask yourself, "are you the most optimal version of yourself."