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SmithFS's avatar

Renewable energy for Russia!?! What they really mean is wind & solar. Powering Russia with wind & solar would be like trying to grow pineapples in Norway. They do have a good hydro resource but they are expensive to develop, way too limited in size, environmentally destructive, vulnerable to drought and the long distance transmission is very expensive and vulnerable to sabotage. Even ESG rarely funds hydro. And never funds nuclear.

Russia has excellent light water reactors, the VVER-1100 and also has Fast Reactors that use a trivial amount of fuel. If they REALLY cared anything for the environment and climate change Russia would be pushing hard on nuclear just as China now is. That's the only sensible path to a low carbon future for Russia and it makes all this crap about ESG, carbon footprint, carbon trading, carbon credits absolutely worthless, in fact less than worthless, of negative effectiveness. Birdbrains, Russia has one path forward on climate change mitigation and that is build nuclear power plants. And since Russia is the largest exporter of Nuclear Power on Earth, why don't they get massive carbon credits for every NPP they export? How come schlock Western Companies, like Amazon or Microsoft get carbon credits for funding solar or wind farms in Developing nations but no credits for NPP exports? ESG is a scam. Unlike wind & solar, nuclear actually does reduce carbon emissions.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s

Your "Carbon Footprint" is a LIE (and we all fell for it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_zjhp5HyfI

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Stegiel's avatar

From Red to Green was the autobiography of Bahro. Bahro, who developed his critique within a Marxist framework, accused the Communist Party leadership of betraying socialist ideals. Characterizing the states of Eastern Europe as systems of organized irresponsibility, he analyzed their political economy and aspects of their industrial production. He recommended far-reaching reforms of the administrative apparatus—indeed, an overhaul of the entire political structure. In Bahro’s view, the Eastern Bloc was not merely an example of deformed socialism, but rather a social reality based on entirely different principles. He accused the Soviet leadership of having, through its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, robbed itself and the peoples of Eastern Europe of the experience of socialism with a human face. He demanded true economic democracy, without wage privileges for tiny elites, and also the elimination of the existing division of labor. Genuine institutional self-rule, Bahro declared, must gradually develop from below, with freedom of personal development a necessary condition. He believed that a coalition drawing from all political tendencies could lead the way out of self-imposed imprisonment. All this was conceived as a new vision of communism. Altogether some 300,000 copies of The Alternative were sold, and the book was translated into numerous other languages.

“Bahro … remains as committed as ever to the vision of a classless society. He sees the ecology crisis as a direct result of the capitalist industrial system [a system taken over lock, stock and barrel by the socialist states) ; he looks to material interests as the ultimate force behind social change—an interest in survival that is ‘more material’ than any economic interest.”

But nor is Bahro Gorz, draping a green veil over an old, decrepit and discredited project. (For a brilliant debunking of Gorz’s Ecology as Politics, see Bookchin’s Towards an Ecological Society. Regrettably it’s the only brilliant material in the book.) There is much in Bahro that is not new: much of what he says echoes Murray Bookchin in the sixties. Nor does his critique seem to me to be as radical as that of Camatte, Lewis Mumford, or the Fifth Estate. Nevertheless, he is deeply involved in a movement that is practically as well as theoretically confronting the megamachine; more of the real project that lies before us comes through his work than through the work of any other marxist “interpreter” of the ecological critique.

Bahro’s central thesis runs along these lines: We face today an ecological crisis of threatening, global dimensions. This crisis is a direct result of capitalist industry, an industry which, according to Bahro, “is driven on by a boundless need to valorize capital, to make value into more value.” This limitless need threatens to destroy the natural base of human life and at the same time “poses the old question of ‘socialism or barbarism’ with an intensity that earlier socialists, for all their farsightedness, did not even dream of.” He states that the future of the “entire social body” is in question, speaking urgently of the imminent results of our suicidal mode of existence: “The present way of life of the most industrially advanced nations stands in a global and antagonistic contradiction to the natural conditions of human existence. We are eating up what other nations and future generations need to live on.” If these nations complete their goal of industrializing the world, life on this planet will be destroyed. This process may take a hundred years, he tells us, and will be caused not necessarily by lack of resources but by the systematic destruction of the biosphere.

In the context of Neo Liberal Russia and the WEF Leninists, Bahro provides a bridge to today. From Green to "Blue" shall we say, or call this curious hybrid a Watermelon. Green on the outside.

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