April 23, 2021
- Earth Day and Biden's world Leaders Summit that lead nowhere
- Greta Thunberg says the leaders are spouting bull
Leaders Summit on Climate
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
Excerpts:
Earth Day, April 22, came as the world’s environmental crisis deepens. One hot year follows another; floods and droughts are more common; climate refugees are appearing in various parts of the world. Meanwhile the International Energy Agency has projected that 2021 will see carbon emissions rebound from the temporary fall last year due to the onset of the COVID pandemic.
The Biden administration is, however, optimistic. Trump had sought to make the US first in climate change denialism, withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions, as toothless and inadequate as that agreement was. Biden has rejoined the Paris Agreement, and has sponsored the two-day Leaders Summit on Climate, April 22-23. It is preparation for the annual UN climate conference, which will be in November. Biden and the news media are trumpeting one new environmental target after another, and heralding a new age of government-corporate cooperation to solve the climate crisis.
But we’ve heard it all before, and it’s what got us into the present crisis. Greta Thunberg put out a new video in time for the Leaders Summit, saying that the targets that are going to be announced are "bullshit", designed “to fool others” and even those themselves who make the targets, but the fact is that "we cannot fool nature and physics".
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If we are to really dispense with fossil fuels, this cannot be left to measures such as subsidies to industry, public-private partnerships, or carbon taxes. There is going to have to be comprehensive economic planning. There needs to be a massive change in infrastructure to deal with eliminating fossil fuels, and also to prepare for the environmental destruction that we will be facing. This requires changing farming as well as industry. It means stopping the poisoning of land, sea, and air with dangerous chemicals as well as cutting greenhouse emissions.
This planning must also ensure the livelihood of the working people. It’s empty words when it is claimed that green jobs will solve unemployment and mass welfare. Of course new technology brings new jobs, and of course there will be new green jobs, but it has never been the case that technological change alone has solved unemployment.
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We can’t let environmentalism be dominated by the establishment environmentalists. Let’s make every day a people’s Earth Day, at which working masses hold the feet of the capitalists to the fire and insist on measures to protect the environment and mass welfare. Otherwise we will find our feet held to the fire of ever-increasing global temperatures.
From Greta Thunberg's video of April 21
"The emissions are still there, whether we choose to count them or not"
Excerpt:
You may call us naive for believing that change is possible. But at least we are not so naive that we believe things will be fixed by companies and countries making vague, distant, hypothetical targets without any real pressure from the media and the general public. The gap between what we are doing and what needs to be done is widening by the minute. And the gap between the urgency needed and the current level of awareness and attention is becoming more and more absurd. And the gap between our so-called climate targets and the overall, current best-available science should no longer be possible to ignore. There are several decades missing.
This gap of awareness, action, and time is the biggest elephant that ever found itself in any room. And until we address this, we cannot achieve any real changes and no real solutions will be found. Let’s call out their bullshit, and please mind the gap. <>
For the full text of the article and of Greta Thunbert's April 21 video, see https://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-210423.html.