Essay by Eric Worrall

I wonder if Prime Minister Modi and the parents of students know the University of New Delhi teaches that capitalist growth needs to be replaced by “cleaner, gentler and more sustainable economic models”.

Climate change is political and we must treat it that way

Global warming is still far from being an election issue — and therein lies the problem

BY ROBERT MIZO
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Apr 17, 2024

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Furthermore, addressing the climate crisis requires a fundamental rethinking of how humans interact with nature — especially how we procure, produce and consume the means of our existence. It necessitates cleaner, gentler and more sustainable economic models.

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For instance, former President Donald Trump, not long after assuming office in 2017, withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement to “promote national economic interests.”

If we invoke Marx’s definition of politics as class struggle, climate change is indeed a site of contestation not only between competing interests, but also conflicting modes of production, or economic systems. The dominant classes — the political and economic elites — have so far resisted overhauling the system that caused global heating in the first place, namely industrial capitalism.

A much-needed economic restructuring is an intensely political question with no viable prospects in sight. The irony, however, is that unlike other issues, climate change is yet to figure on the manifestos of political parties in many major democracies and rarely do politicians promise to take climate action in their campaigns. This, in part, is because there is little demand from citizens to put this issue at the center of the agenda, barring some sparse civil society-led movements.

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Read more: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/04/17/world/climate-change-is-political/

Greens like Professor Mizo are absolutely right that communism would likely reduce emissions. People who are scrounging for grass seeds and trying to figure out which pet they should cook next don’t have the discretionary money to purchase luxuries.

But who in their right mind would actually want to live that way? Even China, which diluted economic communism to preserve political communism, has hundreds of millions of people who live in abject poverty.

You only need to look across the Taiwan Strait to see what China could have been, had Chiang Kai-shek won the civil war on the mainland, and had China fully embraced Capitalism from the start. China would have become like the United States, a powerhouse for good in the world.

Last time I was in Taiwan, a government official asked me to follow her when I was out one night enjoying one of their food markets. Asked, not demanded. I followed, and the people at the government department explained they needed my help for a publicity campaign. At every stage I had the option of saying no. Of course I helped, they asked nicely. Taiwan is that kind of place.

When I visited, Taiwan was clean, the people of Taiwan love and care for their nation. China was filthy, the streets were covered with dust and litter, with only the more visible places swept clean.

I have also stood on the border between North and South Korea, and there too the difference couldn’t be starker. On the South were farms packed with bustle and productivity. On the North was a half finished land, empty overgrown fields, and starving soldiers waiting under camouflage for a war which for them never ended.

China under Deng Xiaoping diluted Mao’s hardline communism by allowing grass roots Capitalism, and saved their economy, but President Xi Jinping appears to be rolling back Deng’s economic reforms, and is threatening to plunge China once again into Communist poverty.

India, like China, stands at a fork in the road. President Modi has given Indians a taste of prosperity and good government, after lost decades of failed socialist policies, but Modi is an old man.

Will Indian students whose minds have been ensnared by green neo-Marxism reject Modi’s legacy?

Given the overwhelming evidence that capitalism and ever rising resource exploitation is the main force for good in the world, bettering lives wherever they are embraced, I think people in India and elsewhere should have a really long think about the alternatives, before they listen to the siren promises of those who advocate the mirage of “cleaner, gentler and more sustainable” alternatives. All the historical evidence indicates that nations which embrace systems other than capitalism for whatever reason inevitably suffer tyranny, starvation, degradation, poverty and ultimately ruin.