The socialist response to the climate change crisis

A massive heatwave has hit many parts of the globe over the past several weeks, including in the US, Mexico, Greece, India, and Africa. The death toll is hard to calculate, but is likely in the tens of thousands.

According to a report published by the World Meteorological Organization last year, a staggering 489,000 people died from heat-related causes every year between 2000 and 2019—that is, nearly 10 million total.

Scientists have repeatedly warned that the climate crisis produced by global warming is reaching a tipping point. Steadily increasing temperatures are behind a series of disasters, from deadly hurricanes to wildfires. Warming oceans threaten the entire global food chain, and rising ocean levels from melting ice caps will lead to worldwide and permanent flooding in areas where billions of people live. 

And there is growing evidence that climate change is pushing thousands of species out of their native habitats, increasing the likelihood of spillover events and future pandemics even deadlier than Covid-19.

Governments throughout the world have demonstrated their inability and unwillingness to take any action to avert this disaster. The various protocols and agreements have produced nothing.

In their response to the pandemic, the capitalist governments subordinated public health to private profit, leading to the deaths of tens of millions. The same is true in their response to global warming.

And the central priority of the major capitalist powers–the United States above all–is the escalation of a global war that threatens all of humanity. Trillions are allocated to develop the best ways to kill people, not save lives and protect the environment.

The basic issue, denied by the various middle class environmental movements and parties like the Greens, is capitalism.

It is impossible to address the increasingly dire reality of global warming within the framework of a social and economic system based on profit. Moreover, the solution to climate change must necessarily be global and therefore is incompatible with the increasingly archaic nation-state system.

Resolving the climate crisis is fundamentally a class question. The impact of the climate crisis falls primarily on the workers of the world. Moreover, it is the working class, united internationally in the process of production, whose interests lie in the abolition of the capitalist nation-state system. 

A solution to climate change requires a frontal assault on the wealth of the capitalist oligarchs and their control over the economy. An emergency response to the environmental catastrophe must begin with the expropriation of the global energy giants under the democratic control of the working class. 

The giant banks and corporations must also be expropriated and the resources of society mobilized to finance an emergency program to produce energy in a way that can meet social needs while protecting the environment, including a massive social investment in alternative forms of energy and public transportation.

It is not “humanity” that has caused climate change, but a definite socioeconomic order: capitalism. The same system that produces war, pandemics and social inequality will also see the planet set aflame for profit. The only solution is a revolutionary struggle by the working class for socialism.