South Africa hosted a two-week United Nations conference on climate change in early December, attended by delegates from more than 190 countries. Called for the nominal purpose of ending greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming, it was one of a long series of failures.
GHGs come from the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. By trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, they have already warmed the earth by more than one degree; under capitalist business-as-usual, they threaten to warm it even more. Global warming shifts evaporation and precipitation patterns, leading to more frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe winter snows. The melting of the big glaciers and ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica, could ultimately threaten to drown small island nations and coastal cities that contain more than 10 percent of the world’s population, including 80 percent of the people living in California. (See the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST magazine “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System...Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World” at www.plp.org.)
As usual, the competition inherent in capitalism has prevented any meaningful agreement among various nations’ ruling classes. The lines are drawn most sharply between the ruling classes of the industrialized nations and those of the developing nations. The European Union recently demanded that all countries share equally in limiting GHG emissions, even though the industrialized countries have produced the lion’s share of GHGs to date. The U.S. rulers, meanwhile, are using this issue in an attempt to stem the rapid Chinese economic development that is pushing the two rivals toward war for control over fuel sources. The ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan concern oil and natural gas. All imperialists, whether from industrialized or developing nations, will fight to the last worker’s death to retain such control.
The conference ended with yet another worthless pledge to meet again later to come to agreement. The world continues to warm and the poorest among us continue to suffer the major burden of climate changes. That industrialized nations promised to throw in a few pennies to help the developing nations cope with the expenses of cutting fossil fuel emissions only serves to cover this reality, and their culpability.
The only established alternative to fossil fuels, which now provide about 85 percent of the world’s energy, is nuclear energy. Other sources are far less developed and reliable: wind, solar, hydro (dams), and geothermal (tapping underground hot magma). The extreme profitability in fossil fuels means that those corporations and their financial backers will continue to fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in their use.
Given the competition that is a mainstay of capitalism and imperialism, climate change conferences will inevitably disappoint the world’s working class. Only when workers everywhere take state power will we be able to halt and perhaps reverse global warming. That will require a communist-led global revolution, which is PLP’s goal. Join us.