How Would Socialist Planning Solve the Climate Crisis?

There is no question that capitalism poses an existential threat to our society and that a complete change in how society is run is an acute necessity.

Greta Thunberg’s message to “listen to the science” is as simple as it is impossible for capitalist leaders to follow. Instead of listening to the science, the ruling class just does anything it can to kickstart the capitalist economy after the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic. When they see a chance of more profit — every word about a sustainable society goes out the window. We saw a graphic illustration of this in the massive state stimulus packages that capitalist governments implemented to kickstart the economy after the 2020 recession, which invested significantly more in fossil fuels than in renewables!

This also goes for the increased imperialist rivalry which is developing into a full-scale cold war between China and the US, in which great power interests completely supersede any concern for the climate. At a time when global co-operation has never been more necessary to handle the most severe threat to global civilisation as a whole, the capitalists put their own interests first — co-operation and global planning is further from reality than it has been for decades. The Cold War can block new international agreements, even insufficient ones such as the Paris agreement in 2015.

As has been outlined elsewhere in these articles, the climate crisis is maybe the most obvious example why we need to shift away from the capitalist economy, where the capitalist “market” is directed by gigantic corporations and their search for maximum profit. What the planet needs is a planned transition where fossil fuels are completely phased out within a decade, and where biodegradation and pollution are replaced by programs for the cleaning up and restoration of ecosystems.

To make this possible, we need a society where the working people of the world, through democratic workers’ states, control, own and democratically plan the most important parts of the economy — that means building socialism worldwide.

Socialism Can Change Everything

Just as the youth on the climate strikes shout “everything must change”, socialism means just that — that everything will change:

• It means turning the power structure of society on its head. A new workers’ state will have the interest of working people as its priority instead of today’s capitalist state whose laws, repression and weapons exist to keep capitalist profits safe at any price.
• It means that the key parts of the economy will be nationalised (owned collectively) and run under workers’ control and management.
• It means that workplaces together with schools and communities, will become a forum for the democratic running of society, making use of everyone’s creativity and input instead of merely a place of exploitation.
• It means sharing out the work to make unemployment history and to give everyone time to take part in running their workplace, community and society, as well as for holidays and free time.
• It means production according to people’s needs with products that last, can be repaired and are made from raw material that can be reused.

A socialist planned economy could cut emissions drastically in a matter of months or a few years:

• 12% of total CO₂ emissions come from road transport. By massive investment in free public transport in all cities, transporting goods by rail, and stopping global shipping being used as a means to cut labor costs, these emissions could be cut dramatically and very quickly.
• 6% of emissions comes from deforestation and fires. Deforestation could quickly be turned into its opposite while fires could be reduced through forest management, more responsible urban planning and reversing cuts to fire services.
• So called “business travel”, which makes up a big part of air travel (12% of total air travel in the US), could be dramatically reduced.
• Today’s industry and energy companies create enormous emissions (around 10% of emissions) exclusively through ineffective processes. With a planned economy which eliminates unnecessary waste, and energy-saving investments, these emissions could be drastically reduced.
• 17.5% of emissions come from energy used in buildings. By insulating buildings, often a quite simple measure, this could be lowered quickly.
• Entire capitalist structures and industries which are extremely destructive could be dismantled: the arms industry, the extremely excessive advertising industry, and financial speculation, including crypto currencies.

Other sectors of the economy may take more time to change, and also require massive investment in intensive research:

• We need investments in fossil-free energy sources, without that investment causing excessive emissions, and without other harmful effects on the environment, like the loss of biodiversity.
• There is a huge housing crisis all over the world. We need to build affordable housing for everyone, but without today’s big ecological footprint.

Putting Science to Work for the Planet

This points to the need for science and research to be channeled in the interests of people and the planet instead of being focused on producing profits for big business.

A democratically planned socialist economy will allow us to produce according to needs, human needs as well as ecological needs.

Via cradle to grave/life cycle assessments of certain products (including extraction, processing, use, and disposal), we can determine which production processes cause what type of ecological and climate impacts, at which point within the process this happens and what to do about it.

To give a concrete example: In cement production, around 90% of emissions are caused by the process of producing clinker, the key constituent of cement. This process directly emits CO₂ via a chemical reaction that needs extremely high temperatures. But with the help of microorganisms (cyanobacteria), bio-concrete bricks can be grown in four days at room temperature out of sand, actually consuming CO₂ instead of emitting it. Under capitalism however, a change to this technology does not take place because of the amount of money already invested by capitalists in the current mode of production. Without capitalist constraints on research and production, there is a large potential to discover materials and production processes with a lower environmental impact and implement them at large-scale.

Capitalist vs. Sustainable Agriculture

Another example is industrial vs. sustainable agriculture. For agribusinesses, the most profitable way is to harvest monocultures (single crops) on huge fields, using fossil-fueled large machinery, pesticides and massive amounts of industrial fertilizer. This produces high yields in a short time, but is extremely inefficient when taking into account the enormous amount of energy required for the fertilizer production and the ecological damage that is caused. Moreover, this type of industrial agriculture leads to massive soil degradation, thereby creating a dependence on intensive fertilizer use to compensate for reduced soil fertility.

Sustainable agriculture, on the other hand, could foster a natural process of soil fertilization (known as ‘biological nitrogen fixation’) instead of overusing industrial fertilizer, thereby making agriculture a part of a sustainable ecological metabolism instead of harming it. Many Indigenous communities also have knowledge in sustainable agricultural practices, intercropping for example, a practice where multiple crops are planted together in the same area. This allows crops to help one another grow through exchanging nutrients, maintaining soil moisture, and physically supporting each other, including through pest control. It also increases crop yields.

Sustainable agriculture does not mean taking an anti-technology approach, far from it. Sustainable practices can be combined with modern technology. Drones could be used to capture data about plant growth, plant health and livestock well-being. Sensors, large data bases and AI can be used to monitor soil composition, humidity and temperature, and control efficient automated drip irrigation that also considers rainfall forecasts. These are just a few examples of how technology can be used to facilitate a sustainable society.

Repairing the Climate

To limit the climate crisis and global warming as much as possible, we will also need to plan gigantic ecological repair and clean-up programs. Stopping deforestation is not enough, we have to plant millions of trees, re-create swamps and close methane leaks. Today’s forestry, which clears large areas and emits large quantities of greenhouse gases, can be replaced with sustainable forestry that increases carbon storage in the ground. Regarding reforestation, a 2019 study in the Science Journal found that in addition to existing trees, agricultural and urban areas, there is the potential to develop an extra 0.9 billion hectares of forest. This could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon, which is around four times the current global annual CO₂ — equivalent emissions.

Large scale wetland and swamp restoration would also be extremely effective, as they are the most effective carbon sinks on earth. They cover only around 3% of our planet’s land, but store approximately 30% of all land-based carbon — twice the amount of all the world’s forests combined.

The possibility of industrially removing CO₂ from the atmosphere should also not be ruled out, even if we know that “carbon capture” (CCS) under capitalism is often held up as an excuse for the continued burning of fossil fuels.

How to Overcome the Market

These actions and policies could and would transform the situation. However, a prerequisite for all of them to succeed is democratic public ownership of the economy, redirecting it to serve the interests of people and the planet instead of profit. Today, private ownership blocks such a transformation. You can’t control what you don’t own! Unfortunately many, even on the Left, only focus on necessary investment for climate action, regardless of whether it is public or private. They do not raise the issue of public or national ownership and democratic socialist planning as part of the policies which are necessary.

Often, this stems from a refusal to contemplate a solution which challenges the fundamental logic of the capitalist system. Breaking from this straitjacket, and recognising that any real solution to this crisis requires a fundamental reorganisation of the economy and society — a socialist revolution — is essential if the climate movement is to win.

In addition, the failure of bureaucratically planned Stalinist economies in the former USSR and elsewhere, and rightwing narratives about planned economies “not working” because of a “lack of information” and “lack of innovation”, are certainly factors in skepticism about socialist planning among many environmental leaders and thinkers. This represents a hangover from the ideological offensive of capitalism which took place after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

As a reaction against overly centralised, bureaucratic planning by Stalinist regimes, some argue instead for a market based on “self-management” by worker-owned enterprises or cooperatives. One problem with this self-management within a market environment is that worker-owned enterprises would be forced to compete against each other. Such a system also lacks overall democratic planning, as it is organised on a regional and national level instead of internationally. This so-called “market socialism” would very soon tend to imitate market capitalism. Another current has argued for moving directly to producing for human needs without money and markets, but has provided no strategy for how to get there — i.e how to overcome the current system and end the rule of capital — thus remaining in the realm of utopian dreams.

Marx, on the other hand, argued that, economically, socialism would have two different stages of development (this should not be confused with the Stalinist ‘two-stage theory’, which claims that countries need to pass through a capitalist stage with liberal democracy before moving towards socialism).

During the first economic stage, what Marxists call the “transitional economy”, general abundance (the overall absence of scarcity) would not yet be attained. Therefore, certain elements of a capitalist approach to distribution, like the use of money, would be kept, but in a modified form. For example, elements of a market, money and payment according to hours worked. However, in addition to wages, there would be an indirect or social wage: a multitude of free or almost free public services. Once, through the advantages of socialist planning, abundance is reached for certain products, the number of freely distributed goods and services could grow. Money would become secondary as people become used to a world without shortages.

As this process continues, the “second stage” of socialism could be reached, when scarcity, class society and the state which arises from it “withers away”, as described by Russian Revolutionary VI Lenin. The full development of socialism would mean the realisation of a society based on what Marx described as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Critique of the Gotha Program).

Among the first measures, during the first stage, would be the reduction of working time without loss of pay, to eliminate unemployment and achieve a better balance between work, family and leisure time, and to allow for economic and political decision making by the working class.

This is also key for the fight against the climate crisis. With publicly owned and democratically planned transport, we could replace short and midrange flights by a wide network of fast train connections in a rapid and planned way. Those who stop working in the aviation or other fossil sectors won’t be unemployed of course. We urgently need retraining programs to redirect labour towards fighting and adapting to the climate crisis, as well as more workers in the social, health and education sectors.

How Would Planning Work?

There are also many debates about how a “planned economy” would work. Should it be centralised or decentralised? The answer is “it depends”. Here are three different ways in which economic planning can be organised:

1. Anticipating demand based on its real time evolution, which is the model of the multinational retail company Walmart. The company shares the information from the cash register in real time with its supply chain. With this information, the suppliers organise Walmart’s stock replenishment, the company doesn’t do this itself. While socialist planning could use such technology to great effect, it would of course be different, with democratic discussions among workers and representative organisations replacing exploitation and top-down decisions about more or less random sales targets.
2. Order-based planning. In this case, production only starts when an order arrives. This can be useful for bigger industrial or technological products, and is already implemented in almost every big corporation, but without being integrated into an overall plan for the industry or economy as a whole.
3. Input-output analysis. This is a form of planning particularly useful for socialist planning. It means that the planning of production is based on output targets and the input needed for their production. This is very useful when it comes to the planning of sufficient free and public health, social and care infrastructure like hospitals, schools, daycare, and public laundries. The same applies for public transport and clean energy.

Different planning methods can be of great help, but they cannot replace the need for a system of workers’ democracy, which is key to the success of a planned economy. Under socialist planning, elected committees or councils of workers in the workplaces, and in neighborhoods, schools and communities would have real power, with elected representatives from these committees coordinating on a regional, sector and national level to manage the key sectors of the economy. In this way, we can decide what type and level of planning needs to be implemented for which sector and product or service.

Of course, not all economic activity needs to be nationalised and planned. Small shops, bars, restaurants etc. could have other forms of ownership. Beginning with the key sectors, however, the big majority of production and distribution needs to be nationalised and democratically planned in order to allow for democratic discussions on the different levels to decide which share of the surplus will go to which sector and where investments are needed most urgently to deal with climate change and human needs.

Even the more far-sighted layers of the ruling class realise that capitalism’s “market solutions” are a brake on all that is necessary to solve the multitude of crises their system is facing. That is why we see that some change their climate policies in the direction of more state intervention. However, this is doomed to fail by the systemic contradictions of capitalism. Only with a democratically planned socialist society will we have the possibility to limit the unfolding climate catastrophe and give workers, youth and the whole of humanity a real future.