Murder, Inc. Profit System Creates Global Warming

There have been over 120 reported deaths from Hurricane Sandy in the U.S., with another 100 or more in the Caribbean countries, the majority in Haiti, a reflection of the worst racist oppression in the Western Hemisphere. Sandy is the largest hurricane on record — over 1,000 miles in diameter —though it did not have the highest winds recorded.

In the U.S., tens of thousands were displaced by destruction of their homes, while in Nigeria in West Africa, the worst flooding in half a century has displaced more than two million people over the last few months and killed hundreds, with the figure still climbing. The overflow of the Niger River, the third largest in Africa, has mixed sewage with fresh water and brought crocodiles, snakes, and hippos into people’s homes. Are these exceptionally destructive events just a coincidence, or is there a common cause?

It is estimated — as only a capitalist system will do — that Sandy may cost over $50 billion. Some costs will be paid by insurance companies and other capitalists, but a majority will fall on millions of workers. It is the second most costly U.S. weather event in recent history, second only to Hurricane Katrina’s more than $100 billion in damages. No other event comes close. By capitalist reasoning, the many deaths in both the U.S. and Nigeria take a back seat to the monetary losses.

Not ‘Freak Natural Happenings’

The capitalist media are slightly more willing on this occasion than in the past to link the catastrophe to global warming. They usually describe extremely violent and destructive weather events as freak natural happenings, but as even Gov. Cuomo of New York pointed out, horrible events that used to happen once a century are now happening every other year.

This makes it harder for the capitalist media to hide the connection between these events and global warming. They still try hard to do so, or at the very least avoid talking in this context about a solution that could make a difference, namely getting rid of fossil fuels altogether (coal, oil, natural gas). Fossils are fueling not only economies, but also the global warming that produces warmer air and warmer oceans that, in turn, produce faster evaporation and immensely greater amounts of rain. But the rain only falls in certain places, robbing other places of moisture and leaving behind desertification and drought.

The accelerated melting of the Arctic Sea ice (as well as land-based glaciers all over the earth) due to the increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels created a high pressure area over the North Atlantic. This prevented Sandy from moving eastward, as hurricanes usually do, instead sending it crashing into the eastern shore of the U.S.  While the devastation was centered on coastal states, the winds and rain were felt as far away as the Midwest with gigantic waves on some of the Great Lakes, mimicking Sandy’s Atlantic storm surge that raised the sea level almost 14 feet in New York City.

In addition to wind-caused damage, many burst natural gas pipelines in New Jersey and elsewhere caused fires that burned hundreds of homes, and all their contents. Because of downed power lines, gasoline was not available even though it was stored underground at thousands of filling stations. As many as eight million homes and businesses lost access to electricity, causing food spoilage and other damage and leaving people to freeze in the dark.

So it seems that these fossil fuels are both dangerous and unreliable in a pinch. But since Nigeria is a vast source of oil profits and therefore a target of imperialist rivalry, workers there will still suffer worsening imperialist exploitation and oppression in the international competition to obtain even more of these fossil fuels.

Communist Dialectics
Gives Answers

Only dialectics, which is the key scientific tool communists use to understand the world and to describe it, makes this transition from quantitative to qualitative changes a central part of its approach to understanding everything in the world. Such ever-present transformations of quantitative changes into qualitative changes can, and do, take place over seconds, years, or even millennia. But the atmospheric changes brought about by GHGs, emitted relentlessly by all capitalist economies, have entered a phase that is taking place over a few decades. Extreme weather events, particularly where they haven’t happened before, are only the tip of the melting iceberg.

Other expected accelerations include permanent rise in sea level. For example, “normal” sea level at lower Manhattan has risen a foot in the past 100 years, and is expected to rise by at least another two feet in the next 70 years. With rivers flooding here and droughts persisting there, killer heat waves and home-destroying wildfires, migration of forest-destroying insects farther from the equator, desertification and consequent food shortages, many other effects of global warming will occur. These things are discussed fully in our essay on global warming in the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST at www.plp.org.

Communist revolution is another example of quantitative change becoming qualitative: not changing the bosses’ system a little, but overturning it entirely, with its profits and competition. And as masses of workers, students, and soldiers in the U.S., Nigeria, and around the world swell the ranks of PLP — a quantitative change — sooner or later will turn into a qualitative change: from capitalist tyranny into a world wide egalitarian communist society run by the workers under the leadership of their communist party, PLP.

Until this occurs, capitalism’s many tragic outcomes will multiply without limit. Neither Obama, Romney, nor Nigeria’s President Jonathan will make any difference in this situation. Only the workers everywhere, through mass collective action from New Jersey to Nigeria, can do that.