To: Detroit/Seattle
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August 11, 2022
Every month this year has brought more climate catastrophes; millions of people have suffered in emergencies that always seem to catch governments by surprise; and green house gas emissions keep rising. (1) Yet this year’s disasters aren’t being taken seriously, neither by the climate denialists (2), nor by the establishment environmentalists, who are clinging to the failed market methods of the past and who fail to take account of how far the situation has deteriorated.
They are not taking seriously the lessons of this year’s disasters,
which show that money means nothing when there is no food or water to
buy, and that nothing serious will be done so long as there is no
overall planning of the economies of whole countries and continents.
And moreover, planning itself will mean nothing so long as the working
majority of the world isn’t involved in formulating the plans and
enforcing them, as the rich polluting corporations have captured the
main government agencies.
This year has seen climate disasters take place in one country after another. In the US, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and floods affect one state after another. Over 2,000 cows have dropped dead in Kansas from heat prostration. (3) Meanwhile the Southwest is in a period of protracted drought that is drying the Colorado River and even threatening to bring an end to power generation on Lake Meade, thus threatening crises in several states and to the Colorado River delta in Mexico. (4)
Internationally, it is even worse. There was a devastating heat wave in March and April in much of India and Pakistan, where it was impossible to do much outdoor labor, and, in some areas, birds fell from the sky from heat stroke (5) The heat wave was ended by the monsoon season, which, however, brought monstrous floods to Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Meanwhile in Europe nearly 12,000 people have already died in this year’s heat wave. Nuclear power is touted by some establishment environmentalists as a green power source, but French nuclear power plants are having to cut back on operation in the heat wave to avoid overheating French rivers, which would have devastating consequences on the biosphere. (6)
This is just a sample of what’s been happening, with other disasters taking place in Ethiopia, South Sudan, China, Latin America, etc. (7) It’s clear that disasters are no longer exceptional events. They are what can be expected year after year, and no matter where one lives. This is the age of disasters that affect millions or tens of millions of people or entire regions. The “Doomsday” Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is melting much faster than expected, and enough of it could collapse within a few years to probably make its overall melting in a longer time period irreversible, with the resulting sea level rise eventually drowning many of the world’s largest coastal cities. (8) The Arctic permafrost is melting, releasing larger and larger amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which threatens more greenhouse warming, and also releasing nitrous oxide, which threatens the ozone layer, which it had been thought had been saved by the Montreal Protocol. The world has reached the point where it may already have passed some “tipping points”, which will result in levels of environmental destruction that can’t be brought back no matter what is done.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t deal with carbon emissions. Even if the most stringent environmental action can’t bring back the old days, they might be able to limit how bad things get. But it does mean that life is going to get harder. It is no longer the case that relatively easier measures might save the world from global warming. Now, if humanity is to survive, the world is faced with the need for much larger changes in economics, politics, production, farming, the location of cities, etc.
One of the major lessons from this year’s disasters is that the devastation of climate emergencies can’t be overcome simply with money. When there are shortages, prices rise beyond what working people can pay. Where there is no food or water or shelter, money can’t provide them. Unless provision has been made in advance, and there are physical stocks of goods, there won’t be the necessary supplies. Unless the physical stocks of goods are available, all the stock, bonds, bank accounts, hedge funds, and gold certificates will be of no avail.
The catastrophes also take the governments by surprise. There is little or no consideration in advance of what to do in an emergency. The agencies are concerned to guarantee the profits of various firms, but not the needs of people. It doesn’t matter that floods, droughts, and heat waves have occurred year after year, the current ones are always unexpected.
After decades of market measures and subsidies for corporations, the
big polluters are as bad as ever. They still don’t care. They still
make profit hand over fist while the world deteriorates. People may
starve, but meanwhile the big agricultural firms make out like bandits.
Greenhouse gas emissions rise, while big energy companies start and
stop token green projects and help fund climate denialist think
tanks. Polluting industries continue to capture regulatory
agencies and ensure that they accomplish nothing much beyond granting
new licenses for more pollution.
There is no serious thought to how seriously the infrastructure has to be changed. It’s not just a question of replacing worn-out bridges, roads, and houses, but of radical change in what is built and where it is built. Yet, after decades of talk about global warming, governments are still surprised when roads and runways melt and railroad tracks buckle as happened to some of them in the UK this year, and even the internet went down briefly there because Google and Oracle weren’t prepared to keep their data centers sufficiently cool in such weather. (9) Meanwhile, in planning for fast trains, it isn’t taken seriously that the route for trains might be affected by the climate, and in weather-proofing houses it isn’t good form to consider whether houses and entire towns will have to be moved, as has already happened in Alaska, where the villages of Newtok and Port Heiden were forced to relocate.
It might be thought that we don’t need to consider such things so long as steps are taken to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But this would be closing one’s eyes to reality. At best, if the most effective environmental measures were taken immediately, slashing carbon emissions to a mere fraction of what they currently are — and, with greenhouse emissions still rising, there is no sign that this will happen — we would still face years more of increasing worse disasters before the situation stabilized at some level. Moreover, it seems likely that some changes are already irreversible.
There is presently a lot of talk about the Inflation Reduction Act
of 2022, which is a stripped down version of Biden’s Build Back Better
plan, but one which contains much of the environmental parts of that
plan. It is said to be the largest environmental bill ever in the US
and will supposedly spur on world efforts to stop greenhouse warming.
But it continues the same array of market measures and subsidies to the
polluting interests that doomed the Kyoto Protocol.
It is based on repeating half-measures from the past and closing
one’s eyes to what’s presently happening throughout the world. It
doesn’t even seek to provide serious means, or even a model, for
dealing with the disasters we see every day on the news.
It may limit some sources of greenhouse gases, but it also provides for some additional fossil fuel production; it relies on unproven carbon capture technology; it boosts the mirage of nuclear power; and it envisions that Americans will buy new or used electric vehicles, even though more than half the population is having trouble paying rent, buying food or prescribed drugs, or even paying off old student loans. The Child Tax Credit that temporarily helped many poor families has been ended, but it is apparently thought families will now give priority to cars over children. And yet the Inflation Reduction Act is the best that establishment environmentalism can presently come up with.
Moreover, the estimates of the reduction in carbon emissions the Act will provide are feel-good guesses, without firm basis in fact. The Act itself doesn’t even provide for ensuring accurate measurement of the greenhouse gases and other environmental poisons flooding into the atmosphere, the oceans, the rivers, and even our bodies. For example, every few months there is a new story about how much more methane, which is a particularly damaging greenhouse gas, is being emitted into the atmosphere than was previously thought. This shows that the previous estimates were unscientific, based in part on self-reporting by the polluters and on simple pollyannaish complacency. (10) As for the confident statements about how effective the market measures in the Inflation Reduction Act will be in curbing carbon emissions, it can be recalled that the subsidies and carbon trading schemes that were at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol failed miserably, thus refuting the predictions of bourgeois economists of what they would bring. Thus, when it is repeatedly said that carbon emissions will slashed by 40% from 2005 levels, this is wishful thinking.
The shortcomings of this Act aren’t due simply to some bad decisions by Biden. They reflect, instead, the attitude of the American bourgeoisie and the politicians which serve it. The Act is based on the same old story of giving subsidies to the big polluters, rather than doing what is necessary to protect the environment and the lives of the population. So long as the capitalist interests that make money off pollution, or simply don’t care about the environment, call the shots, there will be no serious environmental regulation, no rapid slashing of greenhouse gas emissions, but just more subsidies to corporations.
The current disasters show that there needs to be a change in which strict regulation of all sources of carbon emissions replaces subsidies. Since all sectors of the economy result in carbon emissions, all sectors have to be subject to strict environmental regulation. Since the capitalists aren’t going to regulate themselves, this regulation needs to be backed by having the workers at every workplace involved in overseeing what is actually done there.
Sixteen years ago, the noted Australian naturalist Timothy
Flannery pointed out that, if the world’s governments only
took half-measures, the situation would deteriorate as time went by, so
that finally there would be no choice but to set up a “carbon
dictatorship” to oversee all spheres of industrial and agricultural
activity. (11) He talked about an “Earth Commission for Thermostatic
Control”.
Being influenced by bourgeois economics, Flannery assumed that overall economic planning would be an oppressive, Orwellian dictatorship, and he looked instead for a way to have an environmentally-based form of money, a “carbon currency” based on “Ebcus”, energy-backed currency units. (12) Since then, the UN’s scientific climate body, the IPCC, and the world’s governments have talked about the climate emergency, but they have put corporate and state-capitalist interests ahead of the environment, and the situation has indeed deteriorated. The only way out is to replace the current dictatorship of corporate profits with a regulation of the economy that enforces environmental measures. This needn’t be oppressive if the livelihood of the working masses is protected, and if workers are themselves involved in this regulation. But such an outcome would require a massive struggle by the working people against the ultra-rich exploiters who run the world. Otherwise, when overall economic regulation comes, it may well be extremely oppressive, just as economic regulation by capitalist governments is in war-time.
So instead of subsidies for the large polluting energy companies, as
is continued in the Inflation Reduction Act, the influence of these
energy companies must be eliminated. If green projects are put in the
hands of such corporations, it would be like putting health care in the
hands of tobacco companies, or school security in the hands of
gun manufacturers. “Self-regulation” by the polluters, which is now the
method used by government agencies like the EPA in the US and the
various carbon trading agencies in Europe, must be abolished. Instead
of corporate secrecy and needlessly obscure and unverifiable reports,
environmental regulation must become transparent and open to
examination by qualified workers, scientists, and concerned people.
Moreover, it is crucial that the planning of the economy must be done in physical terms, even if money still has to be used in the economy; the environment is sensitive to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, not to the financial amounts in financial budgets; the oceans are affected by waste and plastic thrown into them, not by the financial price of those products of modern industry; plant and animal species are affected by whether they survive, not by the value assigned to them by supposed environmental economists like William Nordhaus. Physical and financial planning will continually come into conflict, and this conflict will continue so long as capitalism does. The idea of developing monetary units that reflect environmental values is a mirage; physical planning needs to come more and more to the fore.
Regulation of the economy, planning in physical terms, and protection of people’s livelihood as well as of the environment, can only be partially achieved under capitalism, but they can’t wait until the social revolution. Instead, the struggle for environmental measures must become part of the class struggle. The experience of working people in demanding oversight of one after another section of the economy will help expose the governments that claim to be socialist, but don’t give workers any role in determining major decisions, and it will help develop the experience of the working masses in developing class-wide action. There needs to be an explicitly working class section of the environmental movement if there is to be a consistent struggle against the dead ends promoted by the capitalist interests. Radical activists must neither abandon the struggle for socialism nor wait for socialism, but the market fundamentalist campaign against regulation has to be defeated if there is to be progress in dealing with the environment. This won’t in itself overthrow capitalism, but it will start an intense struggle over what a regulated economy should be.
In the last years, large environmental demonstrations have taken place around the world. But there hasn’t been much of a reaction to the wave of climate disasters this year. Some organizations have reacted immediately and sharply to the Inflation Reduction Act, discussing the pluses and minuses of this or that measure or even calling for a demonstration. They are concerned with the details of market measures, but ignore the larger picture of what is really needed to limit the ongoing climate catastrophe. Other groups react to the flooding or droughts in this or that state or the poisoning of this or that community. But there is little reaction to the fact that we have now reached the stage when major environmental devastation is inevitable.
The environmental movement is not a single movement. There are the establishment environmental groups in which the leaders make deals with the big polluters and advocate market measures. There is also a militant movement that has come out in the streets and fought with courage and persistence against pipelines, fracking, and the poisoning of local communities. And there are the large world-wide demonstrations such as Fridays for the Future in which the do-nothing policies of the governments are denounced. But so far most of the militant movement is reluctant to openly confront the establishment environmentalists, and Greta Thunberg’s righteous denunciations of governments and the UN for not taking effective action, while they have been useful, don’t clarify what specifically has to be done to deal with the climate emergency.
The result is a movement which has generally been paralyzed in dealing with the mass struggles around the world against various austerity measures which the IMF and World Bank present as supposedly necessary for the environment. With regard to climate justice, it has concentrated on financial payments from country to country rather than on the need for eliminating of the market environmentalist policies. And it uses each disaster only to say that action is needed, and doesn’t look closely at what these disasters teach about the real needs of environmentalism.
Flannery may have recoiled from the vision of the full-scale regulation and planning of the economy, but he did point out that this would be inevitable if climate disasters reached a certain point. In doing so, he did a service to the movement. Unfortunately, since then, environmentalists have generally avoided the issue. It is easier to talk about the details of subsidies, whether to companies or to poorer countries, and to leave aside the issue of replacing market fundamentalism altogether by a very different type of economy. This has gone along with seeking the mirage of compromise with the big polluting interests, while taking a hands-off attitude to many mass struggles of people suffering from austerity and facing starvation from the end of subsidies.
So now we are facing a time when the environmental movement,
despite mass protests and the increasing desperation of
scientists, is largely marking time. The Green parties that are in
parliament in a number of countries are themselves stuck in market
economics. Something different is needed. The environmental movement
needs to give birth to something new, or despite the dedicated actions
of many sincere activists it wouldn’t have much effect on the future.
It cannot continue to simply demand serious action without looking more
closely into what this action would have to be. A working-class wing
has to develop which opposes the market measures of establishment
environmentalism much more consistently and firmly than has taken place
in the past. It has to take seriously the lessons of the disasters that
have struck every month of this year.
News of the environmental disasters in country after country can be found by doing a simple internet search. So the references below are only for a few of the notable events of 2022, in particular ones that might otherwise seem incredible or somehow gone unnoticed.
(1) International Energy Agency, “Global CO2 emissions rebounded to their highest level in history in 2021:
Increased use of coal was the main factor driving up global
energy-related CO2 emissions by over 2 billion tonnes, their largest
ever annual rise in absolute terms”, March 8, 2022,
(2) Indeed, climate denialists are on an offensive to sabotage
environmental measures and ensure the continual record levels of
greenhouse gas emissions. David Gelles, “How Republicans Are ‘Weaponizing’ Public Office Against Climate Action:
A Times investigation revealed a coordinated effort by state treasurers
to use government muscle and public funds to punish companies trying to
reduce greenhouse gases.” August 5, 2022, New York Times,
(3) Sudiksha Kochi, “Fact check: Cattle in Kansas were killed by high temperatures, humdity”, June 30, 2022, USA Today. It refutes the idiotic right-wing conspiracy charges that Bill Gates was responsible for killing the cattle and cites information from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment about what actually happened.
(4) Geoff Bennett, “Megadrought causes perilously low water levels at Lake Mead”, June 2, 2022, PBS Newshour, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/persistent-drought-causes-perilously-low-water-levels-at-lake-mead. See also Joanna Allhands, “What will happen to the Colorado River? What we know about looming water cuts”, June 30, 2022, Arizona Republic, . Will the Colorado River dry up? Much of it, yes ... .“It’s doubtful that all 1,450 miles of the Colorado River will turn to dust, even if we drain Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. But larger stretches could go dry for all or parts of the year if the lakes tank, creating ecological disasters in places like the Grand Canyon.”
(5) Alia Shoaib, “Birds are falling from the sky in India as a record heatwave dries up water sources”, May 14, 2022, Business Insider,
(6) Julia Kollwe, “EDF [Electricite de France, which manages French nuclear reactors] cuts output at nuclear power plants as French rivers get too warm”. August 3, 2022, The Guardian, . Whether nuclear power is safe, and how far these reactors can be relied on in a crisis, are also indicated by the fact that “half [!] of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic”.
(7) For example, see Nectar Gann, “China endures summer of extreme weather as record rainfall and scorching heat wave cause havoc”, July 20, 2022, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/20/china/china-summer-extreme-weather-climate-change-intl-hnk-mic/index.html. It points out that “Since the country's rainy season started in May, heavy rainstorms have brought severe flooding and landslides to large swathes of southern China, killing dozens of people, displacing millions and causing economic losses running into billions of yuan.”
(8) Mindy Weisberger, “Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ could meet its doom within 3 years”, December 21, 2021. Despite the title of the article, it doesn’t say the entire Thwaites glacier will collapse in 3 years, but it does show how the whole glacier is rapidly being endangered, and at unexpected speed.
(9) Stephanie Condon, “Record-breaking heatwave causes cloud-computing problems:
The two major cloud providers on Tuesday reported cooling-related
failures at their London-based data centers as a result of the
sweltering heat.” July 19, 2022, ZDNet.
(10) Accurate measures about the composition of the atmosphere as a whole can be obtained from scientific research stations, but measurement of the emissions from individual sources are flawed. As for the refusal of energy companies to measure methane leaks, see Pete Brown, “Methane: plugging the leaks”, November 13, 2021, Detroit/Seattle Workers’ Voice mailing list.
(11) Timothy Flannery, “2084: the Carbon Dictatorship?", which
is chapter 33 of his book “The Weather Makers” (2005). It is critiqued
in “Tim Flannery's nightmare -- the ‘carbon dictatorship’”. which is a
section of my article “The coming of the environmental crisis, the failure of the free market, and the fear of a carbon dictatorship” in the January 2007 issue of Communist Voice.
(12) Flannery, Ibid., chapter 34. He held, in 2005, that “delay of even a decade is far too much”, and would result in the need for strict regulation of the economy. <>
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