You get the impression from the eco-socialists and degrowthers that humanity wouldn’t face the threat of climate change or biodiversity loss if it weren’t for capitalism (or rather, if it weren’t for capitalist modernity).

But I see no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Thought experiment: Imagine the 1918 German Revolution was successful and socialism spread across Europe and thence the world. Capitalism is vanquished everywhere by, say 1930. No Soviet disaster or Maoist famines. No Hitler or World War Two. No Cold War. No neoliberal revolution

Instead, the fraternity of humanity promised since 1789 is finally achieved.

(Why the German Revolution? Historically it was expected that socialism would arrive first not in basically still feudal societies like Russia or China, but in industrialized capitalist Germany or UK)

Even had all this occurred, it would still probably not have been till the 1980s that the scale of the threat of climate change was understood by scientists—the same period as under capitalism.

(Even if the greenhouse effect was discovered in the 1850s, its full consequences with respect to fossil fuel combustion were not immediately known)

And a successful German Revolution would absolutely not have dispensed with modernity. Rather, it would have spread it everywhere, as fast as development of the forces of production would allow.

So fossil fuel extraction and combustion; steel, cement and fertilizer production; rice and beef agriculture; and aviation, trucking and shipping all would have continued more or less in the same fashion as actually happened in history.

There may have been a few things different here or there, but the only significant difference between a capitalist and a socialist 20th Century that I can think of that would have actually moved the needle on GHG emissions (and only slightly) would be...

... that public transport would likely have been much more emphasized than personal vehicles. But even if the emphasis would have been more on collective forms of transport, it’s unlikely that there would have been *no* personal vehicles.

In fact, there’s every reason to suppose that there would have been *far more* fossil-powered cars, trucks and buses, as a clear 20thC socialist goal would have been ensuring all citizens of the world had access to internal combustion tech, whether of collective or personal form.

Certainly there would have been more steel and cement, as all humanity would be properly housed, and much, much more coal combustion, as electricity would have been delivered to all.

Global warming under a socialist 20th century thus might have been far worse by the time we understood the threat, because socialism would‘ve spread industrial modernity to all citizens of the world, uninhibited by the need for profit-making or its consequence, imperial interest.

No, the difference with respect to the environment between capitalism and socialism is not that there would not have been global warming (or any other environmental problem).

Rather, the difference is that under socialism, once any threat from a technology is understood, the only barrier to switching away from that technology is the speed with which our engineers can develop new tech that doesn’t cause that harm while still delivering the same benefit

Meanwhile under capitalism, we have the additional three problems of 1) market incentive to continue production of a commodity despite discovery that it is harmful, 2) no incentive to produce technologies that may be clean and useful but unprofitable, and...

... 3) the competition between nations (that the market produces) that inhibits universalist problem-solving.

Given that the technologies that could eliminate GHGs for perhaps four fifths of the activities that produce them, while still delivering the benefit we get from these fuels (and from other non-combustion sources of GHG emissions), were known in the 1980s...

... a socialist world would at this point in the 21st Century certainly have worked much faster than our actually existing capitalist world has done to make the clean transition.

But that is all.

Thus a global egalitarian order does away with these three aspects of capitalism that *slow down* our ability to deal with unknown, novel threats, but it cannot *do away* with unknown, novel threats.

How could it? They are unknown and novel.

/fin