Legislating Away Climate Change

A group of US lawmakers in the Senate including Bernie Sanders are proposing to declare the climate crisis an official emergency – a significant recognition of the threat taken after considerable pressure from environment groups. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, plan to introduce the same resolution in the House of Representatives.

A new analysis from the economic firm Rhodium Group today finds the US might achieve less than half of the percentage of pollution reductions it promised other countries in an international agreement.

There is so much real lying and bad behaviour coming from the government and corporations. We've had enough experience where the mainstream media either helped the government and businesses to lie or failed to do its job and ask all the questions it should have. We live in a crazy world with a lot of real evil. 

 The Socialist Party holds no affection of the big corporations. We fully understand the well-justified suspicion of big business.

Abundance already exists. If faced by a shortage of one material we have alternative sources which does not involve the intensification of the extraction process for the original source to the detriment of the environment. Report after report explains that more conservation and less waste is a better solution than constant growth. Our case against capitalism is a "holistic" one yet many still wage all their individual battles and wars as isolated individual campaigns. We are not anti-GM foods or anti-fracking and we are not pro-organic and pro-localism. We are anti-capitalist because commercial vested interests is the fundamental problem of the science, not the particular technologies. We envision a world where common ownership of the earth, a socially controlled economy, and the direct democracy of communities acts as guardian of ecological sustainability.

The protection of the environment is a social problem which requires humanity to establish a viable and stable relationship with the rest of nature. In practice this implies a society which uses, as far as possible, renewable raw materials and energy and practice the recycling of non-renewable resources; a society which, once an appropriate balance with nature has been formed, will tend towards a stable level of production, indeed towards “zero growth”. This does not mean that changes are to be excluded on principle, but that any change will have to respect the environment by taking place at a pace to which nature can adapt. But the employment by capitalism of destructive methods of production has, over two centuries, upset the balance of nature.

It is not “humanity” but the capitalist economic system itself which is responsible for ecological problems. It is only after having placed the means of society’s existence under the control of the community that we will be able to ensure their management, no longer in the selfish interest of the capitalist class, but in the general interest. Within capitalism, the drive to accumulate profits and the needs of the market outweigh the needs of the environment and no amount of palliatives can effectively control this exploitation of our natural wealth. People are hungry today not because there is no food. They are hungry because the food is too costly and because of its distribution. We need food to survive and food is big business and with rising populations fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides and other such chemicals find their way into our systems giving big profits. It is not that big businesses and political leaders do not know that they are responsible for killing people and destroying livelihoods in the developing world, not to mention the destruction of biodiversity and natural resources. Yet they continue their policies and practices.

Most environmentalists accept the economic dictatorship of the owning minority since they don’t understand the link that exists between the destruction of the environment and the private/state ownership of the means of production. Because by definition capitalism can only function in the interest of the capitalists, no palliative can (nor ever will be able to) subordinate capitalist private property to the general interest. For this reason only the threat of a socialist movement setting down as the only realistic and immediate aim the establishment of social property of society’s means of existence so as to ensure their management by and in the interest of the whole community, would be able to force the capitalists to concede reforms favourable to the workers for fear of losing the whole cake. Yet more reason to advance the maximum programme of socialism. Talking at conferences has not made any changes and it has not reduced the crises.