If you ran a private business in the manner that the US Government (or my state government for that matter) is run it would be bankrupt in short order and cease operating.

Tell that to AT&T.

The parent is correct. At least with a government it's fundamentally unstable. If we don't like the people in charge, we have a very direct and focused way of taking them out of office: the ballot box.

Private industry has no checks and balances. The corporations as they are today can create global food shortages, medicine shortages, influence public policy, and all we can do is stop supporting them. If we're really angry we can actively protest against them, but you would need a large amount of people to get behind you - a difficult and challenging problem. Just look how long the child labour problems have been going on in the manufacturing sector. We all agree that this is an evil practice, but at the end of the day we don't have the time or energy to research every stitch of clothing we wear.

There was a cooling trend from the mid 1940s to the 1970s. It it attributed to unrestricted pollution and increasing industrialization releasing SO2 and other aerosols. We started cleaning those up in the 1970s when the temperatures started rising again. "The coming ice age" got sensationalized by a couple of articles in Newsweek and Time but it was never a consensus in the climate community. A study showed from 1965 to 1979 there were 7 papers about global cooling published and 42 papers about global warming.

Humans are not about to destroy the planet in the long view. But we might make it difficult or impossible to support the level of population we have. If that's true it probably won't be pretty how we get to that lower population level.