Even if we manage to address climate change in time, I worry we’ve already missed the boat for addressing the accompanying ecological collapse that seems to be rapidly accelerating.
"The sharpest decrease occurred between 2006 and 2015, with roughly 25 percent fewer species spotted"
This short time scale doesn't seem to fit with climate change being the cause (assuming that the decrease is actually real at all, not an observational artifact).
Yup, but I'll bet a significant sum it corresponds with tonnage of neonicotinoid and other pesticide production (application).
This is truly a problem that free markets will never handle, by design
The market is great at identifying the utility of aggressive pesticides. Need found, production started, pricing, & distribution - insect crop damage 'solved' (for some values of 'solved').
Discovering that this 'solution' actually breaks the food web will also be 'solved' by the free market, as the last remaining produce that requires those pollinators spike from $/bushel to $/gram levels.
But, that will fail to create more production when pollinators are extinct, and even if they could be ressurrected from DNA libraries, the poisons are still spread.
Oh, and all the customers also died
Yes, regulation is massively inconvenient, and apparently inefficient, and one can always find egregious bad examples. But intelligent regulation is necessary for our survival.
Yes, some change in pesticide use would fit better with the time scale.
But supposing that's the source of the problem, I don't understand your focus on capitalism. In any economic system, some people are going to be trying to increase the efficiency of food production (if not, they'll all eventually starve to death). In doing so, they are going to be responding to incentives of making money, or of getting a promotion after fulfilling the goals of the five-year plan, or simply of having the inner feeling of having done a good job. I don't see why only the "making money" incentive is problematic. And indeed, the former Soviet block was notorious for terrible environmental problems.
Good question, thx. It is the balance that I'm focusing on.
Completely agree that over-regulation, e.g., soviet-style, is a recipe for many of the WORST environmental disasters.
Corporate regulatory capture or elimination of regulation is just crashing the scale in the other direction.
Since the current problem in most of the world is lack of constraints on production of, for example, things that serve some purpose but also break the food web, that's my focus.
Basically, it seems that, whenever people get enough good information, and have good democratic (small-d) control of the system, they find a balance to encourage and regulate development. No one wants to live in a wasteland.
But if too few control things, such as an authoritarian state, or corporatists doing regulatory capture, they have the illusion that they can destroy all they want, externalize the damage, and enjoy life in their palaces. For centurys, it was true. Now, we seem to be approaching the point where the whole food web may break.
As soon as the "ecological collapse" stops, extensive speciation will occur. Nature always wins. There's a lot to be hopeful about even when it seems like there might not be.
