At the first United Nations conference on climate change, held nearly 30 years ago in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, Fidel Castro declared that humanity ‘is endangered due to the accelerated and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions’, adding ‘the main responsibility for the brutal destruction of the environment lies with the consumer societies. They are the offspring of the old colonial metropolises and of imperialist policies that also begot the poverty and backwardness which are today the scourge of the overwhelming majority of humanity.’ His conclusion? ‘Let selfishness and hegemonism cease, as well as callousness, recklessness and deceit. Tomorrow it will be too late to do what should have been done a long time ago.’ In November 2021, COP26, the 26th annual summit since Rio, will take place in Glasgow, and the ‘selfishness and hegemonism’ that Castro condemned is already evident as the hegemonic – that is, imperialist – countries thwart any serious progress towards ensuring the future habitability of Planet Earth and with it, the survival of humanity. Tomorrow is upon us, and we have to do what Castro called us to do in 1992 – fight imperialism. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
Imperialism the enemy
While the root cause of the crisis lies in capitalism and its ceaseless search for profits to fuel its limitless self-expansion, this is not a complete explanation for the accelerating crisis. It is capitalism in its monopoly or imperialist phase that is relentlessly driving Planet Earth to destruction. Imperialism:
‘…is fundamentally monopoly capitalism. It is the historical period of the decay of capitalism and is characterised by parasitism. Imperialism is the era of finance capital in which enormously concentrated banking capital has fused with industrial and commercial capital. The export of capital – that is global investment – as opposed to export of commodities becomes the distinguishing feature of imperialism. As a result capitalism has grown into a global system of national oppression and of financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of advanced countries.’ (‘The politics and economics of globalisation’, D Yaffe, FRFI 137, June/July 1997)
Terms such as globalisation or neo-liberalism can be used to obscure the fundamentals of the imperialist stage of capitalism: a system which is characterised by the looting and plunder of the poorer, less developed nations by the advanced capitalist or imperialist nations through their gigantic banking and industrial monopolies whose insatiable demand for profits knows no national boundaries. Castro had already argued this in 1992 when he said ‘the Third World nations cannot be held accountable for this, for only yesterday they were colonies and today they are still exploited and plundered by an unjust world economic order.’ Capitalism cannot solve the crisis: it will only make it worse.
Code red for humanity
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report published in August shows what is at stake:
- Driven by human activity, global temperatures have risen by 1.1C since pre-industrial times.
- A further 12 years of current rates of carbon emissions would leave only a 50:50 chance of staying below 1.5C, the limit set by the 2015 Paris agreement, and that the limit will be reached under any scenario by 2040.
- The 1.5C boundary has already been breached for brief periods, in one instance for two months during the 2016 El Nino event.
- The past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850; human influence is the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic sea-ice.
- The warming that has taken place to date has already made changes to many of the planetary support systems which are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia: the oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or even centuries.
UN Secretary General António Guterres described the report accurately as ‘code red for humanity’. This year has already shown what is in store for large swathes of humanity, with record-breaking temperatures across Scandinavia, in Italy and North America, and droughts now the norm across the Mediterranean countries, South and Central America as well as western US. Accompanying this are storms of unprecedented ferocity in China and central Europe; Hurricane Ida extended 1,000 miles into central US and flooded New York, and by mid-September the 2021 hurricane season had exceeded the 2020 season in its accumulated energy. The official season does not end until 1 November.
A graveyard of agreements
The history of the international summits and conferences on climate change since Rio has been one of deliberate failure. Rio revealed the determination of the major imperialist powers, particularly the US, to avoid responsibility for serious action against climate change. The fossil fuel monopolies led by Exxon continued to plough money into climate change denial lobbying groups. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, signed by all the then G8 countries except the US, had the stated aim of cutting overall emissions of heat-trapping gases to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2008-12. This required curbing the use of coal, oil and natural gas; however its provisions did not come into effect until 2005. Annual carbon emissions continued to rise, from 23bn tonnes in 1990 to 32.3bn by 2014, and are currently running at about 40bn.
“Climate change is indeed a war of the rich against the poor: of the rich nations against poor nations, and of the rich against the poor in every country. It is now time for the poor to wage war in return”
Copenhagen in 2009 saw an open battle between the imperialist and underdeveloped countries with the Labour government of the time working with the US to push through an agenda which ignored the demands of the poorer countries. The Africa group of countries had demanded $400bn a year to finance measures to contain climate change; Britain and the US co-opted Ethiopia and Bangladesh as token poor countries into a select group of 25, ignoring more than 160 others. The Ethiopian prime minister agreed to a mere $100bn annual finance from the imperialist countries between 2010-2012, while US President Obama rejected even the pitiful emission cuts offered by the imperialists, well below the 40% by 2020 demanded by both science and the poorer nations at the time. To add insult to injury, Obama preferred to make a stand on verification of emission cuts by the poorer countries; the Sudanese chair of the G77 group of underdeveloped countries said Obama had ‘asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries’. Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela denounced what was happening; Bolivian President Evo Morales saying ‘The budget of the US is $687bn for defence. And for climate change, to save life, to save humanity, they only put up $10bn.’
Paris in 2015 was supposed to answer all the questions left unanswered by Rio, Kyoto and Copenhagen. But the headline aim – to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C rather than 2C, the target of previous agreements – was an empty gesture given that even if all the agreed commitments were met, the end result would still be a global rise of 2.7C. Alberto Saldamando, a lawyer involved with the Indigenous Environmental Network, laid the deal bare: ‘The Paris accord is a trade agreement, nothing more. It promises to privatise, commodify and sell forested lands as carbon offsets in fraudulent schemes. These offset schemes provide a financial laundering mechanism for developed countries to launder their carbon pollution on the backs of the global south. For example, the United States’ climate change plan includes 250 million megatons to be absorbed by oceans and forest offset markets. Essentially, those responsible for the climate crisis not only get to buy their way out of compliance but they also get to profit from it.’ Bolivian President Evo Morales was one of the few voices to address this reality in Paris. Delivering a manifesto ‘to save Mother Earth and life’, he said: ‘Capitalism has fostered, introduced and driven the most savage and destructive formula against our species’.
Cochabamba 2010
The only international agreement with any significance took place outside the COP rounds, at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia, which was attended by leaders of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas. The resulting agreement recognised that: ‘Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials, and human beings into consumers and a means of production, into people that are seen as valuable only for what they own, and not for what they are’. Calling for the establishment of an international Climate Justice Court, the Accord also demanded that developed countries:
- commit to reducing carbon emissions by at least 50% based on 1990 levels, eliminating carbon markets and other offset mechanisms;
- recognise, support and give full rights to climate migrants;
- establish a climate fund of 6% of their annual GDP created to honour climate debt run up in the destruction of natural environment, seas and contaminated air space.
The agreement was a challenge to the failure of Copenhagen, and pitted an anti-capitalist message against the evasiveness of the developed countries. It followed the January 2009 Belem Ecosocialist Declaration which had asserted that:
‘Infinite economic expansion is incompatible with finite and fragile ecosystems, but the capitalist economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth… Thus the inherently unstable capitalist system cannot regulate its own activity, much less overcome the crises caused by its chaotic and parasitical growth, to do so would require setting limits upon accumulation – an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: grow or die!’
Breaking imperialism’s hold on the world is therefore central, and that means a fight to end the debt bondage that crushes the developing countries, and an end to the looting and plunder which underpins it, by removing monopoly ownership and control of their resources. There can be no solution to the ecological or climate crisis without the achievement of economic sovereignty of the poorer countries, and that cannot happen without the abolition of the so-called Third World debt, and the restitution of all those resources that have been seized and looted by the imperialist monopolies.
Abolish the financial debt!
Already in 1983 Fidel Castro had written that the external debt of the underdeveloped countries could never be paid back. In 1982, this debt stood at $626bn with annual debt service payments at $131bn. Seven years earlier in 1975, they were $179bn and $26bn respectively. Today, what are described as ‘emerging markets and developing countries’ have about $11 trillion in external debt and about $3.9 trillion in debt service was due in 2020. According to the Brookings Institution in 2020, ‘many developing countries simply will not have the foreign exchange to service their debt this year, notably those who are heavily indebted, are commodity dependent (two-thirds of all developing countries according to UNCTAD) or have relied on large tourism receipts, or on remittances.’ Zambia has to allocate 44% of its annual government revenue to creditors; Ghana spends about 37% and Cameroon spent 23.8%. This predates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic which has merely exacerbated the desperate financial conditions such countries face. In 2019, the cost of servicing external debts in 64 countries exceeded what they spent on healthcare. Such levels of indebtedness strangle any chance of development and place these countries at the mercy of the banks and monopolies.
Pay the ecological debt: restitution
The financial enslavement of the underdeveloped countries and the looting and plunder of their natural resources are no more than the routine operations of imperialism, of monopoly capitalism. The consequences are continued impoverishment and eco-destruction on a colossal scale: the mining, fossil fuel and agribusiness monopolies do not care about the consequences of their activities; all that concerns them are the super-profits to be obtained. Monoculture, essentially industrialised agriculture on a massive scale, depends on destruction of biodiversity through deforestation and the extensive use of pesticides and artificial fertilisers. The result is a rapid exhaustion of the soil, and the associated destruction of binding agents means that it is continuously swept away; as Castro noted: ‘Forests are disappearing and deserts growing while billions of tons of fertile soil end up in the oceans every year. Numerous species face extinction’. Preferential access to scarce water resources frequently involves the active expulsion of the indigenous inhabitants or their displacement since they can no longer live off the land. It is the same with mining and fossil fuel monopolies: their control of the natural resources of the poorer countries maintains them in a state of subservience to imperialism. The call for restitution is to cut off the monopolies’ tentacles: it is not enough to call for their nationalisation, what matters is terminating the global character of their operations.
“[Humanity] is endangered due to the accelerated and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions…Let selfishness and hegemonism cease, as well as callousness, recklessness and deceit. Tomorrow it will be too late to do what should have been done a long time ago” – Fidel Castro, 1992
No to green imperialism!
Many socialists are calling for a Green New Deal, or a Green Transformation in the case of the Labour Party. Yet if we look under the bonnet, we cannot see any transformation of the relations between the poor nations and the developed countries that are the starting point for serious struggle against climate change and associated eco-destruction. The presumption is that the raw materials – the lithium for batteries, the rare earth metals for wind turbines and the like – will be made available by the poorer nations on the same terms as they are at present. The automobile monopolies will be encouraged to replace petrol-drive vehicles with the same number of electric cars even though the consumption of metals required would drive a coach and horses through any climate change target. Asad Rehman from War on Want makes the point:
‘In this new energy revolution, it is cobalt, lithium, silver and copper that will replace oil, gas and coal as the new frontline of our corporate destruction. The metals and minerals needed to build our wind turbines, our solar panels and electric batteries will be ripped out of the earth so that the UK continues to enjoy “lifeboat ethics”: temporary sustainability to save us, but at the cost of the poor.’ (The Independent, 4 May 2019)
Rehman characterises this as a ‘new form of colonialism’, where countries like Britain resolve their individual climate problems through new forms of plunder of developing countries. Focusing on what to do to improve the environment within Britain when the real problem is British imperialism’s relationship with the rest of the world is social chauvinism.
Burning the planet
Despite the promises of the politicians, despite their green commitments, the reality is that the banks and the fossil fuel multinationals have no intention of curtailing their planet-burning activities. Since the 2015 Paris agreement, the 60 largest private banks have invested $3.8 trillion in fossil fuels; the big five British banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Standard Chartered) invested $190bn between 2018 and 2020. The 2021 Fossil Fuel Finance report Banking on Climate Chaos described Barclays as the worst in Europe, and the seventh largest investor, ploughing $145bn between 2016 and 2020 into fossil fuels. HSBC was 13th out of the 60 banks ($110bn). NatWest, an official sponsor of COP26, invested £13.4bn. In May 2021, a mere 14% of Barclays’ shareholders backed a resolution calling on the bank to align its fossil fuel investment policy with that required by the Paris trajectories; this was fewer than the 24% which supported a similar resolution in 2020.
COP26: another deliberate failure in the making
As if the IPCC report was not dire enough, the Royal Institute of International Affairs issued its own Climate Change Risk Assessment 2021 for heads of government in preparation for COP26 which has three key points:
- The world is dangerously off track to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
- The risks are compounding.
- Without immediate action the impacts will be devastating in the coming decades.
The report says that there is a 10% chance of global temperatures rising by 7C. A failure to slash emissions by 2030 will mean that 3.9 billion people will be hit by major heatwaves at various intervals of time; 400 million people will be exposed to temperatures that exceed ‘the workability threshold’; and the number of people on the planet exposed to heat stress exceeding the survivability threshold is likely to surpass 10 million a year. It dismissed what it calls a ‘fad’ of making net zero carbon emissions pledges which have no meaning, and points out that croplands hit by severe drought will rise by 32% per year by 2040 without drastic action now.
How have the imperialist politician responded? At the UN General Assembly in September, President Biden promised to double US annual aid to underdeveloped countries to $11bn a year to combat the effects of climate change – at a time when the US defence budget is slated to be $753bn. Prime Minister Johnson says that only ‘zero emission’ vehicles should be sold after 2040 – as if manufacturing tens of millions of cars were carbon neutral let alone socially useful, and in calling for an end of coal power by 2040 there are no corresponding targets for the far more significant fossil fuels, oil and gas. In calling for all countries to cut carbon emissions by 68% by 2030, compared to levels in 1990, Johnson is giving expression to the ‘selfishness and hegemonism’ Castro described 30 years ago: it is a demand that the poorer countries remain in their state of underdevelopment to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on the imperialist countries. Climate change is indeed a war of the rich against the poor: of the rich nations against poor nations, and of the rich against the poor in every country. It is now time for the poor to wage war in return, and fight for the rational organisation of society to address the climate crisis, that is, for socialism.
FRFI 284 September/October 2021
