Common ownership: Our last chance (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

A recent episode of the PBS program Now, broadcast nationwide in most states on 4/22/2005, announced gravely not only that “scientists are convinced our Earth is warming, and with scary consequences,” but also and even more gravely that “meanwhile industry funds a campaign to do nothing.” The program quoted Dr. Richard Alley, professor at Penn State University, a paleo-climatologist, one who studies the Earth utilizing data from glacier ice and ice sheets. According to Dr. Alley, our planet has on numerous occasions previously experienced a phenomenon known as “abrupt climate change.” His concern, and that of scientists whom the program referred to as “the best minds on the planet,” is that human society is so altering the atmosphere and the climate that it may trigger such an abrupt, indeed possibly catastrophic, transformation of the climate.

A visit to the "Web site of the environmental think-tank EcoBridge lists hefty references suggesting indisputable recent changes in our atmosphere, including increases in carbon dioxide and methane, more frequent extreme weather, disappearing glaciers, melting arctic sea ice, Greenland’s ice sheet melting, tropical diseases spreading, and oceans warming with accompanying coral bleaching and disintegration. Paralleling such dire developments are other examples of human society’s significant transformation of the planet from its condition even a century ago, including enormous deforestation rates (discussed in impressive detail in the article “Destroying the World’s Forests” on the Web site of the World Socialist Movement [WSM]) and the introduction of vast quantities of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that are contributing to ozone layer depletion (also discussed on the WSM Web site in an article entitled “Profit Enhancing Chemicals”). Vast research-based evidence thus appeared to support the hypothesis that the planet is warming and becoming increasingly less hospitable for humans and other animal fife.

Does the future have a future?

What is presumably of greatest concern to those of us who work for a living is the total lack of apparent control that we may exert at present upon the corporations, media and governments whose practices exist to serve the interests of a small percentage of the population. The great historical question is going to be: are we just going to stand around amidst alternating storms of doomsday prophecies and media coverage minimizing the magnitude of the problem, and not take matters into our own hands, even at the risk that our and our children’s future may be horrendously bleak, even non-existent?

For example, according to the above mentioned Now television show, in Congress the House has just approved an energy bill which promises tax breaks and subsidies to coal, oil, and gas companies — the companies most responsible for the mess in the first place! Furthermore, those most opposed to theories of global warming are those such as Senator Inhofe who represent the economic interests of the magnates of his oil-producing Oklahoma. He is ironically the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee’s biggest recipient of contributions from oil and gas companies. He says global warming is a hoax.

Ross Gelbspan, a former editor of the Boston Globe, was described in the Now program as having devoted many years to reporting the ways in which the energy industry has attempted to cover up the scientific warnings about global warming. For example, in 1989 the disinformation campaign began when representatives of the petroleum, automotive and other industries formed the Global Climate Coalition, and later the Information Council on the Environment, which was funded by the Western Fuels Association, mostly representing coal interests. The strategy for that campaign, according to Mr. Gelbspan, suggested their drawing on several prominent global warming skeptics, scientists who argue that global warming is mired in unknowns. Mr. Gelbspan found that energy industry leaders had paid those scientists hefty fees and compensations amounting to more than half a million dollars between 1991 and 1995. Some of these scientists, who had engaged the media in interviews to suggest global warming was an unsupported theory rather than a strongly supported hypothesis, reemerged some years later in videos distributed by yet another group, the Greening Earth Society, a group also supported by the coal industry.

In 1997 the Global Climate Coalition appeared in a multimillion dollar campaign to persuade the public that the science behind the international Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases was shaky. One of those ads stated: “Countries responsible for almost half the world’s emissions won’t have to cut back. Check it out for yourself, it’s not global and it won’t work.” Then President George Bush, former oil man himself, pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Treaty, claiming that “the targets themselves were arbitrary and not based upon science.” According to the Now program, a 2001 memo by Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican consultant, may have played its part in affecting Mr. Bush’s decision, when it advised the White House that the best way to “address the global warming” problem is to “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The May/June 2005 edition of Mother Jones suggested that Exxon Mobil alone contributes to more than 40 policy groups that seek to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

Welcome to Hell

According to a citation in a January 13, 2000 CNN Web site article about scientific experts discussing the overwhelmingly strong evidence for global warming, a conference of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) comprising over 2,500 scientists, was quoted as having reached a near-unanimous conclusion that global warming was at least partially the result of human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide, methane, and others gases into the atmosphere, forming a global “blanket” that traps heat near the Earths surface. The IPCC predicted an increase in global temperatures of between 2 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. The panel also predicted the expansion of warming oceans and calculated that the melting of land-based ice formations would combine to add between one and three feet to the existing sea level. The IPCC projected sharp increases in the frequency and intensity of storms and droughts, in the spread of tropical diseases, in coastal flooding and in accelerated waves of extinctions of plant and animal species which fail to adapt to the changing climate.

As suggested earlier in this article, large countries such as the United States may choose to put profits before people in refusing to cooperate with Kyoto Accord limits to greenhouse gas emissions, while other developing nations such as China, a coal-based economy, are likely to vastly surpass the greenhouse emissions of the United States by 2025.

Such is the anarchic nature of the capitalist system. It is comprised in part of vast corporations with vested economic interests to broadcast disinformation to the public and to influence governments to steer policy away from potential threats not to our well-being but to their profit-making. It is also made up of rival nation-states each attempting to care for the economic interests of their own internal capitalist class. Finally, it is characterized by billions of workers whose receipt of information is heavily influenced by the capitalist media over which they have no control.

In other words, even rational decisions by governments, such as those pronounced in the Kyoto Accords, may be thwarted and never realized because of the needs of the few rather than the needs of us many. While some or even many capitalists predictable phenomenon not caused by the negative side effects of industrial society, humans may still need to find a solution to keep themselves and future generations from destruction in droughts, floods, or plagues.

Such complex solutions are not likely to be effectively realized in an intrinsically competitive and undemocratic society, in which the resources we will desperately require are owned by the planets private owners or by rival nation-states. In such a preliminary social order as we presently live under, the economic costs of dollars and cents will likely play a major part of any such grandiose scheme, as there is only so much money to go around. Furthermore, in this hierarchical, class-based society, the major decisions will be made by those with power and privilege, and not by those of us who must work to live and who remain relatively powerless players in the machinations of national or global politics.

Good Decisions Will Require Common Ownership

Or we could decide to take matters into our own hands. By democratically taking over the means of production, to be thereafter considered subject to the common ownership of the whole human species, any drastic solutions that may need to be made by and in the interest of even the entire human race could more readily be achieved, as decision-making over the use of resources will be entirely ours. Whatever we decide, such decisions will be made in harmony with the findings of the scientific community, and we will be able to act upon our decisions immediately, without the endless walls of bureaucracy, finance, politics or power murderously standing in the way of our lives as they are at present with regards to an issue such as global warming that could potentially alter the course of human history.

At what point do humans decide that sustaining the interests of a small gang of owners — whom working-class humans have thus far decided have every right to own the planet and enjoy the fruits and luxuries that workers provide — is not worth the imminent threat of an Earth no longer able to sustain human fife? Scientists are warning us that the point of no return is close by or has already been passed. Do we pretend the problem is not really that bad? Do we passively resign ourselves to a pessimism that announces it is too late to act so why not just embrace a selfish consumerist individualism? Do we continue to trust our politicians to represent our interests even though they have always failed to do so since they are unable to alter and control the laws of the capitalist economy in the interests of us hard working folk?

The barrel of the gun is pointed right now between your eyes. What are you going to do?

— Dr. Who