https://socialistaction.org/2016/05/15/capitalism-cannot-solve-the-climate-crisis/
Capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis
/ 23 hours ago
May 2016 Global justice
By BILL ONASCH
This year’s Earth Day, hosted by the UN, was staged to be all about
climate change. The chosen venue came attached with some historical
irony. The land for the New York City complex housing the United Nations
Headquarters was donated by John D. Rockefeller. His father started him
off as a director of Standard Oil—main ancestor of Exxon-Mobil—as well
as U.S. Steel. He was also a director of the Colorado Fuel & Iron
Company at the time of the bloody Ludlow Massacre that slaughtered wives
and children of striking coal miners.
Accompanied by brass bands, and many school children bused in for the
occasion, representatives of 170 countries were on hand for a ceremonial
signing of the accord adopted by the Paris Climate Summit last December.
President Obama was in England celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s 90th
birthday, but Secretary of State Kerry, with a granddaughter on his lap,
signed for the U.S. Al Gore, who had signed the first climate treaty in
Kyoto in 1997—which President Clinton declined to submit to the Senate
for ratification—was present and beaming. Among other VIPs was Leonardo
DiCaprio.
So when can we expect all this pomp to change our circumstances? An AFP
story explains that it won’t be at a galloping pace—more the speed of
the creatures that the French like to turn into escargot:
“The next, and final, procedural phase will be ratification by
individual governments. Countries which do not sign the document on
Friday can do so in the year that follows. The agreement sets out broad
lines of attack against climate change. It defines the goal of limiting
global warming to ‘well below’ two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit)—1.5C if possible. It does not prescribe deadlines or targets
for curbing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions: these are described
in further detail in non-binding pledges countries filed to shore up the
pact.
“On current trends, scientists say, the world will warm by 4C over
benchmark pre-Industrial Revolution levels—or 3C if countries live up to
their pledges.”
A 4C world could not sustain human civilization as we know it; 3C would
be only marginally less disastrous. It could take many centuries for the
greenhouse layer to dissipate to pre-industrial levels. Even if the
current non-binding pledges were met, we would be bequeathing
unrelenting misery to future generations.
Since the dominant driving force of global warming is fossil fuels, the
solution would seem obvious—commit to completely replacing fossil fuels
with clean, renewable, freely available energy sources like solar, wind,
and tidal, as quickly as possible. That is in fact what nearly all
climate scientists propose. There are credible estimates that an
emergency crash program could accomplish this goal in 20-25 years.
But those who own the polluting global economy, and control most
governments, reject such measures that mortally threaten their profits
and rule. They will not agree to more than tactical tinkering. That’s
why the non-binding goals are all over the map.
The U.S. largely relies on a temporary reduction in power-plant
emissions due to conversion from coal to now cheaper fracked (and
methane-spewing) natural gas. In fact, half of Obama’s pledge had
already been accomplished when his plan was initially announced nearly
two years ago. However, tiny Holland, home base of Royal Dutch Shell,
has a wary eye on rising sea levels. They plan to ban all cars other
than plug-in electrics by 2025—while Shell continues business as usual
elsewhere.
Like pesky dandelions in the garden, nuclear power advocates, in the
camp of General Electric, are again sprouting, fertilized by the lack of
progress toward needed elimination of fossil fuels. In late April,
Eduardo Porter wrote a New York Times article entitled, “Liberal Biases,
Too, May Block Progress on Climate Change.” He says, “Ted Cruz’s
argument that climate change is a hoax to justify a government takeover
of the world is absurd. But Bernie Sanders’s argument that ‘toxic waste
byproducts of nuclear plants are not worth the risks of the technology’s
benefit’ might also be damaging.”
He bolsters his attack on an alleged anti-science left with a Pew poll
showing that a big majority of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science favors more nuclear power.
Some scientists, of course—even the dean of climate scientists, Dr James
E. Hansen—have in utter desperation shown conditional support for
nuclear power as an emergency stop-gap measure due to inaction on
replacing fossil fuels with safe, clean, renewable energy, available
free of charge.
It is true that nuclear power plants produce negligible greenhouse
emissions where they generate electricity. But their advocates ignore
the vast amounts of emissions resulting just from mining, refining, and
transporting their fuel. The fuel is not renewable—it depends on a
dwindling supply of extractable uranium. They are anything but safe.
Reactor accidents can be catastrophic. And there’s no known proven
method for safe disposal of waste that can remain dangerous for
centuries. These objections are not political bias—they are based on
solid science.
Polluted hot spots
The oil and gas sectors continue to prolong their destructive pursuit of
profits even while hailing the signing of agreements negotiated at the
Paris COP21 summit last December. Hansen concisely characterized that
deal as “bullshit.” But we don’t have to wave the white flag just yet.
There are credible estimates that an emergency crash program to
completely replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy could be
could be accomplished in 20-25 years.
To completely clean up the environmental mess, we will require more than
new fuels. Some messes will need decades of remediation—such as General
Electric’s settlement obligation to keep dredging the Hudson River until
it is completely free of the PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl) they
routinely dumped from the now closed, UE-organized Hudson Falls plant.
Some newly revealed even more dangerous localized hot spots continue to
pop up. An April 28 Wall Street Journal article begins, “About a mile
from homes in Missouri’s St. Louis County lies a radioactive hot spot
with contamination levels hundreds of times above federal safety
guidelines. But there are no plans to clean it up. That is because the
location, tainted with waste from atomic-weapons work done in local
factories decades ago, has been deemed by the federal government to be
effectively inaccessible and not a threat.”
But they quickly follow, “However, a group of private researchers funded
by an environmental activist, including a former senior official of the
Clinton administration’s Energy Department, is challenging those
assurances. They say a recent sampling they did suggests contamination
from the radioactive hot spot is entering a nearby stream, known as
Coldwater Creek, and then traveling downstream into the yards of homes.
The contamination involves thorium, a radioactive material that can
increase a person’s risks for certain cancers if it gets inside the
body, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.”
In the U.S. overall, we have an even bigger challenge. If we are to
build an ecologically sustainable society providing a good standard of
living for all, we have to halt and reverse the urban sprawl that has
been the linchpin of post-World War II domestic ruling-class strategy.
They have done a thorough job of integrating this scourge—socially and
environmentally harmful in so many ways—into the American Dream of the
vanishing “middle class.”
Convincing workers that we need to phase out suburbia and instead
renovate, rebuild, and repopulate our collapsed urban cores—and reclaim
the forests, wetlands, and farmland that used to surround and nourish
our cities before being wrecked by irrational “development”—will not be
an easy sell. Tougher yet will be winning them over to the fact that we
can’t sustain each individual’s having their own personal car, truck, or
SUV. Electric powered public transit in the cities, and plug-in electric
vehicles in rural areas, will need to become our dominant forms of daily
transportation.
A key role for labor
Trying to reason with the Establishment to do the right thing is a
fool’s errand. Because of their vast reserves of wealth produced by our
labor, they can live with some reforms they don’t like. But they know
the steps needed to survive the climate crisis they have created put the
future of their very system of rule by the rich at mortal risk.
On the other hand—with no illusions about the difficulties—I have
confidence we can educate and organize the working-class majority to not
just support but lead the struggle to satisfactorily resolve the
greatest crisis humanity has yet faced. My optimism is two-fold. It is
in the material interest of our class to do so, and only our class has
the social and economic clout to defeat the climate-wrecking bosses and
bankers.
There are already hopeful signs in the union movement. On a global
scale, there is Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, with affiliates
representing 4.6 million workers in 17 countries on every inhabited
continent—nine of them in the United States. They have produced an
excellent short YouTube animation, introducing workers to climate
change—and what can be done about it—suitable for showing at union
meetings or any gathering of workers.
The Labor Network for Sustainability is a U.S. affiliate of TUED that is
developing educational programs for American unions and collaborates
with other climate action movements like 350.org. And some major unions,
such as the Amalgamated Transit Union, National Nurses United, and the
Service Employees International Union, have for the past few years
mobilized their members for actions against the Keystone XL pipeline,
and participation in the 400,000-strong 2014 People’s Climate March in
New York.
Victories of American social movements, such as civil rights, antiwar,
and women’s rights have all been accompanied by visible protests in the
form of mass demonstrations and/or mass civil disobedience. All of these
were assisted by support from wings of organized labor. Building a broad
climate action movement through such tactics is needed right now.
But the scope and urgency of the climate crisis—not to mention the other
class issues flowing from globalization, wars of intervention,
incarceration, deportation, austerity, and a host of other ills—requires
us to simultaneously prepare to go beyond protest. We need to aim to
take political power out of the hands of the ruling rich. We must
replace the rule of greed, war, and pollution with a working-class
government that can implement our plan to save our biosphere so that we
can all “Make a Living on a Living Planet.”
But this is the Achilles Heel of the American labor and social
movements. Every other industrialized republic has at least one mass
working-class party—most of them established in the 19th century. Only
in America has the ruling class been allowed to have a virtually
uncontested monopoly of all things political through their control of
the two major parties. The long track record of numerous attempts to
capture one of these parties on behalf of our class proves it is every
bit as doomed as winning over the master class itself through reasoned
civil discourse.
Reviving the movement for a class-based labor party is a vital component
of a Class & Climate program in the country with the biggest economy and
biggest concentration of the super-rich.
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May 15, 2016 in Uncategorized, Environment. Tags: global warming,
Hansen, climate, 350.org
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