“There are many here among us who feel that climate change is but a hoax,” Bob Dylan did not croon back in the 60s in his great song All Along the Watchtower, but it seems an apt lyric today. Given the increase in climate-related disasters of late, it’s hard to believe people are still in denial about the issue, but the phrase “There’s no such thing as global warming,” seems to be a popular mantra these days, especially among Republicans, a position on the crisis taken without evidence, like the other conspiracy theories and delusional ideologies that define the Grand Old Party of Trump. The science emphatically suggests otherwise; more than a million species are at risk of extinction because of climate change, including Homo sapiens, as CO2 concentration in the atmosphere reaches the highest point in human history. This salient fact impacts global sea levels which have risen eight inches since 1870. Other effects on the environment include a dramatic increase in air pollution and extreme weather events, a rise in heat-related human illnesses and the proliferation of climate-related threats to global food production. “Global warming is human-caused,” writes C.J. Polychroniou in Common Dreams, April 18, 2021, “and the culprit is industrial capitalism and its addiction to fossil fuels.”
The urgency of the climate crisis cannot be overstated. As David Harvey points out in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, at no point in the 800,000 years prior to the 1960s did the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere exceed 300 ppm. “Then over the last 60 years, it has gone from 300ppm to 400ppm,” he writes. “Now that’s a huge and very rapid increase.” In concert with many other critics of capitalism, Harvey insists that “The global community has to address this—as quickly as possible—and this cannot happen without calling into question the driving force behind it all which is that of endless and compounding rates of capital accumulation.”
To address the wall of political denial that’s been built around the issue, the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change categorically states that scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is indisputable. “The current warming trend is of particular significance because it is unequivocally the result of human activity since the mid-20th century and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over millennia. It is undeniable that human activities have warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land and that widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.” Supporting these realities the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) points out that “the evidence for rapid climate change is compelling,” noting the rise in surface temperatures since the late nineteenth century that has been driven largely by human activity, with most of the increase occurring in the last 40 years. As a result, NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show “Greenland lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019, while Antartica lost about 148 billion tons of ice per year.” Meanwhile, glaciers are retreating almost everywhere, global sea level has risen eight inches, while the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The NASA report also cites the increase in extreme weather events including the number of record high temperature events.
In her June 1, 2022 report on the climate crisis, Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent for the The Guardian newspaper interviewed Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the U.S. who says, “People do not understand the magnitude of what is going on. This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.” Hayhoe is talking about global warming, a crisis growing more ominous with every passing day of inaction on the part of governments worldwide. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns that “Carbon dioxide is now more than 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, pushing the atmosphere further into territory not seen for millions of years.” According to an April 4, 2022 United Nations report on climate “harmful carbon emissions from 2010-2019 have never been higher in human history,” prompting UN Secretary-General António Guterres to warn that unless governments everywhere reevaluate their energy policies the world will be uninhabitable. “This is not fiction or exaggeration,” said Guterres. “It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree (Celsius, or 2.7-degrees Fahrenheit) limit.” The report further states that “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors,” the goal of limiting global warming to the limits agreed upon in Paris in 2015 is unattainable. “It’s now or never, said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of the IPCC Working Group III that produced the report.
The Earth is a finite resource and the global capitalist, fossil-fuel driven economic system which requires a minimum compound growth rate of at least three percent to remain viable, is driving CO2 emissions to the point where economic gains are offset by catastrophic losses in the resource base. In short, the incessant growth paradigm is unsustainable from an ecological perspective and will soon result in system implosion. 80 percent of current known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground in order to limit temperature rise. Otherwise, global warming will mean “game over” for the capitalist private wealth machine. In the face of this fact, it’s clear that corporate capitalism must be dismantled. As Ashley Dawson succinctly stated the case in his April 15, 2019 In These Times essay, “We need system change to beat climate change.” Indeed, the title and subtitle of Dawson’s piece say it all: “We can’t beat climate change under capitalism. Socialism is the only way: The changes needed to avert environmental catastrophe are incompatible with capitalism.”
So the question now is how do we accomplish such monumental systemic change in a predatory society dominated by an elite capitalist class that has declared war on democracy and the principles of equitable governance for the common good upon which our nation was founded? Since free-market incentives such as carbon taxes are deemed insufficient and are, in any case fiercely resisted by capitalist elites, Dawson says “to overcome this opposition, we will need a massive, organized anti-capitalist movement.”
“We have little time left,” warns Chris Hedges in his Common Dreams December 7, 2015 essay Apocalyptic Capitalism. “Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.”
A good starting point for change would be a radical reduction in the defense budget and a reevaluation of military deployment policies of perpetual war that now drive the global expansion of the American Empire. “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them deserve to be called existential,” stated Secretary of Defense Loyld Austin, as quoted by Doug Hyland in his excellent Doug’s Climate Newsletter on Substack. “The climate crisis does. Climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.” As I wrote in my comment to Hyland, the Secretary of Defense could start taking “action” with the U.S. Military, now considered the world’s largest climate polluter, emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than Morocco, Peru, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland. Cutting back on unnecessary global wars, mostly waged to increase the profits of U.S. weapons manufacturers, would be a big carbon offset. Of course, that’s not going to happen and nothing much else of any consequence is going to happen at the government level as the Biden administration has shown, so it’s pretty clear that the world’s neoliberal, predatory capitalist economy must be dismantled in order to ensure climate stability, but nobody really wants to admit that at the upper levels of the military/corporate/congressional establishment. Consequently, the damage mounts, despite repeated warnings.
While scientists around the world protest in public to raise awareness of the climate crisis, some chaining themselves to the doors of oil-friendly banks, and in Washington, D.C. recently to the White House Fence, government leaders continue to support the planet destroying agendas of the fossil fuel industry. Jake Johnson in his April 7, 2022 Common Dreams report quotes U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalun who said “I’m taking action because I feel desperate. It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane.”
As Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute points out, “Reducing energy consumption is the only long-range solution to climate change. Unless we’re willing to give up some of our power over nature—our power to extract and transform resources and deliver the goods that we have come to rely on—then we’re destined to creen from one disaster to the next until our worst fears are realized.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Environment correspondent Fiona Harvey reports in her June 17, 2022 column that “the latest round of UN climate negotiations ended in a stalemate…Few countries have produced the plans on tougher emissions cuts they promised in November at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, and finance and help for poor countries to adapt to the impacts of climate breakdown are still lacking.” The situation is dire and our failure to act decisively risks devastating consequences. In a special Sheerpost dispatch on June 20, 2022, Chris Hedges set the stage for the debacle to come illustrated with a frightening Mr. Fish graphic of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse—Conquest, War, Famine and Death—as they “gallop into the 21st century.” In his piece, Hedges documents the myriad ways the ruling class threatens to kill us all, including themselves, with their greedy, mad design of forever wars and rampant capitalist exploitation of the planet’s finite resources. It’s like an alcoholic’s compulsion to drink, a consumptive quest for fulfillment that inevitably ends in insanity and death. Like alcoholism, it’s an ugly, tragic diagnosis, but at least with journalists of integrity like Hedges and Mr. Fish presenting the evidence, survivors, if there are any, will at least have the satisfaction of knowing the causes of mankind’s catastrophic demise.
“Those who rule,” writes Hedges, “servants of corporations and the global billionaire class, accompany the suicidal folly by cementing into place corporate tyranny. The plan is not to reform. It is to perpetuate the corporate pillage. This pillage, more and more onerous for the global population, necessitates a new totalitarianism, one where the billionaire class lives in opulence, workers are serfs, rights such as privacy and due process are abolished, Big Brother watches us all the time, war is the chief business of the state, dissent is criminalized and those displaced by conflicts and climate breakdown are barred entry into the climate fortresses in the global north. Portions of the human species, the most privileged, will, in theory, hold out a little longer before they succumb to the great die off.”
the sad truth
Mr. Fish's final illustration says it all.