I used to joke that Sri Lanka is like Diet India, except during pollution season, when it's like India. India's air quality during its crop burning season (November to January) is death incarnate. I hate hearing about Delhi's suffering downwind because we are downwind also. The pollution hits Sri Lanka around February, meaning my kids are effectively smoking three cigarettes a day and not allowed to play outside. My family all have bad noses and everyone is sniffling and snuffling. India is family, but for fuck's sake, get your shit together.

Sri Lanka, of course, cannot just blame India, as much as we like to. Indian crop sati accounts for the variation in Sri Lankan pollution, but the baseline is us. As O.A. Ileperuma said, quoting a 2012 report, “In Sri Lanka, during 2011, emissions from motor vehicles accounted for 55-60% of air pollution, while 20-25% was due to industries and 20% was from domestic sources (Ministry of Environment, 2012).” Again, note that this is Sri Lanka's baseline pollution, which Indian ‘transboundary air pollution’ tips over seasonally, like now.

At a deep level, we have both not got our shit together, whereas China—which used to be notoriously polluted—has. What's going on?

Capitalist vs. Communist Air

Remember that the core difference between communism and capitalism is who/what is in charge. Basically if it's a who or if it's a what. Either the human community is in charge under communism, or capital incorporate under capitalism. The words basically contain their own definition.

The key insight of China's reforms in the 80s was that you can have markets within socialism as long as you keep power over them. Capitalism, on the other hand, puts society inside a market where even politicians are bought and sold. A communist (or socialist) government can put the community (or society) at the center of decision-making, but letting capital decide on its own is a recipe for disaster.

Take air pollution, for example. In a deeply unequal society like India the rich get expensive air-filtration systems, expensive schools, and expensive cars. They privatize air. This is all good business for the private sector—more stuff to sell—though the public suffers—life is hell. The overall economy gets much worse because people can't breathe and are sick, but as long as one sector makes enough money to bribe politicians, it all clicks. This is not a market failure, it's markets working as intended if you let the markets run themselves.

This failure is because pollution is a social problem that cannot be solved at the market/firm level. A firm will algorithmically optimize its profits and not measure anything outside themselves including, in this case, the air. As these firms grow they co-opt elites with their products (private cars, education, etc) and corrupt politicians with that plus filthy lucre. Remember that liberal democracy was a Trojan Horse, left by capitalist colonizers, a last bit of divide and conquer into two parties.

Note that within capitalism, none of this is especially intentional, the whole point of capitalism is to remove human intent and let markets magically move resources around. But they just move the resources into a few pockets while everyone else drowns, average it out, and then drinks all around it. The collapse in air quality in countries that failed at socialism (like India and Sri Lanka) is just the unnatural result of letting a market make decisions for people. On top of actual cancer, you get capitalist cancer, firms that profit from problems and widen inequality.

Communism—or any system of human control—will not magically solve these problems, but it is at least not algorithmically bound to exacerbate them. A strong public sector (could be communist party or king) can say, hey, everyone piling into $50,000 cars is stupid, let's move more people much cheaper with trains. The private sector on its own won't do this because cars are quite profitable, which is why you need a strong public sector to beat some common sense into them. Central planning can take a higher look at the economy and balance it, which markets and firms just won't do on their own. In the same way, you need central planning to see when certain sectors (like private education or private air) are becoming cancerous and reduce them.

The broad principle, which should be self-evident, is that human goals are only achievable if humans have control over planning. You cannot just cede control to an invisible hand (which isn't real) or the whims of rich people (who are really assholes). Human values (breathing, not getting sick, not dying) are simply not understood by corporations, which only understand monetary value. It does not compute unless you ram the numbers down their throat. When there's actually more money to be made by selling air, selling healthcare, and selling coffins than in solving these problems, why would you solve them? Why would you reduce profit for people, planet, or anything so extraneous? Broadly, this is to say that such central problems are only solvable if you have central planning. And China is a case in point.

China

When I was in Beijing for a month (2012) I never saw the sun. At most I saw the fuzzy end of God's lit cigar, ashing in my eye with scorn. Men hung around smoking cigarettes in their Beijing bikinis and I guess I was smoking also. Unlike failed socialist states like India and Sri Lanka, however, socialism with Chinese characteristics actually worked. They made a plan to reduce pollution, and three five-year plans later, they did it. Now you can see the Beijing sky, something I've never seen before. This became possible over successive Olympic Games, and now it's common.

Chinese communism industrialized rapidly, with concomitant pollution and environmental destruction. Unlike capitalism which must keep growing at all costs, however, communism has a boss in the communist party which can change direction or even stop certain activities. And so they made air quality a priority and did it. As Sustainable Mobility said,

Backed by municipal and national support, including the ambitious Five-Year Plan 2001-2006 as well as 2011-2016, which coupled economic growth with environmental stewardship, Beijing embarked on a journey to reshape its transportation fabric (Yao, 2018). This transformation encompassed investment reprioritization, reduced freeway growth, and curbed parking provisions, underpinned by an overarching focus on transit and the revival of traditional Chinese urban design – walking centers and transit linear corridors with dense, mixed-use patterns. The result? A decoupling of private vehicle use from wealth, as Beijing embraced public transport, cycling, and e-vehicles powered by renewable energy sources, reshaping the city’s transportation landscape.

Air quality was prioritized in the national five-year plans and in city level plans like Beijing's. Around the time I left, Beijing announced huge societal, industrial, changes to make itself suck less. Specifically,

The capital's 2013-2017 plan aims to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million tonnes and keep it within 10 million tonnes by 2017, compared with 23 million tonnes in 2012. The city will also slash its cement production capacity to 4 million tonnes in 2017, from 10 million tonnes in the early period of the 12th five year development plan from 2011 to 2015. Beijing's action plan for clean air echoed a national air pollution prevention and treatment plan, which was also released on Thursday on the central government's website...

Iron and steel, cement, chemical and petrochemical industries will reduce waste emissions by more than 30 percent in 2017 compared with the levels of 2012, said Beijing's action plan. Meanwhile, Beijing will promote the use of clean energy in public vehicles, such as buses, taxis and postal trucks. By the end of 2017, Beijing will have 200,000 vehicles on the roads that are powered by new and clean energy, with about 65 percent of public buses using clean energy. The city will shut down 1,200 small polluting mills in the building materials, chemical, founding and furniture sectors by 2016.

Since China doesn't change between bribed governments every X years, they're actually capable of policy continuity (remember that liberal democracy is a Trojan Horse, meant to entrench global capital and cripple local governance). China is able to actually execute policy, and actually execute billionaires (unlike capitalist countries which only execute the poor).

Anyways, getting down to brass tacks, Beijing's coal consumption dropped by more than 50% (measured differently, but percentage drop is as planned). Beijing also closed six of eight cement factories by 2018, lowering production capacity to 3.1 million tons, ahead of plan. Beijing's public transport is largely electrified now, and China's fuel use seems to have peaked. They also did it while preserving GDP growth (a noxious measure, but whatever). The point is that graphs like this don't happen, there are a lot of party functionaries pulling a lot of levers. You can certainly have a stupid plan under central planning, but you at least don't leave it to capitalist chance.

China is doing these big policy shifts and balances across its economy. Electrifying transport, for example, so much that fuel demand there may have already peaked. As the International Energy Agency said this year (2025), “For China’s fuel growth trajectory to be leveling off at this early stage of development is without historical precedent. This slide is likely to accelerate over the medium-term, which would be sufficient to generate a plateau in total China oil demand this decade.”

Of course, this ain't all blooming roses. A lot of the Beijing polluters merely moved further away. Crop burning, while banned for a while, have been allowed again. China still deploys mega coal projects and grows economically, which always requires energy, all forms of which require fossil fuels, not to mention other nonrenewable resources. I am not saying that communism produces environmentally magical results more that capitalism, it is still a human system. All I'm saying is that communism—by virtue of having central planning—can actually have a plan and stick to it. This can lead—for the narrow purposes of our conversation—to localized results.

Hence China, specifically Beijing, sees it air quality get better because they're trying to make it better while India and Sri Lanka see ours get worse because we're praying to the predators. We're caught in a capitalist doom cycle, with our elites dragging us down like Greeks out a Trojan. Divide and conquer, commodify and corrupt; capitalism née colonialism still works a charm for fucking shit up. We're releasing reports and having meetings, but as long as the economy is out of government control, both economy and environment careen out of control; predictably so. There's a saying that failing to plan is planning to fail. Ain't it the truth.

For a piece on the global climate communism we should've done 50 years ago, click here.