this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Climate
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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.
China is the same, but better at propaganda. There can be no centralized solution.
Better at propaganda? I literally can't stop consuming American media that reinforces liberal-capitalist ways of thinking. My school was designed to conform to American propaganda standards, my workplace, my country's constitution. When I explain the righteousness of communism I do through the liberal language of rights. When I make moral choices it takes constant effort to avoid returning to a Protestant moral binary. I am writing this with American mannerisms. You literally can't tell the culture I was born to because it has been literal years since I consumed artistic media from the country I was born and raised in and that I still live in.
China is not the same. As a state they are also terrible and they also commit genocide, but it's like the difference between Napoleonic France and Louis XVI France, or between the USA and 18th century British empire, or between Nazi Germany and the postwar German Republic. Each state has its own distinct flavor of awful, and some are less awful at certain things or even categorically less awful.
Context matters. The US isn't trying to greenwash anything right now. It's external image has completely collapsed. Meanwhile, China is working really hard on it's external image.
I agree though that the US is one of the most internally propagandized country. Chinese propaganda also operates differently. In China, propaganda comes from the state and corporations are extensions of the government. In the US, media is controlled by corporations and the government is an extension of the corporations.
But the context was on clean energy, and Chinese greenwashing propaganda is ahead of the US.
Er, I am not American. But as far as greenwashing is concerned, my nation is using American greenwashing rhetoric for plastic recycling, subsidizing American electric cars because they're good for the environment while cutting funding for public transit, letting American companies advertise their greenwashing initiatives on television and billboards, etc. Chinese corporations keep quiet and there's propaganda associating them with environmental harm through fast fashion and products that are quick to fall apart or made of poison.
American greenwashing is endemic, treated as inevitable and as the best option possible. China has the benefit of being the alternative to that dominant lie, but it's still merely "the alternative".