Capitalism is in dire crisis, and to salvage it the imperialist ruling class is holding the entire planet hostage. By investing billions in fossil fuels and creating new ‘green’ markets they are driving the ecological destruction of Earth to maintain profits. Meanwhile, thousands of scientists have repeated urgent calls to action to tackle the climate emergency. They are warning that the world is on the brink of a cascade of climate tipping points that will lead to an existential threat to civilisation. BEN ADELAIDE and BJORK LIND consider two of these tipping points.
Code red for Planet Earth
In the last 200 years, greenhouse gas emissions from capitalist industrial activity have led to an average global increase in temperature of over 1°C. The effects of this are already being felt around the world: more than 60 million people live in areas affected by extreme heat stress; over the last decade, approximately 20 million people a year were displaced from their homes by extreme weather events; more than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reef-forming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are currently threatened with extinction. The WHO estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate change could cause 250,000 additional human deaths a year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone. Such a bleak prediction does not even take into account climate tipping points, defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as thresholds that, once crossed, can cause elements of the Earth system to change into an entirely different state. Deforestation could cause the collapse of forest systems, while increasing temperatures could threaten glacial systems, often with no chance of reverting to normal. According to the IPCC, the impacts of climate tipping points are likely to be much closer than most people realise and will fundamentally reshape life on Earth. At least 18 ‘abrupt changes in the ocean, sea ice, snow cover, permafrost, and terrestrial biosphere’ have been identified in IPCC models that could occur below 2°C of warming, and a further 19 could occur beyond 2°C.
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet
One tipping point is the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the world’s second largest body of ice. Scientists have identified a number of feedback loops which threaten to cause its runaway melting. The most critical of these loops is the process whereby the ice sheet melts due to rising temperatures, thus decreasing its height. The remaining ice at a lower elevation is exposed to warmer air, accelerating its melting during the summer and decreasing the replenishment of layers of snow during the winter. Eventually, the top of the ice is so low that the entire ice sheet is doomed to melt away. A review paper in Nature Climate Change in 2018 concluded that 1.8°C of warming would be enough to trigger this feedback loop. The decline of the ice sheet after this threshold has been passed is highly dependent on the future climate and varies between about 80% loss after 10,000 years to complete loss after as little as 2,000 years. However, what is clear is that once the tipping point has been passed, its collapse is inevitable – only another ice age would bring it back.
As the ice sheet disintegrates, far-reaching natural disasters will be triggered, including rising sea levels, droughts and large-magnitude earthquakes due to changing pressure on Earth’s crust. The build-up of heat in the Southern Ocean will cause ice loss in the Antarctic. It is estimated that if all the ice covering Antarctica and Greenland melts, sea levels will rise over 50 metres. Approximately one billion people currently occupy land less than 10 metres above sea level, including 230 million below only one metre. The global sea level has already risen 20–24 cm since 1880, with about a third of it occurring in just the last two and a half decades. The low-lying islands of the Pacific region are more vulnerable to the acute effects of rising sea levels than any other region in the world and are expected to become uninhabitable within decades. Indeed, as stated by Satyendra Prasad, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Fiji to the United Nations, the failure of large emitters to cut emissions is a declaration of war on Pacific peoples who contribute less than 0.03% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Amazon rainforest dieback
Another tipping point is the collapse of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest. The nearly 390 billion trees act as giant pumps, sucking water up through their deep roots, which is eventually released as water vapour through their leaves. The evaporated water then forms rain-producing clouds, creating a cycle which sustains the wet climate of the forest. However, due to global warming and deforestation, the climate of the Amazon is gradually shifting into a drier state, undermining its self-sustaining water cycle. There is only so much disruption the Amazon can tolerate before its ecosystem collapses. Multiple studies show that, in the absence of other contributing factors, 4°C of global warming would be the Amazon’s tipping point. Beyond this, the forest would see widespread ‘dieback’ and transition to savannah. However, this is without taking into consideration the scale of deforestation today. Once we do that, the tipping point appears much closer. Climate researchers Thomas E Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre have estimated that interplay between deforestation, climate change, and widespread use of fire could turn major parts of the Amazon into non-forest ecosystems within 15 to 20 years. After that, the entire rainforest could turn into savannah within 50 years.
The loss of the world’s largest rainforest would have major cascading effects on the stability of the Earth’s biosphere and affect populations around the world. The Amazon basin stores an estimated 90 to 120 billion tonnes of carbon and the release of this CO2 would accelerate the warming of the planet. Moreover, with the forest gone, we would have lost an important carbon sink, making it much more difficult – if at all possible – to tackle climate change. Additionally, losing the forest’s water cycle would disrupt the movement of water in the atmosphere and thus change global weather patterns, hastening the decline of ecosystems as far away as Africa. Particularly concerning would be the consequences for those who rely on the Amazon for their livelihoods. Many indigenous peoples have already seen their homes go up in flames and have fiercely fought against private businesses ravaging their land. The continued decline of the rainforest will generate an immense humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of millions of people suffering water and food insecurity, in a region where more than a third of the population is already experiencing food shortages due to imperialist plunder.
Nature for sale
With a callous disregard for humanity and the planet, world leaders are fixated only on relaunching economic growth. This is because capital must expand in order to survive, requiring an escalation in the production of commodities which, in turn, necessitates the burning of fossil fuels. It is therefore no surprise that governments around the world continue to subsidise the fossil fuel industry. This in defiance of a plethora of scientific reports saying unequivocally that, if the world is to stay within the 1.5°C limit, any new extraction projects must stop immediately. According to Friends of the Earth, at least 40 new British fossil fuel projects are in the pipeline for approval in the coming years. These include 30 offshore and seven onshore oil and gas projects, as well as three coal mines.
Not only is it ignoring calls to stop the plundering of the planet, but the capitalist class is exploiting the climate crisis by inventing more ways to make profit in the form of new ‘green’ markets. The banking sector is currently making a killing via ‘green financing’, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into supposedly sustainable projects. A recent investigation by The Economist found that many of these ‘green’ investments are funnelled into the major polluters. The world’s 20 biggest so-called ‘socially responsible’ funds, on average, each hold investments in 17 fossil fuel producers, including the top two, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco. On top of that, the introduction of carbon offset schemes – the commodification of the atmosphere – has created a multibillion-dollar market and undermines regulations designed to protect the environment. Imperialist monopolies can now freely exceed legally defined limits on environmental destruction with the promise of compensation elsewhere, for example by establishing monoculture tree plantations and, in the process, destroying natural ecosystems.
Despite the ruling class’s relentless efforts to greenwash its dirty business, social pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is growing throughout the world. Capitalist states and businesses are therefore forced to find ways to assuage fears of environmental deterioration and are doing so, among other things, by promoting technological solutions. This includes ‘carbon capture and storage’ technologies, which would store CO2 emissions underground. Some fossil fuel companies, including Chevron and Shell, are currently experimenting with ‘CO2 enhanced oil recovery’, where the captured CO2 is injected into existing oil fields, allowing more oil to be extracted. This method is upheld as ‘carbon negative’ even though it would contribute around four times more CO2 emissions than it would remove. Technological fixes are mostly fraudulent, used for financial gains or otherwise based on a false representation of climate change. By treating the warming of the Earth as a linear and reversible process, governments create the illusion that the future deployment of technologies will ‘roll back’ the climate, allowing business-as-usual CO2 emissions in the meantime. However, the destruction of nature’s capacity to renew itself is irreversible. If we do not get emissions under control now, the Earth system will be driven to a point of no return.
Saving the planet: a working class struggle
The accumulation of profit sucks the lifeblood out of all living beings and forges a grim future, above all for the poorest masses. Millions of people in low-emitting, underdeveloped countries are already struggling to survive due to the combined effects of imperialist plunder and climate change. In 2020 alone, around one million people were displaced in Somalia, 4.4 million in Bangladesh, 900,000 in Honduras, 800,000 in Kenya, and over 300,000 in Guatemala. The total number of people living in internal displacement exceeded 50 million by the end of 2020.
The imperialist states are well aware of the deadly effects of the climate crisis brought about by the capitalist system, as well as the social upheaval they will inevitably create. In 2003 a Pentagon-commissioned report warned that, in a worst-case climate scenario, the US would need to erect ‘defensive fortresses’ to stop ‘unwanted starving migrants’ from countries like Guatemala and Haiti. The 2015 UK National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review similarly predicted that more extreme weather will make ‘political instability, conflict and migration more likely’ and ‘result in ungoverned spaces which can be exploited by terrorists and criminals’. It called for the British government to strengthen its ‘ability to control migration’. According to the Transnational Institute, border spending by the seven biggest greenhouse gas emitters rose by 29% between 2013 and 2018. In the US, spending on border and immigration enforcement tripled between 2003 and 2021. In Europe, the budget for the EU border agency, Frontex, has increased by a massive 2,763% since its founding in 2006. As the climate crisis deepens and makes more and more places uninhabitable, the polluting imperialist powers are making sure that the consequences of their callous profiteering are kept outside their borders.
At the core of the climate crisis lies the class struggle: a struggle for profit against the struggle for life. The workers of the world have the power to cut off the flow of profits that are the lifeblood of the capitalist system, to build an anti-imperialist movement which fights for climate justice and the end of the racist border regime. Only they can build the socialist planned economy needed to resolve the climate crisis. The survival of the planet and humankind now depends on this struggle.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 286, February/March 2022
