Urgent UN talks on tackling the climate emergency are still not addressing the true scale of the crisis, Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has warned. At Madrid’s COP25 the overriding issue of how fast the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions has received little official attention.
“We are at risk of getting so bogged down in incremental technicalities at these negotiations that we forget to see the forest for the trees,” said Rockström. “There is a risk of disappointment in the UN process because of the inability to recognise that there is an emergency.” Rockström said the UN conference must grapple urgently with reversing emissions of greenhouse gases, which are still on the rise despite repeated scientific warnings over three decades and multiple resolutions by governments to tackle the problem. “Next year is the year of truth. The year when we must move decisively to an economy that really starts to reduce investments in fossil fuels.” Even the coal-fired power plants currently planned or in construction are enough to produce double the amount of carbon that can safely be put in the atmosphere for the next century, Rockström said. The situation was so dire that governments should be starting to consider geoengineering technology, he said. “It makes me very nervous. That is really playing with biological processes that might kick back in very unexpected ways. But I don’t think we should rule anything out – an emergency is an emergency.”
The Socialist Party has no easy answer to the problem of climate change and offers no reforms to mitigate it effects because climate change is wedded to the operation of the capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production, and the drive for profit, which is the source of the problem. The social relations of capitalism are based, in the final analysis, on the buying and selling.
Overcoming the threat to human civilisation posed by global warming is inseparably bound up with the struggle for socialism, that is, the overthrow of the system of private ownership and the ending of national states. The dictates of profit must be overturned and the laws of reason applied to social and economic relationships. Confronted with this perspective, the apologists of the present order rush to its defence. But the rational democratic control of the economy, ending the domination of the blind workings of the market, is not a matter of preference. It is a necessity to protect the planet. Humanity is threatened by the outcome of its own economic activity, over which it has no control.
Let us assume, for argument’s sake, that all the so-called world leaders assembled at the COP25 in Madrid or next years COP26 at Glasgow genuinely want to achieve an agreement to reduce global warming. They are unable to do so, because of the structure of the economic system over which they preside. This capitalist system has become the greatest danger to the continuation of human civilisation and we must change it.
Many in the environmentalist movement say socialism may be all well and good, as a general aim, but the fight for a socialist perspective cannot deal with problems, such as climate change, that have to tackled immediately. Such arguments are generally advanced under the banner of ‘realpolitik”. In fact they constitute the most unrealistic perspective of all. It is most unrealistic to believe that somehow, some way, if only enough pressure is applied, the capitalist system can be reformed in such a way as to provide a future for the next generation and all the generations to come.
The Socialist Party reject claims that the threat to the environment is caused by the allegedly too-high living standards of working people in the developed world, or by supposed over-population. Such conceptions represent an effort to blame the human race for the problems caused by the capitalist mode of production. Socialism is not to regress backwards to more primitive way of life. The Earth can sustain a growing population with an average standard of living far above that which now prevails now under capitalism. While abundance is the enemy of capitalism, scarcity is that of socialism. Abundance is needed for the realisation of a sustainable and just society.
Climate change will affect you, and your society. It’s going to happen to you, and it will be bad. The climate will also become much more unstable. Rainfall and storms will increase in intensity, and hurricanes and cyclones will move north and south. Some places will flood, and in others drought will spread. Crops will fail in many areas and decline overall. Small rises in sea level will be magnified by hurricane surges – giant waves that carry all before them. We can expect to lose many coastal cities. As climate change intensifies, there will be many disasters, in many places, in the same year. Governments will be unable or unwilling to cope. The poor will be hit hard. The worst hit will be small farmers in poor countries hit by drought, working class people in coastal cities, and all those people in every country who cannot run. The impact of these “natural” events will be massively increased by the way society is now organized, aka “capitalism.” Crop failures will become famines. Disasters will lead to hundreds of millions of refugees. Those refugees will come up against armed borders. They may spend years in refugee camps, or the rich may become “tired” of feeding them. And there will be wars. You will change for the worse, and the society you live in for the worst too.
No one knows the precise form serious climate change will take. No one knows the timing either. It won’t be the end of the world. Civilisation and high-tech capitalism will continue. All those dystopian novels and movies of the post-apocalypse offer predictions of what may happen. But be sure of one thing, the climate negotiations lack any credence at all, and it’s time to view the entire process as thoroughly corrupted and hopelessly beholden to fossil fuel corporations and the interests of global capital.
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