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| A WORLD TO WIN, A PLANET TO SAVE |
In just 100 days or so, world leaders will gather in Paris
for the COP21 climate change talks. The urgent need for action to reduce CO2
emissions and stop global warming was recently described by both Barack Obama
and Pope Francis as a “moral imperative” and summed up by President Obama who
said: “We are the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change, and
the last generation to be able to do something about it.”
New Zealand’s recently-announced climate change target are
the second weakest of nine countries and regions. Only Canada will take a less
ambitious goal to the United Nations December climate change conference in
Paris. Even the carbon tax-scrapping Australians promise to do more than New
Zealand to address climate change. Of the nine countries, New Zealand has the
slowest greenhouse gas reductions planned for the decade beginning in 2020
decade.
Victoria University climate change scientist James Renwick
said it was disappointing to see New Zealand could not even match the
commitment of Australia, let alone the European Union’s goal to cut 40% from
its emissions by 2030. “Australia are not actually doing particularly well
either, but New Zealand is doing worse. It is not a good look. New Zealand
already has a rather poor reputation in these meetings and negotiations, in my
understanding.” The comparisons contradicted the government’s description of
its target as “fair and ambitious”, Renwick said “It’s unimpressive and it is
not fair, because it is not fair on future generations. As this becomes more
and more important, this is going to hurt us, economically.” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/21/clean-green-new-zealand-falls-behind-australia-on-climate-change
Paul Young, co-founder of Generation Zero, said “New
Zealand’s emissions are growing and the ministry for the environment tells us
we’ll be nowhere near our target by 2030 under current policies. It would look
even worse for New Zealand if you took that into account. Even if we had a plan
to meet these weak pledges, we’d be in a much better position.”
Let’s cut to the chase, civilisation as we know it is coming
to an end unless urgent action is taken. We are doomed and our time on this
planet is rapidly approaching its endgame. The capitalist structures of
society, and the foundations that our economic system and way of life are built
on, are completely unsustainable. We are blindly and seemingly willingly
accelerating towards our own self-destruction as a species. Many may think that
this is an exaggeration and little more than a depressing dystopian look to the
future.
The rising global temperature on both land and in the sea
impacts on every living thing on this and it is caused by increasing levels of
C02 in the atmosphere and has numerous knock on effects. New Scientist reported
that a 2 degree rise in global temperatures would see water availability drop
by 20-30%, crop yields in Africa drop by 5-10%, 40-60 million more people
exposed to malaria in Africa, 10 million more people affected by coastal
flooding, Arctic animal species will begin to die out, and Greenland’s ice
sheet could melt permanently.
The UN has said that “desertification is a phenomenon that
ranks among the greatest environmental challenges of our time.” Through
unsustainable farming practices and through the impacts of climate change, more
and more arable land is lost each year. It is occurring at “30 to 35 times the
historical rate” and causes 12 million hectares of land to be lost every year.
That is 23 hectares every minute with a single hectare being roughly the size of
a rugby pitch. 1.5 billion people are currently affected by desertification.
With capitalist society’s relentless drive for bigger,
better and more expensive, we have taken the phrase “out with the old, in with
the new” to an unparalleled stage. Human waste and pollution has turned
enormous parts of our Earth into dumping grounds of last seasons’ commodities.
Its detrimental effect can be seen across the globe. Scientists from the US,
France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand have found that there are “more than
five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes…
floating in the world’s oceans”. On the island of Midway, more than 2,000 miles
from the nearest continent, birds are found dead with plastic in their
stomachs.
In March of this year, The Observer reported that the “fresh
water shortage will cause the next great global crisis”. Though typically many
see this problem as an issue for the developing world, Californians can attest
to the fact that it is a concern for us all. The state is now in its fourth
year of drought and cities and towns are being urged to cut back on their water
usage by 35%. The crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, General Sheikh
Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, recently admitted: “For us, water is now more
important than oil.”
There are also increasing number of floods each year, more
numerous and more violent tropical storms and cyclones, droughts, the threat of
volcanic explosions, earthquakes, rising sea levels, soil erosion, coral reef
destruction, ocean acidification, nuclear waste, and unsustainable and damaging
human farming methods.
The World Socialist Party (New Zealand)
would love to write about the coming global social revolution, but
realistically it seems more likely that the world will collapse rather than capitalism
being overthrown. Our society and our way of life need to be in harmony with
nature, not always battling against it, because in a fight against Earth and
Nature there can only be one winner, and it will not be us. There are so many
ongoing signs that the planet is heating up, even “on fire” when one reads the reports
of raging forest-fires around the globe. Globally, surface temperatures have
been setting record highs. Human-induced climate change is relentless. As the
WSP(NZ) continually point out, to pollute or not, is a matter of the impacts on
profits, and that alone. It does not take much digging to unearth the direct
relation between a system of production for profit and a whole range of
problems. This is particularly clear in the case of environmental problems. Capitalism
is all about capital accumulation and the insatiable pursuit of profit is
naturally accompanied by tremendous waste and destruction. If there are profits
to be gained, capitalists are not too bothered by the long-term, or even
short-term, consequences for other people or future generations. Political
leaders lecture about the need to address environmental problems, while turning
a blind eye to the role played by this rapacious system of profit chasing. Capitalism
is a blind process of profit accumulation. It doesn't understand moral
arguments. The functionaries of capitalism serve a supremely ignorant master.
New Zealand political leaders are never going to challenge the thing they most
believe in. They will still be making their bogus hot-air speeches while the
world burns round them.
The survival of humanity depends upon the victory of the
working class over the ruling class. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) chair R. K. Pachauri, said “The solutions are many and allow for
continued economic and human development. All we need is the will to change,
which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the
science of climate change...Addressing climate change will not be possible if
individual agents advance their own interests independently; it can only be
achieved through cooperative responses, including international cooperation.”
The threat of global warming is clearly a global problem
that can only be dealt with by co-ordinated action at a world level. But this
is not going to happen under capitalism. As a system involving competition
between profit-seeking corporations backed up by their protective nation-states,
it is inherently incapable of world-wide cooperation. So it’s not going to
happen. There is not going to be any coordinated world action to deal with
global warming as long as capitalism is allowed to continue. Something will be
done but it is bound to be too little, too late. Individuals do have some
responsibility in the matter. Capitalism - the cause of the problem - only
continues in the end because people put up with it. Effective remedial action
will only be possible within the framework of a united world which can only be possible
on the basis of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources being the common
heritage of all humanity. A growing consciousness that we are all inhabitants
of a single world, that we share the globe in common despite our different
languages and cultures, is essential if we are to tackle ecological problems
such as global warming. What is required is association with the other peoples
of the world, on the basis of socialism. What is required is world socialism
where the Earth's resources will be owned in common and democratically
controlled through various inter-linked administrative and decision-making
bodies at world, regional and local levels. A system without money and the
profit motive in which the interests and needs of all are paramount. In such a
system the challenge of the human impact on the environment can be seriously
addressed for the first time. People and not money will control the world and steer
the direction of social progress.
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| WORLD SOCIALISM |
Think globally, act locally, we hear many sincere voices
within the green movement say. Anyone who follows the news cannot help but
think globally. We are up against a global system which can only be effectively
and lastingly dealt with at that same level. The urgent need for world
co-operation in dealing with the problems of world energy supply cannot be
realised within the social productive relations and the existing economic
framework. It is completely impossible under capitalism for humanity to use the
earth's resources for the benefit of all people. Yet there is in fact no
barrier presented by any alleged inability of people to co-operate in their
mutual interests. On the contrary, this ability to co-operate is universal. This
movement already exists as the movement for world socialism. It is vital that
those who see the need for world co-operation in dealing with the problems
facing all of humanity should join its ranks to swell its voice of sanity and
thereby contribute to the work of preparing practical programmes of action
which could be implemented once the socialist political objective is achieved. This
political objective is one of democratically gaining political control with a
view to taking the means of production and the earth's resources out of the
hands of the world's capitalist class and placing them at the free disposal of
the whole world's community. In the long run, humanity's greatest productive
resource lies in the innovative genius of our species. The essential problem is
one of how to establish a society in which this genius can find its fullest
expression directly for human needs.
So perhaps not all hope is lost.
WSP(NZ) website:
E-mail:
wsp.nz@worldsocialism.org
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