The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a new record high despite reduced emissions amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It puts the world on a trajectory towards a terrifying environmental catastrophe where poor communities bear the consequences despite contributing the least to pollution. With no regard for the total destruction awaiting us, the capitalist class continues to exploit untapped reserves of oil, coal and gas in their chase for profit and in defense of their imperialist domination of the world. BJORK LIND reports.
The International Energy Agency warns that the rebound in emissions after the pandemic could be much larger than the decline. Careless of such warning, capitalist institutions worldwide are bailing out big polluters: Britain’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility shows that billions of pounds are being funneled to airlines, carmakers and oil services.
Business-as-usual
In June, an interim briefing by Britain’s Citizens Assembly for the climate crisis urged the government to use the forthcoming economic stimulus to move closer to its net zero emission goal. Within days the government agreed to a £810m backing of a Mozambique gas pipeline, claiming that ‘liquefied natural gas is an important transition fuel as we work to reach the target of net zero emissions’. Despite this claim, natural gas is a fossil fuel that emits large amounts of carbon dioxide and contains methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas.
The bailing out of polluting industries and the continued investments in oil and gas networks seriously undermine current talks of approaching ‘peak fossil fuels,’ the point at which coal, oil and gas will be left in the ground simply because they cost so much more than their clean alternatives. It was only a decade ago that a global recession drove big energy companies, such as BP and Shell, to make large investments in the solar industry only to exit it two years later as prices of solar technologies fell. Industries did not engage in the transition as many had wished they would. On the contrary, most oil companies resorted to storing oil until its demand and price recovered. While states are now bailing out fossil fuel dependent industries, seven billion barrels of crude oil – more than three quarters of the global storage capacity – lies stockpiled waiting to be profitable again.
Meanwhile capitalist states have diverted interest towards technological solutions to the climate crisis. Britain’s Treasury is currently set to offer £100m in funding for an obscure technology aiming at sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it underground. This method – championed by the Prime Minister’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings – requires tremendous amounts of electricity.
Why is capitalism addicted to fossil fuels?
The shift to coal fuel in 19th-century Britain allowed the newly rising capitalist class to more effectively exploit industrial workers. The substitution of human and animal labour power, in addition to water power, by coal-driven machines freed production from place-bound watermills and muscles. As a result, production could be brought to towns where an emergent working class could be concentrated in factories.
Coal provided energy around the clock and this abundant power supply unleashed unprecedented economic growth rendering fossil fuel fundamental to the expansion of capitalism. The global economy has since been marked by its ever increasing use of coal, gas and oil, which are transported to wherever labour costs are cheap.
Accordingly, fossil fuel has become a highly valued and necessary commodity that imperialist states are competing to control. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the rapid expansion of US military activities in the Gulf of Guinea in Africa and the increased threats directed at Iran and Venezuela, all signal the need of imperialist states to extend their control over fossil fuel reserves worldwide.
Energy imperialism
The struggle against climate change is a struggle against the ruling class which produces most of the planet’s fossil fuel emissions: in the early twenty-first century the poorest 45% of humanity generated 7% of current carbon dioxide emissions, while the richest 7% produced 50%. As emphasised by geographer Andreas Malm, ‘more than a third of humanity is not even party to a proto-fossil economy: as of 2012, 2.6 billion people still relied on biomass [e.g. fuelwood, agricultural waste and animal dung] for cooking’.
Conveniently for imperialist powers, the Paris Agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was conducted on the basis of allocating emissions to the territorial states where the pollution leaves the ground. Since much of what we consume is imported from other nations doing the work of manufacturing, the ecological burden is being off-loaded to distant producers, to which it is then said to belong. Subsequently, the imperialist nations – owning most of the means of production – can record lower carbon intensity than poor ones.
The impending East African Crude Oil Pipeline, financed by massive monopolies, encapsulates the nature of this imperialist onslaught. It will become the world’s longest heated oil pipeline, stretching 900 miles and passing through 12 forest reserves and 200 rivers before reaching the Indian Ocean. The oil fields discovered on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are currently among the biggest and cheapest new reserves available.
The pipeline is set to displace thousands of small farmers and is likely to cause significant ecological disturbance in addition to contributing to the warming of the Earth’s climate. East Africa is a hot tropical region particularly vulnerable to climate change. Thousands of people died last year as the result of cyclones, floods, drought and landslides. As capitalist states and corporations push for the construction of the pipeline it becomes ever more evident that there is no shared sense of catastrophe. This region, which is already subject to famine caused by capitalist plunder, may soon become entirely uninhabitable.
Time to pull the plug
The easy profit to be gained from fossil fuels will inevitably continue to drive up their demand under capitalism. A direct suppression of the use of fossil fuel therefore requires the dismantling of the property-owning class and its imperial pillaging of raw materials. Only through an anti-imperialist socialist planned economy can we reorient production towards the limits of ecosystems. This means taking advantage of renewable energies such as the sun, which strikes the planet with more energy in a single hour than humans consume in a year. It follows that there can be no ecological revolution in the face of the current crisis unless it is simultaneously a working-class revolution against capitalism.
Unilever Earth Strike protest: ‘We are watching you!’
On Saturday 11 July, comrades from the RCG joined Earth Strike groups across London on a vibrant protest outside the Unilever headquarters on Victoria Embankment. Speakers highlighted the role of Unilever – a British/Dutch consumer goods monopoly with its roots in racist British colonialism in West Africa and a history of collaboration with the Nazi regime. Unilever’s palm oil plantations are a major cause of deforestation and destruction of ecosystems in Indonesian rainforests and elsewhere. Colourful placards and banners decorated the front of building. ‘Bio-hazard’ tape criss-crossed doorways while people dressed in boiler suits held a banner stating: ‘Capitalism is extinction! Another world is possible!’ We blocked Blackfriars Bridge with a huge banner reading: ‘Unilever – plundering the planet for profit!’
We want these murdering multinational companies to know we are watching them! Join us to build an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist climate action movement. Check out our social media for future actions:
Facebook: EarthStrikeNorthoftheRiver; Twitter: EarthStrikeNOTR; Instagram: EarthStrikeNOTR
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 277 August/September 2020
