> Please clarify what exactly you mean when you say "capitalism".

Privately-owned productive instruments using a profit-based, moneyed system of distributed production (necessarily with state-based control mechanisms).

> That's an incredibly bold claim with absolutely no evidence supporting it.

Besides the planet we live on? Are you suggesting that if we do everything the same as we have been for the past 100 years, that everything will be fine? Why haven't markets started incorporating the known costs of fossil fuel usage at-scale? What about the countries made of plastic floating in the oceans? Why is the price of single-use plastics still low? Why is planned obsolescence cheaper even though the long-term shared costs are much higher?

Why are we still using an economic system where the price of something and the known cost has such an enormous differential?

> And you seem to imply that there exists some other system distinct from whatever you call "capitalism" which can organize production in a less harmful way - again with no evidence.

Capitalism is just a protocol. There are other protocols available to us (that are distinct from state planning) that can organize production. As far as evidence of them, how would that work? Capitalism is the dominant economic system and actively stamps out any other economic systems. There's fun little experiments like Rojova or EZLN, but nothing at-scale.

If you want an example of such a protocol, you can look at one that I'm developing: https://basisproject.net/

> From where are you pulling the notion that "capitalism" (for some definition of that word) is incompatible with managing externalities? Or that economists somehow just ignore the existence of externalities?

Capitalism, at least in its current form, is incapable of managing externalities because it ignores their existence. It operates on the principles of determining the differential between supply and demand via pricing and profit...this is an overly simplistic mechanism which provides no other information inputs for managing known externalities. It delegates this as a matter of the state. As an economic system, it is incomplete and externalizes its own "simplicity" to other systems.

> This kind of attitude is distressingly common online and to me it seems no different from the mentality of anti-vaxxers. Just because a field of science is imperfect and distorted to some extent by government/corporate agendas doesn't give you carte blanche to throw out every bit of research ever done and substitute your own reality.

I'm not substituting my own reality, and frankly that's fairly insulting. I believe I've described the mechanism at play several times, yet it feels like I'm screaming into the void.

Do you or do you not agree that the profit mechanism incentivizes externalities? If so, do you agree that if a productive system using profit as the organizational lynchpin is scaled, the externalities will scale with it? If so, do you agree that there is a threshold beyond which many externalities cannot be absorbed by the system at large (eg, CO2 output)? If so, then you've reached the same conclusion that I have. This isn't rocket science.