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Why aren't you going by China's approach? Because you don't like the answer?

Anyway, capitalist liberal democracy did exactly what you said in the 1960s to 1990s. US congress discussed climate change in the 60s, and the fossil fuel lobby prompted them to bury it.

So capitalism and communism are equally bad at this first part. The reason nuclear power plants are treated with such suspicion in most of the west is that they are an alternative to fossil fuel, not because they are dangerous.

Because, including Chernobyl, nuclear power is safer than fossil fuels. The difference is that nuclear power isn't as fun for rich people because it involves optimizing safety rather than neocolonial extraction. And capitalism will always choose inefficiency if it means more fun for the rich.

But back to the topic, the next question is what communism would do after the cat is out of the bag. Thankfully, despite the collapse of the USSR, we have another analogy we can make: China's response to covid and to climate change.

First, climate change. China is clearly building for the future. It used fossil fuels to catch up to NATO, and now it is quickly surpassing NATO it is investing hard in green tech. The fossil fuel lobby is not as important as the Party, and the Party wants stability.

Covid gives us another useful data point because it confirms how China behaves in face of a national Prisoner's Dilemma like climate change without as strong penalties for its rivals choosing selfiahness. It shows how China would handle climate change if it was a global hegemon in the way the US was in the 1990s-2000s.

At first, China covered it up, like Russia and the US. But when the cat was out of the bag, it enforced quarantines with an iron fist, i.e. actually efficiently enough to suppress the pandemic in a statist society. China had the lowest death rate from covid of all countries it spread into the general population of. Including the clear bump of deaths when the strict policy lifted that shows it wasn't just propaganda.

Translated to climate change, this means China - and by extension state communism - would simply force its citizens to consume in ways that lead to zero emissions, even if it means a hit to their quality of life. The only limiting factor is the risk of revolt, unlike in capitalist democracy where there is carbon-emission lobbyists and private propaganda and election losses.

So yeah, in the long run Chinese state communism will handle climate change better than the capitalist USA or EU.

And real communism? Or better yet, anarcho-communism? You wouldn't believe how well a decentralized responsibility for justice works at preventing the existence of overly polluting industries.