In 2018, climate scientists warned the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5ºC (as agreed at the 2015 UN Paris Climate Conference), carbon emissions must be reduced to 45% of their ‘pre-industrial’ levels by 2030 and then reduced to zero by 2050. The imperialists saw such steps as a threat to their capital, profits, and power.
In January 2017 and again in January 2025, US president Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN’s 2015 Paris Agreement on climate protection. The British government now claims that by 2045 it will balance the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by extracting the same amount – with a ‘net zero’ result. However, since emissions will continue until the equivalent extraction rate can be arranged, by 2045 (twenty more years), the ‘balance’ will be achieved at a much higher absolute level of atmospheric pollution than the current critical rate. While pretending to be a capitalist solution to the climate crisis, ‘net zero’ anticipates a more disastrous environmental crisis.
The imperialist states have long manipulated the emission figures, previously excluding shipping and airline pollution and continuing to ignore growing military emissions from national figures. Carbon offset agreements, carbon trading and reforestation schemes have been set up with little oversight of their effectiveness. This simply greenwashes polluting industries. It is no surprise that carbon dioxide emissions increased by a record 3.75 ppm (parts per million) in 2024, triple the rise in 2000. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now at the 430ppm level that scientists have warned ‘would push the world past its target for avoiding dangerous climate change.’ In fact, for six consecutive days in April it exceeded this level.
Donald Trump’s return as US president has seen a retreat from the target of 61-66% emissions reductions from 2005 levels by 2035, announced by President Biden on 19 December 2024 (see ‘US accelerationism and environmental destruction’ below).
Another reactionary initiative
In Britain, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, has ditched net zero policy to stem her party’s losses to Reform UK. On 29 April, the reactionary Tony Blair Institute (TBI) released a paper, ‘The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change’, former British PM Tony Blair’s foreword stated ‘that any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.’ He argues that Africa, China, India and South-East Asia are problem areas with population and emissions growth. He ignores Africa’s miniscule carbon footprint (itself significantly inherited from colonial period extractive industries), or the fact that China, India and South-East Asia pollute because they sub-contract vast amounts of manufacturing for the imperialist nations.
The TBI solutions to the climate crisis are:
- carbon capture (a technology unproven at scale, and where big oil companies have withdrawn due to the lack of near-term profitability);
- nuclear power, specifically small modular reactors (expensive, uninsurable, requiring vast amounts of water as droughts become more frequent);
- AI applied to energy efficiency and the energy grid (still untested at scale, expensive and ironically energy intensive);
- eliminating planning restrictions (an attack on democracy and a boost to profitability);
- largely dismissing any use of natural schemes, ‘principally afforestation,’ since there is ‘no comprehensive plan as to how to encourage them or invest in them’ and it isn’t ‘a permanent solution’ (emphasis added). Nothing could express better the antagonistic relation between capitalism and nature.
TBI has contracts with petroleum export dependent states and fossil fuel multinationals, and is heavily funded by the technology industry. The report adopts their interests. One of TBI’s largest donors, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, is investing heavily in AI and is designing a new data centre powered by three small modular nuclear reactors.
TBI’s report recognises that UN climate change conferences haven’t effectively combatted the climate crisis. It calls for a process of work to be ‘mandated by the few nations that can make a real difference to climate change’, the very same imperialists that have bribed and bullied to ensure that nothing is done against their interests. Acknowledging philanthropy’s role, TBI insists that markets must be the central force financing climate change action, despite admitting that the carbon market has ‘yet to fulfil its promise’. TBI lamely concludes that ‘it cannot be beyond the vast array of financial talent the world has at its disposal to devise that system so that it can deliver its full potential.’ TBI refuses to recognise that markets have evolved to serve capital alone, not for humanity’s wellbeing. The underlying exploitation of the environment and human labour is simply concealed.
The trade union Unite’s General Secretary Sharon Graham accepts the establishment’s net zero game if their relatively well-paid members in the oil and gas sector are not thrown on the scrap heap. As communists, we defend workers’ rights, but not at the cost of other workers’ rights. We oppose the super-exploitation of workers in the oppressed countries, like the miners of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, and Indonesia, who pay for Britain’s Net Zero policy with their lives.
Between 2016 to 2023, nine British banks invested more than £75bn in companies developing 117 ‘carbon bombs’ (huge oil, gas and coal projects around the world which will destroy all attempts to limit temperature rises to internationally agreed targets). British housebuilding companies threaten not to reach housebuilding targets if regulations to build low carbon houses are enforced. Fossil fuel companies have pulled back their ‘green’ investments, while Danish wind power company, Ørsted, pulled out of plans for one of Britain’s biggest offshore windfarms, all due to a lack of profitability. The Labour government prioritises ‘growth’, that is the successful extraction of more profits above all else. It will increase pollution by its civil and military investment policies, and the broader defence of British imperialist interests.
Regulatory reform or international compromises will not stop capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit, whatever the cost to life on the planet. Only socialism with comprehensive direct planning can end this destruction of life and of the environment, because it puts people and
our planet first.
David Hetfield
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 306 June/July 2025
