A Living Earth

Bill McKibben's 2010 book is Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet. Earth is our only home. Global warming is real . And it’s not conducive to better holidays. We fight it or we die with no time for holidays. Our enemy? Fact: 6 of the 12 biggest corporates build cars or pump oil to run them. Either we disable these corporates or fossil fuels will kill us. Not just a collapsing climate but all the destructive wars fought over hydrocarbons that plague us. It’s only a question of what will kill us first. It looks like the weather is already having a go.

Unfortunately McKibben’s solutions fall short of the mark. He lists usual ‘sustainable’ growth, of thinking slower, smaller, local, human scale, solutions. It’s a matter of convincing the enemy to change course by working ‘close to home’. Small, not big: dispersed, not centralised.” (120) But first we have to convince ourselves.

So what to do? McKibben’s vision fits well with broad Green activism; educating ourselves about all aspects of Global Warming and then dedicating ourselves to home-grown solutions to build sustainable alternatives for our survival. So we have to conserve water, food supplies and find new sources of energy. This reads like a Hollywood dystopia movie were a few survivalists start civilisation again after a doomsday event. There is no talk of challenging and overthrowing the capitalist system that relies on oil-driven expansion to make its profits.

What about the solutions put up by James Hansen the pioneer global warming advocate currently touring Aotearoa? He has done more than any other scientist to discover and map the “fast feedback effects” that may cause a sudden climate meltdown? Hansen says the "Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at 200 km3/y (cubic kilometres a year!), the Antarctic ice sheet at 100 km3." And "Last time climate was 2 deg warmer, the sea level was 25m higher". Here is a very bright guy who surely knows that such a risk means that a revolution is needed to avoid the end of Earth and Humanity as we know it.

Back in January, 2009, Hansen said, "We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead." Yet Hansen is an activist only in the sense of calling for the Courts to charge fossil fuel corporates or Congress to outlaw coal mining - though he has been arrested protesting open cast coal mining. But none of this has the urgency or the potential to avoid his famous ‘tipping point’. Obama’s four years will soon be up and CO2 emissions continue to build up at alarming rates.

Clearly the solutions put up by global warming publicists and activists are no way near what is needed to stop a meltdown. The solution must be the overthrow of the social system that has created the problem - production for profit and not need. Our big need is to survive, but that is not profitable. So we have to eliminate profits to survive. Capitalism must die or we die. Climate change activists have to be anti-capitalists.

Fortunately a new generation has made the connections. Look to the Arab revolution and the educated youth coming up against the moribund profit system that starves and represses them. They revolt for ‘freedom’ and form democratic organs to fight for it. Dictators shoot down unarmed protesters, yet the revolution strengthens. They have nothing to lose but a lost generation and a lost planet.

Capitalist barbarism has finally met its match. The educated, unemployed youth rise up against total system dysfunction and breakdown. This is the only road to human survival. The masses mobilise across borders to form regional, continental and ultimately global socialist society in which allocation of resources to meet basic needs are met. The necessary by-product of this social revolution will be the living Earth.

Climate Change: A Dire Emergency

Only Socialist Revolution Can Prevent Ecosystem Collapse

Climate change poses an immediate threat to the survival of all life on this planet, the scope and urgency of which cannot be underestimated. Many scientists have concluded that we are at or close to the point at which, even if we drastically curtail greenhouse gas emissions immediately, planet Earth will still undergo major climatic change. If we fail to take such measures, the results will be absolutely catastrophic. In as short a time as a few decades, our planet could experience such a swift, massive rise in temperature that human civilization would have little or no chance to survive. (For details, see below.)

Obama has pledged to achieve an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A reduction of that magnitude is impossible under capitalism. We cannot rely on national governments or other entities (such as the United Nations) that are controlled by the capitalist class to do that job. No matter how “progressive” capitalist politicans purport to be (see discussion of Evo Morales below), the inherent conflict between the profit motive and the good of society makes it impossible for them to enforce the necessary sacrifices on corporate-controlled industries.

But even if a miracle happens, and Obama’s pledge is fulfilled, it will still be much too little, and way too late. The human race needs to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions almost entirely within the next 10 to 30 years if it wants to survive.

The bottom line is that only workers’ control of the means of production can avoid the imminent climate change catastrophe. This means that a successful socialist revolution is needed within a decade or two. If the working class waits to overthrow capitalism for another 30 or 40 years, it is likely to be too late.

Even after the socialist revolution, the catastrophe cannot be averted unless we take immediate action. The planned economy will have to impose draconian measures against greenhouse gas emitting industries, and retool all of our energy generation and consumption to run on green, environmentally friendly, sustainable tech­nology. This change will have to be implemented extremely rapidly, and will require the involvement of practically everyone on the planet, if we are to prevail.

The current crisis of capitalism presents an opportunity for us to spread the message to the struggling working class about the gravity of the situation. We must tell the workers, and every middle class and progressive person who supports their struggle, that time is running out. The working class must combine its struggle against capitalist exploitation, and against the current economic crisis, with environmental consciousness. It must fight for workers’ control of industry in order to implement dire emergency measures to transform the current, outmoded technology of industrial production to green and sustain­able technology.

Ultimately, this urgently necessary trans­formation can only be accomplished if the working class and its allies get rid of capitalism via the socialist revolution. Every living soul that cares about our planet and the fate of humanity, please be aware: The game of trying to “reform” capitalism must come to an abrupt end. The stakes are no longer socialism or barbarism. They are socialism, or else the end of life on this planet as we know it.

The Methane Time Bomb Is Already Ticking!

As a result of the global warming that has already occurred, the ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is disappearing very fast. Many scientists predict that in the relatively near future, it will be entirely gone in the summer. Even now, an ever-increasing portion of the ice melts to open water each summer, making it darken and thus absorb more solar heat. This causes a positive feedback loop of increased warming.

The rise in the surface temperature of the Arctic means that the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is also warming rapidly. This situation threatens to compound the problem of global warming by quickening its pace exponentially. The reason is that the seabed beneath the Arctic Ocean contains a time bomb of unimaginable proportions: a huge amount of frozen methane, a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide. As the ocean temperature rises, a massive amount of this methane could be released into the atmosphere, causing global warming to increase drastically in a matter of years or decades. A similar phenomenon is now believed to have caused the Permian Extinction, or “Great Dying,”which wiped out almost all life on earth 250 million years ago. (For details and links to source material, see http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=65747.)

We are now threatened with the very real possibility that catastrophic climate change, leading to mass extinction, could happen again. Worse, it could happen so fast that it would be impossible to develop and implement any technological solution that would allow us to preserve the human race from a reversion to barbarism, or even extinction.

The Limitations of “Progressive” Politics

In December 2008, the United Nations held a conference on climate change in Poznan, Poland. In a speech given in connection with the conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales – widely viewed on the Left as a leading progressive figure – correctly proclaimed that “Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet,” and that “As long as we do not change the capitalist system …, the measures that we adopt will be palliatives that will [be] limited and precarious in character.” (Morales’s speech can be found online at http://links.org.au/node/769.)

Unfortunately, Morales failed to follow this thought to its logical conclusion – i.e., that in order to save the planet, we must do away with capitalism. His solution? He proposes that we “Debate the structural causes of climate change.” “Debate”? While the ecosystem collapses around us? What is needed now is not debate, but action.

Neither Morales nor any other politician or public figure, no matter how “progressive” or even anti-capitalist they purport to be, can offer a realistic solution to the threat of catastrophic climate change unless they are also willing to build a revolutionary movement with the power to overthrow capitalism. As long as the capitalist ruling class holds power, all politicians must capitulate to the limitations inherently imposed by the profit system, which will not permit them to implement the measures that must be taken to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, transform the means of energy production, and increase the efficiency of energy use. Only a planned economy, democratically run by the workers and their allies in the interests of society as a whole, can forestall the destruction of the ecosystem.

The Need for Transitional Demands

In the current financial crisis of the global capitalist system, the workers will inevitably be the ones who suffer most from the misdeeds and greed of Wall Street. This creates an opening for socialists to argue to a mass audience that we must replace capitalism with a different system, one that puts the needs of all human beings – including the necessity to preserve our planet – ahead of the voraciousness of the privileged few who seek ever increasing wealth and power.

As workers struggle today against the effects of the crisis on their basic rights and standard of living, they need to fight for democratic working class control over the mean of production. A big part of this struggle for workers’ control should be the demand for the immediate transformation of all industries to produce and utilize “green” non-polluting technology. Scientists and other technical experts should join together into massive, democratically run unions to demand that all available resources – trillions of dollars – be devoted to researching and implementing sustainable, environmentally positive technologies. Ultimately, the struggles and demands of the workers and their allies should lead to the socialist revolution, since there is no way that capitalism can implement them.

Humanist Workers for Socialist Revolution

Member of International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction.
October 2009