Tony Abbott and Nancy Klein both say it's impossible to preserve capitalism and avoid global heating disaster. They disagree in whether capitalism is worth the disaster.

I disagree with them, because today's rapacious "damn the environment (and the workers), full speed ahead" capitalism is not the only possible kind. It is not the only kind we have tried. I have seen rapacious capitalism replace more benign forms of capitalism, as it crushed the countervailing forces such as democracy and civil society that used to hold it in check.

It is a mistake to equate "capitalism" with the modern rapacious kind of capitalism, because that writes off the possibility of pushing capitalism back into a form we can control and live with, the way we control and live with fire.

The reason today's rapacious capitalism blocks action to avoid climate disaster is that it amounts to plutocracy. Where the fossil fools control the media and their money buys the polluticians, they can veto political will for the necessary changes. We must, one way or another, bring back democracy, and that requires ending plutocracy.

To be sure, clipping capitalism's claws won't be easy. But neither would getting rid of it — and that would raise the question of what to replace it with.