15th March - Climate Change Day of Action

Protecting our environment is a central issue for millions of people across the world today. Unless global warming is halted and reversed the consequences could be catastrophic, even threatening the future viability of civilisation on the planet. Action is needed to avoid disaster. The root of the threats to the future of the planet lie within the capitalist system itself. Despite the scientists describing the best and worse scenarios, no one knows for sure what the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions will be. The earth’s climate is a complex system – one in which small changes can have sudden, dramatic and unpredictable effects. This uncertainty over the possible climate effects and the social consequences of such changes makes the threat even more worrisome.

 It is argued that the solutions to the climate change crisis are relatively straightforward in principle. Even radicals can imagine a series of palliative legislative measures that are not incompatible with the capitalist system and that the capitalists can as easily live off the profits based on the production and sale of renewable energy as they have done from oil and coal. Being capitalists with an eye for a financial return, some may well decide there is money to be made from developing alternative energy. However, at the heart of the production for profit on which the whole system presently depends is the fossil fuel industries and we can expect the profit-seeking CEOs who head these giant corporations, and who must follow the logic to expand so to accumulate capital will resist with all their power anything which fundamentally threaten their business interests. Green reformers say popular pressure and government actions may change the way the fossil fuel corporations operate. But at best they will not do so at the scale and pace that the experts say is required. We should not rely upon the “invisible hand” of the market to reshape the world’s economy in time to head off a pending disaster. And we can also be assured that many politicians will act in line with the pro-business, pro-market, pro-profit corporations who oil the wheels of politics with generous party funding. Real-politik means making concessions to Big Business.

The struggle over climate change raises the question of wresting power and wealth out of the hands of those who have it now. There is a desperate need for society to be run in a fundamentally different and democratic way, one in which production is not for profit but to satisfy and serve the needs of ordinary people and the planet. Such a transformation is what we call socialism. A socialist revolution overturning capitalism is the best strategy to tackle the threat to the environment and remains the key which can solve the climate crisis. The real solution to the terrible threat of global climate disaster is simple – challenge the logic of profit.