I always have a problem when people blame "capitalism" for our dire global predicament. Because "capitalism" is not an "ism" at all, actually. It is just what tends to happen naturally after money is invented as an abstract, zero-sum medium of exchange for commodities.

Think of a game of monopoly: a perfect illustration of the zero-sum logic of money as arithmetic. Everyone starts out with the same allotment of cash, but as the game goes on, those who are clever enough to control the most money and property thereby gain the economic clout to buy that much more property. In the end--inevitably--one player owns everything and the rest own nothing at all, and are in debt to the winner for their houses and hotels. Then the game is over--the system collapses. But none of this happens because of ideology, or the inherent greed of the bad guys. It happens because of the two intrinsic rules of the game: (1) More is always better; (2) What's mine is not yours. Since these two rules seem to serve the immediate self-interest of all players, the game goes on, inexorably concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

What has this to do with the climate crisis? Very simply this: money is a transform of available net energy, and by far the largest source of net energy that is readily available is fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas. We may want to build a whole new infrastructure based on wind and solar power, but you cannot build a windmill with wind power, nor can you build a solar array with solar power. Both such infrastructures would need a huge influx of energy for the manufacturing process, and the only available net energy to do the job is...fossil fuels. And as we all know now, fossil fuels are killing the Earth--now--at an accelerating rate. So our predicament is not due to "capitalism" (whatever THAT is); it is due to the incompatibility of the intrinsic maximizing logic of the money game ("More is always better") on a finite, optimizing biological support system, the living Earth, where Enough is always Enough, and too much or too little of any value is toxic to the system.