That's a good thing.
"Capitalism" likes growth. But so do other economic systems.
You want one that has a sharp drop-off in carbon emission, you get the socialism of Venezuela with its economic crash, or late-stage Soviet socialism in the '80s that led into the crash of the '90s. North Korea had dropping carbon emissions. But those aren't because of ideology, and nobody views those things as "progressive".
One can be pro-environment.
One can be anti-capitalist.
The danger is seeing them as biunique, assuming there's an "if and only if" when there isn't one there. That if you're one, you're necessarily the other, because *the* thing that hurts the environment is capitalism. It's an easy conclusion, because we don't have our noses rubbed in the information that dissuades us from that conclusion and because that conclusion is often exactly the conclusion we want to reach--two problems that feed bias and reinforce each other.
Some pre-Columbian New World civilizations trashed their environment and drove species to extinction. Some Old World cultures produced toxic sites back in the pre-capitalist Bronze Age. What we see is a correlation: Capitalism has produced large-scale problems not because only capitalism causes problems but because capitalism produced large-scale enterprises. Similarly, 20th century wars and genocides were catastrophic and at time genocidal not because capitalism and modernity led to more wars and genocide but because we had economies of scale in large conflicts, when genocides and smaller wars were much more common in previous centuries (and in civilizations far removed from anything resembling "capitalism"
. But just as there are whitebread American myths about virtuous leaders and a romanticized past, so other peoples romanticize their past to produce a kind of non-American exceptional quality that makes their identities superior.
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