2023 was the hottest year for 100,000 years, yet December’s UN Climate
Conference (COP28) proved to be another foot-dragging exercise in 60 years of wilful obstruction by the imperialist powers and their oil and gas providers to confronting the horrendous global pollution they have created. Their disregard for any consequences, beyond the loss of money wealth for investors, has brought about terrifying consequences for billions, as natural systems collapse all around us. James Martin reports.
COP28 was marked by the conference president Sultan Al Jaber’s astonishing early claim that there was ‘no science’ to show that fossil fuel phase-out is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5ºC. As chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company Adnoc, he was at the same time involved in exchanges with oil and gas producing countries to exploit their reserves; 15 countries in all.
The conference final text showed no clear pathway to phasing out fossil fuels. Only the ambiguous term ‘transition’ was tolerated. The text is full of holes in addressing the practicalities of collecting $100bn annually for climate finance for developing nations first agreed at the 2009 COP jamboree (see FRFI 297). This is supposed to help poorer countries cut emissions of gases that retain heat in the atmosphere – greenhouse gases (GHG) – and adapt to the climate crisis.
The Earth is suffering an abrupt and irreversible climate change. The physics of inertia guarantee that rising temperatures will continue at least until the 2060s despite any efforts to mitigate, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019, and World Meteorological Office in 2020. Because of the refusal to act seriously when the problem was clearly identified in the 1960s, there is now no demonstrable approach or combination of approaches by which the global average temperature of Earth can quickly be stabilised or reduced. The ruling class are simply hesitatingly preparing for more disasters on a massive scale. They are stressing ‘adaptation’, prioritising narrow class-interest instead of making the necessary effort for the mitigation that is vital today.
Profits first and last
The explanation is simple. The existing system of exploitation, of capitalism, by a narrow group of corporate owners of capital’s production and circulation, is trapped by compulsion for continuous self-expansion. With the US in the lead, more oil was extracted in 2022, at a record 5.4% growth rate, than ever before, with more planned.
Disregard for the catastrophic consequences of capitalism’s hunt for profit is shown in its unhesitating use of destructive processes of production and distribution. These environmentally irrational processes – always justifying the dependence on oil use – result in wholesale ecological destruction, the dramatic pollution of fresh water, of the seas and the air, and consequent declines in crop yields, malnutrition, diseases, and other illness. The final solution for the imperialist states is to shift their internecine struggle for profits to open warfare in their desperate efforts to continue to exploit humanity and the rest of nature. The system of capitalism opposes the direct democratic provision of the material conditions which could guarantee the sustainability of all of nature. The permission of capitalism’s gatekeepers, the bankers, is always the pre-condition of its production decisions.
The shameless coverup
From the earliest scientific reports on greenhouse gases the large corporations actively denied the evidence or censored these warnings. Anticipated in the 1850s by Irish geologist John Tyndall and confirmed as a process by Swedish Chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, the greenhouse effect was first measured by British steam technologist Guy Stewart Callendar in 1938. In 1946, public concern with air pollution prompted US oil and gas industry executives to set up a ‘Smoke and Fumes’ body to promote scepticism of environmental science and especially environmental regulations. CO2 emissions exploded after 1948 as post-war reconstruction
took off. In 1959 Edward Teller of Columbia University publicly argued that ‘if the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels’ warning that eventually, ‘all the coastal cities would be covered’. Global warming was statistically confirmed by US scientist Charles David Keeling in 1960.
In 1965 the American Petroleum Institute (API) president, Frank Ikard, promptly responded to then President Johnson’s scientific advisers’ report, ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment’, by reporting it to an API meeting. He quoted ‘carbon dioxide was being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate’. He continued, there was ‘still time however to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.’ In 1968 the Stanford Research Institute warned the API that if left unabated, significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, causing melting ice caps and rising sea levels. The oil industry knew very well the consequences of their compulsive profit digging.
By 1971 Total Oil knew of the potential for catastrophic global warming from its products, yet began promoting doubt about it by the late 1980s. It then took 10 years publicly to admit climate science while promoting policy delay or policies peripheral to effective action. In 1975 James Lovelock’s article ‘The Quest for Gaia’ in New Scientist, presciently identified the integrated nature of the Earth’s biomes, warning of the severe dangers presented by capitalism’s pollution. He was ridiculed by the establishment’s journalists. After all, the wealthiest in the world, through their grotesque personal consumption, cause 40 times more emissions than the poor, quite alone from the preceding production processes, preferring to hush all this up.
Beginning in the 1980s Exxon, through the International Petroleum Industry’s Environmental Conservation Association, coordinated an international campaign to dispute climate science and weaken international climate policy. The American Petroleum Institute supported this campaign even after its own secret ‘CO2 and Climate Task Force’ (1979-83) was told by John Laurmann of Stanford University in 1980 that if fossil fuels continued to be used, by the 2060s it would have ‘globally catastrophic effects.’ The members of this group included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major US and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio as well as Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil, Chevron’s predecessors. The same year the API called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.
In 1981, an internal Exxon memo noted its long-term plans could ‘produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic, ‘at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population’. Its own confidential internal report of 1982 predicted exactly the temperature consequences the world now suffers. In 1986 a Shell corporation internal report warned that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be ‘the greatest in recorded history,’ including ‘destructive floods,’ abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world.
In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen (Director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies) warned the US Senate that the earth had been warmer in the first five months of 1988 than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years earlier, and these temperature increases would continue. The next year the fossil fuel industry created the Global Climate Coalition to sow doubt about climate change and lobby politicians to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s. Climate scientists Dyke, Watson and Knorr have shown that even had Hansen’s warnings been heeded immediately, there would still have even then been only a 2/3 chance of preventing a global temperature rise of 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels, as set at the Paris COP in 2015. In 1992 Fidel Castro made a brilliant and impassioned speech at the UN pointing out that imperialism was the cause of the mounting tragedy.
After the First Kyoto Agreement, adopted 1997, 37 industrialised countries and the EU reluctantly agreed to reduce GHG emissions to an average of 5% against 1990 levels. Meanwhile Shell was demanding delays to the end of gas flaring in Nigeria, where more than the entire German industrial gas consumption was burnt off each year. Kyoto only entered into force after 18 years, on 16 February 2005. Hurricane Katrina occurred on 23 August 2005. Surface temperatures of the North Atlantic were the warmest ever, and it was already the worst year for hurricanes and tropical storms. The World Wildlife Forum warned that the atmosphere could warm 2ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2026. The George W Bush administration (2001-2009) opposed mandatory carbon emissions controls, and banned reference to ‘global warming’ in all official publications. His administration, infamous for its climate change ‘denial’ reluctantly accepted the fact of ‘global warming’ in 2006, but rejected the 1997 Kyoto climate change protocol. He appealed to ‘market solutions.’ 2006 also saw the release of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, the Stern Review, and the British Government’s statement about the economic consequences of warming (Climate Change: The UK Programme 2006). These came 50 years after the first serious warnings, but all still words in a sea of obfuscation and inaction. The 2016-20 Trump administration actively removed environmental regulations, stifling the truth. In 2016 global emission rates of CO2 into the atmosphere were 10 times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years.
By 2020 serious disagreements have broken out between sections of the ruling establishment. The Secretary General of the UN Antonio Guterres’s warned in 2020 that humanity faced ‘a new war, unprecedented in history, which is in danger of destroying our future’, apologetically adding, ‘before we have fully understood the risk’. GHG emissions are today 62% higher than in 1990, then already at dangerous levels. By 2021 large ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland (losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour in 2022) had reached tipping points, meaning large rises in sea levels. Discharged fresh water from the Arctic has weakened the hitherto warming effects of the North Atlantic currents, with incalculable consequences. Meanwhile world groundwater levels are showing an accelerated decline.
A crisis of imperialism
Whatever progress the wealthiest countries at COP28 claim to have made, their response is designed simply to save and use as much of their existing capital as they can. Hiding behind the slogan ‘net-zero’ emissions by 2050, they are indifferent to the fact that continuing state backed monopoly capitalism reproduces the current disastrous environmental situation on a larger scale.
In 1968, CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood at about 323 parts per million molecules (ppm). By 2000, after 32 years of obfuscation and climate denial, this was 369ppm causing a temperature increase of nearly half a degree over pre-industrial averages. Today the figure is 420 ppm. By 2023 after 60 years of oil corporation obstruction, average temperatures worldwide were 1.48ºC higher than the 13.5ºC of the second half of the 19th century and will certainly fluctuate above 1.5ºC over the next four years.
Self-interested individual capitalists and their miserable representatives in governments across the globe have to be removed, and the means of production taken over by working people in order to stem this catastrophe, and develop decent lives for all, in a constructive relation with nature.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 298 February/March 2024
