Written by Phil
Gasper and first published at International
Socialist Review
It’s not
hyperbole to say that the accelerating climate emergency, which is getting
closer to spiraling out of control, is the most serious crisis that humanity
has faced in its entire history. Two reports came out at the end of 2018 that
ought to have put aside any doubt that we are facing an existential crisis that
threatens the continued survival of advanced human societies and possibly even
our continued existence as a species.
The first
report was issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in
October.1 The IPCC was set up by the UN to provide an overall assessment of the
state of scientific knowledge about the climate and to make broad policy
recommendations.
It consists of climate experts, but because most of its
members are appointed by governments, and because it must issue reports
acceptable to those governments, it has tended to make the most conservative
assumptions about what is happening to the climate.
The IPCC
predictions for how rapidly climate change would develop have consistently
proved to be too optimistic.2 So when the IPCC reports we have twelve years to
get carbon emissions under control or we are going to face a climate
catastrophe, this is not some wild worst-case scenario—it is the sober
assessment of an extremely cautious body. If the IPCC concludes that we are in
serious trouble, we are almost certainly in even greater trouble than it says.3
For anyone
who hasn’t being paying attention, the twelve-year deadline may be startling,
but it is based on a new scientific consensus that global warming must be kept
to 1.5°C above the average pre-industrial global surface temperature to keep
the consequences within manageable proportions.
Since the 1980s, 2°C has been
the widely accepted goal, and it was the target adopted by nearly every
government on the planet at the Paris climate talks in late 2015. But even in
Paris there were governments and climate researchers saying that the goal
should be 1.5°C.
Earth’s
average surface temperature has already increased by about 1°C since the
pre-industrial period in the eighteenth century. But even with one degree of
warming we’re seeing major climate disruptions: the polar ice caps are melting,
and some areas are experiencing severe and prolonged drought, creating the
conditions for events like the devastating and unprecedented wildfires in
California last year. We are experiencing more and longer heat waves.
Hurricanes
are getting more intense as a result of an increase in ocean surface
temperature. There are record floods, soil loss, and coastal erosion. Ocean
acidification is increasing because more carbon dioxide is being absorbed. The
world’s coral reefs are beginning to die. And the sixth mass extinction in the
planet’s history has begun.
With an
additional degree of warming the consequences will get far worse, including
major disruptions to agriculture and food supplies. This is why the IPCC says
we now have to keep warming to 1.5°C.4
But in order
to meet that target, we have to stop emitting carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases. More precisely, according to the IPCC, global net carbon
emissions need to be zero by 2050, which requiring a 45 percent reduction in
net carbon emissions by 2030.
Even if we (meaning human societies across the
globe) began working toward that goal today, it would be a steep hill to climb.
But at the moment, we’re moving in the wrong direction. Global carbon emissions
rose in 2017 and increased to an all-time high in 2018.
A second
major study came out in November 2018—the US National Climate Assessment, a
report mandated by Congress that the Trump administration tried to bury by
releasing it the day after Thanksgiving. But the findings of the report were
too dramatic to be ignored.
The report concludes that “neither global
efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change nor regional efforts to adapt
to the impacts currently approach the scales needed to avoid substantial
damages to the US economy, environment, and human health and well-being over
the coming decades.”5
If current trends continue, we’re on track not for 1.5°C
of warming, but for 5°C or more by the end of the century. The cost to the US
economy would be enormous, but the consequences for large parts of the Global
South would be even more devastating.
Without any
question, our species is in dire straits. For the last 12,000 years, humans
have been living in the Holocene epoch, characterized by very small
fluctuations in overall global temperatures. This is the environment in which
settled agriculture and human civilization developed. We are now pushing the
climate system out of this relatively stable set of parameters.
Some
geologists now say we have already moved from the Holocene to the Anthropocene,
in which the biggest impact on the earth’s ecosystems is the result of human
activity. The consequences are already so dramatic that some environmentalists
are saying that it is too late to prevent climate catastrophe. A report in
Britain’s Observer newspaper last December was headlined, "Portrait of a
Planet on the Verge of Climate Catastrophe."7
The following
day, Truthout published an article by Dar Jamail, who has reported extensively
on climate disruption, in which he announced, “I have . . . surrendered and accepted
the inevitability of our situation: that we will live the rest of our time,
however long each of us might have left, on an irrevocably changed planet,
while the Sixth Mass Extinction event continues apace. We will daily walk
further into that frontier.”8
The next day
the Washington Post es to reduce the spheadlined “‘A Kind of Dark Realism’: Why
the Climate Change Problem is Starting to Look Too Big to Solve.”9
It is easy to
see where the despair comes from. We need to be rapidly reducing carbon emissions,
but instead they are rising. And the response of Trump, his administration, and
virtually the entire Republican Party has been to reject the reports and the
overwhelming scientific consensus, and to accelerate the development, use, and
export of fossil fuels.
Trump is withdrawing the United States from the Paris
climate agreement, continuing as if nothing important is happening. He says he
has a feel for these issues and his gut tells him that the reports are wrong.
In November, he tweeted that cold weather refuted global warming.10
How it is
possible for the dominant faction of the ruling class in the world’s biggest
economy to succumb in this way to complete irrationalism? Suffice it to say
here that in periods of severe crisis, anti-scientific and irrational ideas can
spread among all classes of society. If we add to this the dominance of fossil
capital in the economy (with powerful economic interest to protect its
investments and future profits), the ground is fertile for the dissemination of
various brands of climate denialism.
Meanwhile,
the rise of the far right around the world—whether of the populist or
neo-fascist variety—has created a major new problem for anyone who wants to
avoid climate disaster.
While Trump encourages increased production of fossil
fuels in the United States, the newly elected neo-fascist president of Brazil,
Jair Bolsonaro (another climate change denier) is promising to increase logging
in his country’s Amazon rain forests, the world’s biggest land-based carbon
sink.
In India, the far-right BJP government has encouraged a sharp increase in
the use of coal—one of the reasons why global carbon emissions increased over
the past two years.
But it isn’t
just the far right that is the problem. The Paris climate accord was itself
totally inadequate.11 Even if every country was on target for meeting its
voluntary goals in reducing emissions (which they are not), we would still be
heading toward at warming of at least 3°C by the end of the century.
Even
Germany, which has greatly increased its use of renewable energy sources over
the past decade, continues to mine large quantities of coal for export.12
In the United
States, the Democratic Party had virtually nothing to say about climate change
during the last election.13 According to some environmentalists, Nancy Pelosi,
the new Speaker of the House, is bringing a water pistol to fight a forest
fire.
But it’s
actually worse than that. While Democratic Party leaders favor the development
of renewable energy sources, they have also been in the forefront of increasing
production of fossil fuels. In 2018, the United States became the world’s
biggest oil and natural gas producer. In November, Barack Obama spoke at Rice
University and boasted that he was responsible for this:
“American
energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was
president. And you know . . . suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer.
. . . that was me, people.”14 While Obama’s official position was that the
United States should reduce its use of fossil fuels, in his 2013 State of the
Union address he advocated an “all-of-the-above” energy plan that would “keep
cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.”
In 2015 he signed
legislation lifting a forty-year ban on oil exports. The reality is that the
Democrats are coming to the forest fire with a water pistol in one hand and a
can of gasoline in the other.
Climate and capitalism
That is all
depressing. But there is one piece of good news: headlines that say we are past
the point of no return are not true. There are no insuperable technological
barriers to doing what the IPCC calls for—reducing carbon emissions by 45
percent by 2030 and eliminating them completely by 2050. What we have to do is
stop using fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy sources.
A transition
to 100 percent wind, water, and solar power for all purposes (electricity,
transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) could be achieved in the
continental United States between 2050 and 2055,16 according to a study
published in 2015 by a group of researchers at Stanford led by Mark Jacobson.
The group
followed that up with a 2017 report charting a path to 100 percent renewable
energy in 139 countries by 2050.17 While other researchers criticized the
earlier Jacobson study, they did concede that 80 percent of energy needs could
be fulfilled by renewables by 2050.18
Let’s accept
that lower number. The Jacobson plan is based on replacing current energy use.
But hand in hand with a transition to renewables, we need massive gains in
efficiency and conservation.
The United
States is by far the most wasteful user of energy on the planet. Energy
consumption per capita in the US is double that in Western Europe. We could
halve our energy consumption and still have a standard of living as good as the
rest of the advanced capitalist world. One big reason for the difference is the
US dependence on cars and trucks for transportation, rather than mass transit
and high-speed trains.
If we had a
massive expansion of such options—powered, of course, by renewables—we could
see a huge reduction in energy consumption in this country. And there are so
many other steps that we could take, for example, constructing energy-efficient
homes and buildings, or redesigning cities to reduce the sprawl that requires
people travel long distances to get to work, shop, or do other things necessary
to survive.19
But while the
technical problems can be solved, there are enormous political and economic
obstacles in the way. Reducing emissions will require reducing the size of the
global economy, and that runs headlong into the way that capitalist economies
are organized. The dynamic of capitalism is based on production for exchange,
not for use.
In capitalist
economies, a small minority, driven by competition and the search for ever-greater
profits, controls the means of production. The system imposes on individual
capitalists a drive to accumulate, and this results in a focus on short-term
gains that ignore the long-term effects of production, including its
consequences for the natural environment. Here’s how Frederick Engels explained
it:
As individual
capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the
immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken
into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a
manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is
satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the
commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of
the same actions.
What cared
the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the
mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation
of very highly profitable coffee trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical
rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil,
leaving behind only bare rock!
In relation to nature, as to society, the
present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate,
the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote
effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are
mostly quite the opposite in character.20
The measure
of success for capitalists is growth and accumulation. If any individual
corporate executive tries to buck the trend, they will either be replaced, or
their company will go out of business. Endless growth is built into the system.
The problem is that endless growth is impossible on a finite planet. Sooner or later
the process of accumulation will run into planetary boundaries.
Not so long
ago, many people believed that the boundaries were so far in the distance that
it would be centuries or longer before we reached them. Some people still
believe that. Unfortunately, they are wrong.
Capitalism
has opened up what Marx called a “metabolic rift” between human societies and
the rest of nature––a disruption between social systems and natural systems.21
The processes necessary to sustain capitalist society put it at odds with the
natural world. As one commentator puts it:
The essential
problem for the Earth—for us—is that there is a mismatch between the short
timescales of markets and the political systems tied to them, and the much
longer timescales that the Earth System needs to accommodate human activity.
The climate crisis is upon us not because markets aren’t working well enough
but because the market system is working too well in accelerating global energy
and material cycles.”22
Since the
industrial revolution, capitalism has been entwined with the extraction and use
of fossil fuels. From the late eighteenth century coal was used to power steam
engines, first for cotton mills, and then for railroads and coal-powered ships.
From the late nineteenth century, after the invention of the internal
combustion engine, oil became dominant. These innovations drove not just
production, but also military expansion and war.
After World War II, fossil
fuels became an even more central component of the world capitalist economy. As
Andreas Malm puts it, coal, oil, and gas are “utilized across the spectrum of
commodity production as the material that sets it in physical motion.” Fossil
fuels “have now become the general lever for surplus value production.”23
The size of
the fossil fuel industry is mind-boggling––there is more capital invested in it
than any other industry. The major oil and gas companies make tens of billions
of profits each year, and the total value of existing fossil fuel and nuclear
power infrastructure is somewhere in the region of $15 trillion to $20
trillion.24
Most of this
infrastructure has decades of possible further use. But in order to solve the
climate crisis, we need to shut it down almost immediately and invest in
renewable energy systems based on solar, wind, and tidal power.
The people
who own and profit from the existing system obviously won’t let that happen
without a huge fight. That’s why they’ve been funding climate denialism for
decades, both through sponsorship of think tanks and through large campaign
contributions to right-wing politicians.25
That’s why oil corporations like
Exxon and Shell, who knew about the threat of global warming as early as the
1970s, hid their research from the general public and adopted the strategy that
the tobacco companies used for decades—deny, deny, deny.26
The tobacco
companies ensured that millions of people died prematurely from smoking-related
diseases. The oil companies have gone one further and put millions of species
at risk.
A transition
to an economy based on renewable, non-carbon fuels is physically quite
possible, but it won’t happen while it is blocked by the petro-capitalists and
their government supporters—from right-winger Donald Trump to liberal Justin
Trudeau in Canada—who don’t want to give up the $50 trillion of known oil
reserves still waiting to be extracted. The problem runs deep because the use
of fossil fuels is so bound up with capitalism as it has historically
developed, that it is no longer possible to separate the two. As the British Marxist
Chris Harman put it:
High levels
of carbon-based energy are central to virtually every productive and
reproductive process within the system––not just to manufacturing industry, but
to food production and distribution, the heating and functioning of office
blocks, getting labor power to and from workplaces, providing it with what it
needs to replenish itself and reproduce.
To break with
the oil-coal economy means a massive transformation of these structures, a
profound reshaping of the forces of production and the immediate relations of
production that flow out of them.27
Focusing on
lifestyle changes or on so-called green consumption by individuals is
essentially a waste of time. If we want to prevent environmental catastrophe,
we have to organize to change the system.
Reasons to be cheerful?
Does that
mean that we have to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a society based
on workers’ control of production and sustainable development and in the next
twelve years? As much as I would like to see that happen, I think it’s going to
take longer than that.
But the
strategy of revolutionary socialists has always been to fight for immediate
reforms while using those struggles as building blocks to create the kind of
movement that can take on the whole system at some point in the future. That’s
exactly the strategy that we need now.
We have to
raise demands and be involved in grassroots struggles that can start shifting
the economy away from fossil-fuel dependency as soon as possible. What is
important to remember is that the form of the struggle matters just as much as
its immediate goal. We want to mobilize the largest numbers of people possible.
Radical
change can only come about through the action of mass movements, and
participation in mass movements changes the people who are involved in them.
They begin to develop the skills and the confidence for society to be run on a
truly democratic basis, which is the defining characteristic of genuine
socialism.
How can we go
about building that kind of movement? People are already beginning to move into
action, and it is this that should give us some hope and inspiration.
Immediately after last year’s mid-term elections, activists in the Sunrise
Movement occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington to demand progressive
climate action, supported by newly elected member of Congress Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.28
The young
people involved may have all kinds of mixed ideas. Some of them no doubt have
illusions about what the Democratic Party is willing to do. But much more
important than that is the fact that they took direct action. It is through
involvement in struggle that people’s ideas begin to change as they come to see
that tinkering with the system isn’t enough and that we need a much more
thorough-going transformation.
Another
exciting development last year was the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, which
is committed to acts of mass civil disobedience in support of a radical climate
agenda. In November, thousands of activists blocked no less than five of the
bridges that cross the River Thames in London, leading to many arrests.29 Since
then there have been other actions in the UK and other countries, including the
United States.
We can also
draw inspiration from Greta Thunberg, the fifteen-year-old student in Sweden
who has been organizing weekly climate strikes outside her school. Her activism
got her invited to speak at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 24 meetings in
Poland last December. COP 24 was the gathering at which the world’s governments
were supposed to sort out the details of the Paris climate agreement, but it
was even more useless than earlier meetings, with representatives from the US
and Poland advocating for the increased use of coal.30 This is what Thunberg
told the assembled world dignitaries:
Since our
leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility
they should have taken long ago . . . [O]ur political leaders have failed us,
because we are facing an existential threat and there’s no time to continue
down this road of madness . . .
[W]e can no
longer save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be
changed. . . . So, we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for
our future. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We
have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or
not. The people will rise to the challenge.”31
There is also
incredible inspiration to be drawn from the mass struggles against oil
pipelines that have taken place in the US and Canada in the past few years,
often led by Native American nations and organizations. Of course, these are
all still small steps––they need to become part of a much bigger movement that
can fight in a more unified way for its immediate demands. The ideas motivating
those involved are mixed, to say the least. But this is the way that bigger
movements start.
A crucial
part of any movement that is capable of winning the kinds of changes we need is
the organized working class. Workers not only can demonstrate in large numbers,
but also they have the power to shut down sectors of the economy. It’s that
power that gives us leverage against the entrenched economic and political
privileges of the ruling class. One recent example of this power is the “Yellow
Vest” movement in France, launched by truck drivers in opposition to a regressive
fuel tax imposed by the Macron government.
In the mainstream media, Macron was typically
presented as the responsible leader who was simply trying to reduce fuel
consumption and carbon emissions. But this narrative was rejected not just by
the “Yellow Vest” movement, but also by the vast majority of the French
population, who gave the movement overwhelming support.
They point out that
Macron cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy before imposing a fuel tax
that hurts workers and the poor. The movement raised a set of progressive
demands through popular assemblies that it has organized, which of course
include taxing the rich.
French
workers want the government to go after the big polluters instead of putting
the burden on the backs of the poor. After weeks of protests, which turned into
riots in Paris in November, the mayor of one district in the city announced,
“We are in a state of insurrection, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Within
twenty-four hours, the Macron government announced that it was suspending the
fuel tax.32
What took
place in France is an illustration of the incredible power that workers have if
they are organized. The movement confronted both the government and the
conservative trade union leadership. As the Marxist environmentalist Andreas
Malm argues, an effective environmental movement “could learn a great deal from
the methods and tactics of the gilets jaunes.”33 That’s why the demand for a
Green New Deal that has been raised again recently by a handful of progressive
Democrats is important.
It makes
clear that a transition away from fossil fuel use does not have to come at the
expense of ordinary people. A Green New Deal means promoting an environmental
agenda that offers well-paid jobs and fights against economic inequality. Some
critics on the US left worry that the proposal is just a way to prop up
capitalism. But it is not the content of the reform but the way it is fought
for that will prove decisive.
Reforms can
be used to strengthen the existing system (as was the intent of the original
New Deal in the 1930s), but they can also be used as a stepping to stone to
press for more radical changes, provided that there is a movement powerful
enough to do this.34
There are
other demands that could and should be raised, including a huge expansion of
mass transit and a state-of-the art high-speed-train network across the
country. Demands like these begin to challenge the logic of the capitalist
market and give the opportunity to build campaigns and movements that can go on
to fight for more.
The role of
socialists is to participate in whatever struggles like this emerge, fighting
for immediate victories, while making an argument about why we need to go much
further with the goal of building an ecosocialist alternative to capitalism.
None of this
is going to be easy. But it is possible, and it offers an inspiring vision.
Most importantly, if we don’t fight for this alternative, capitalism will
surely take us over the climate cliff.
Notes
2. See Glenn
Scherer, “Climate Science Predictions Prove Too Conservative,” Scientific
American, December 6, 2012, https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...
and Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the
Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), chap. 6.
3. The report
was immediately criticized by some climate researchers as too optimistic. For
example, “Michael Mann: We Are Even Closer to Climate Disaster than IPCC
Predicts,” The Real News, October 10, 2018,
https://therealnews.com/stories/michael-....
5. “Fourth
National Climate Assessment: Volume II, Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the
United States,” US Global Change Research Program https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/.
The report is issued every four years by thirteen federal agencies headed by
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and written by leading
climate researchers. It assesses “current trends in global change, both
human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to
100 years.”
6. For the
details, see Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, part 1.
16. Mark Z.
Jacobson et al., “Low-Cost Solution to the Grid Reliability Problem with 100%
Penetration of Intermittent Wind, Water, and Solar for All Purposes,” PNAS,
December 8, 2015, https://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060.
19. See Fred
Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating An Ecological Society: Toward a
Revolutionary Transformation (New York: Monthy Review Press, 2017).
21. See John
Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), chap. 5.
23. Andreas
Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
(London: Verso, 2016), chap. 13.
24. This
figure is from a 2011 United Nations report quoted by Ian Angus in Facing the
Anthropocene, chap. 10.
25. See Naomi
Orestes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists
Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London:
Bloomsbury, 2010) and Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The
Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), part 1.
26. Naomi
Orestes, “Exxon’s Climate Concealment,” New York Times, October 9, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/exxons-climate-concealment.html;
Benjamin Franta, “Shell and Exxon’s Secret 1980s Climate Change Warnings,” Guardian,
September 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/exxons-climate-concealment.html
27. Chris
Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2010), chap.12.
28. Ryan Grim
and Briahna Gray, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Joins Environmental Activists in
Protest at Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Office,” The Intercept, November
13, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-sunrise-activists-nancy-pelosi/
Ocasio-Cortez’s brief appearance at the protest was notable, but so was the
fact that she sees her role as steering the movement into the Democratic Party.
She told the activists: “Should Nancy Pelosi become the next speaker of the
House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back in pursuing the most progressive
energy agenda that this country has ever seen.” Whether the movement can remain
independent of the Democrats, or whether it will be absorbed and neutralized by
them, will be a key political fight in the months ahead. For relevant history
see Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket Books, 2012), Ch.
5: Social Movements and the “Party of the People.”
