Part 1:
Global warming is not simply “man-made” as the Nobel committee stated — it is in fact capitalist-made. Capitalism, and not humanity, is the cause of global warming.
Grow or die is the law of capitalism. The net effect of this planless competitive system is that as each corporation is driven to expand by the drive to stay alive, the total accumulation of capital grows.
The overall effect of this single-minded capitalist focus on profits is continual crisis, war and world war, followed by periods of renewed economic expansion. The vicious business cycle causes devastation in the lives of workers through layoffs, increasing deaths, recessions, depressions, homelessness, starvation, drugs, filling of prisons, and the use of working-class youth as cannon fodder in wars. Adding to the misery caused by capitalism are the pollution and methods of waste disposal that destroy the lives of workers, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S., and globally in
Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Capitalism Systematically
Destroys Nature
Capitalism is a form of social organization that systematically destroys nature. It is a system driven not by need, and particularly not by the need to preserve the natural sources of its bounty. It is driven by profit. Profit-making requires efficiency not only within the individual business, but the competition inherent in profit--making requires that all businesses maximize profits continually, and particularly so over the short term — or go belly up.
Capitalism, for all practical purposes, prevents us from obtaining food, water, shelter, clothing, and other needs, unless we work for the capitalists and produce value worth more than we are paid — with the excess taking the form of surplus value, or profit.
Capitalists invade nature for their own class needs, in effect stealing it from the working class, enforcing their control over us and over the earth through their control of state power. They strip-mine and destroy entire mountains; they force over-fishing of the oceans in the competitive drive for profits; they clear-cut forests for wood products; they drain wetlands for city development without creating replacements elsewhere. Capitalism turns land into real estate, forests into lumber, and oceans into fisheries and turns the world’s working class into profit-producing commodities as appendages to capitalist machines.
Planet Becomes a Toxic
Dumping Ground
On the waste-product side: capitalists dump toxic or radioactive waste into soil, rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere. Numerous deaths result, without our class being able to do much to stop them, since the state protects only capitalist interests.
In a few local situations, through long major collective campaigns, workers have forced a few temporary concessions, but the overall destruction of lives and the environment accelerates everywhere else. The capitalists thus literally get away with this type of murder, just as they do through police brutality, poverty, racism, and oil wars.
In its single-minded drive for profit, world capitalism is fast exhausting the earth’s resources, and what is left is fast being ruined by waste products. The most important resources fast approaching exhaustion are oil (the lifeblood of capitalist economies) and fresh water (the lifeblood of all plants and animals). The primary waste products include toxic and radioactive substances and most important so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs).
GHGs are causing a rapid warming of the atmosphere — glaciers, soil, and oceans — that threaten to change the earth’s climate radically and to push the change into an irreversible phase with catastrophic results — the depletion of fresh water will become a catastrophe as well, both directly for personal use and indirectly through the effect on our food supply.
‘Greenwashing’
Particularly beginning with the Obama campaign, there has been a shift in the U.S. media and government from denial to “greenwashing.” Greenwashing involves the admission that the earth is warming and that human activity is indeed the cause, but it generally lays the blame on an over-consuming and overpopulated working class, without recognition that capitalism determines what people consume.
Overpopulation is a relative term concerning what portion of the working class capitalism can employ. Furthermore greenwashing proposes solutions that appear effective but are at best mere tokens, not radical plans that could actually stop global warming.
The U.S. rulers need to guarantee that they don’t have to change the infrastructure of capitalism or end their extremely profitable oil-based industries. The U.S. rulers also have an imperative need to try to slow the rapid economic advance of their imperialist rivals, especially China, whose capitalist ruling class promises to take the title of World’s Largest Economy away from the U.S. in the next decade or two. China’s industries, as well as India’s, thrive on coal more than on any other source of energy. Their pollution of the world’s atmosphere through the burning of coal is well known.
U.S. Rulers Adopt Tokenism
In order to lessen their own isolation and increase that of India and China, and even more importantly to find other ways to attempt to slow the economic growth of these two challengers, the U.S. rulers are now taking token steps that appear to address global warming. However, these steps are wholly inadequate to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Various international meetings among capitalist governments have produced schemes to reduce GHG emissions, such as “cap and trade” or “carbon tax,” but even the most ambitious target from the European Union, that calls for a reduction of emissions 80-95% below 2000 levels by 2050, allows continued increase in GHG concentrations.
Along with caps, alternative sources of energy have to be found. There are a number of such sources that have been touted, including solar, wind, hydroelectric, ocean wave, tide, agriculture, geothermal, and finally nuclear. There are problems with most of these alternative sources. These include the increasing amount of energy and materials that have to be put into them in order to get energy out of them (Heinberg). Aside from the profit considerations that dominate all capitalist decisions, some of these alternative forms of energy may not be practical even after capitalism becomes history. J
(concluded next issue)