Only Capitalism Can Solve Environmental Problems

By Andrew Follett

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

 

A dangerous idea is gaining prominence: the notion that the only way to protect the environment is to abandon capitalism — despite capitalism’s vastly better track record on environmental stewardship compared to communism.

 

“Stick with an approach to climate change mitigation in which the private sector continues to be seen as the savior, and we are setting ourselves up to continue to fail,” Brett Christophers, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden and author of several anti-capitalist books, recently wrote in Time magazine. “Veiled by discussion of headline global trends in new renewables capacity investment is the fact that almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China.”

 

Christophers is a “geographer interested in various aspects of Western capitalism.” He goes on to praise Communist China as an environmentalist champion, since its state-owned and centrally planned companies manufacture a lot of solar panels and wind turbines. This sort of faux-academic is often called a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside — and deeply ignorant of the basics of the sciences they lecture others on.

 

There’s strong evidence that green energy from solar and wind power has actually increased CO₂ and other more potent greenhouse-gas emissions so far. Even ignoring the moral atrocity that these allegedly green technologies depend on Chinese slave labor, Christophers is mathematically mistaken. There’s a natural experiment to test his claim, comparing Chinese carbon-dioxide emissions with those of the capitalist United States. It doesn’t go in the direction of the professor’s thesis.

 

Chinese carbon emissions per person have virtually tripled since the year 2000, while U.S. emissions per person have fallen by 30 percent, according to 2023 Global Carbon Budget data.

 

Of course, the global thermostat doesn’t care about per capita emissions, only absolute numbers. In the year 2000, the capitalist U.S. was a larger emitter, producing about 6 billion tons of CO₂ compared with Communist China’s 3.65 billion. But by 2006, China had surpassed U.S. CO₂ emissions. And by 2022, China produced 11.4 billion tons of CO₂ while the capitalist U.S. emissions fell in absolute terms to 5 billion tons.

 

All this communist pollution isn’t set to improve either, as it largely comes from China’s demand for highly polluting coal-fired electricity. The country’s demand for power is growing so fast, it builds a new coal power plant every week. Of the 2,400 coal-fired power plants under construction around the world, 1,171 will be built in China.

 

“Western governments typically do not own and operate renewables generating facilities. The lion’s share of such facilities – more than 95 percent of installed capacity – are owned and operated by the private sector: the exact mirror image of the renewables ownership picture in China,” Christophers writes, falsely. “The West’s reliance on the private sector to decarbonize power generation is proving a major problem.”

 

Capitalist America, in contrast to Communist China, has slashed CO₂ emissions with the market-oriented solution of transitioning from coal power to natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). EIA data indicate that American emissions have fallen 12 percent since 2005, with 68 percent of the decline in emissions attributable to the switch to natural gas. China lacks the natural resources to pursue natural gas to the same extent, and, due to its relative lack of economic freedom, China also lacks the innovative capacity to reduce its emissions through the embrace of new technologies generally.

 

This transition was made possible not because of government green policies, but in spite of them. The development of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has caused CO₂ emissions to drop sharply in 47 states and Washington, D.C., according to both Scientific American and the U.S. Department of Energy.

 

Sadly, however, Chinese CO₂ emissions will likely continue rising as the country’s economy grows (in keeping with the environmental Kuznets curve) such that they will more than cancel out both America’s and the rest of the world’s CO₂ cuts.

 

“The consequence of all this is that Western policymakers face a choice that will only get starker as emissions continue and global temperatures further rise,” Christophers continues. “That choice is between two unpalatables. One is to moderate the still-strong faith in the ability of markets and the profit motive to deliver an accelerated energy transition, with governments instead adopting a much more directive role. The alternative? To face a growing risk of climate catastrophe.”

 

I propose a different alternative.

 

Christophers should correct his profound scientific illiteracy and appreciate the massive emissions reductions capitalism has achieved in the West, and place blame for rising global emissions where it belongs: on China.

 

Indeed, environmental disasters in China aren’t limited to just emissions. They actually are so widespread they boggle the Western capitalist mind.

 

The capital of Beijing is so inundated with air pollution that spending just one day there could be equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes, according to the Economist. And that’s in the center of power, with smog so bad it must really be seen to be believed. The American embassy in Beijing tracks air quality to determine if residents should duct-tape their homes shut.

 

After bad press compelled China to make some progress in combating Beijing’s smog (mainly by moving coal plants to surrounding provinces, worsening air quality elsewhere), last year the city’s air quality again plummeted. The Washington Post blames the deterioration on China’s “economic reliance on coal-fired power and polluting heavy industries such as steel, aluminum and cement.” So much for communist economies prioritizing the environment!

 

But communist ecological catastrophes aren’t limited to today’s China. They’re an inherent feature of Marxist states. Just look at the Aral Sea. It was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Then the Communist Soviet Union followed its ideological dogma of “the transformation of nature” and began to destroy it starting in the 1960s in favor of a series of cotton-irrigation programs. Today, the Aral Sea is about a tenth of its original size. The transformation has crushed once-prosperous fishing communities, devastated natural pollution-control mechanisms, and spread deserts across the region. Communists triggered a massive ecological collapse so serious former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon called it “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.”

 

Meanwhile, global CO₂ emissions per dollar of economic output have steadily declined since the 1960s, largely due to new technologies and market incentives compelling businesses to constantly seek to reduce their energy costs. A worldwide retreat from capitalism and embrace of less efficient economic systems would endanger that trend. To protect the environment, we need more capitalism, not less.