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Big oil quietly walks back on climate pledges as global heat records tumble
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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If you think those 2 are communist countries, you're stuck in the last century. Let me give you some news. The Soviet Union collapsed and gave way to a capitalist oligarchy. China realized that capitalism is profitable and brings them tons of money from the west. I have no idea why tankies still simp those countries as communist (wait, I do actually - because tankies never had any principles of their own, they just wanted to be anti-west).
There is one country that needs to kickstart change for it to have any effect, it's the US. Not only does it pollute the most per capita, it's a huge market. My tiny ass country with fuel prices already being twice as much in the US, can raise fuel prices even more, but that won't affect global demand. Americans no longer getting fuel for essentially free, would actually affect global demand.
Yes, of course, because political systems are binary and there's only capitalism and communism lmao
There's plenty of systems that mix both, but Russia and China aren't actually good examples. They're pretty capitalist.
If you want a better example of mixing capitalism with socialism, you can take a look at something like the Nordic countries, where there are tons of social services and safety nets, but there's still a very strong (just regulated) free market.
State companies and state-connected companies own more than half of each one's economy. More than in Nordic countries.
Do you belive that in a communist country everything is owned by the state? If so, I urge you to look up communism again.
In really existent ones - yes.
And what are those existent communist countries? The ones that come the closest are China, Vietnam, cubs, Laos, North Korea. But none if them is there yet. https://www.britannica.com/question/Which-countries-are-communist
Communist means ideologically communist. Because "countries which have built communism according to Marx with stateless society with common ownership of means of production" etc are like Zeno's Achilles and turtle metaphor. Only I don't get why would anybody use such an unreachable by design criterion to judge on the effect of communist ideology on societies.
Well in the examples I gave only in north Korea everything is controlled by the state. So your point is irrelevant.
There are gradations between "everything" and "critical mass" as well, and part of it is "private" property which can be easily confiscated or in some other way transferred to a more loyal person, just the system has mechanisms to prevent killing the golden goose (for now, it seems comrade Xi has some ideas with potential to affect this).
I mean, if you consider Nazi Germany capitalist, then China is too.
Anyway, it all depends on terminology. Some people think that "war communism" is the closest to real communism the world has seen. For others it's not communism at all, because they don't forget that "stateless" part. While Makhno's republic is that. For others the Nordic countries are almost like communism.
Just like with Christianity, with Communism we should trace all branches of the tree, not just discard everything we don't like as schismatic.
Confiscation of private property as a criterion for communism is also new to me.
Is the Taliban communistic?
I meant that the state has control over all those big Chinese businesses.
And what are those existent communist countries? The ones that come the closest are China, Vietnam, cubs, Laos, North Korea. But none if them is there yet. https://www.britannica.com/question/Which-countries-are-communist
Because capitalism with state protection is not capitalism I guess.
In each, we're talking about capitalism with the caveat that the owners of the country want a kickback too, and in return local capitalists are protected from foreign capitalists. Vladimir Putin owns Russia, the CCP owns China. In neither case does capital belong to "the people" as a whole.
Yes, it's not. I mean, for Marxists it is, because Marx describes something similar specifically to XIX century Germany with state-supported enormous trusts, influential aristocracy, and so on. Which is for obvious reason of living there, just not very relevant, because real economists use the term differently.
Well, CCP is not different from CPSU in this case.
Seems a bit silly to decide that "capitalism" is the majority contributor to climate change when the country that produces the most greenhouse gases is only "pretty capitalist" doesn't it? If capitalism is the major contributor, why don't more capitalist country produce more greenhouse gases?
I never set out to argue that capitalism doesn't exist in countries that aren't primarily capitalist.
That's not necessarily the case. The pollution comes from where manufacturing is, not necessarily where consumption is. The demand is coming from capitalist countries.
Edit: To account for this, we can look at per-capita consumption-based emissions (thanks to @boonhet@lemm.ee for the data link).
The country that produces the most greenhouse gases is doing so to satisfy the demands of private industry that's producing goods for private profit. What part of that is not capitalism?
Also the country that produces the most per capita, is arguably the most capitalist country, the USA.
While I agree that per capita emissions is a useful metric, perhaps even more useful than raw emissions numbers, where are you getting that the USA has the highest production per capita?
This table shows data from 2018 so things change, but the per capita emissions would have had to double in five years to put the USA on top.
If you look at the non-per capita numbers, the USA is the second largest emitter behind China (using data from 2018).
Good point, I was a bit inaccurate with my last comment.
If you look at the non-per capita consumption based emissions and divide that by the amount of people, you'll find that Americans consume way more per capita.
China has the bigger (even per capita) number in terms of production, but they export a lot of what they produce, whereas Americans get all their shit from China and can then claim China has the worse emissions.
Here's a map showing consumption-based emissions per capita, you can see that the US has a number twice as big as China's.