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September 24, 2019
RE: the climate action summit, the Peruvian Amazon, and GM strike news
By Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
The UN's 2019 Climate Action Summit took place on Monday, September 23, in the midst of the week-long youth climate strike. It was addressed by the 16-year activist Greta Thunberg, but this didn't make any difference to the politicians. The UN Summit was firmly dedicated to protecting profits, not ensuring the world's survival.
The UN has been holding climate conferences since 1995. This year there will be the 25th UN Climate Change conference (COP 25) in Chile in December, as well as the present Climate Action Summit in New York. And yet, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres himself, "on our current path, we face at least 3-degrees Celsius of global heating by the end of the century" (Summit main release). The UN "estimates the world would need to increase its efforts between three- and five-fold to contain climate change to the levels dictated by science -- a 1.5° C rise at most" (Ibid.) Shouldn't Guterres have asked whether the UN, representing the bourgeois ruling classes around the word, bears some responsibility for this?
No, he didn't. Instead the UN is determined to stay the course. The very same press release that contains these dire figures declares that "The Summit is designed to showcase government, business, and civil society efforts", and that these show the "concrete ways in which countries can better adapt to climate change and cut emissions". Geez, can one showcase the process that has gotten us to the brink of disaster and at the same time believe that progress along the same lines will lead to saving the earth? An article in the New York Times sums it up as follows, the Summit "was meant to highlight concrete promises by presidents, prime ministers and corporate executives to wean the global economy from fossil fuels..." But, the article continues, China "made no new promises, the US "said nothing at all", and "a host of countries made only incremental promises."
Indeed, the Summit was silent or mumbled on one current problem after another:
* It met while the Amazon forest burned, and it turned its back on the problem.
* It met while the Arctic is burning, and turned its back on the problem. Yet these fires, and the resulting faster melting of the permafrost, not only threaten a vast increase in greenhouse gas emissions, but could lead to the destruction of the atmospheric ozone layer, a catastrophe which, until now, had been thought to have been avoided by international action under the Montreal Protocol.
* It didn't deal with the problem of countries that are backing out of any commitment to environmental action, such as the Trump administration in the US or the Bolsonaro administration in Brazil.
* Despite this year's report from the IPCC, the UN's scientific body on climate change, it had nothing too serious to say about the need for major changes in agriculture.
* It mainly dealt with global warming in isolation from other looming environmental issues. One looked in vain for any serious discussion of the problem of the contamination of the world by plastics, pesticides, fracking waste, and other chemicals. Or for any serious discussion of the threat facing the ocean.
* It didn't even establish any way to keep track of and verify the progress towards fulfilling the many promises that were showcased at the summit. That's aside from the fact that many of the promises, even if fulfilled, would result in action that was 10 or 20 years too late.What the Summit was focused on was prettifying the role of multinational corporations and high finance. Money first, everything else second.
* It was silent about the role that market fundamentalism and privatization of resources has played in devastating the environment. Instead it lauded supposed "unprecedented levels of private sector action". (See closing press release)
* It was silent about the need for mass supervision if governments and companies were really to reach their environmental goals. And it was silent about the need to fight inequality and poverty along with environmental devastation if the environmental changes were to have mass support.
* It welcomed the privatization of the government itself through the growth of "public-private partnership", and was silent about the way in which even government inspections are handed over to the private sector, so that the fox guards the henhouse. Instead of warning about the danger that the big polluters could end up in control of renewables and other green measures, it is helping to pave the way in that direction. (See industry press release)
So this was another summit of complacency. The world bourgeoisie is split over environmental issues. One section is climate change denialists. The other recognizes the danger of climate change but is still complacent, embraces half-measures, and upholds failed market measures. The environmentally-aware bourgeoisie may preach about climate change, as the UN Summit did, but it closes its eyes to the need for major economic changes if the danger is to be avoided. It doesn't want to see market fundamentalism replaced by overall economic planning with mass supervision. It dreams that environmentalism is just another business opportunity.
The Summit invited Greta Thunberg to speak, and indeed was preceded by a UN Youth Climate Summit on September 21. But this year has seen two huge waves of global mass protest over the environment, and Thunberg put forth the worry and anger of the demonstrators. She denounced "empty words", something which the UN is full of, and said "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?" Well-spoken, Thunberg!
The huge waves of mass protest are demanding effective action, something which the UN hasn't accomplished in 25 years of climate talk. Instead this year's climate action summit has contributed to global warming with tons of hot air. The time will come when the mass section of the environmental movement recognizes that the very program of the UN and the establishment environmentalists is flawed, that much more serious environmental measures are needed immediately and must be demanded, and that to achieve these measures the environmental struggle must be connected to the class struggle against the corporate polluters and financiers. And then the movement will begin putting forward its own solutions, far better than those of the UN.<>
By Tim Hall, Detroit Workers' Voice
As the Brazilian and Bolivian sections of the Amazon rain forest burn, vast reaches of the forest lying within Peru are being devastated by another force of rapacious capitalist extraction: gold mining.
Over 300,000 square miles of rain forest lie within the borders of Peru, making the Peruvian part of the Amazon rain forest alone the fourth largest rain forest in the world. 870 square miles have been lost to gold mining this year, triple last year’s total. The rape of the Peruvian rain forest is accelerating.
It is estimated that as many as 40,000 illegal miners are operating within this zone. The Peruvian government has sent military expeditions against the miners. But no doubt many miners are ordinary working people, driven by the whirlwinds of capitalist existence to labor out their days destroying the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide and escape ruin via global warming. This shows one of the connections between the destruction of the environment and the continuing market fundamentalist offensive that devastates the people's livelihood. This connection was not mentioned at the UN's 2019 Climate Action Summit because the world bourgeoisie runs the UN, praises itself, and puts ever-increasing profits over everything else. <>
By Tim Hall, Detroit Workers' Voice
The GM strike is in the interest of the workers of other companies and trades, as it battles against the austerity campaign of the capitalists, who are trying to drive the workers and poor into the dirt. And expressions of solidarity with the strikes have started to spread.
Here is a clip showing Chrysler workers supporting the GM workers at one plant. The combined picket is impressive. https://www.facebook.com/scott.smith.733/videos/10217732386440383/
The Retirees Chapter of the Detroit District Local of the American Postal Workers Union voted unanimously on Sunday to support the GM strike and called on its members to attend a solidarity picket on Tuesday planned for retirees at the GM Hamtramck Assembly Plant in the east side of Detroit. Some Detroit APWU retirees have already been attending GM strike picket lines.
Brazilian GM workers sent a video
in Portuguese with English subtitles declaring their support and
pledging solidarity against “capitalist exploitation”. They end the
video with the declaration: “We are together!”
Mexican GM workers at the Silao complex in Guanajuato have sent a letter of solidarity with the strike.
GM has canceled the health care of its workers, forcing the union strike fund to pay, in a blow aimed at the strike. Unannounced beforehand, this is causing great difficulties for the workers.
At the same time, it has come to light that the five or so billion
dollars that GM has pledged to re-open plants, including the Warren,
Ohio, Lordstown plant, would not be used to pay full UAW wages but
instead some new, lower tier of pay. This has outraged the
strikers.<>
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Posted on September 26, 2019
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