If the Soviet Union was able to objectively acknowledge and respond to problems outside of ideological orthodoxy, it wouldn't be the USSR.
Yes, the Soviets, who had such brilliant minds that they could made orthodox ideological arguments for why Socialist Imperialism was a good thing and for why the fatherland was important even when Marx said the working class had no fatherland... The ideological framework of the Soviet Union was certainly limiting, but much more flexible than you might expect. So I doubt that this would be a particularly bad impediment to the Soviets acting on what climate science tells them.
That said, they've got bigger problems which IMO will make any cogent response rather difficult.
They have the same cruel calculus that is killing us: infinite growth in a finite system is a recipe for death.
For darn sure. The Soviets, first and foremost, were a modern industrial society. More like the West than unlike it. In this case, that's not a good thing.
Now suppose you have a brilliant leader with a supine bureaucracy, an energized Soviet public, and the will and wealth to cut production, eat bitter, zero out emissions, and plant billions of trees. You know who's going to see that as an opportunity? The West and China, who will together more than make up for the Soviet bloc in terms of pollution. They may change their tune once the catastrophes start happening, but by then it's almost too late.
So OTL basically only with fewer starving pensioners? Part of the problem here is they'd be hollowing out their industrial power just as in OTL they unintentionally hollowed out their industrial power. It's a bit of a risky play when there's a very real risk WW3 could happen at any moment.
Presuming that the USSR was able to hold on in one form or another, what is their take on climate change and emissions policy likely to be?
Given their likely dependence on fossil fuel exports, is it likely that they would attempt to discredit it or would they support efforts to limit emissions?
Much depends on how it holds on.
Soviet environmentalism was in its infancy before Gorbachev turbo-charged things. It was also fairly nationalist - for example poets and writers who objected to the Soviets despoiling the natural resources of _Russia_ for the benefit of Central Asians or Ukrainians.
So does the Soviet Union end up flattening the environmentalist movement inside its borders because of its nationalism? Does it pander to the movement to gain the support of nationalists? Does the Party start "green-washing" itself to steal the ecological issue from the nationalists? It could go either way.
Also, it's important to keep in mind why the Soviet system was so dysfunctional - the biggest problem in the system is the way that bureaucrats at all levels weaponized information to use against other bureaucrats. The Soviet Union actually had fairly strict environmental regulations by the 80s - the problem was that because any information sharing undermined the power of the bureaucrat sharing the information, the regulators were kept blind, unable to get enough information to really tackle the pollution problems that were unfolding. As long as information flows are impeded, the Soviets will struggle to implement any well-meaning policies. If they successfully push back the culture of secrecy as Andropov and Gorbachev were trying to do, then the existing environmental regulations can start to have beneficial impacts even if the Soviets do not have any overt policy of tackling ecological problems.
And the Soviets have one advantage - their backs are well and truly against the wall. The go-to way to solve economic problems in the Soviet Union had been "throw more stuff at it", resulting in the hideous waste of material the Soviets are so famous for. And it was very clear by the 80s that "throw more stuff at it" was not cutting the mustard any more. If the Soviets survive, they must have found qualitative, rather than quantitative solutions. Even to cling on as a slowly declining zombie garrison state, the Soviets must make some qualitative improvements (got to run to stand still). And such qualitative improvements would tend to have economic and ecological benefits.
For example, the Soviet Union hadn't reformed the coal price since Stalin's time, meaning that the state was subsidizing dirty coal plants - reform the coal price, and industry is pushed to more efficient energy sources and the state ditches a costly subsidy.
On the other hand, the Soviet "war against the Earth" is likely to continue. I suspect that at the very least, canals would be built to divert water from the north of European Russia to Souther Russia and the Ukraine, which would hit the wetlands in that region hard, leading to loss of biodiversity and carbon release from the wetland soils. The Soviets may even end up diverting some of the Siberian rivers into the Aral Sea (with similarly awful impacts on the Siberian wetlands, though it would at least refill the Aral sea). I can't see the Cold War ending, so any Soviet leadership will be weighing ecological needs against "what if the Americans invade" - and the ecology is going to lose that argument often.
Much of the ecological recovery of post-Soviet Eurasia doesn't happen, because absent a Soviet collapse, there's just less opportunity for the wilderness to push human civilization back.
On the other hand, even if the Soviets don't divert Siberian rivers into the Aral Sea, that particular ecological disaster still won't be nearly as bad - the Aral Sea disaster was pushed into overdrive by post-Soviet slave agriculture and the sea being divided up between several newly independent states.
So overall, I would expect that a surviving Soviet Union would be somewhere between "somewhat improved" and "very improved" in its ecological stewardship compared to how it was in the 1980s, but things would still be worse than OTL's post-Soviet states.
Especially because I suspect that the Soviets surviving would have a bad impact on the West - whatever the actual Soviet policies I suspect that the Soviets would deploy their usual whataboutism and might even go so far as "green washing" Communism for Western audiences to attempt to co-opt Western Green anti-capitalists (especially if, as mentioned above, the Party green-washes itself INSIDE the Soviet Union as well, to weaken nationalist voices). And that, of course, would make a very convenient target for anti-Green factions in the West.
Considering that methane release from the Arctic is already in OTL at "
extreme danger" level, the Soviet Union surviving may well lead to human extinction.
fasquardon
