Capitalism Causes Deadly Climate Change

In its entire 400-year-plus existence, capitalists have been hard at work decimating forests, poisoning rivers, polluting the air and exterminating ocean life. The pursuit of profit turns the life-sustaining qualities of the planet are commodities to be exploited and fought over. Moreover, the capitalist treatment of the planet mirrors its treatment of the working class. The same profit motive that drives them to ruin our environment also subjects us to the horrors of racism and sexism, brutal working conditions, and imperialist war, with its threat of nuclear holocaust.  Buying a hybrid car, recycling plastics and using more efficient light bulbs will not change the destructive tendencies of capitalism. Only communist revolution can rescue the planet, and the workers that inhabit it.
Racism Makes Super-Exploited Groups The Most Vulnerable
The racism inherent in capitalism means that Black and Latin workers are hurt most by climate change. They are systematically placed in the most vulnerable locations for flooding and housed in poorly constructed homes. The poorest workers don’t have the financial resources to protect themselves and rebuild after extreme storms and are left homeless and more desperately poor.
Sociologist Robert Bullard, discussing how environmental racism impacts people of color in Houston, writes: “They not only have to deal with flooding in their homes, but pollution in water that’s contaminated when water floods refineries and plants. You’re talking about a perfect storm of pollution, environmental racism, and health risks that are probably not going to be measured and assessed until decades later. The fact is that laissez-faire, unrestrained capitalism and lack of zoning means people with money can put protections up, and people without can’t” (Huffington Post, 8/29).
The media refers to these catastrophes as “natural disasters.” However, one thousand people did not die in Bangladesh, Nepal and India this summer only because of nature. Millions of Puerto Ricans were not left without power or water, threatened by outbreaks of deadly communicable diseases and dying from lack of medicines because of nature. Fires alone cannot be blamed for the destruction happening in Northern California, Portugal and Spain. Capitalist racism, greed and drive for profit created the conditions that allowed all of these disasters to occur.
The Future Of Capitalism-Caused Climate Change
The following facts are from “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells (NY Mag, July edition).
Barring a radical reduction in global warming, sea levels will rise AT LEAST four feet by 2100. One third of the world’s cities are coastal, so power plants, ports, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshland and rice paddies will flood.
High temperatures will end the production of many basic foods such wheat, corn and soybeans. By 2080, Europe will be in constant and extreme drought. NASA, in 2015, predicted that future droughts in the Midwest of the US would soon be the worst in 1000 years.
Global warming threatens to release potentially dangerous microbes that have been locked in frozen ground around the poles. Also, the range of the insects that spread diseases such as malaria and Zika virus could increase, meaning millions more will be exposed to these and other diseases.
Higher temperatures increase health-damaging ozone in the air. More ozone leads to deaths from respiratory and cardiac illnesses. Wildfires will increase and add more carbon particulate to the air, causing more health problems.
Capitalists Have No Answer For the Crisis
The response of right-wing “climate deniers” to these well-supported predictions represents the outlook of one segment of the US ruling class, concerned only with short-term profit and  indifferent to the deadly effects of global climate change. Other bosses realize that worsening climate change could potentially eat away at their profits. Even oil companies like Exxon-Mobil have recently been jumping on the “green wagon” and investing in renewable energy sources, because they worry that “severe weather disrupts delivery of supplies.” At the same time, the energy companies fully intend to extract tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas still below the ground, which will spew more carbon dioxide into the air and raise global temperatures, with terrible results.
Meanwhile, the liberal ruling class refuses to blame capitalism for the problem. Instead, they primarily place the blame for climate change at the feet of the working class. We’re driving too many SUVs! We’re not recycling! The New York Times even had the racist nerve to blame poverty-stricken Indians for contributing to climate change by burning cow dung for heat and cooking (12/8/2015).
The capitalist media continuously pushes the false narrative that it is the collective responsibility of workers to fix the problem. So we must change our consumption patterns while they continue to perpetuate the very things that caused the crisis in the first place. So now we have a slew of eco-friendly, sustainable, and green products preying on workers’ guilt, and peddling the false notion that consuming eco-friendly goods will solve the problem.
The bosses push these individual responses in order to avoid opposition to their system. The iron-clad rules of capitalism mean that if Boss A chooses not to exploit a particular resource due to concern about the climate, Boss B will swoop in, claim and exploit that resource, and drive Boss A out of business. This is reflected in the Paris Climate Accords. This agreement between global capitalist leaders represents the best they can do at resolving the contradiction between profit accumulation and environmental destruction. It doesn’t start until 2020, and is merely a non-binding, toothless set of “targets” for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. There are no consequences when countries fail to meet their targets. In a communist, planned economy, targets would be set and all of society would be set to the task of meeting those targets.
Communist Revolution Is the Solution to Climate Change
We are constantly reminded that “human” activities such as fossil fuel burning, deforestation, meat production and agriculture as the main culprits that release gases like methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, into the atmosphere – without connecting it to the giant corporations that profit mightily from those activities.
In order to reduce carbon emissions and prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absolutely essential to destroy capitalism and replace it with communism. While workers will die and suffer, capitalism will survive all manner of global weather calamity. What they absolutely cannot survive is communist revolution. The united working class is the only force, natural or otherwise, that can bring this exploitative and murderous system to an end. Become a part of this force today by joining PLP.