Socialist Sonnet No. 241: Record Breaking (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Record Breaking

What was seen as this green and pleasant land

Is being relentlessly bleached into straw

By desiccating sun, its dazzling glow

Frazzling all in between mountain and strand.

Our carbon abundant atmosphere acts

As a lens magnifying remorseless rays

Through unremitting procession of days,

Focusing attention on climate facts

That’re surely undeniable unless,

Of course, economic necessity

Requires oil to lubricate equity;

Then the market cannot resist the press.

As long as demand for profit exists

It’ll create naysayers and populists.

D. A.

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

Action Replay: Warming up (2026)

The Action Replay column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The UN has a programme called Sports for Climate Action, described as ‘a global movement harnessing the unifying power of sport to address climate change and build a more sustainable and resilient future’ (unfccc.int). Sport can be adversely affected by climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity, but supposedly it can also be an agent for promoting collective action. Sport, it is claimed, needs to adapt to the impacts of global warming and also to engage its global audience to make their own contribution to fighting climate change.

All very well, of course, but a look at some of the environmental impact of professional sport paints a rather different picture. In motor racing, Formula 1 (F1) will be moving from the use of fossil fuels to an allegedly sustainable fuel from next season, fuel which might then be used in ordinary cars. But, as noted in the November 2025 Science Focus, there are major issues involved here. The new fuels may be low in carbon emissions but still emit many other pollutants, hence not really being sustainable. The synthetic fuels may in fact involve CO2 emissions in the process of producing hydrogen from natural gas, so the overall climate impact is not at all clear. In any case, fuel from races is only a tiny part of F1’s total carbon footprint, with massive amounts of global travel playing a far larger part. Carbon emissions in the logistics side of F1 have already been reduced, but there is still a long way to go to achieve real sustainability.

Another example would be this year’s football World Cup, which will be played in the US, Canada and Mexico, in stadiums from Vancouver to Mexico City, so meaning much long-distance travel. It will involve 48 teams and 104 matches (sixteen more teams and forty more games than previous tournaments). Scotland, for instance, will play their group matches in Boston and Miami, which are well over a thousand miles apart. One estimate is that the tournament will generate over nine million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, almost double what previous ones have produced.

In addition, the heat will mean that many of the venues will be effectively unplayable during the afternoon. Many top players have already suffered while playing in hot conditions in the US, as in last year’s Club World Cup, and also there will be hundreds of thousands of supporters, plus backroom staff and media workers who will have to endure extreme heat at many matches, reaching over thirty degrees or perhaps even forty. FIFA are apparently keeping ‘an open mind’ on all this, which presumably means they won’t be making any significant decisions quite yet, if at all.

So global warming can affect not just people’s living conditions, but various kinds of leisure activity too. And sport can exacerbate climate change, as well as (just possibly) help to combat it.

Paul Bennett

Socialist Sonnet No. 212: COP . . . out (2025)

   From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

COP…out

Assemble fifty thousand delegates,

From around the world. Ask what the price is,

When considering the climate crisis,

Of convening fourteen days of debates.

Then there’s the press corps and TV news,

Social media that requires broad banding,

The wining, the dining, the glad handing:

A towering Babel of discrepant views.

Far, far too many are still enraptured

With fossil fuels and profits they’re making.

For all the hot air there’s no mistaking

That not a gram of carbon is captured

After the fortnight, despite pressing need.

Just lots of motions with nothing agreed.

 

D. A.

The Doughnut revisited (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s Socialist Standard we discussed Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. As it happens, on 1 October Raworth and co-author Andrew Fanning published an online paper ‘Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance’ in the journal Nature. This updates and widens the scope of previous work in this framework.

Things have not improved since the original work was done: ‘Billions of people are falling short of meeting their most essential needs, whereas humanity’s ecological imprint on the living planet is now overshooting at least six of the nine planetary boundaries’. Previously four of the boundaries had been crossed, ecological limits which it was essential to keep within.

The boundaries are measured in terms of indicators, with more than one indicator for some boundaries. Ozone-layer depletion has been stable since the early 2000s, but the other indicators for which information over time is available show a worsening of conditions. For instance, four indicators have more than doubled the extent to which they exceed acceptable limits: CO2 concentration and radiative forcing (both of which relate to the climate change boundary), and hazardous chemicals and phosphorus (relating to chemical and nutrient pollution).

The inner ring of the Doughnut deals with meeting people’s needs. Here two indicators have deteriorated significantly, food insecurity and the existence of autocratic regimes. Others have improved, but only slightly, with 10 percent of the world’s population being undernourished in 2021–2, compared to 13 percent in 2000-1. A rapid improvement would be needed to eliminate this problem by 2030. The proportion lacking access to safely managed drinking water only went down from 39 percent to 37 percent over the same period.

Has there been progress overall? Global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022, but ‘only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends’.

So the Doughnut’s method of examining whether society is coping with meeting everyone’s needs while keeping the planet in a sustainable condition shows very clearly that the present system, capitalism, is unable to meet either goal. A system based on profit cannot solve these problems, and only a change to a world based on production for use will be able to do so.

Paul Bennett

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been unmasked as the mystery buyer of one of Washington, D.C.‘s most expensive properties: a $23 million mansion that he quietly paid for in an all-cash deal that was so secretive, the home vanished from view on Google Maps soon after it closed.

                                                                                                                               [Yahoo]

Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils, or soviets, in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated.

[Canadian Dimension]

A city divided by a 12-year gap in life expectancy… Sally Cartwright, the county’s director of public health at Cambridgeshire County Council, agrees that a lack of access to cheap, nutritious food, expensive gym memberships and insufficient exercise and community facilities in the area have all contributed to the gap in life expectancy…. Differences in wealth affect people’s health, she adds, as well as other triggers such as smoking, heavy drinking and poor diet. 

[BBC]

A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels. 

[Common Dreams]

Some argue that ecological change has historically posed great challenges to existing systems, and therefore, climate change must do the same to capitalism. This view overlooks a key fact: unlike previous modes of production, capitalism is fundamentally based on change. Then there is the assumption that climate change will create such severe problems — food shortages, infrastructure collapse, mass death — that capitalism simply can’t cope. But capitalism has always been adept at placing death in some corners of the world, so that life – and profits – can continue elsewhere. Mass death has never been a fundamental problem for capitalism; the system itself was built on colonialism, wars, and genocides. 

[Rebel]

A legal team representing Hamas pro bono — since it would be illegal to receive money from the group — claims in its own filing that while Hamas’s actions fit the definition of ‘terrorism’ in British law, so do those of the IDF, the Ukrainian army and even the British military. 

[The Times of Israel]

[These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view].

Nature (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nature of Nature. The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change. By Vandana Shiva. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2024. 162pp.

This is a wonderfully eloquent treatise on the human relationship with food and how that relationship is being disrupted by the despoiling of the earth and biosphere that is taking place and by the earth being treated as ‘raw material for industrial production’. In essence, it echoes the famous line from Rousseau: ‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ It imparts with the utmost urgency messages such as ‘biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency’ and ‘the climate crisis has become a climate emergency’, not simply stating them as unevidenced opinion but backing them up with research and evidence gathered over decades from the most well-informed scientific sources.

The author is particularly scathing about ‘agribusiness’ (also referred to as ‘the chemical and industrial food corporation’ and ‘the Poison Cartel’) and the alarming rate at which it is not only destroying biodiversity and the environment with its methods of cultivation and extraction but is now also, in response to criticism of its activities and consumer concern, pretending to ‘decarbonise’ its industrial food chain by what it falsely calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. Even its investment in meat (and dairy and egg) substitute products as a supposed replacement for intensively produced food is, she argues, a way of bamboozling consumers into thinking switching to such products (referred to here as ‘fake food’) somehow helps to lessen degradation of the biosphere and pressure on natural resources. Most of it, she claims, even when plant-based, is in fact just as ultra-processed, chemically and resource intensive and harmful to health as food produced and marketed through the conventional industrial food systems and just as, if not more, wasteful of the earth’s natural resources. The result, she states, is that it ‘ignores our relationship with nature’ and ‘reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine’.

All of this of course means that the author is profoundly opposed to the so-called ‘deep green’ agenda of renewability, regarding it as no more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised production. She sees the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain ‘renewable’ activities and technologies as both continuing to rely on fossil fuels and involving at least as much savage exploitation of the earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as in ‘non-green’ methods of production. So she is intensely critical of apparent environmental champions such as George Monbiot, referring to him as one of ‘the messiahs of fake food’ for his claim that ‘lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’. Such a view she dismisses as ‘false at every level’, since ‘being energy, resource and capital intensive, the lab food and fake food economy is highly non-sustainable’. A ‘greenwashing operation’ pure and simple and a massive fraud is the way this book’s author sees all this – at best an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs. But, even worse, it is, she tells us ‘a fully fledged counterfeiting operation that aims to gain control over our diets by making food ever more dependent on the multinational companies that produce and patent it’.

All this constitutes a searing indictment of capitalist industrial production, even though the author does not once in this book use the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘capitalism’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘maldevelopment’ or ‘the economy of greed’. This may be a deliberate choice on her part so as not to lay herself open to any accusation of political partisanship as opposed to following the evidence of facts and science. Nevertheless, it is still clear that she is describing what socialists call commodity production, i.e. the production of goods for sale on the market with a view to profit for the tiny minority class who own the means to produce them. And she does show that she knows of the existence of this class (she mentions ‘the 1%’ on several occasions), that they are ‘predatory’ and that their activity ‘places profits above nature and people’. Yet there is no evidence in her book to indicate that she is looking outside the framework of commodity production for a different way of doing things.

At the same time, she has ‘an alternative path’ to propose to the current system’s ‘chemically grown and highly processed’ methods of food production. This consists of methods of production that would be ‘ecological not industrial … conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity’, and these would involve ‘following the ecological laws of the earth – the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health’, thus offering ‘solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected’. It must be said that this is nothing if not an admirable vision. The snag, however, is that the author seems to see it as achievable within the framework of the present system of buying and selling and production for profit – and this by means of social pressure and the goodwill and actions of governments. Unfortunately this ignores the reality that all governments of all kinds and stripes are servants of that system (i.e. the capitalist system) and their role is one of oversight and of attempting to make it run in the least worst way. They are not in the business of overthrowing it or regulating it for the common benefit – or indeed for anyone’s benefit other than that of the small minority who already monopolise the planet’s wealth.

The existing method of production and distribution, with its growth imperative and its commodification of everything, has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. How can we prevent this going any further and reversing it? Not via tweaks to the way the current system works but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to cooperatively organise a leaderless, stateless society without governments, without markets, without buying and selling and with free access to all goods and services – a society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole biosphere, the whole environment of which we are a part – the real ‘economy of care’ that Vandana Shiva so passionately advocates for but offers no realistic path to.

Howard Moss

Transformism (2025)

Book Review from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transformative Adaptation. Another world is still just possible. By Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips with Manda Scott. Permanent Publications. 2024. 102pp.

This is a collection of short essays written by the editors, Rupert Read and Morgan Phillips, and by other contributors – with titles like ‘Transformative Adaptation as Part of the Emerging Climate Majority’, ‘How we will Free Ourselves – Together’, and ‘Thrutopia: Creating a New Story for a World Undergoing Transformation’.

So what do these writers mean by ‘transformative adaptation’? Most of them talk about a wide variety of what they see as ecologically beneficial initiatives and activities, for example restoration of wetlands, ‘agroforestry hubs’, biodiverse planting schemes, community food-growing sites, and use of green technology. Among specific ideas put forward are ‘autonomous community-led centres focused on meeting local needs and building local resilience’. They give examples of this kind of thing they see as taking place in various parts of the world, for example Nepal, Kurdistan, and more locally in, for instance, the ‘Talking Tree’ project in Staines and the ‘Zero Carbon Guildford Climate Hub’. They see transformative adaptation as going beyond efforts to simply cut down on carbon emissions and be generally more environmentally conscious (they describe that as ‘mitigation’) and characterise it as part of the need to ‘work with nature not against her’ so that ’ecological breakdown can be reversed’. Above all they stress that, if the world carries on along its current anti-ecological track (COP, for example, is seen as a failure and a fraud, ‘a surrender to the forces of big energy and big capital’), it will quickly lead to a situation where ‘the very habitability of our earth teeters’.

But what does this book have to say about the political dimension of climate change and global warming and efforts to curb or reverse it and protect the environment? It says a certain amount. It refers to what is happening as ‘a crisis of political economy’, whereby we all live in a system that demands continuous economic growth’ and creates ‘dire levels of inequality that would have made Roman emperors blush’. It further states, that ‘climate stability and capitalism – in any form – are not compatible’, that ‘unimaginable “profits” continue to be made, as capital attempts to commodify life itself’, and that to remedy this we need ‘societal transformation’.

So far so good, except that it seems to think that all this can somehow happen within the system of capitalism and its buying and selling imperative and talks about ‘exerting pressure on government’ and ‘on decision makers’, as though governments were somehow neutral and their purpose was something other than managing the capitalist system in the interests of the tiny minority who monopolise the wealth of society. So the book states the undeniable truth that ‘the solutions are available, we just need to take collective action and implement them in our communities’.

If ‘collective action’ simply means local planting schemes, ‘green’ technology and the like, clearly this will do little more than scratch the surface of the problems of the environment and inequality they point to. So, though we cannot blame the advocates of transformative adaptation for wanting to do something practical to rescue an overheating planet from the ills of capitalism, it cannot in itself feasibly be seen as a wider effective solution.

However, to be fair this book does end up going somewhat further, and that’s mainly thanks to its final chapter contributed by the novelist Manda Scott, who talks about the need to imagine ‘how our lives would look and feel if we let go of our encultured drive to engage in a market of goods and services’ and states flatly that ‘capitalism is not compatible with a flourishing web of life’.

Groups and movements that offer examples of self-organisation, democratic cooperation and sharing of resources and goods, which this book wants to see a spread of, offer something of an antidote to those single-issue campaigns calling on government to bring in various reforms which, even if enacted, rarely do more than tinker at the edges of the massive problem constituted by the whole system of production for profit. But the most radical of the ideas put forward here, that of a ‘parallel government’ possibly leading to a more democratic system and even perhaps to some form of non-monetary economy, seems unnecessarily complicated compared to using simple democratic political action via the existing system of elections as a route to the establishment of a democratic, moneyless, marketless society of common ownership and production for direct use. In Manda Scott’s words, ‘a system designed to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet’ and ‘a world that is fully connected, where we are not born to pay bills and then die’.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Climate of crisis (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

You might think, given much of the news last month, that the howler monkeys had taken over the zoo. Some of Donald Trump’s executive appointments were widely viewed as stark raving bonkers. Matt Gaetz, ‘the most investigated man in the United States Congress’, suspected of underage sex and sex-trafficking, and friend of far-right conspiracy nuts and Holocaust deniers, was made attorney general. Tulsi Gabbard, avowedly anti-Nato and allegedly pro-Moscow, was made director of national intelligence, prompting critics to suggest that in future there won’t be any. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who sacked the janitors at Twitter so workers had to bring their own toilet rolls, has been given a job to cut state spending. And the president-elect put Robert F Kennedy, the vaccine sceptic and 5G conspiracy nut, in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ‘That sound that you just heard was my jaw dropping, hitting the floor and rolling out of the door,’ as one professor put it.

In the words of the Economist, Trump is an aroma many people don’t want to sniff. His attitude to the ‘climate hoax’ is also well known. He is fully expected to pull the country out of the Paris Agreement once again, just as the latest UN report announced that, far from restricting warming below 1.5 or even 2.0°, the world is on track to warm by 2.6 to 3.2°. The likelihood of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel producer bolting for the door and leaving everyone else holding the bag may well have overshadowed the two COP meetings that took place last month, as participating states must have calculated that if the USA bailed, then probably China would follow, leading a stampede of ‘every state for itself’. COP16 met in Cali, Colombia to discuss ways to preserve biodiversity in the face of what is being called the sixth mass extinction on Earth, but broke up in chaos. Then COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan started badly with its own chief executive being caught on film making oil deals, the country’s president calling their gas resources ‘a gift from God’, and fossil-linked lobbyists outnumbering the delegates, making the event look like a mafia-led War on Drugs initiative. No wonder a former UN secretary general and a former UN climate chief have written to the UN saying that the COP climate talks are ‘no longer fit for purpose’. And all this just after the publication of the 2024 State of the Climate Report, which begins: ‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled’.

Something else Trump has no time for is the World Health Organization, which has since the last pandemic been attempting to negotiate a collective global accord in time for the next pandemic, but which last month also failed to reach agreement. The reason for the failure is the same reason the climate talks never get very far, and it’s not Trump, it’s the capitalist competitive market system. The 194 WHO member states certainly understand that the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if. They know perfectly well that they don’t want to be caught with their pants down and unable to react, like last time. So they have every reason on Earth to cooperate. But they just can’t. For one thing, poorer countries can’t afford to scale up their health facilities, meaning richer countries would have to foot the bill, a big ask given their many other financial commitments. An even more pressing issue is the transfer of technology for vaccine development and production, part of the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS). Poorer countries want PABS to be mandatory (of course), but the WHO is an entirely voluntary scheme, and big countries are reluctant to bear all the R&D costs only to give away their valuable intellectual property for nothing. They are insisting on merely giving away a certain percentage free, and a further percentage at cost price, a proposal that infuriates poor countries who are invariably on the sharp end of diseases like Ebola, bird flu and Mpox. Negotiations are further stalled on the establishment of the Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network, which is intended ‘to facilitate equitable, timely and affordable access to pandemic-related health products.’ All parties are agreed that this is highly desirable and in everyone’s collective interest, but squabbling continues over just one word, ‘unhindered’, to go in front of the word ‘access’. Once again, poorer countries obviously want this, while rich countries are afraid to cut their own pharma industries off at the knees.

When you consider the world’s urgent and existential need to mitigate climate change, halt a mass extinction, and prevent the next pandemic, and that instead of acting, countries always end up paralysed by the competing requirements of the market, you realise that capitalism as a planetary management system is about as helpful as Superman building his own kryptonite factory.

But since it would be unseasonal to end on a sour note, a recent study found that the news might not be entirely as bad as you think it is, and that there has been an ‘increase in media coverage of crises, but not in the number of crises’. Researchers looked at news articles from The Times, going back to 1785, along with parallel studies of the Guardian, Economist and others, and concluded that there has been a notable increase in ‘crisis rhetoric’ rather than in actual crises, and not for the usual reason that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. They pin the blame on ‘intensified crisis PR’ from pressure groups, better public education creating a more acute perception of crises, and a proliferation of politicised media outlets. But crisis or not, we’re definitely going round in circles, even if not quite circling the drain.

Paddy Shannon

Brewing up a storm? (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

After 29 October of this year many more people, (particularly in Spain) will, one suspects, have become a lot more familiar with the acronym DANA. It stands for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos (Isolated Depression at High Altitudes).

A DANA is a rather unique meteorological phenomenon, often experienced at this time of the year on the Iberian peninsula. It begins with a large slow-moving mass of circulating cold air, breaking off from the jet stream and settling over the peninsula at an altitude of about 9,000 metres. What then happens is that warm air sucking in moisture from the Mediterranean is forced upwards by mountain ranges and collides with the cold air above, precipitating a torrential downpour mainly along the Mediterranean coastline.

Temperatures are a critical factor. According to the World Meteorological Organization website:

‘For each 1°C of warming, saturated air contains 7 percent more water vapour on average. Every additional fraction of warming therefore increases the atmospheric moisture content which in turn increases the risk of extreme precipitation events’ (31 October).

Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution organisation argues that climate change has made extreme rainfall 12 percent more intense and twice as likely (Guardian, 4 November). This is something we had better get more used to, she suggests. We need to build more resilience to deal with events like 29 Oct – better infrastructure, more effective early warning systems and so on.

But, of course, in capitalism this boils down to spending money on something that doesn’t yield a financial return; predictably, it will meet some resistance. What seems like just plain commonsense has to constantly do battle against financial priorities and short-term thinking just to reach some sort of compromise.

Aggravating factors

In any event, it would seem that people in those parts of Spain affected by the storm of 29 October had not really been prepared for what happened. Of course, it was expected that there would be heavy rainfall since this is what normally happens around this time of the year in this part of the world. What was not expected was the sheer intensity. AEMET, the national weather forecasting service had, as early as 25 October, issued a warning but this had been largely ignored and apparently, even ridiculed by climate change denialists as ‘alarmism’ (‘October 2024 Spain floods’, Wikipedia).

It’s not just atmospheric temperature that matters, so too does sea temperature since this affects the take-up of moisture into the atmosphere. Since the 1980s, the Mediterranean has warmed up by about 1.5 degrees. Water, of course, retains heat longer than land so this has implications not only for the intensity of precipitation but, also, the timing of DANA events (in the past, they were more common in September or early October).

As one commentator explained, it takes just a tiny increase in the sea´s temperature to make a big difference: ‘The DANA encountered water temperatures around 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) off the coast of Valencia, while the usual temperature for this time of year is around 70 F (21 C). That difference may seem small, but it is enough to supply the storm system with extra energy’.

The storm that followed caused a truly unprecedented amount of damage – most particularly to communities in the autonomous region of Valencia but also in areas as far afield as Andalucia and Castilla-La Mancha. Some communities received a year’s worth of rain in the course of a few hours. The impact of this enormous volume of water in such a short space of time was made worse because of the recent drought, making the soil hard and unable to absorb the water rapidly enough.

Other aggravating factors included vegetation loss, inappropriate farming techniques and rampant urbanisation along the Mediterranean coastline, covering the land with impermeable surfaces. Speculative building projects have resulted in housing units being constructed ridiculously close to old water courses prone to periodic flooding.

As of early November, we still do not know the full extent of the damage, but the tragedy has already been dubbed Europe’s worst flood-related disaster since 1967. The death toll is currently 217 and rising. There are still many more people unaccounted for and reported missing

Rescue teams have been searching for bodies in underground car parks such as the Bonaire shopping mall near Valencia airport, as well as river mouths where currents may have deposited bodies. Additionally, at the time of writing, there are still many flooded underpasses and basements that have yet to be inspected, not to mention remote rural locations.

It is not just the lives lost and damaged that define this tragedy. The physical destruction has been catastrophic: houses washed away or structurally weakened, countless roads blocked or partially destroyed, bridges broken up and swept away like mere matchstick structures.

Video clips have revealed the fearsome sight of enormous volumes of fast-flowing water gouging out the sides of once bone-dry barrancos or carrying countless cars down narrow streets, along with the flotsam, to some final resting place where scores of them can be found piled up like metal corpses in what are perhaps some of the most hauntingly emblematic images of this whole dreadful event.

Beyond the urban areas, thousands of hectares of crops have been seriously affected. In Almeria’s greenhouse belt that supplies a significant fraction of the UK´s fresh vegetables, initial estimates suggested at least 4,500 hectares of greenhousing have been seriously damaged by hailstones–the plastic shredded beyond hope of repair.

Pent-up anger

Very understandably, all this is has aroused a great deal of anger among local people. In quite extraordinary scenes, the Spanish monarchs, along with the prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, were pelted with insults and lumps of the ubiquitous mud that cakes the streets of the towns they visited. Accused of being ‘assassins’ they prudently decided to cut short their scheduled tour of the area.

Predictably, political opportunists have waded into the fray with far-right elements, like supporters of Vox, protesting against the Sanchez government for its inexplicable tardiness in sending in the army to help. For their part, leftwing groups like Podemos, have called for the resignation of the Valencian president, Carlos Mazón of the conservative People’s Party, not least because of his decision last year to scrap the Valencia Emergency Unit (UVE) as a ‘superfluous expense’. The UVE was set up to respond to emergencies precisely like the current one, but such is the stupidity of short-term thinking that it is only with hindsight that we can now appreciate its potential value.

Much criticism levelled at the authorities has focused on the question of why people were not alerted sooner to give them more time to reach high ground and safety. According to an Al Jazeera report (3 November): ‘When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps’.

AEMET, as mentioned, knew of the approaching storm and issued a yellow warning a few days before it broke. On 29 October, it converted this into a red warning:

‘AEMET issued a red alert level warning very early on Tuesday, the day of the Dana, but life pretty much went on as normal until hours later when the torrential rains began to fall, and the rivers began to overflow in inland Valencia’ (4 November, Sur in English).

As that day dragged on and conditions deteriorated Mazón held a press conference at about 13.00 claiming that ‘the storm would dissipate by 18:00’ (Wikipedia). Of course it did no such thing and matters steadily worsened. Only by 20:11 did the Generalitat Valenciana issue a general SMS alert to the public to stay indoors while around midnight on 30 October, ‘Mazón’s social media team deleted a tweet claiming the storm would dissipate’. Astonishingly, Mazón also apparently rejected offers of help from firefighters in Catalonia, Navarre and Bilbao.

It was not just the regional government that was at fault. Many businesses in the area adamantly insisted that their employees turn up for work that day and in the evening, despite the obviously deteriorating circumstances, thereby putting the latter´s lives at risk. That speaks volumes.

Political bickering

Of course, it is all too easy to get embroiled in the blame game when it comes to ‘natural tragedies’ when we should really be focusing on the wider picture. Strangely, though, weather forecasters are often the first to cop the blame. One recalls the famous gaffe by the BBC weather forecaster, Michael Fish, in 1987 on the eve of the Great Storm reassuring his viewers that there was no hurricane on the horizon, (though as an afterthought he suggested it might become ‘quite windy’). One truly feels for poor Mr Fish and the backlash he endured but predicting the weather has never been an exact science.

Blaming the weather forecaster is precisely what seems to have happened on this occasion as well – except that AEMET actually got its forecast spot on. That did not stop Alberto Feijoo, leader of the Popular Party, springing to the defence of his comrade Carlos Mazón and, in desperate need of a scapegoat, claiming that AEMET had not forewarned the public sufficiently promptly (31 October, elDiario.es ).

Undoubtedly, the descent into political bickering and backbiting has hampered efforts to deal with the situation. It has also provoked a huge amount of public anger at the ‘political class’ – not just over the delay in warning people but also because of the delay in responding with practical help.

A complicating factor is that Spain has a relatively decentralised system of regional government. There are protocols to be followed as to when central government can become directly involved in the affairs of regional governments and Mazón seemingly dragged his feet when it came to formally raising the official crisis level which would have automatically triggered central government involvement. Of course, when the latter did get involved it was already too late, in the view of many.

In any event this all set the scene for what has been the one truly positive and outstanding development to emerge from this whole sorry saga – the awe-inspiring and magnificent efforts of ordinary working people to handle the situation themselves. Unwilling to wait any longer for the authorities to take action they themselves set about the monumental task of rescuing others, locating bodies and cleaning up. Even those who had lost everything.

Wave of solidarity

The mobilised power of mutual aid is indeed a wonderful and inspirational sight to behold. There are videos circulating on the internet of truly enormous columns of volunteers – thousands upon thousands of people – buckets and mops in hand, trudging on foot from one part of Valencia to another (travel by car being impossible and, at the time of writing, forbidden by the authorities).

This spontaneous voluntary effort originated in social media – for example among groups of young Telegram users – as a bottom-up initiative. Predictably, this has not stopped the authorities from muscling in on the act:

‘From now on, all the organisation is in the hands of the Generalitat. A “wave of solidarity” that needs “coordination”, said Mazón in an institutional message. “We are doing this to better organise, transport and segment the aid of those who are lending their solidarity”’ (2 November, Sur in English).

That smacks of the typical politician trying to save his bacon while claiming the kudos for what others have done. Nevertheless it won´t detract from what the latter have shown themselves amply capable of achieving as working people – not ordinary but extraordinary.

Robin Cox

The Stern gag – capitalist policies for capitalism’s problems (2006)

From the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production . . . in our whole contemporary social order”

You could be forgiven for thinking the above quotation came from a modern-day ecologist or environmentalist, commenting on impending global ecological catastrophe and drawing upon the myriad reports currently in existence, written by concerned scientists, that portend cataclysmic changes to our life-styles if we don’t stop abusing our natural environment immediately. The quote is in fact 131 years old and is taken from Dialectics of Nature, written by Frederick Engels (1875).

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset. Socialists have been warning about the effects of capitalism’s penny-pinching production methods and how they impact on the wider environment for well over a hundred years, and it is often with despair that we reiterate Engels’ message from the later 19th century, more so now that state-of-the-art technology exists that provides hard evidence as to the exact effects of capitalist production.

Global disaster

It was, therefore, not with any great sigh of relief, or with shock and disbelief, that socialists received the findings of the much-trumpeted Stern report on climate change and indeed the government’s reaction to it. It does make for grim reading, suggesting that time is running out to really address the environment question previous opportunities having been pathetically squandered at the Hague and Kyoto Summits and that the possibility of preventing a global disaster is “already almost out of reach”.

The 700-page report, commissioned by the Treasury and carried out by the former World Bank chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, argues that environmental problems will be “difficult or impossible to reverse” unless something is done now. It paints a disturbing picture of the future of the planet if overall global temperatures rise by just two degrees Centigrade. It suggests that four billion people could face water shortages, that sixty million Africans would be exposed to malaria and that forty percent of the world’s species would face extinction.

Two-hundred million more people, it goes on, could be exposed to hunger and that figure could rise to 550 million if the temperature rose one extra degree because of a knock-on 34 percent drop in crop yields across Africa and the Middle East. Australia’s arable land would become simply too hot to sustain cereal crops. Another couple of degrees rise in temperature would, according to the report, see the ice glaciers of the Himalayas melt, depriving 300 million Chinese of a water supply. Rising sea levels would inundate half the world’s major cities, creating more homelessness, and increased ocean acidity would result in a serious decline in fish stocks.

The report further informs us that “changes in weather patterns could drive down the output of the world’s economies by an amount equivalent to up to £6 trillion a year by 2050, almost the entire output of the EU.” But all is not lost, believe Chancellor Gordon Brown and Environment Secretary David Miliband. They point to the ‘positive message’ arising from the report; this being that the world has the means to avoid the awaiting cataclysm. Money can be thrown at the problem – the earth-shattering sum of one per cent of Global GDP should suffice; a figure, incidentally, which is dwarfed by global military spending.

Whiff of profits

Responding to the report, Miliband sounded quite optimistic. Interviewed by the Independent (30 October), he said: “The second half of his message is that the technology does exist, the financing, public and private, does exist, and the international mechanisms also exist to get to grips with this problem – so I don’t think it’s a catastrophe that he puts forward. It’s a challenging message.”

What we are offered are capitalist remedies, and to make it all the more attractive there are profits to be had – well, the master class has to have some damned incentive before they act. As the Independent reported: “Combating climate change could become one of the world’s biggest growth industries, generating around $250bn of business globally by 2050.” Providing, that is, that we still have a planet worth saving in 50 years time.

Environmental disaster and the best capitalist politicians can think up is to tempt the master class with the whiff of profits to come if they agree to mend their ways! Indeed, the report is punctuated with terms such as “cost-effective” and “profitability”. Well, Stern is after all a leading world economist so his thoughts are naturally with his associates in big business. The very people who have disregarded the effects of their production methods on the natural environment for hundreds of years are now being asked to show it some mercy! Global environmental catastrophe can be halted by throwing money at the problem!

The simple fact is that businesses will not take the risk of falling behind in the struggle for profits and nor will any government enforce policy that will result in a drop in the profits of its respective capitalist class. This is exactly what President Bush cited when he pulled the USA out of the Kyoto Agreement. He is no doubt aware that the USA consumes more than one quarter of global oil production and is accountable for one quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, while being home to only 4.5 per cent of the world’s population, but his remit is not to protect the environment, nor the millions who would suffer as a direct result of environmental chaos. His job is protecting US interests all over the world, interests which are inseparable from profits.

Capitalist businesses survive by forcing out their competition, by cutting costs and sidestepping policies that hinder their expansion. They seek new outlets for their wares, to sell more and more, because this is the law of capitalism, and it is a law antagonistic to ecological concerns. It is the crazed law of capitalism that compels the big oil producers to pay teams of scientists to prepare reports that refute the findings of environmentalists who forewarn of the dire effects of current production methods.

The market economy demands that businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interests. Pleasing shareholders takes far more priority than ecological considerations. The upshot is that productive processes are distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits. The result is an economic system governed by anarchic market forces which compel decision-makers, whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste. They may well be loath to contaminate ecosystems, but the alternative is closure should they invest in costlier eco-friendlier production methods. Little wonder then that nature’s balances are upset today, and that we face problems such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, acidic oceans and the like.

All Greens now

The Greens have long insisted that things could be put right with a change of government policy, which is exactly what Labour now proposes. The problem, they believe, can be rectified by governments forcing through laws and imposing green taxes on air travel, motoring and high emission vehicles – to protect the environment. Even the Conservatives, with their new infantile eco-logo, and the Liberals have jumped on board the green bandwagon. Shadow chancellor George Osborne promises a whole swathe of green taxes. All are seemingly convinced the problem facing the environment is an economic one insofar as the world’s governments can spend their way out of environmental catastrophe.

Governments, to be sure, exist to run the political side of the profit system and, no matter how well intentioned, do not have a free hand to do what is sensible or desirable. They do not control the market-driven profit system it controls them and shapes their policies. Which government is going to tell its oil companies to produce less oil, when these same oil producers are under constant pressure to pump more out of the ground and as cheaply as possible? Within three years annual car sales are set to hit 60 million per year, 10 million up on 2004. Which government will dare threaten these car sales with its eco-policies? At the very best their eco-policies can only slow down the speed of environmental decay, not halt it in its tracks at some future date.

Socialists are no different from others in desiring an environment in which the safety of all animal and plant species is ensured. Where we differ from our political opponents is in recognising that their demands have to be set against a well-entrenched economic and social system, based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding law of profits first.

It has long been our case that human needs can be satisfied without recourse to production methods that adversely effect the natural environment, which is exactly why we advocate the establishment of a system of society in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit. We are not talking about nationalisation or any other tinkering with the present system, but rather its entire abolition and replacement with a global system in which the Earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled; a society in which each production process takes into consideration not only human need but any likely effect upon the environment.

One does not need a mastery of Earth sciences to envisage types of farming that preserve and enhance the natural fertility of the soil, the systematic recycling of materials obtained from non-renewable energy sources while developing alternative sources that continually renew themselves (i.e. solar energy and wind power); industrial processes that avoid releasing poisonous chemicals or radioactivity into the biosphere; the manufacture of solid goods made to last, not planned to break down after a period of time.

Once the Earth’s natural and industrial resources have been wrested from the master class and become the common heritage of all humanity, then production can be geared to meeting needs in an ecologically acceptable way, instead of making profits without consideration for the environment. This the only basis on which we can meet our needs whilst respecting the laws of nature and to at last begin to reverse the degradation of the environment caused by the profit system. The only effective strategy for achieving a free and democratic society and, moreover, one that is in harmony with nature, is to build up a movement which has the achievement of such a society as its objective.

John Bissett

Global warming – what is it? (2007)

From the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global warming is an increase in mean global temperature, which is an average of temperatures taken in various parts of the world at near surface level on land and sea. It’s now about 14.6º Celsius (about 58º in old money). On a mild December day in Britain it could be more or less that temperature outside. But of course this is a pure coincidence. In most other parts of the world the temperature today will have been quite different. That’s because it’s an average. Actually, the absolute figure is pretty meaningless, which is why commentators generally fix a base year and compare changes since that year.

More or less reliable statistics have existed only since 1880 and these show that the average global temperature in 2000 was 0.5ºC higher than in 1900. But this was not a continuous rise. It rose from the 1900s to 1940s, then fell in the 1950s and 1960s, and has been rising since the 1970s. The average temperature in the 70s was 14.01. Today it’s about 14.6, a rise of 0.6º. So, while it is not accurate to say (as some do) that temperatures have been rising since 1900 or since the industrial revolution, the world does seem to be currently warming – even though a century, let alone a few decades is the equivalent of a second in geological time over which changes in global temperatures (Ice Ages and Warm Periods) are measured.

Changes in the Earth’s temperature also mean changes in the Earth’s climate or, rather, since there’s no such thing as a single Earth climate, in the climates of the different parts of the world. When the Earth warms up this means, for instance, that the polar ice caps decrease in size and that glaciers everywhere retreat. Which is happening now.

So, it can be accepted that we are living in a period when the Earth is warming at least temporarily and that this is resulting in climate change.

The big question is: what is causing this? We know that in the past the Earth has warmed and cooled and that this has been due to natural phenomena such as volcanic activity, changes in the intensity of solar radiation or changes in the Earth’s tilt towards the Sun or its orbit round the Sun. Some scientists are suggesting that this is the case now, that the Earth is just warming up after the “Little Ice Age” that lasted from 1500 to 1850 and which may partly have been caused by a reduction in solar radiation.

But the majority of scientists take the view, to quote from a recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which groups hundreds of scientists, specialists in their field, from all over the world:

“Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.

Burning fossil fuels releases the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), into the atmosphere. CO2 is called a greenhouse gas because, though it does not prevent heat from the Sun reaching the Earth, it prevents some of it from radiating back. Which is a good thing actually, since we need this. Without any greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the average world temperature would be minus 18C.

At the time of the industrial revolution and for thousands of years before the average amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been estimated as about 280 parts per million or ppm (in other words, out of every million molecules in the air 280 were CO2, not much: 0.00028%). In 1958 when this was first measured (as opposed to estimated from other data) it was 315. In 2000 it was 367. Today it is near 380 – and rising. A word of caution is in order here. CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. There are others, especially methane (which is a product of agriculture). Total greenhouse gas presence in the atmosphere is measured in terms of CO2 equivalent. Today this is about 430 ppm. And this is the figure that is generally referred to in discussions on the subject. It’s as well to be aware that when this figure is quoted not all of it is made up of CO2, but is a figure for all greenhouse gases. CO2 equivalent is about 15 percent higher than the figure for CO2 alone.

Socialists are not scientists so all we can do is to exercise critical thinking while taking into account what the majority of scientists in the field have concluded, knowing that they could be wrong.

The majority of scientists in the fields involved have concluded that the undeniable rise in average global temperatures has been caused since at least the 1970s by the rise in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. In other words, that it is man-made or “anthropogenic” as they put it in their language.

What is not clear – scientists are still arguing about it – is what precise temperature rise is caused by the emission of a given extra amount of CO2. This of course is a key ratio since more and more CO2 is being released into the atmosphere by the continued burning of coal, oil and gas.

If you assume the “climate sensibility” of CO2 to be low, then the rise in average global temperature at particular levels will be low. If you consider its “climate sensibility” to be high, then by 2100 the rise could be 2, 3 or 4ºC. A 3 or 4º rise could cause huge problems: sea levels rising by a third to a half a metre (one or two feet), more stormy weather, more forest fires, more droughts and desertification.

So, without necessarily subscribing to the higher figures put forward by the more engaged scientists, it can be accepted that it is desirable to cut back on CO2 emissions. The question we look at in this issue is how likely is this to happen under capitalism given its competitive and anarchic nature?

How we live and how we might live - Part 2 (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

It is November, 1884. William Morris, designer, author and revolutionary socialist, stands before an audience assembled at his London home delivering a talk: “How we live and How we might live”. Six hundred miles away across the North Sea in Berlin, representatives of the European powers are gathered, negotiating, bargaining, manoeuvring, carving up the African continent into agreed spheres of influence and exploitation. The British are becoming anxious and a bullish jingoism is percolating through society. The United Kingdom has recently lost its world lead in manufacturing to the rapidly growing capitalist powers of continental Europe. Rivalry among them is heating up.

Morris assesses the situation shrewdly. He observes:

‘it is now a desperate competition between the great nations of civilisation for the world-market, and tomorrow it may be a desperate war for that end.’

That ‘desperate war’ among the ‘great nations of civilisation’ would come eventually in the cataclysm of 1914-18. War, of course, was nothing new, and the ‘great nations’ were no strangers to it. Even as their representatives in Berlin haggled over African territories, the French and Dutch were fighting separate colonial wars in China. Industrial capitalism, birthed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, had shown no capacity for limiting mass violence. Quite the contrary. The nineteenth century had exploded across the European landmass with the muskets and cannons of the Napoleonic and Coalition armies. Throughout the century the long destructive arc of capitalist violence ripped through a multitude of colonial and European territories and states. It began the new century on the southern tip of Africa with Brits and Boers fighting it out in a hail of machine gun fire and rifle bullets.

The slaughter continued in a multitude of conflicts. It failed miserably to end with ‘The War to End All Wars’, rose to new heights of violence between 1939 and 1945, and by the millennium, had left behind it vast material devastation, 230 million dead, and an untold number of broken lives. The arrival of the twenty-first century didn’t disappoint. It opened with a flood of civil wars and insurgencies, and with a cynical and drawn out conflict in Iraq.

Today, some twenty years later our TV screens and news media are filled with narratives of the current slaughter in Ukraine and the Middle East. Elsewhere, less newsworthy but no less deadly conflicts rage around the globe: in Cameroon and Haiti; in Yemen and Mexico; in the deserts of northern Africa, and in the mountains and plains of South America. Warfare appears to be a fixture in human affairs. It changes its colours and pretexts with each new conflict, but never disappears – despite the fact that few sane people actually want it. Once again, this raises the question that Morris asked of another seeming fixture of human life, poverty: why? Why poverty? Why war? Why do we see no end to it, no relief?

Why war?

It would be easy to settle on a simple answer to his question, one we see everywhere online, in the media and sometimes even in academic texts – ‘human nature’. We hear those words pronounced sagely at home and in the pub. It’s just the way we humans are, we say. The truth however, is that we humans like simple explanations, something that we can pin down in a weighty phrase or with a shake of the head, and then tuck away in the back of our minds before returning to the immediate problems of daily life. But is war so simple? It takes vast organisation and resources to conduct a modern war. It takes a great deal of thought and preparation. Human nature, geared to quick instinctive responses does not seem to fit the bill.

In his talk, Morris addressed the questions of war and poverty as they affected British society in his own time, yet he might just as well have been speaking for us today. Poverty and the drive to war persist even though a lot has changed in the scope and impact they have on our lives. Under the competitive pressures of a capitalist market, the advance of science and technology has led to the increased mechanisation and destructive power of war. It has led to the growth of a huge and lucrative armament industry, and to growing stockpiles of weaponry. It has vastly increased the possibility of widespread, even global destruction.

Disarmament agreements that offered some reassurance over past decades have now fallen by the wayside. Competition has once again grown fierce and borders have closed. Poverty, too, continues to scar communities in the capitalist West, and in the countries of the ‘developing world’ subject to capitalism’s long reach and market imperatives. With the capitalist advance and the destruction of traditional economies, however, poverty arises less often these days from a result of natural scarcity, and more frequently from lack of ability to pay.

Escalating crises

Time moves on. This is 2024, not 1884, and in addition to the historical blights of poverty and war, we are now facing potential catastrophes of a kind that Morris never had to deal with. After decades of evasion and denial, few now are unaware of the escalating crises of climate change, loss of species diversity and of pollution. Climate change has made itself felt around the world in the large scale destruction of lives and property brought on by extreme weather systems. In David Attenborough’s well publicised words to the United Nations, climate change has now become ‘widespread, rapid, and intensifying’. It poses threats to food security, access to fresh water and to natural resources. It is altering the migration patterns of human beings, creating social division and disruption. And of course, as always, it is the poor that suffer most.

Since 1950, that is, within the lifetime of many people, over half of all the world’s species have become extinct, and much of this is driven by capitalist imperatives and human action. From what we now understand of the interdependency of all life on the planet, this loss is not just a matter for sentimental regret. The excessive rate at which species are being lost or diminished is putting severe pressure on the ability of ecological systems to adapt. Ecologists warn that beyond a certain limit these natural systems are likely to become unstable or collapse. Seventy-five percent of the genetic variation in crops has disappeared in the last 125 years through selective breeding for commercial purposes. It is irretrievable. A lack of genetic diversity leaves crops more vulnerable to disease, pests and invasive species but also to the effects of climate change. Not only does this threaten global food security but it can have disastrous consequences for local populations who are tied into the capitalist system and are dependent upon revenue from the sale of crops.

Pollution too, is reaching new levels, and creating new threats. Here in the UK, the media keeps us aware of local problems like our polluted waterways. But this is only scratching the surface. Air, land and water pollution has a significant global impact on ecosystems and on human health. According to the World Health Organisation, almost 99 percent of the global population is now breathing air that exceeds quality limits, creating cardiovascular problems, strokes and respiratory diseases. Today, eight million deaths annually are attributed to air pollution. The land, too, is rapidly deteriorating from an onslaught of pollutants from landfill sites, from agricultural pesticides and fertilisers. These pollutants, along with untreated sewage, leak into the water supply contaminating seas, lakes and rivers. Oil spillages and accumulations of plastic waste kill animals and destroy habitats.

In the face of all these current crises, it seems we have become paralysed, unable to act effectively. And that requires an explanation. Looking around at our advances in science, in engineering, in medicine, and in so many other fields, it’s clear that we are a practical and problem-solving species. The capitalist system which currently dominates our lives and directs our activity is so often credited with a capacity to innovate, and yet when it comes to collective problem-solving in areas such as these, it seems impotent.

It is not that these problems have lacked attention or proposed solutions. A vast amount of human energy has been expended on them. The outcomes, however, have been inadequate, and the solutions proposed have been superficial and ineffective. Globally, we are still pumping huge quantities of climate-altering carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The long string of international gatherings since the first 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm has achieved little. The internationally agreed Kyoto protocols have been established but their targets have remained largely unmet. The annual COP meetings have been attended by heads of state, politicians, and thousands of business representatives, lobbyists, journalists, negotiators and scientists. Weeks have been spent in intense exchanges and negotiations, yet with very little positive result.

A single origin

So what is going on? Why have we made so little progress? In recent years there has been a growing recognition that these crises: climate change; loss of species diversity; and pollution are not separate problems. They influence and magnify one other. They cannot be separately addressed. Fashionable terms like ‘the polycrisis’ or ‘the metacrisis’ have been popping up to describe this new understanding like bubbles on the surface of a rapidly flowing river. There is an acknowledgment that these crises have a single origin. This is an advance of sorts.

Some, at least, have come to the realisation that it is no longer sufficient to blame superficial features of our society like particular industries, businesses or political ideologies. And there is little to be gained by blaming vague abstractions like ‘human nature’. It is becoming acceptable, even in the conventional media, to acknowledge that the problem lies in something much more fundamental, in the way we organise ourselves as a global society to produce the things we need (or think we need) in order to live. It lies, in other words, in the structure of the capitalist economy.

Despite this advance, we soon hit a problem. There is disagreement on what capitalism fundamentally is. It gets defined in terms of its surface features. But superficial definitions give rise only to superficial and ineffective solutions. Economic textbooks and business sites tell us, for example, that capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production (factories, machines, raw materials, etc). ‘Libertarians’ tell us that capitalism is no more than voluntary exchange. These abstract definitions are both highly ideological and highly reductive. They tell us very little about the complex nature of the world we actually inhabit. Worse still, they are inaccurate.

Capitalism is an impersonal system. It matters very little how the means of production are owned, or who owns them. The central feature of capitalism, the accumulation of capital by means of wage labour, remains the same whether businesses are owned by individuals, partnerships, families, cooperatives, groups of shareholders or by the state. So what is this thing we call capitalism, and how is it responsible for so much that appears wrong with our world?

In next month’s Socialist Standard we will dive down into its workings and start to look at the ways in which all these features are generated in our own time by what lies at the heart of capitalism itself.

Hud.

Danger: conspiracists at work (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump immediately gave rise to a frenzy of conspiracy theories. One story that quickly spread was that the whole thing was staged by supporters of Trump. One US-based YouTube account said the picture was just ‘too damn perfect” and described how they got ‘the flag positioned perfect and everything’. But more widespread was the idea that assassination was ordered by anti-Trumpers of various kinds – the CIA, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Mike Pence, or even Joe Biden. What has unfolded since then has been straight out of the conspiracy theory playbook with committed activists on social media who deny almost everything (the Covid pandemic, climate change, mass shootings, terror attacks) putting out a panoply of overwhelmingly improbable stories. In their minds not just one thing is suspect and said to be the subject of a hidden conspiracy but very many.

Another striking example of such ‘invented knowledge’ is the idea that ‘weather manipulating’ or ‘geo-engineering’ is taking place enabling governments to control both weather and climate for sinister purposes. Such stories have been around for some time but spread more widely in the UK recently based on the erratic and unusually cool weather experienced in June and July followed by one of the wettest winters in recent years. This is being done, so the claims say, by such methods as ‘cloud seeding’ (which does actually exist and was experimented with in the 1950s but shown to have only small, localised impacts) and ‘solar radiation management’. There is even talk of ‘chemtrails’, said to be a secretive plot to spray people with dangerous chemicals. As a result, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, weather forecasters have been on the end of significant abuse from conspiracy theorists on social media, accused of hiding truths about weather from the public. One user on ‘X’ wrote, ‘Imagine watching the geoengineers at work, and you report the weather without telling the truth about what really is going on. That is sick’. No attention is paid of course to the reality that, on a warming planet, warm air is able to hold more moisture, which in turn fuels more intense rainfall and erratic weather conditions. All this is dismissed as ‘climate scam propaganda’.

The BBC’s fact-checking service, ‘Verify’, which looks into stories circulating on the internet that may seem the result of some form of conspiracy theory or at least questionable, has found no evidence for such theories and credibly debunked them. But what one writer has termed ‘belief perseverance’ among conspiracy theorists persists even in the face of solid contradictory information and facts. Of course those who spread such ideas will say that the BBC is itself part of the conspiracy seeking to exercise control over people and the environment and take away their ‘freedoms’ and therefore its findings cannot be trusted. And it must be said that it has been ‘verified’ that in past times the BBC did function as a servile collaborator of the Secret Services when it came to the British state’s attempts to sniff out ‘subversion’.

Luckily the myths propagated by conspiracy theorists are rarely shared by whole populations, as they might have been in the past. They tend rather to exist among a certain segment of the population, perhaps as an expression of despair among people who find their existences particularly confusing, stressful and alienating, feel impotent to influence events or their own lives, and so seek consolation in such theories. It is only a pity that many other myths are shared by large swathes of people: for example worship of non-existent gods, devotion to leaders, the idea that one’s accidental country of birth somehow makes that place superior to others, and in particular the acceptance of class-divided society based on obscene wealth for the few and just getting by or dire poverty for the many as a natural and unchangeable way of organising human society.

Howard Moss