Apocalypse Now! Climate change,
capitalism and revolution
John Molyneux
First published in Irish Marxist Review 25, November 2019.
In the year since the publication in October 2018 of the IPCC
[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Report warning that the world has 12
years in which to limit global warming to a 1.5C increase, the impending
apocalypse of catastrophic climate breakdown has moved dramatically from future
tense to present tense.
It is difficult to find the words adequately to express
either the scale of the crisis that is upon us or its urgency. This is because
we are entering a situation for which there is no historical precedent or
analogy. It is not like the Black Death, or similar to the First or the
Second World Wars. Nor is it the same as a nuclear holocaust. And it hasn’t
happened yet so none of us know concretely what it will be like or exactly how
it is going to unfold. Nor will the climate crisis be a single event or even a
series of events with some kind of time limit. Rather it will be a multitude of
interacting events and processes which may extend indefinitely over decades or
even centuries.
But what we do know is that both the rapidly accumulating scientific
evidence and the evidence of events round the world show that climate change is
developing and climate catastrophe is hurtling towards us at an even faster
rate than the IPCC report predicted.
We know that July 2019 was the hottest month the world has experienced since
records began.
The
European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Programme, which analyzes
temperature data from around the planet, said that July, which was the hottest
month since temperature records began, was around 0.56 °C warmer than the
global average temperature between 1981-2010. That's slightly hotter than July
2016, when the world was in the throes of one of the strongest El Nino
events on record.
We know that Canada and the far north are warming at twice or more the rate of
more southerly latitudes. This is producing a much faster melting of the ice
caps, glaciers and permafrost (soil, rock or sediment that is frozen for more
than two consecutive years) than was expected. Thus
Greenland's massive ice sheet may have melted by a record amount
this year, scientists have warned. During this year
alone, it lost enough ice to raise the average global sea level by more than a
millimetre. Researchers say they're "astounded" by the acceleration
in melting and fear for the future of cities on coasts around the world. One
glacier in southern Greenland has thinned by as much as 100 metres since I last
filmed on it back in 2004.
And
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted,
an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis
is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said
they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had
destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been
frozen solid for millennia.
“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a
professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication
that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more
years.“
And
the consequence of this is not just on polar bears and rising sea levels. It has an immediate effect in terms of
intensifying the greenhouse effect. White ice reflects heat from the sun back
into space. Dark ocean and land absorbs and retains it so the shrinking of the
ice caps further amplifies global warming . The melting of the permafrost releases
into the atmosphere immense quantities of methane and methane (also produced by
ruminating cattle) is a far more deadly greenhouse gas than CO2. Over a 20 year
period it traps 84 times more heat than CO2 and global concentrations have
already risen from 722 ppb (parts per billion) to 1866 ppb, the highest ratio
in 800,000 years.
Then there have
been the succession of extreme weather events over the past 12 months. These include the huge fires in California; 50C
temperatures in much of Australia, the catastrophic cyclones (Idai and Kenneth)
in Madagascar, Malawi and Tanzania (which claimed over 1000 lives): major fires
in Portugal and Northern Greece, fires across Alaska and Siberia, drought in
Southern India with Chennai (Madras), a city of 7 million people, running out
of water; flooding in Nepal (90 dead and 1 million displaced) and Mumbai, Bihar, and Assam ; flooding in Japan;
a heat wave across Northern China; fires across Sweden; exceptionally high
temperatures in July in Europe such as 38C in the UK, 41.8C in Belgium, 40.7C
in the Netherlands (the first time ever over 40C in that country) and 42.6C in
Paris. And now, as I write, the burning
of the Amazon (along with fires in the world’s other great forest carbon sinks
in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Congo) and the utter destruction of the
Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian.
What is more there was also the
extraordinary cold spell in America in January/February of this year in which
semi-arctic conditions swept down into the heart of the USA in what was a
‘polar vortex’ with temperatures as low as – 30 C. [The polar vortex is
linked to climate change because rising temperatures in the Arctic affect the
jet stream in the upper atmosphere driving cold winds south and drawing warm
wind northward]
What makes these events so important is not just the
dreadful immediate suffering they produce but the fact that it is in the form
of extreme weather (rather than rising sea levels) that climate change is going
have its main impact in the next five to ten to fifteen years, so they are very
much the shape of things to come – this year, next year and the year after, not
in 2050 or ‘by the end of the century’ as is so often said in the official
discourse. Taken in the round this combination of scientific predictions and
actual experience is alarming in the extreme and a number of very serious
climate scientists are beginning to articulate this.
James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of
atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were
damaging the Ozone Layer states has stated that: ‘The chance that there will be
any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,’ and
argued that recovery from this will require ‘a World War Two type transformation of industry’ within ‘five years’.
When
considering the prospects we face, socialists also have to take into account
not only the direct natural consequences of the heatwaves, droughts, fires,
storms and floods that are on their way but also their likely social and
political consequences. First, it is
absolutely unavoidable that those who will suffer most, by a long way, from all
these climate disasters will be the poor and deprived: above all the poor of
the global south where temperatures are already high, housing is ramshackle,
health and emergency services weakest and welfare provision nonexistent. To experience drought or flooding in India or
Bangladesh, where people are already dying on the streets in ‘normal’ times, is
quite different from experiencing it in modern Europe. But the same will also
apply, if not to the same extent, to the poor and the working people of even
the most advanced capitalist countries. All the soaring inequalities that characterise
our neoliberal capitalist society will inevitably be reflected in circumstances
of climate breakdown,
Second, we know
from abundant experience in the past that the way our rulers respond to
so-called ‘natural disasters’ is through a combination of crocodile tears (for
a very short while), callous indifference and repression. This pattern has
repeated itself through the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina
in New Orleans in 2005, to Superstorm Sandy in 2012 under Obama and Hurricane Maria
in Puerto Rica in 2017. In all of these cases all sorts of pledges of aid and
reconstruction were made in the immediate aftermath of disaster only for them
to slip away into abandonment when it came to delivery. Years later people who
lost their homes and everything in them were still unable to return. The case of Hurricane Maria was particularly atrocious.
Initially the death toll was officially claimed to be 64. A year later it was
admitted to be 2,975 and many critics argue that it was really
much higher. Bitterness at the appalling
response to the Hurricane, by both the Trump administration and the local
governor, was a significant factor in the great revolt of the Puerto Rican
people earlier this year. On a lesser scale similar scenarios were played out
over the Grenfell Fire and in relation to flood victims in Ireland.
Third, there is
the dreadful fact that accelerating climate change is destroying food
production and increasing desertification in the hotter regions of the earth
and is going to render increasing areas of the planet virtually uninhabitable.
If global warming exceeds 2C or heads
towards 3C, for which it is on course at present, this will apply to southwest
North America, North Africa, large parts of southern Africa and Australia while
major expansions of semiarid
regions will occur over the north side of the Mediterranean, southern Africa,
and North and South America.
Climate
model simulations also suggest that, alongside droughts, rainfall, when it does
occur, will be more intense for almost the entire world (we are already seeing
this in places) and this will increase soil erosion. The effect of all this, as night follows
day, will be a huge increase in the numbers of climate refugees.
Climate refugees already exist, of course,
but the fact that this is not an ‘officially’ recognised category and that an
exact definition is difficult to arrive at
means that estimates of numbers vary greatly and are to some extent arbitrary. Thus Climate Migration website tells us ‘For example we know that last year 24 million people were
displayed by weather related disasters like floods and hurricanes’ while Migration Data Portal says, ‘In 2018,
17.2 million people in 144 countries and territories were newly
displaced in the context of disasters within their own country’,’ and that ‘In 2018, displacement has been caused primarily
by extreme weather events, especially storms (9.3 million) and cyclones,
hurricanes and typhoons (7.9 million). Particularly devastating were the
southwest monsoons in India and Typhoon Mangkhut in China and the Philippines ‘
Accurate predictions as to future numbers of climate refugees are therefore
inherently impossible but it is clearly going to run at least into the hundreds
of millions. And what we do know is how existing capitalist governments, rulers
and politicians have responded to this situation. We know that one wing of the
political spectrum ( Trump, Orban, Salvini, Bolsonaro etc) have responded by
saying simply ‘let them drown in the Mediterranean or die in the deserts’ and
by trying to legally enforce such racist inhumanity by criminalising aid to
refugees and simultaneously using the crisis ideologically to grow and sustain
far right political movements. We know that the so-called ‘centre’ and ‘mainstream’
of the spectrum (Macron, Obama, May, Varadkar etc) and even many on the left, while using a less
incendiary language, nonetheless in
practice appease and capitulate to the far right in such a way as to strengthen
the latter. In other words we know that as general climate crisis escalates so
too will the danger of a fascist and barbarian ‘solution’ to it.
In concluding this section I will
simply say that while all predictions about the speed of the process of climate
breakdown and consequent deadlines,
whether they are the IPCC’s 2030 or James Anderson’s five years, can only be best guesses It is an
unavoidable fact that this catastrophe is hurtling towards us. It is also
unavoidable fact that neither the current global system, nor any significant
component of it (for example any major government)
has shown any sign of taking the action necessary to avert the
catastrophe. Despite all the scientific
reports, all the evidence of actual disasters, and all the green talk, global
greenhouse emissions – and in the end that is the statistic that counts – are
still rising. In 2018 they reached an all-time record high of 37.1 billion
tonnes with China’s up by 4.7%, the US by 2.5% and India by 6.3% .
In 2019, the UK Met Office predicts, there will be a further rise by 2.75 parts
per million (ppm), among the highest annual rises in the 62 years since good
records began.
Asleep or awake our rulers are walking us into the furnace.
Climate Change and Capitalism
In this article I will take for granted
that ‘we’ – concerned citizens, activists, trade unionists, workers, young people
and old, school students and college students – all of us together,
should do everything we can to raise awareness about climate change and to
build a movement against it. We should have supported the 20 September school
strike, and will support future strikes; we will back Extinction Rebellion Week
and every other similar resistance round the world. We will also back every
piece of progressive legislation – like bans on fracking, declarations of
climate emergencies or Brid Smith’s Climate Emergency Measures Bill (which
sought to compel the Irish Government to cease grant licenses for further
fossil-fuel exploration and extraction) .
We will fight for everything that gains us time, moves us in the right
direction and pushes back the impending disaster or even sets an example to the
rest of the world as to what has to be done. The only exception to this is
those measures such as carbon taxes which violate the principal of just
transition and, by penalising working class people, threaten to alienate them
from the mass popular movement we need. We should campaign for free and
expanded public transport; for retrofitting of homes; for huge aforestation
programmes; for the redirection of agriculture away from cattle and beef
production and for massive public investment in renewable energy (wind, solar
and tidal power).
Having said all that, however, I also
want to argue that in order to combat climate change, to prevent it becoming
catastrophic and to deal with the effects of it that are already built into the
system and will inevitably intensify in the coming years, it is essential for
the anti-climate change movement to become anti-capitalist and indeed to end
capitalism.
Capitalism drives and is
linked to climate change at every level. There is an important historical argument that our economic
dependence on fossil fuels came about not due the availability of natural
resources nor for technological reasons but because it suited the needs of
capitalism. Andreas Malm in his important study Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming has shown that during the
Industrial Revolution steam power based on coal was adopted in preference to
water power because it facilitated capitalist exploitation. There is also the powerful argument, both
scientific and political, that the origins of a new geological age, the
Anthropocene characterised by a total environmental crisis including climate
change, corresponds to the immense global capitalist boom after the Second
World War. Hence the ‘hockey stick’ shaped graphs for so
many natural and social phenomena ranging from C02 in the atmosphere to ocean
acidification, urban population and international tourism.
However,
the angle from which I want to approach this issue is the simple question: why
have our rulers, the world’s governments and politicians left it so long to
even begin seriously addressing the issue of climate change when it would have
been so much easier to tackle it earlier? Here there are a number of parallels.
What would happen to a doctor whose patient was diagnosed with cancer and who knowingly
ignored the diagnosis, fobbing the patient off with paracetomol, until they
were almost at death’s door? They would certainly be struck off and probably
subject to criminal prosecution. Or what about a shipping company that had an
ocean liner which they knew was not seaworthy and most likely would not make
the Atlantic crossing for which it was scheduled, but nonetheless gambled on
sending it out at the cost of a two thousand lives? That company would be
guilty at the least of corporate manslaughter. These examples can be repeated
for cars, planes, bridges and so on. Yet the fact is that what our rulers have
done regarding climate change has been worse than any of these in terms of its
consequences for humanity and animal species. They have, already, guaranteed
the death of millions of people and the extinction of thousands of species.
Let’s
be clear about how long they have known about the problem. The possibility of
the greenhouse effect was first understood in 1896, by the Swedish scientist,
Svante Arhenhuis, but it was not considred practically significant. The fact
that some global warming was actually occurring was first measured in the 1930s
but it was assumed to be on too minute a scale to worry about. This started to
change in the 1950s with the work of Guy Stewart Callender and in the 1960s
David Keeling demonstrated that human-generated greenhouse emissions were large
enough to cause global warming. By the late 1970s there was
already a degree of scientific consensus on this. The simple fact that the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the
World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme and issud
its first report in 1990 testifies to the fact that every serious government
and political leader has known about the problem for thirty years. In 1992 the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) , at the Rio Earth Summit,
committed states to reduce gas emissions ‘based on the then scientific
consensus’. In 1993 scientists received evidence from Greenland ice cores and
by the end of the 1990s they knew they were looking not just at gradual warming
but the real possibility of rapid and catastrophic warming should certain
thresholds or tipping points be crossed. In other words, our so-called
‘world leaders’ and governments, almost without exception, have been knowingly
gambling with the lives of hundreds of millions of people for decades. Their
deep guilt is undeniable but the question is ‘why?’
One
answer might be that these politicians simply don’t give a damn – they care only
about themselves, their careers and the pockets they can line. But even this
were true it woouldn’t explain why politicians and governmentswould not
consider it in their own interest, politically as well as for their children,
to do something serious about climate change in the same way that the British
ruling class decided it was in their interest to abolish the slave trade in
1833 or the US government decided it had to abolish slavery in order to win the
Civil War or, a century later, to pass civil rights legislation.
An
answer to that might be that there have been no votes in tackling climate
change because ‘people’ didn’t care about it. But people didn’t care because
they didn’t understand it. This, of course, can be laid at the door of the
media. The responsibility of the media is clear. For decades they colluded with
corporate funded climate denial to treat climate change as just ‘a theory’ and
invariable to ‘balance’ scientific testimony with climate scepticism. If they
no longer do that [in Ireland and the UK, as opposed to the US and elsewhere]
they still don’t treat climate change as a real ‘crisis’ like Brexit or an
economic crash but relegate it to the inside pages and they still refuse to
link ever increasing extreme weather events to climate change. However, the
media is not a stand alone independent force in this: a) the media is largely
owned and controlled by people, like Rupert Murdock and Denis O’Brien, who are
an integral part of the ruling elites; b) the media, especially the news media,
takes its cue to a huge extent from governments and leading politicians. All it
would have required to get the media to change their agenda would have been a
few concerted statements and appeals from ‘world leaders’. So we are back to
our question as to why those leaders have refused to do this.
The
compelling answer is the tackling climate change consistently clashed with the
interests and priorities of capitalism, the imperative of profit. At every
stage, and still today, our leaders have found that even when they ‘sincerely’
wanted to do what was necessary to avert climate breakdown this conflicted with
the immediate needs of ‘the economy’ ie. capitalism and they invariably chose
the latter over the former. This applied whether it was Enda Kenny, George
Bush, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama (never mind Trump) Tony Blair or David
Cameron, Sarkosy , Macron, Putin or Xi Jinping.
Understanding
this involves understanding not so much how climate change works as how
capitalism works. For capitalist businesses the
profit imperative is not just a need for a reasonable ‘return’ (as they often
claim) but a drive to maximise profit . Nor is it just a matter of personal
greed, an insatiable desire for more luxury cars, yachts or private jets. It is
an objective pressure deriving from the very nature of the capitalist system –
not just the ideology of neo-liberalism – which dominates every enterprise and
unit within it. This is because capitalism is based on competition in the
market, ultimately the world market, and the measure of success in that
competition is the amount of profit realised. This operates at every level from
the local corner shop to the giant multinational corporation. To put it
concretely SPAR is competing with Centra, Volkswagen is competing with Toyota
and General Motors, and ExxonMobile is competing with BP and Shell, and if they
do not keep up in he race, the race for profit, they will go out of business
and get taken over. Crucially – for
responding to climate change – this operates not at the level of states but also
internationally between capitalist states, between the USA and China and Russia and the EU and
India and so on in an endless struggle of all against all.
At a
national level this relentless competition is partially mitigated by the
existence of the state (not just parliament but the civil service, judiciary,
police, armed forces etc) . One of the functions of the capitalist state, along
with repression, is to provide services and infrastructure (schools, hospitals,
roads, transport etc) required by the capitalist economy as a whole, which it
may not be in the interests of private businesses to maintain. But no such
authority exists at the international level. Internationally each
capitalist state acts on behalf of its own capitalist class in the global
competition. Thus not only each business but also each state is under an iron
compulsion to grow its economy at a rate that matches its rivals.
The
final piece in this capitalist jigsaw is the central role played by fossil-fuel
and fossil fuel related corporations in the global capitalist economy. The
likes of Shell, BP, ExxonMobile, Texaco, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors
are among the very biggest in the world and they all exercise a huge influence
on government. It should be remembered that US Vice President Dick Cheney, the
brains behind George W Bush, was an executive of the oil company, Halliburton
and that Trump’s first Secretary of State was Rex Tillerson, former CEO of
ExxonMobile. But it should also be understood that the objective weight of
these companies in the world economy gives them immense political leverage even
without such direct personal influence.
As a
result of these combined pressures the prioritisation of profit over the
environment and over human life becomes second nature to both business
executives and mainstream politicians and state officials. US Secretary of
State, Mike Pompeo, is pleased the Arctic is melting. In May this year, with $
signs flashing in his eyes, he stated:
The Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and
abundance. It houses 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil, 30 percent of
its undiscovered gas, an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold,
diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources, fisheries galore.
Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways
and new opportunities for trade. This could potentially slash the time it takes
to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days. Arctic sea lanes
could become the 21st century Suez and Panama Canals.
The
point about this is not how outrageous but how normal this is. ‘They’ might not
all say it so openly but it is how the large majority of them think. It
requires immense popular mobilisation, on a much greater scale, than anything
yet achived by Extinction Rebellion or Fridays 4 Future or anybody else to
force them to even contemplate any other way of operating and when that does
happen their ‘change of heart’ is only temporary, to get the threat of the
popular movement to go away, before returning to profit driven
business-as-usual.
This
is why capitalism and capitalist politicians have done next to nothing to stop
climate change: this is why they have been prepared to sacrifice hundreds of
millions of lives and millions of species and gamble with the future of the
planet. That is what they have done for decades and, in many cases, for
centuries and what they are still doing now and will continue to do in the
future. And this doesn’t just mean not
doing enough; it means actively intervening to prevent serious action being
taking as Leo Varadkar and Fine Gael did in Ireland by using behind the scenes
parliamentary manoeuvres tp block Brid Smith’s Climate Emergency Measures Bill,
and as Obama did at the Copenhagen Earth Summit in 2009 and Trump has done by
pulling the US out of the 2015 Paris Accords.
Trump’s statement on this summed it all up in a single sentence, ‘ the
Paris Accord will undermine our economy’.
This
explanation of what has already happened in the immediate past provides us with
the best guide as to what will happen in the immediate future. Even if by some
extraordinary and most unlikely miracle substantial sections of the global
business and political elite were to have a collective Damascene conversion to
environmentalism, there would be no way, by their methods, they could turn
around the immense oil tanker of the global economy in the very short time we
have to avert disaster. This is why we need ‘System change not climate change’.
The Meaning of System Change
The
slogan ‘System change not climate change’ is popular in the movement and that
is a very good thing, but itis clear that it means different things to
different people.
For
some, and I would cite Irish Green Party leader Eamonn Ryan as an example here,
bringing about system change is largely about changing the collective ‘mind
set’ and developing a new ‘narrative’ According to this view,
and I think that in a rather vague way this is quite widely shared in ‘green’
and environmentalist circles, capitalism is first and foremost a set of
attitude and beliefs – attitudes and beliefs which can be altered by education
and persuasion , even if that persuasion involves a significant amount of
peaceful protest. What is involved is the ‘people’ should be induced to move
away from their acquisitiveness and obsession with consumption. Similarly
society should be persuaded to abandon its addiction to economic growth and its
use of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a key measure of national success.
This
approach, well intentioned as it may be, gets the relationship between mind
sets and social reality upside down. CEOs and business managers are not
obsessed with profit maximisation because profit maximisation because the idea
arbitrarily dropped into their heads from the sky but because it is a daily
necessity imposed on the by capitalist social relations. Capitalist politicians
are not focused on economic growth because they were taught it at university
but because without growth capitalism goes into a downward spiral , a
‘recession’, and nation states that fail to grow decline and are eventually
conquered or taken over. The ‘mind set’ of capitalist economics which prevails
from the Harvard Business School to the Economics Department at Trinity, from
the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington to the ESRI, is not just a mistake; it
represents a set of real material interests, the interests of the capitalist
class. System change, therefore, requires not just changing attitudes but
changing the material social relations which underlie them.
Another
widespread view is that system change means a
mix of government initiatives
from above and life style changes in society so that gradually a
sustainable eco-friendly form of capitalism will be arrived at. This idea should, of course, be tested in
practice, in particular by demanding the necessary initiatives from governments
e,g. keeping fossil fuels in the ground It is right always to test the limits
of the system. But it is very doubtful
that this gradualist approach can work at all and it certainly isn’t going to
work quickly enough to meet the challenge we face. Moreover, it leaves the basic economic dynamic of the system – competitive production for profit – in place
and tht dynamic is inherently anti-ecological: it creates as Karl Marx, John
Bellamy Foster and others have argued, a ‘metabolic rift’ between society and
nature so that even if some time-gaining reforms are achieved (which is helpful
but not guaranteed) all the fundamental problems will reassert themselves.
Real
system change means transforming the basic way in which production is organised
in our society. It means public ownership, not of every corner shop and small
business, but of the main industries, services, banks and financial
institutions and their operation according to democratic social planning. The
democratic planning is not an afterthought or optional extra – without it
public ownership gives you, as in Stalinist Russia, only state capitalism. Only this breaks the
competitive ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake ‘ logic of capitalism and
makes possible large scale production to meet human needs which include a
sustainable relationship with nature. The word for this is socialism. Without
socialism the march to ecocide and barbarism will continue.
Revolution
But
how is socialism to be achieved? Unfortunately socialism cannot be achieved by
the normal methods of parliamentary democracy. I say unfortunately because it
would be much simpler if it could; indeed we would probably have many examples
of socialism already since there have been many instances of the election of governments with socialist intentions.
The problem is that parliament is essentially a talking shop, a facade for a
fundamentally undemocratic system. The real centres of power in any capitalist
society, whether it is the US, China or Ireland, lie outside parliament in the
board rooms of the banks and major industries and in the armed forces, the
upper ranks of the civil service and the judiciary and in the recesses of the
deep state, none of which are in any way democratic. Whenever socialist or even
seriously reformist governments come to power these institutions mobilize their
power to frustrate, block and eventually remove the government. They would do the same
with any seriously ecological government. The only way in which such a government could
successfully be defended would be by mass mobilization from below, which went
beyond the limits of normal parliamentary democracy to defeat the bosses and
the state; in other words by revolutionary means.
The
only way, in general, that real system change, real change to an
environmentally sustainable society, can be achieved is by mass revolution. That
means a combination of mass street demonstrations, mass strikes and widespread
workplace occupations which breaks the power of the existing state and
establishes a new form of democracy based on people’s assemblies.
There
is an obvious argument against this perspective: it runs ‘There is no sign of
your mass socialist revolution happening and we have no time; we need a
solution to climate change NOW!’ This
argument was put to me when I first started to get involved on the climate
issue about 18 years ago. It was a powerful argument then and remains a
powerful argument today (only 18 years later and capitalism iis no nearer
solving the problem). I would reply with
two points. First revolution is not, and should never be, counterposed to the
immediate changes that are needed now: keep it in the ground, free public
transport etc. I repeat we must fight for every immediate step forward we can
get. Second, it is true that there is
not an immediate prospect of national, let alone international socialist
revolution, but the very fact of extreme climate crisis will generate the
conditions that will make revolution possible.
First,
the proliferation of extreme weather events around the world, together with
accumulating scientific evidence, will make the need for system change clear to
increasing numbers of people globally. Second, the actual experience of those
weather events will push people more and more in the direction of people power,
collectivist responses to them in order
to deal with them and prevent ordinary people being abandoned while the rich
head for their gated communities in the hills.
Third, the imminent prospect of
climate catastrophe will increasingly provide a straightforward answer to what
has long been a major objection to socialism and revolution: look how it ended
in Russia! The truth is Marxists could produce endless explanations about what
went wrong and how Stalinism was a
result of material conditions not socialism as such but most people who never
read Trotsky or Tony Cliff or any of that were still turned against socialism
by what happened in Russia (and China, and Eastern Europe and so on). The point
about extreme change is that it is likely to override all that with the
proposition that at least socialism would better than extinction. Third, the very global nature of the climate
crisis will make the global spread of revolution, if a national breakthrough is
achieved, more likely and more obviously necessary. Lastly, and this too will become more and
more obvious as the climate crisis deepens, the alternative to socialist
revolution will be fascist barbarism.
.
https://theconversation.com/climate-strikes-greta-thunberg-calls-for-system-change-not-climate-change-heres-what-that-could-look-like-112891?fbclid=IwAR0gKBwVotRv_C1l16kCOl7H
El
Niño events are characterized by warming of the ocean waters in the Pacific
Ocean and have a pronounced warming effect on the Earth's average temperature.
Though there was a weak El Niño in place during the first part of 2019, it is
transitioning to a more neutral phase, making the extreme July temperatures
even more alarming.
Damian Carrington ‘Brutal news': global carbon emissions jump to all-time high in 2018’ The Guardian, 5 December 2018.
