If consumers notice that there is something missing from the market, they have the opportunity to profit by bringing that thing into being.

Except said consumers would first need the means of production, which can be denied or unrealistic to acquire in any remotely competetive way once you have even a mildly developed capitalistic system, let alone the massive concentration of wealth and market power we are looking at today. You'd also need to find a way to make a relevant number of other customers aware of the advantages of your product. That can prove impossible in a system where media content also is dictated by profit motives.

Well sure, but that's why you do things like create carbon credits or other incentivizing programs when issues like that come up.

That certainly couldn't be considered autonomous capitalism, though? In fact, protection of the environment would seem like exactly the kind of "externality" which a well developed capitalism is pretty much blind to. We're not talking local businessmen having a self-interest in the well-being of their community, here. The owners of "WeAreEvil Inc" are not going to be fracking in their own backyard, but they certainly don't appear to see a problem with doing it to backyards a thousand miles away.

We don't have those problems, though, when it comes to figuring out how many paperclips need to be made and where to sell them from, or the logistics of how to get strawberries to colder climates during the winter.

Lamb raised in New Zealand is cheaper to buy in the United Kingdom than lamb raised in the UK, because the actual cost of raising lamb in NZ and shipping it to the UK is less than raising lamb in the UK itself.

From the perspective of preserving our planet's ressources, including its ability to sustain a decent population of human beings a few decades from now, wouldn't it maybe be better to accept that strawberries are a fruit which we don't expect to find / eat in colder climates or times of the year? Wouldn't it make more sense to accept that those sheep will be more expensive to raise in the UK than in NZ instead of accepting the enviromental cost of shipping them? If the UK workers are not forced to compete with those half a planet away, chances are that their wages will buy that more expensive wool.

It's just a better way of getting bread to everybody's house.

It doesn't get bread to everybody's house, though, does it? In fact, nothing in capitalism dictates that you can't deny bread (or, say, medication) to a population if it is profitable to do so. There's also no real reason that you shouldn't sell a pretty convincing approximation of bread which usually doesn't hurt anyone's health too badly to everyone except for those who can afford your premium deluxe variant.

I think that capitalism only tends to make sense as long as you accept the framework it postulates. It seems to run into problems the second that the most profitable / "efficient" way of doing things is not the actual best way of doing them as far as the well-being of most people over time is concerned. I don't know how academic your background is, but economists postulate many prerequisites for their theories without really caring about their emprical merrit. They also declare an awful lot of factors (say, human misery for those unable to compete / the environment a hundred years from now) externalities. I also still have to find a capitalist who can really explain to me how the unlimited growth needed to sustain a system which includes interest and compound interest is supposed to work in a limited ressource environment. I don't really buy "technology is going to save us". The technologies we keep comming up with to work around our "limited ressources" problems seem to tend towards the environmentally destructive.

In a capitalist world, when it comes down to it, there is one code which matters. "Pay / not pay". Capital doesn't care if it is accumulated by selling drugs, by profiteering from war (which may or may not be helped into existence so said profiteering can take place), by exploiting people who are not in an economic position to argue or simply by being born into the right family, golden spoon in hand. Yet in capitalism, capital is power over people. I strongly disagree with the notion that the successful aquisition of capital justifies that power.