Climate change is real, and its impacts are clear. Increasingly the climate disaster feels apocalyptic. The real issue is not: is there climate change? What is to be done? – that is the question.
Some, especially young people, feel despair worrying about the future state of the world. If the governments and corporations that dominate the world continue on their present path, everyone has reasons to despair. However, there are answers and ways to avoid the looming disaster. But we need to recognize what the problem is, and who is to blame.
Capitalism, Not Humanity to Blame
Oil companies knew about climate change decades ago. A 1968 report to the American Petroleum Institute warned that a significant rise in CO2 would melt icecaps and raise sea levels. Exxon’s 1970s research found that increased CO2 would have serious consequences. Yet for decades after, big oil spent billions of dollars to avoid any actions to reduce CO2 releases or tackle climate change.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), formerly a pro-oil body, stated in 2021 there can be “no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now.” Yet investment continues to produce and use more fossil fuels. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, Canada’s big five banks – Royal, TD, Scotia, BMO and CIBC – have provided over $700 billion to fossil fuel companies as part of the $5 trillion the world’s 60 biggest banks have pumped into escalating climate change.
In the election campaign, the parties talked about climate change, but as with COVID, their actions have been too little and too late. Worse, their actions don’t match their inadequate words.
The Liberal government claims it understands climate science and declared a “climate emergency.” Yet the Liberals continue to subsidize fossil fuels, including spending over $16 billion to build a pipeline to increase CO2 releases for the next 40 years. BC’s NDP government also claims to get the science, but it gives billions of dollars in subsidies to LNG projects, which will exacerbate climate change.
Conservatives are worse. Alberta’s Tories spend public money on pro-oil propaganda, while cutting health workers’ jobs. The federal Conservative conference refused to agree that “climate change is real,” and O’Toole wanted to cut the current climate targets.
Clearly, current politicians and big business cannot be relied on for solutions. Why are they so wedded to fossil fuels, even if they know the science?
Capitalism’s purpose is to generate profits for the owners. Each corporation seeks to off-load costs to boost profits, so the costs of pollution, poor health and damage to the environment, now and into the future, will be paid by someone else. Capitalism wants the profits now, so continues to use fossil fuels. Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has relied on fossil fuels to drive machinery, provide transport and enhance food production. All to produce profits.
Individuals are urged to take action, and this is important. However, individual actions can’t substitute for the failure of public policy. The major decisions about energy use are not made by ordinary people; they are made by businesses and governments: deciding to buy a pipeline, subsidize fossil fuels or lend money to big polluters. If public transit is infrequent or non-existent, it is not an option. Upgrading buildings is vital but expensive up front – to achieve the level of improvements needed, government actions and support are required.
Politics is the Barrier to Change
Individual corporations will resist major change. They have large investments in the production and use of fossil fuels. Present governments are also unwilling to act, fearful of big business’s power.
The world’s politicians will gather in Glasgow in November to discuss climate. They will not agree to reduce CO2 fast enough or big enough to avert disaster. Each will try to blame the other. They will protect the profits and investments of the big companies in their country that rely on fossil fuels: auto, steel, airlines, tourism, electricity supply, construction, agri-business, oil, logistics, coal, gas – the list goes on. The military of each nation rely heavily on fossil fuels. The US military, excluding weapons manufacturing, emits as much greenhouse gases as Portugal.
The former Conservative Prime Minister Kim Campbell wrote in 2019 “the oil companies have committed CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY ! Nuremburg worthy!” At a very minimum, the oil and other fossil fuel companies must be taken into public ownership. Public ownership alone is not the answer, as many large oil producers are state-owned and Canada owns a pipeline. Democratic control and planning are necessary to ensure accountability, and to plan the transition to clean energy. But criminals should not be compensated for their crimes. These companies should be expropriated for the good of humanity.
How to Win?
Demonstrations and lobbying can slow down projects and build public awareness. Sometimes they can stop an individual project, such as the Northern Gateway in BC. In these cases, the companies simply find another way to produce and transport the fossil fuels.
Blockades are an effective way to slow a project, gain publicity and build a movement. However, the state – the courts and police – can and usually will use enough force to remove the blockade, as happened in Wet‘suwet‘en, on the Trans Mountain Pipeline, or high profile cases such as Standing Rock.
Tackling climate change is about resisting every fossil fuel project, but more than that, it’s about system change. The capitalist system is fused to fossil fuels.
Mass movements have always been the way to make substantial change – building unions, ending apartheid, winning civil rights and more. The working class is the largest, most powerful force in society, both in numbers and also in the operation of every sector of the economy. It takes workers to grow food, bake bread, run hospitals, make and ship goods and staff the stores. Essential workers are essential – bosses are not.
Workers have the power to hit the capitalists where it hurts – in their profits. A major oil spill in Vancouver harbour would be ecologically and economically devastating: the City of Vancouver estimated the cost at $1.2 billion. To protect jobs, health and the environment, a general strike of workers and students is entirely justified and would have a huge impact on the bosses’ profits. This is the power needed to tackle climate change.
A Jobs and Climate Plan Needed
The bosses peddle the lie that jobs and the environment are in conflict. There are no jobs on a devastated planet. But it is capitalism that destroys jobs, not environmentalists. Bosses halved forestry jobs in BC over 30 years. The TMX pipeline will provide 90 full-time jobs when completed – the same money could provide 100,000 job/years in renewable energy.
Crucial to winning mass support, especially of workers, for ending fossil fuels is guaranteeing good, well-paid, secure jobs. That requires the public ownership of the wealth of society with democratic planning. Many, especially young people, do not have good jobs now; instead they work in the gig economy, in McJobs, in dead-end, soul-destroying occupations.
There are more jobs in renewable energy than in carbon. There is plenty of work to re-build the environment, build good urban public transit and efficient long-distance freight and passenger rail, re-fit buildings, and convert to renewable energies of wind, water, solar and geo-thermal. All these jobs – in design, manufacture, installation and maintenance – are skilled and rewarding. Society also needs more carers – teachers, nurses, support workers, etc. – and they need to be well paid and treated with respect.
A socialist society might not have 57 varieties of ketchup or so many assorted gizmos. But products would be made to last and to be repaired, instead of breaking after a few short years and being thrown in the dump. People would have security of their home, their health care, their children’s future and their old age. The work week would be shorter, and work would be much more enjoyable, rewarding and healthy.
That vision of a better world in work and leisure with a healthy planet is the vision of socialism. It is much more attractive than capitalism’s climate hell and poverty wages. That is the program that can win the struggle to stop climate disaster. That is the program of Socialist Alternative. If you agree, join us.
