Globally, 2015-2025 were the hottest 11 years on record, and 2026 will be hotter still. The working class is confronted by a global elite that resolutely ignores the causes of this mounting catastrophe, driven by a pathological obsession with pressing forward the accumulation of capital, by dispossessing and exploiting the working class.
Since the 1960s the large energy monopolies and their political allies have known, without any doubt, that continuing with the current technology to maintain their profiteering would bring about this disastrous change in the earth’s biosphere. The emission of greenhouse gases, including the extraordinarily damaging methane, has brought rising sea, land and air temperatures; the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic, the accelerating loss of bio-diversity and species extinction; the consequent fall in agricultural output and the decrease in water sources; the upending of seasonal weather patterns – the increase in number and violence of storms – and the rising toll of forest fires. All of these changes have been predicted by scientists with increasing concern for the last 70 years.
What the working masses of the world face is a squabbling cavalcade of politicians, each determined to protect the interests of their paymasters, the business elites of each state, that demand the maximum freedom to exploit their own labour forces. They are determined to prevent the premature removal of their capital by any environmental regulation before they can maximise profits. Even as the climate crisis worsens, within the limits of entrepreneurial profit margins, a calculated ‘write-off’ of capital values can be absorbed, allowing a continued indifference to climate change, even if floods wash away roads, damage railways and lead to failures in power and sanitation systems.
Climate change is adding fuel to inter-imperialist rivalries. Disputes over water have sparked violent antagonisms between Asian states. July forest fires in Canada have left smoke smothering New York (335 miles away from Canada at its closest) and this was used as a justification for more tariffs on Canada by climate change denier president Trump because the wildfires hurt air quality in the US!
The ‘pollution’ generated by capitalism in its drive to transform nature into commodities is the result of exploiting the labour power of the working class, and of nature’s other resources, without regard for any consequences other than the profit made. In calculating accounting profits, the destructive effects of production by capitalism (contempt-uously dismissed as ‘externalities’) are ignored or reluctantly heavily discounted. In the balance sheets of business there is no cost accepted for the destruction imposed by its operations.
Private profits drive global disaster
While the European press expresses its alarm at the heat waves hitting its own regions, with the premature deaths of thousands of the ill and elderly, much worse consequences across the globe are ignored. In July alone record-breaking temperatures in China, Europe and the United States sparked forest fires, water shortages and a rise in heat-related hospital admissions. Devastating flash floods have hit regions from Central Africa to South Asia and parts of the Americas. India’s monsoons, which supplies 70% of the country’s annual rainfall, has become highly unpredictable and climate disruption means that forecasts of droughts by 2050 may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population. Unrelenting high temperatures and a lack of rain dry out soil, reducing crop yields and devastating livestock worldwide. Conservative predictions put additional deaths from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress at 250,000 every year between 2020 and 2050 (World Health Organisation).
Global average sea level has risen 8–9 inches (21–24 centimetres) since 1880, half of this has come in the last 33 years alone. Levels will be 7.2 feet (2.2 metres) higher by 2100. Fifteen per cent of the global population (1.25 billion people) live within six miles of the shoreline and will be severely affected, as will major coastal cities.
The 2015 Paris climate talks failed to bring about sufficient commitments by governments to prevent even more dangerous levels of warming. The 1.5 to 2C target limit set in Paris has already been passed, underlining the criminal negligence of the world’s ruling classes, whose self-interest calculates the rising working class death toll that it can afford to inflict as it strives for unending ‘growth’, the production for profit making all other considerations secondary. UN Climate Change Conferences (commonly known as COPs) have become opportunities for fossil fuel companies to lobby states to prevent any effective action being taken.
The Earth’s bio-physical systems face ‘tipping points’, critical limits in its climate and planetary sub-systems (e.g. rainforests and ice sheets). Small additional changes can trigger major and potentially irreversible shifts that continue on their own, the dialectical transformation of quantity (temperature grades) into unliveable climate qualities – multiple bio-spherical and physical shifts. These shifts are driven by feedback processes difficult or impossible to reverse on human timescales, even if the original greenhouse gas emissions are reduced or even eliminated. We have no choice but to rid ourselves of the ruling class that has manufactured this crisis, building a political party of the victims of this great disaster, that can take power, and in a rational way, ameliorate and remedy the crisis. Capitalism is extinction, socialism is survival.
James Martin
