Dolack features some recent research by climate scientists that dovetail astonishingly well with the forecasts contained in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth which received much criticism at the time even from people on the left.
While one climate scientist referred vaguely to "powerful societal forces" as inhibiting serious solutions to the climate crisis, Dolack becomes much more clarifyingly specific:
...those “powerful societal forces” [are] the biggest industrialists and financiers in the world capitalist system. As long as we have an economic system that allows private capital to accumulate without limit on a finite planet, and externalize the costs, in a system that requires endless growth, there is no real prospect of making the drastic changes necessary to head off a very painful future.
Just because a study was conducted decades in the past does not mean we can’t learn from it. If we reach still further back in time, Rosa Luxemburg’s words haunt us still: Socialism or barbarism.
