this post was submitted on 14 May 2023
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GenZedong

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Can climate change be stopped if the PRC and the Global South must industrialize? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by NikkiB@lemmygrad.ml to c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
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Took my monthly foray into Reddit and made a post of r/capitalismvsocialism asking people what they thought would happen to capitalism when climate change wreaks it havoc across the planet. I learned three things about liberals.

  1. They either think climate change is not happening or is not a serious threat.

  2. They think Communists pollute more because China, a developing nation with over 1.4 billion people, currently has a higher raw annual CO2 output, which incidentally isn't true.

  3. They think capitalist green energy is on pace and everything's gonna be fine guys don't worry we still have PLENTY of time.

But someone did argue that "zero carbon means zero carbon for everyone," therefore the global south can't burn fossil fuels if climate change is to be combated effectively. Is this really true? Is there no way for these countries to develop without causing climate change?

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[–] redtea@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 years ago

There's a fourth point to add about liberals: they can't imagine anything but capitalism. Many even realise this, thanks to Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. (Then they wear it as a strange mark of pride.)

One implication of this is obvious: liberals simply cannot comprehend a socialist way of doing things. But there are at least two other ways of phrasing the point, which might help us to understand the problem better, or at least in a different way:

  1. Liberals cannot imagine a non-capitalist way of doing things, and
  2. As liberals do not understand capitalism except in it's most commonsense form, they assume that even after capitalism, people will still make decisions that only make sense within a capitalist framework.

This may seem like a lot of words to say the same thing or nothing at all. But if may help us to see a problem with our own liberal assumptions (I have many, and constantly need to challenge them!). The main assumption here is that development in the underdeveloped world must take the same path as development did in the west and some semi-periphery countries.

There's no obvious reason why that should be the case. China and Cuba, at the least, are already experimenting with alternative ways of developing, for example. I can't add much to what Munrock and The Kaffe said on this.

For other perspectives, you might look to Jason Hickel's work on degrowth and Aaron Bastani's work on 'fully automated luxury communism'. Both have a book and several videos if you're interested.