Groucho Marxism

I recently finished reading a book entitled Planning for the planet: How socialism could save the environment, by Pete Dickenson. In this book Dickenson puts forward two inter-related claims, namely: (1) capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis; and (2) socialism can. I have argued for the first of these claims in a series of recent blog posts so I won’t rehash those arguments again here. In this blog post I will focus instead on Dickenson’s second claim, that socialism can solve the climate crisis. Of course it does not automatically follow that socialism can solve the climate crisis from the fact that capitalism can’t. Indeed, there are many historical examples that could be used to argue that socialism cannot solve the climate crisis either.

Perhaps the most obvious case studies that could be put forward here are the Soviet Union and China. Both countries went through a period of rapid industrialization in the mid-20th century, the environmental impacts of which were catastrophic. And today China, a nominally socialist country, produces more CO₂ per head of population than many capitalist nations due to its heavy reliance on coal for energy. The obvious rebuttal is that the Soviet Union and China were never really socialist countries. Many socialists would refer to the former as a deformed workers state and the latter as state capitalist. However both countries had planned economies, which in theory should have enabled them to develop industrially without destroying the environment in the process.

The reason the Soviet Union and China created such immense environmental devastation lies in their desperation to catch up with the industrialized West. It must be remembered that both countries were backwards agrarian societies when socialism took hold and felt they needed to rapidly industrialize in order to compete with more advanced Western nations. This highlights how competition between nations is the main impediment to successfully tackling the climate crisis. That the Soviet Union and China were so desperate to compete with other nations demonstrates that although they had planned economies, they were not truly internationalist and therefore were not truly socialist. Thus I don’t think they can be held up as examples of socialism’s inability so tackle climate change.

Again, though, it does not automatically follow that socialism can solve the climate crisis. Socialism may be necessary for this but that does not mean it is sufficient. In order to effectively solve the climate crisis we also need a plan. What should such a plan involve? Obviously it must involve a rapid move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources, as Dickenson argues at length in his book. However Dickenson argues against the widespread adoption of nuclear power, for three reasons. First, it creates a security risk, as nuclear power plants inevitably become a single point of failure that can be targeted by nefarious actors. Second, we can never rule out the possibility of accidents occurring. And third, we have not yet come up with a way to effectively deal with radioactive nuclear waste.

Those in favour of nuclear power argue that although nuclear accidents have caused several thousand deaths, these pale into insignificance when compared to the millions of deaths that have already been caused by burning fossil fuels, and the millions more that are likely to result from climate change. In my view, however, this is argument is an example of ‘lesser-evilism’. Instead of comparing nuclear power with what is clearly the worst energy generation method we have available to us – burning fossil fuels – we should compare it with generating power from renewable sources. Although it should be noted that moving to renewable energy sources will also inevitably result in some accidental deaths, such as maintenance workers falling off wind turbines and so on.

Rather than getting into the weeds of a debate on whether we should or should not adopt nuclear power, I think it is better to view nuclear power as one of a range of clean power generation options that also includes renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and so on. The decision on whether or not to adopt nuclear power should then be made as part of a wider decision on what mix of energy sources to use. The actual mix used in practice would depend on a range of environmental, technological, economic, and social factors. But the point is that this is a decision that should be made democratically by the people rather than imposed from above. It is only under socialism that such democratic decision-making could effectively be carried out.