Hello, I am Kimberly Adams. Welcome to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kyle Rizdalli, it is Tuesday. That means one podcast, one topic. We are talking capitalism and climate change today.

And here's the dilemma. Capitalism arguably got us where we are on a changing climate.

The question of course is can capitalism get us out of where we are?

One person who certainly thinks so is sheeling Sue. He's an economist and Dalembert professor at Florida State University College of Law,

and author of the new book Capitalism and the Environment, a proposal to save the planet.

Dr. Sue, welcome back to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Let's get to the topic of your book. What parts of capitalism do you believe can help save the planet?

Well, actually let me back up for a minute. Do you buy the thesis that Capitalism got us where we are on a changing climate?

I don't. I don't think capitalism is to blame. I don't think you could blame capitalism for climate change anymore that you could blame capitalism for, say,

or there are manufacturers marketing toxic masculinity to kids. Capitalism only goes in a direction that political choices steer it.

And we've just made a couple of bad political choices that have caused polluting industries to over-pollute.

What are those choices?

Well, you know, you think about the economy as this machine. If you told the economy, let's maximize GDP, and let's not worry about the environmental harm that's caused thereby.

I guess what? Capitalist economy is going to do that, and it's going to do it very efficiently. So the choices would be, let's focus on economic growth, and let's not think too much about the environmental costs of that economic growth.

I will say that even if capitalism isn't strictly to blame for it, what it does do, because it's so efficient, is amplify the effects of those political choices. And, you know, it's done a marvelous job of growing the economy and ignoring environmental harm.

All right, so how does capitalism get us out of this then? Because, well, I'm not going to go off my standard to feel about political choices in this country just simply not being made. But how does capitalism help us?

You know, think about capitalism is that if it's operating well under a well-functioning democracy, there's some pretty surprising things that happen in capitalist societies.

What we've been doing, in my view, wrong for the past 150 years, is not pricing environmental harm. What I'm proposing in the book is that we should have environmental taxes that reflect the cost of environmental harm, of whatever industrial activity or commercial activity is going on.

Now, what that does is, if you actually make capitalists, industrialists, everybody really kind of take into account the environmental harm that they're causing to everybody else, they make different choices.

What we've been doing for the past 150 years is making choices while ignoring the environmental costs. If you make people think about the environmental costs, in the interest of trying to reduce their tax bill, they try and figure out ways to reduce their environmental harm.

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