Thursday, July 25, 2019

End Capitalism or the End of Civilisation? - Your Choice

Just in case we do not already know it, more research highlight the seriousness of the climate crisis. The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years. The research suggests that the current warming rate is higher than any observed previously. There is no event to compare with it. Not the “Little Ice Age” or what's called the “Roman Warm Period” and other such variations. experts say that this new work debunks many of the claims made by climate sceptics in recent decades.
"This paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle," said Prof Mark Maslin, from University College London, UK, who wasn't part of the studies. "This paper shows the truly stark difference between regional and localised changes in climate of the past and the truly global effect of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions."
The authors say this highlights how unusual warming has become in recent years as a result of industrial emissions.
There is no doubt left – as has been shown extensively in many other studies addressing many different aspects of the climate system using different methods and data sets,” said Stefan Brönnimann, from the University of Bern and the Pages 2K consortium of climate scientists.
Currently, across Europe, the United States and China many regions are experiencing record-breaking heatwaves. Clare Nullis, from the World Meteorological Organization, said the heatwaves bore the “hallmark of climate change”. The extreme events were “becoming more frequent, they’re starting earlier, and they’re becoming more intense,” she said. “It’s not a problem that’s going to go away.”

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich said the summer heatwave across northern Europe last year would have been “statistically impossible” without climate change driven by human activity. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said Europe’s five hottest summers since 1500 had all occurred in the 21st century – in 2018, 2010, 2003, 2016 and 2002.

The environmentalist movements are a marvel of our time. Ecologist groups are springing up everywhere. Many involved were not previously politically involved at all and united by the slenderest of threads, a shared concern for the future of the planet. There are very real anxieties about the effects of climate change and it has made many people want to do something to halt it. So there are marches and speeches and demonstrations. Will they succeed? Can they succeed? We do not deny the sincerity of many campaigners; the energy and ingenuity they displayed in tackling a job they considered important provided further proof that once working men and women get on the right track capitalism’s days are numbered.
In calling for the world's governments to join together to combate global warming, it is easy for the non-socialists to make the mistake of thinking that it is in nations interest to co-operate. This is because they identify the nation with the people. In fact the nation is not the people; it is the capitalist class. The people—ninety per cent of them —are not the nation. They are the working-class who have no country. It is certainly in the interests of all the peoples of the world to co-operate. But it is not in the interests of all the nations of the world to co-operate. It is not in any nation’s interest to combine with another nation, except to form a supra-national bloc in order more effectively to assault other nations or blocs.
Any effort expended on reforms is effort unexpended on revolution. When we consider that parties which have started out for revolution and “immediate aims” have ended up with no revolution and immediate aims gone sour, we realise what a wild goose chase the pursuit of palliatives is, even if they are connected with something as vital as the possible end of civilisation. The only way to solve climate change is to establish socialism. The remedy is not the unreality of asking capitalism to behave differently but the socialist policy of getting rid of capitalism which creates environmental destruction. The only effective cure would be to abolish capitalism altogether.
The only possible way to reduce carbon emissions produced by capitalism, is to abolish their root cause—capitalism itself. Clearing away all the mystification about our present social system in the media and in education, the Socialist Party recognises that the two hundred year old system of industrial capitalism is already dangerously obsolete. Only the profitability of capital is their focus. This is insanity. Technology need not be a danger if it can be made safe and geared to human needs. Capitalism cannot be humanised. It cannot even be controlled. It cannot cope. Our only hope is to scrap it before it destroys us. Help us organise to replace it with a liberated class-free world without private property socialism. What is needed is to go beyond a moral outcry and to attack the system which creates the spoliation of nature. Good intentions will not solve the problem of climate change. We must first end capitalism.

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