this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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China also pollutes significantly more than India, even if the Chinese per person emission is lower than some other developed nations.
Plus, Capitalists invented the newer green power used by China and instead China invented bigger coal power plants.
India remains heavily underdeveloped domestically. And the cultural gap - most remarkably, India's enormous vegetarian community - plays a bigger role than it's economic model in curbing gross emissions.
It should also be noted that India has had and continues to have one of the largest active Communist Parties in history. In fact, the 34 years of the Left Front rule in West Bengal is the longest-serving democratically elected communist-led government in the world.
So you can't really use India as a pure capitalist counterexample, unless you only want to discuss the corners of the county under decisive BJP rule (itself a relatively new political turn for India).
Many developing nations like India, Vietnam and Ethiopia are going to leapfrog the fossil fuel detour and go straight to renewables which will also help.
https://youtu.be/qoNr6hjy7aE
fingers crossed
Idk if they're leapfrogging it so much as showing up late to a dry riverbed. There simply isn't enough petroleum left to do in India / the Pacific Rim or Africa in the 2020s what China, Europe, and the US went through in the 1980s. But I guess the US and Europe are helping out by retarding their technological progress long enough for these other countries to catch up and move ahead.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing!
I think that's a bit reductive. Firstly, I wouldn't describe China as non-capatalist. Secondly, China has a nuanced relationship with environmentalism and green energy as one would expect from a nation that large.
The problem is there are a lot of Tankies on the Fediverse who consider China to be one of the ONLY non-Capitalist nations, so what I stated needed to be said just to counteract any potential Tankie disinformation attempting to make China look good.
Fair enough, I think I was also premptivly reacting fediverse to tankies and maybe read your comment as more agressive than it was. Sorry about that.
China is the manufacturing hub of the entire world. Of course it's going to pollute significantly more than India, its energy consumption is 5 times of what India consumes.
And I don't get this insinuation that China invests in coal power. China invests the most into renewable energy than anyone else in the world, almost 40% of global renewable investments come from China. And last I checked almost half of the energy China produces comes from renewables.
And the reason China had use fossil fuels in the first place is because renewable tech didn't exist when they needed the energy. Why didn't it exist? Because capitalists refused to invest into green energy even though the oil companies did the research and knew that fossil fuels are a dead end (that research was done back in the 70s and Exxon decided to bury it instead of acting on it). We see in Africa that countries are skipping fossil fuels and are going straight to renewable because the tech exists, so it's reasonable assume the same would've happened in China had the tech existed.
If you want to shit on China, there are legitimate points to criticize. Renewable energy is not one of those points.
So all is forgiveable in the name of more industry? Including Chinese slave labour?
China produces a lot of cheap plastic shit and textiles nobody asked for, but they only recently became competitive in high tech after stealing from other nations like Taiwan and Korea.
Is one country supposed to bear the burden of blame because every other western country moved their manufacturing there? If the rest of the world didn't turn China into a manufacturing hub they wouldn't be polluting that much now would they?
Now that is something you can criticize.
China produces a lot of cheap plastic shit because there's a lot of international demand for it. The shit that ends up on Temu is the outcome of overproduction to meet the estimated demands of the foreign markets. If you want to blame anyone for China producing a lot of cheap shit, blame America who is their biggest importer of cheap shit.
And that's another thing you can criticize. As far as I know they've (allegedly) stolen DRAM technology and to that my answer is fuck the DRAM cartel. If stealing their tech is necessary to break their stranglehold on the memory production then I'm all for it. The reason we're currently in the middle of a memory crisis is specifically because the 3 biggest memory manufacturers somehow magically all end up with similar RAM prices to a point where one of them deliberately shut down one of its fabs because RAM prices were getting too cheap.