Review of 'Going Dark'

by Guy R. McPherson
Publish America, Baltimore, 2013.

Guy McPherson is rapidly gaining a reputation as Guy ‘McStinction’ as the climate scientist who is predicting near-term human extinction “beyond the 2030”s. He makes the case that Climate Collapse (CC) is upon us and that only industrial collapse could stop it. When that happens we as a species will as he says, “Go dark” as it becomes extinct. The 26 positive feedback loops (PFLs – causal chains that are self-reinforcing and increase exponentially) are many and almost all are already beyond human control. McPherson accepts that against all odds there are (currently) two positive feedbacks that we can influence. These are the ones that set all the other PFLs in motion. Broadly they are the extraction and burning of fossil fuel. The only way McPherson thinks we can reverse and stop those positive feedbacks is for industrial civilisation to collapse. 

The problem is that while McPherson has the scientific credentials to understand and explain CC, he lacks these credentials when it comes to explaining the industrial civilisation that caused it. One requirement of science is that if you are postulating human action to stop an effect you need to understand the cause. Before we talk about ‘industrial society’ collapsing we need to know what it is and how to make it collapse.

McPherson has a good grasp of industrial society as that of ‘empire’ controlled by corporations. He sees industrial society ruled by those in power now using a police state and NSA to keep a hold over the people. He hoped that the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 would bring about the collapse of industrial society. But that did not happen. The big banks and big business rallied with big bailouts and bonuses from big government that then turned the big cops on Occupy. Far from collapsing, the monopoly capitalist state then embarked on a crash program to extract and burn all known fossil fuels to boost profits. What will it take to build a citizens crash program to stop the corporate crash program turning the planet into a ball of fire? McPherson’s response to this is the need for ‘total revolution’, ‘anarchy’ and ‘freedom’ but he has no road map for how this can be made possible. This is the main problem with Going Dark and the rest of this review is about spelling out that crash socialist program for survival.

Capitalist crisis meets Climate Catastrophe

Why didn’t the 2008 GFC bring about the collapse of industrial civilisation? The short answer is that the capitalist class did not allow it to collapse and the working class did not make it. Industry is capitalist industry owned and controlled by capitalists. They are motivated by profits which they screw out of the working class surplus-value. Capitalism is a dynamic contradiction. It develops technology to increase labor productivity to get more surplus-value out of workers. But the consequence of this is the increase in investment in the tools of production (machines etc) that cannot produce value, relative to the wages of productive workers, who do. This is the famous organic composition of capital. This sows the seeds of crisis in the form of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). The capitalists fight the TRPF with counter-tendencies, plundering the world for cheap resources, cutting wages, and of course inventing better machines to make labor more productive.

But inevitably the capitalists cannot screw enough surplus value out of workers to make a profit on their investment and the TRPF wins. A crisis of falling profits results leading to a fall in investment, the classic capitalist slump, and an overproduction of capital which must be devalued to restore the rate of profit. The last major slump began in the 1970s but despite devaluations of capital, particularly in the neo-liberal years, surplus capital remained. It found an outlet in speculating in existing values creating fictitious values was above true values. 

The 2008 GFC was a collapse of several of these overvalued speculative markets, beginning with housing but spreading to the whole banking system. To prevent this system collapsing along with these fictitious values, the banks were bailed out by central banks which created $trillions of debt to be paid for by future generations of workers in cuts to living standards - hours, wages, pensions, conditions etc. But $trillions of fictitious values remain to be destroyed before profits recover back to their post-WW2 boom levels.

The GFC did not lead to the collapse of industrial civilisation because it was no more than a symptom of that long decline as capitalism exhausts its capacity to plunder the earth and the labor value of workers sufficient to sustain its profits. The capitalist class treated the symptom of an ailing capitalism but it has not yet been able to cure the disease – falling profits. 

This explains why the ruling class is ruthlessly mining, drilling, fracking the earth, and ruthlessly spying, militarising, and repressing workers, activists and ‘terrorists’ who resist its headlong rush to destruction. It is the crisis-ridden capitalist system in extremis that accounts for the polarisation of the global population where the ruling class, with its political parties, fake social movements, and media bullshit oppress the global working class which is fighting to survive as part of the natural world that parasitic capitalism threatens to make extinct. This contradiction is becoming more extreme and can be resolved in favour of nature and humanity only by the international working class, the proletariat, overthrowing and replacing the capitalist system.

Green capitalists and socialists

McPherson’s terms, ‘anarchism’, ‘freedom’ and ‘total revolution’ are subversive concepts, but they need to be translated into revolutionary strategy and tactics to overthrow capitalism. Logically, ‘total revolution’ is the only course of action in stopping the positive feedbacks still within our control. If we succeed then survival makes ‘Freedom’ possible. But are ‘Anarchism’, ‘ecosocialism’ and even ‘Marxism’ up to the task? The first test is to reject ‘Green Capitalism’ which is both utopian and reactionary. Utopian, because capitalism cannot coexist in harmony with nature; reactionary because it limits itself to “peaceful civil disobedience” as a sort of passive-aggressive behavior; activist against the ‘corporate elite’ but pacifist against capitalism. 

Who are the Green Capitalists? James Hansen calling for more nuclear power; Bill McKibben’s 350.org and anti-Keystone campaigns funded by Rockefeller and other business foundations to the tune of $10 million to stop the tar-sands and shale fracking; Climate Ground Zero and the defenders of Coal River Mountain, or Greenpeace climate activism all over the world. All assume civil disobedience can stop fossil fuel burning without overthrowing capitalism. While they ‘act out’ this passive aggression the positive feedbacks keep burning us up.

‘Total Revolution’ also means going beyond Green Socialism (or ecosocialism) which claims that socialism can be achieved by redistributing the world’s wealth and imposing sustainable growth without smashing the capitalist state and creating a centralised workers’ government. This is Green capitalism with a socialist gloss. It deludes workers into the belief that capitalists can be made to forgo their carbon burning destructive profiteering without making workers pay dearly with loss of livelihoods and loss of lives. A prominent advocate of Green Socialism is John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. Foster shares with the Green capitalists the belief that we have the time to mobilise to stop climate change by pushing for reforms. 

He critiques Hansen et al for failing to see that capitalism will repress any direct action to enforce a carbon tax yet still pins his hopes on such reforms leading to the development of revolutionary consciousness. Such reforms include a carbon tax, opposition to capitalist waste and capitalist growth that does not meet real needs and so on. The problem is we do not have the time to struggle for reforms that may lead to revolution. Marxists have always argued that reforms only result when the bosses want to head off a revolution. We have to take action now to shut down oil and gas plants as well as the major industries that rely on them such as the auto and plastics industries. We also have to warn that mass direct action targeting the ruling class right to rule will bring down the spy, anti-terror state forces on activists and make it necessary to abandon the reformist road for the revolutionary road.

‘Total Revolution’ and Survival Socialism

For Marx the forces of production included nature (importantly the labor-power of workers) that was subordinated to capitalist production for profit. The capitalist exploitation of nature did at that time not pose Climate Catastrophe. Today we are faced with consequences of centuries of capitalist plunder – a blowback by nature. This is not anthropogenic but capitalogenic Climate Collapse. For thousands of years before capitalism humans had to coexist as part of nature. So it is not ‘human’ agency but capitalist agency that destroys the forces of production in its mad rush to exhaust millions of years of stored up carbon. For revolutionary Marxists capitalism is lived past its due date. A socialist revolution is long overdue to stop the massive destruction of the forces of production (nature).

Yet while socialist revolution is necessary now there can be no immediate transition to a socialist society in which newly invented technology will allow the forces of production to develop in harmony with nature allowing a reduction in labor, a conservation of energy and basic need of all met. First, the destruction of nature has to be stopped. The immediate priority will be the conservation of resources while a transition to new technology is developed along with a global plan that reorganises production on the basis of meeting the basic needs of all. For revolutionary Marxists then, ‘total Revolution’ means overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a transitional workers government that acts to stop the carbon burning feedback loops. Only if and when that has been achieved can production be planned sustainably to meet the needs of the 7 billion earthlings.

Climate change demands a ‘total revolution’ to dump corporate capitalism. ‘Anarchism’ is not sufficient. Anarchism is premised on the petty bourgeois individual who is a creature of capitalism. The proletariat is also the creation of capitalism but it is also the progressive class within capitalism whose historic mission is to be the ‘gravedigger’ of capitalism and the builder of socialism. The proletariat needs to control and conserve its productive forces to survive as part of nature. Grass roots movements like Idle No More, trade unions and community activists etc., need to join forces as the universal struggle of the proletariat. This is class war. We need to organise democratically but act globally. This requires an international organisation – a world socialist party. We must take the power and wealth off the ruling class – take over the Banks and all the big business.. We must smash their state apparatus that indoctrinates us, spies on us and represses us.

The positive feedback revolution can stop is the capitalist exploitation of nature as the source of corporate profits. We as workers are the source of those profits. Our labor-power (along with the rest of nature) is the source of all wealth. We need to mobilise our own class power. We have to build a system of workers power to defeat the state power of the ruling class. That power has to be based on its source – our labor. We need to withdraw our labor in many strike actions that build into a General Strike that shuts down capitalist production world-wide. To hold onto this power we need to occupy the workplaces and defend them against the armed forces of the state. 

All of this will mean a program for an alternative society. This will start with local strike committees and defence committees that coordinate nationally and internationally. Here the various currents of anarchism, socialism and Marxism will debate strategy and tactics to win support for the best course of action. Arising from such committees will grow councils or communes where the working people will debate political tactics and plan the production of the good and services that we need to survive. There is no guarantee that we can do this, or that it will be enough to stop Capitalist Climate Collapse. But there is no way that generation Zero will go quietly into the night. And for revolutionary Marxists there is no question that we go with a bang and not a whimper!

Nuclear Power won’t stop Climate Collapse

Prominent climate change pioneer James Hansen and a number of other environmentalists including Guardian journalist George Monbiot are now publicly advocating new nuclear power generation as the only viable solution to burning carbon. Yet we literally do not have the time to debate the cost-effectiveness of Nuclear energy 60 even 20 years ahead. Climate collapse will have turned nuclear plants into nuclear disasters by then. We should be shutting down nuclear plants now if we are to survive as a civilisation. Environmentalists and reformist politicians who think that capitalism can find a nuclear fix to climate change delude themselves and attempt to delude the masses. The evidence is clear that nuclear energy is potentially as destructive of nature and society than burning carbon. The sun is the only nuclear plant which socialists should advocate as the source of our energy.

Capitalists produce for profit no matter what the expense in terms of social and environmental damage. Any social progress under capitalism is due to working class struggle. That is why socialists never put their trust in capitalist solutions to social and environmental problems. The current structural crisis of capitalism is creating worsening global instability and threat of inter-imperialist war. In wars nuclear reactors are vulnerable to damage and destruction. Israel has bombed Syrian and Iraqi nuclear facilities and continues to threaten to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. Moreover the major imperialist powers have nuclear powered fleets which if involved in military hostilities would endanger their reactors. Even without war there is a long list of nuclear accidents and release of radiation. All this is the living proof that as capitalism nears the end of its existence it intensifies its destruction of the forces of production. Today this has taken a dramatic turn. The destruction of the forces of production today is fused into the global destruction of anthropogenic climate catastrophe and the threat of human extinction.

Risk is real, not hypothetical or alarmist

Nuclear plants are too risky, too expensive, too insecure and too slow to build in the time left us. The danger of nuclear meltdown is top of the list. Fukushima and TEPCO are evidence of the negligent design and operation of nuclear power plants. Far from rescuing capitalism from climate change there is the 'potential' for nuclear meltdowns due to climate collapse. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were Level 7 (highest known) meltdowns caused by human failure. Chernobyl involved operator error compounded by design deficiencies and inadequate operating instructions. Fukushima was built on a fault line, without adequate protection from a tsunami, and also had major design deficiencies. Climate collapse adds much greater risks of ‘accidents’ as an exponential increase in extreme weather events that will render many existing plants vulnerable to flooding. This is why nuclear plants should be closed down now before they are inundated by storms and floods and no new ones built by big nuclear subsidised by the dominant imperialist states.

The standard rejoinder of nuclear advocates is that the risk of nuclear meltdowns and resulting harm is vastly overstated by anti-nuclear campaigners. Or at least, as Hansen et al argue, these known dangers are much less than that of carbon induced global warming. The official method of measuring radiation poisoning originates from methods of measuring doses of radiation from nuclear weapons. But obviously there are also longer term environmental and health effects. There are huge differences in which measures one uses. Monbiot, for example, quotes from the UN agency Unscear for his numbers of 43 dead from Chernobyl, while Caldicott and others think this agency covers up and lies about the true extent of health effects and quotes the NY Academy of Sciences review of a mass of epidemiological research. More important than Chernobyl as an indicator of future risk from climate change are the measurable effects of the Fukushima meltdown because they simulate the extreme weather conditions associated with climate collapse.

We have already seen nuclear plants flooded in the US. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew caused major damage to the Turkey Point plant in Florida. Fort Calhoun in Nebraska was shut down because of flooding in July 2011 and remains shutdown. Nuclear whistleblowers in the US claim that there no adequate preparation for upstream dam failures facing many plants. During Hurricane Sandy more than a dozen plants on the eastern seaboard were threatened and the oldest nuclear plant in the US, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, was shut down as flood water came within two feet of its backup diesel cooling system. Since Fukushima, US nuclear plants have been subjected to inspections and found wanting, the worst being at Monticello, Minnesota.

In Britain, unpublished government analysis shows sites are at risk from flooding due to climate change. [see Sizewell graphic].In Europe heat waves have caused problems with nuclear plants that have to be shut down. In 2003 and 2006 and 2011 heatwaves forced the shutdown or reduction in production of nuclear plants in France, Spain and Germany. In the US the 2012 heatwave forced the shutdown of one reactor at the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut. Inside Climate News reports on the many instances in the US and Europe where heat and drought have interrupted production of nuclear power. So, climate change is already bringing extreme weather events such as droughts and flooding that are testing the poor design and safety of existing nuclear plants.

Fukushima Daiichi warns of nuclear Armageddon

The disaster at Fukushima has altered the debate dramatically. Here we have a combination of design defects and administrative blunders combining with a natural disaster – an 8.9 earthquake and a massive tsunami. Here is the ‘perfect storm’ that simulates what many argue will be the future natural disasters compounded by extreme climate change. Fukushima has activated both sides of the debate, but now ramped up many decibels in response to the potential extreme threat.

On the pro-nuclear side Fukushima supports the need for a nuclear future. A Forbes writer claims that the radiation leaks from Fukushima are no worse than eating bananas. In any case like Hansen et al, the writer claims the risks of Fukushima leakages are far less than continued carbon burning. He states that the German decision to close the nuclear stations means much greater reliance on damaging brown coal burning plants. He concludes:  
“The point being that Fukushima went through absolutely the worst natural disaster that the world could throw at a nuclear plant: and yes, that plant was wrecked but wrecking the plant hasn’t killed anyone and won’t do. The amazing thing about nuclear power is not how dangerous it is but how safe it is. And given that we do indeed need to have some power if we’re to keep this civilisation thing on the road, given that renewables simply cannot scale up in time, we’re going to have to replace some of our fossil fuel fired generating capacity with more nuclear. Which is exactly what Hansen et al are pointing out.”

The anti-Nuclear side point out that the real threat has not yet been revealed. While the effects of Chernobyl forced the authorities to disclose what caused the disaster and today the real extent of the environmental and health damage is seriously documented, in Fukushima we still have a lot of political and corporate secrecy and denial. Koide Hiroaki is a nuclear engineer and one time advocate of nuclear power who now wants these plants closed down. A long-time critic of nuclear energy, after March 11, 2011 he is now seen as a sort of official nuclear ‘whistleblower’ in Japan. Not only has Koide exposed the safety defects of nuclear plants, he links this fact to the secretive corporate state regime that disregards public safety. His message is clear, the plant’s containment systems were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami and the leaking of radiation continues and is not under control. Existing levels of emissions are much worse than consuming bananas and future emissions and their health effects are as yet unknown. The latest information on emissions is very scary. There is an excellent coverage of Fukushima by Japan Focus.

It is clear that far from convincing us that Fukushima has survived the worst that even global warming can throw at us proving the viability of a nuclear future, on the contrary, the ongoing disaster at Fukushima is putting the future of nuclear power generation in doubt. Japan is proving that once the real human costs of nuclear disasters become known, public opinion is mobilised and far from settling for more carbon burning as envisaged by the Abe Government, it can become the decisive factor in the rapid growth of renewables. What the pro-nuclear lobby fails to recognise is that public pressure in Japan, Germany and other countries is now making possible the viability of energy renewables to replace coal, oil and gas plants.

Renewables come cheaper and faster

At the same time as downplaying the risk of nuclear disasters the pro-nuclear advocates underestimate the viability of renewables such as solar, wind and biomass based on increased cost efficiency even without the nuclear industries massive state subsidies. Renewables are already competing with nuclear and increasing their share and do not take 10 years or more to construct. Moreover the multibillions needed for new nuclear plants takes money away from the rapid expansion of renewables.

In a comment to NY Times article on the call in the Hansen et al Open Letter for nuclear power as an alternative to burning carbon, Amory B. Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute wrote:

"There's an important missing point here: Building new nuclear power plants would reduce and retard the climate protection that Drs. Hansen et al. (and I) want. Why? Because new nuclear power plants (of any kind) are so costly and slow to build that they'd save ~3-20x less carbon per dollar and ~20-40x less carbon per year than investing the same money in efficiency, cogeneration, and modern renewables. This unavoidable conclusion from these technologies' empirically observed market prices and deployment speeds was summarized in 2009. I wonder if Drs. Hansen et al. would please enlighten us about exactly why they believe renewables cannot scale fast enough. The empirical data show that non-hydro renewables are adding 80+ GW/y, have already added more capacity in less than a decade than nuclear power has achieved in a half-century, and are attracting a quarter-trillion dollars of private capital per year. Nuclear energy is losing capacity (and was even before Fukushima), will soon fall behind nonhydro renewables in output as it already has in capacity (even China's nuclear power was outgenerated last year by its windpower), and is unfinanceable in the capital markets.

More fundamentally, non-hydro renewables are scalable, mass-producible manufactured products. They're exploiting the economies of mass production and fast marketwide installation that for nuclear power are a remote hope—and unrealistic due to poor economics. It's strange to tout new reactors when the US has terminated 14 operating or planned ones this year alone because just their operating cost can't compete. If the concern is the supposed challenges of grid integration, I'd invite the authors to explain why Germany and Denmark (with 23% and 41% renewable electricity in 2012) have Europe's most reliable electricity, and how the lights stay on in Spain (48% in the first half of 2013) and Portugal (70%), all without new bulk storage. Of course, the cheapest and fastest options are on the demand side. U.S. weather-adjusted electricity use per dollar of real GDP fell 3.4% last year alone, and we're barely scratching the surface of profitable efficiency.”

Workers Power!

The capitalist market is already showing that energy renewables are cheaper, more efficient and practicable as the alternative to burning carbon for energy. But state monopoly capitalism is facing a terminal crisis of falling profits. To keep the oil fuelled global capitalist economy going big oil and big nuclear are pushing coal, oil, gas and nuclear rather than energy renewables. To keep the capitalist system alive they will fight a dirty class war to dig, drill and frack the remaining stockpile of carbon or power up nuclear fission and turn the world into a ball of fire.

Climate scientists are now coming to the view that climate catastrophe is unstoppable. We therefore face a very stark choice of capitalism in all of its destructive drive to survive, or socialist revolution for humanity to survive. Facing capitalist crisis and climate meltdown the working class needs a political program that can meet its needs. To have a chance of surviving we have to get rid of capitalism and create a socialist society! We put forward a program of Transitional Demands for urgent debate among the world’s workers:

• Basic demands for decent jobs, wages, houses, transport, health, education, social security etc all pose the urgent necessity for workers to self-organise their own class power!
• We demand the immediate closing down of coal and gas plants through worker occupations of big oil and its operations.
• We must demand the transfer of the multi-billion state subsidies to big nuclear be spent instead on rapidly expanding solar and other renewables to reach zero carbon by 2030.
• We demand a crash program of public works in renewables to meet climate collapse 20-40 years into the future and to put the industries under workers control and administration. Energy production must be socialised under the democratic control of the working people!

Capitalist resistance to our basic demands for human survival will prove that it is necessary to overthrow the capitalist ruling class and replace it with a worldwide Workers Government. Without this we cannot act in time to reverse climate collapse, stop human extinction, and create a socialist society based on planned production that restores the balance with nature and produces sustainably to meet our human needs.