> Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.
During communism Czech Republic lost forests over whole mountain range, because they were melted away by acid rains because it was cheaper to run brown coal power plants without any filtration.
Rivers were used as sewers for big factories. Water being brown-red under the paper mill? That's normal comrade. Having massive clumps of foam under weirs and rivers smelling like swamp and detergent? Don't complain comrade if you don't want to have problems.
Oil spills (i.e. from oil pipes) weren't cleaned, they were just covered with earth, some found decades after fall of communism.
Nobody cared about filtration in general. It was kind of normal to have a smoke cloud over an industrial city forever, unless winds were blowing strong enough to gift this poisonous present to countryside.
Is it snowing in the summer? Yeah it is not, that's just ash from factory over there. Try to catch "snowflakes" on your tongue if you would like to have cancer in few years.
Agriculture was insane as well. Forced collectivization of land and making fields as big as possible so mechanization is as effective as possible has caused erosion of soil and thus increase of usage of fertilizers which were flushed into already polluted rivers during rains.
I could go on and on. Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.