For a Socialist Plan for Jobs and a Healthy Planet
In October, many of Canada’s forests are full of red, orange and yellow leaves. The air is cool, and the rains have returned. All a welcome relief from the summer of hell. Then, the woods were a blaze of reds, oranges and yellow — but of flames, not autumn leaves. The soils were parched as much of western Canada is locked in a drought. There were days of scorching temperatures.
Nearly 18 million hectares of forest have burned so far in this year’s fire season, which started in May. This is an area the size of Washington State and 2.5 times higher than the previous record. By mid-September the fires had released 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide; that is more than the UK total of 353 million metric tons in 2021. Over 200,000 people had to evacuate their homes. Toxic smoke from the fires blanketed cities in Canada and the US for months. There were days when cities in Canada and the US had the worst air quality in the world. When New York was covered in smog, the New York Post had a headline “Blame Canada,” a more accurate headline would have been “Blame Big Oil.” At the end of September, there were still 800 forest fires burning.
In between the fires there were flash floods. The area around Edison, Alberta was evacuated twice in June, once due to fires and then days later due to flooding. The Halifax area was inundated twice, in July and again in August, leaving four people dead. In September, Hurricane Lee battered and drenched parts of Atlantic Canada, leaving over 100,000 people without power.
Hottest Summer on Record
This summer of hell was all across the northern hemisphere as July was the hottest month ever, and August and September the hottest ever for those months. September was 0.50C hotter than the previous record, a huge jump. One scientist described it as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”
South Asia was hit by a heat wave in April. In China, July temperatures reached a new record of over 520C, followed by record rain. Beijing had the most rain in a day in 140 years, and massive floods that claimed at least 62 lives.
Forest fires burned around the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Tunisia and Algeria. Lahaina in Hawaii burned to the ground.
Derna in Libya was devastated when torrential rains swept away the city centre and took at least 10,000 lives. Two dams burst, releasing a wall of water because of the heavy rain and government failure as the gangsters who run Libya (in power since NATO bombed Libya in 2011) pocket all the money allocated to repair the dams.
Now as summer arrives in the southern hemisphere the heat wave rolls on. Already climate scientists are predicting that in Australia “summer is going to be brutal.” Spring arrived in Brazil with scorching heat, with places hitting over 400C, so hot that one person commented that, “even Lucifer was using a fan! He couldn’t bear the heat either!”
Climate change is stressing the world’s agriculture. The world’s oceans are getting hotter; ocean surface temperature in August was the highest ever recorded, 1.030C above the historic normal. This is killing sea life, or making animals move towards the poles or into deeper, colder water, impacting other species and fishing. The 2021 heat dome over the coast of BC killed some 1 billion marine animals.
Extreme heat is killing people. The hot summer of 2022 caused some 61,000 premature deaths in Europe. BC’s heat dome in 2021, with temperatures above 400C, killed 619 people in one week. Pollution from forest fires is estimated to cause 340,000 premature deaths every year around the world.
For years there have been warnings that climate change would bring this devastation. The warnings are that it will get worse unless there is a dramatic change of course. Yet big business and their politicians are accelerating down this highway to hell as they pump out more fossil fuels.
Profiting While the World Burns
Emperor Nero was famously criticized for “fiddling while Rome burned.” This is nothing compared to the fossil fuel companies today. In 2022, the profits of the world’s oil and gas companies reached US$4 trillion, more than double 2021’s profits.
The banks also are riding the gravy train of profits from destruction. The 60 largest banks invested $669 billion in fossil fuels in 2022. Royal Bank of Canada, the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuel development in 2022, invested $41 billion. This is profitable: RBC’s gross profits were $41.4 billion in the year ending July 31, 2023. RBC and the RCMP showed their true faces when they threw Indigenous leaders out of the RBC annual meeting. RBC is an outstanding hypocrite as it has stated that “climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time.”
These profits are from the lost lives, the scorched forests, the devastated agriculture, the flooded farms and cities, the loss of biodiversity and more. It is blood money and should be confiscated to start to repair the damage caused. Instead, governments around the world continue to subsidize fossil fuel corporations!
Government Enablers of Crimes against Humanity
In response to the present climate disaster, never mind the future, governments may make some speeches and go to a world conference, but in practice they are doubling down on climate change.
Sunak, Prime Minister of Britain, has promised to “max out” oil and gas production. Even politicians like Biden and Trudeau, who claim they understand climate change, are pushing the pedal to the metal to increase fossil fuel production.
Trudeau has directed billions of public dollars, including $30.9 billion to build the government-owned Trans Mountain pipeline, as well as RCMP enforcers, to ensure construction of new pipelines. His environment minister, former Greenpeace activist Steven Guilbeault, approved a massive new deep-sea oil drilling project that will last decades into the future. Canada will increase oil production by 10 percent in 2024!
In the 2020 election, Biden pledged to stop all new oil extraction on federal lands. In 2023 he approved the massive Willow project on federal lands in northern Alaska. He has also approved further drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, site of the devastating Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 that killed 11 people and caused the worst oil spill in US waters.
Corporations, such as RBC, engage in willful greenwashing. Capitalism’s priority is maximum profits. They hide behind talk of jobs, but apart from short-term construction, the fossil fuel industry is shedding jobs. Alberta has lost nearly 50,000 jobs in oil and gas since 2014. The new jobs are firefighters, first responders, house builders and others who respond to climate disasters, mostly paid for by our taxes. Judge big business and politicians by their actions, not their words. They are failing humanity.
Another COP-out Coming
Every year since 1995, politicians and big business, and sometimes environmentalists, meet to discuss action on climate change — the Conference of the Parties, COP. However, the results are meagre, with very few concrete actions. Total world emissions of C02 from burning fossil fuels and industry were the highest ever in 2022.
This year’s COP is meeting in United Arab Emirates, the sixth largest exporter of oil in the world, chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the world cannot rely on big business and politicians to tackle climate change and other looming ecological disasters.
The climate juggernaut, driven by capitalism, will not be stopped without changing the driver, by ending capitalism. This seems a daunting task, but the alternative is to give up and accept a climate hell.
Some draw pessimistic conclusions from this undeniably grim situation — there is nothing to do, and humanity is doomed. This is expressed in the idea of “capitalist realism,” that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”
Capitalism has only existed for a few hundred years of humanity’s tens of thousands of years. Its triumph was the result of revolutions — revolutions that overthrew feudalism in Europe. Capitalism can also be overthrown, and it must be for the sake of humanity and the planet.
Resistance
People are refusing to accept capitalism’s highway to hell or to accept capitalism’s lie that it is the only possible system. Humanity will not go gently into that night of climate disaster or despair. Indigenous and tribal peoples in the Americas, Australia, India, and Africa, and brave activists around the world, are all working to change direction. Some have given their lives in this struggle.
There have been some victories. The Northern Gateway pipeline across BC and Energy East to the Atlantic were stopped. There have been big environment demos in Europe including 60,000 in London and 35,000 against a coal mine in Germany. New York saw 75,000 on the streets on September 17 and there were over 700 rallies around the world that weekend.
Building the Socialist Alternative
The working class is the vast majority of humanity, producing most of the world’s goods, food and wealth and providing the services of society. We have the power to remove the capitalist class from the driver’s seat.
A convergence of the climate movement with working-class struggles offers a way forward. Already, climate activists call for strikes and argue for “system change not climate change” and that “climate struggle is class struggle.” Climate activists have joined picket lines.
Immediate calls to action should include ending all government subsidies of fossil fuel companies and all investment in fossil fuels by public organizations and workers’ pension funds, with the money redirected to good green jobs. Some have talked of a climate action program similar to the direction of industry during WWII. However, to do this for the climate and jobs requires the public ownership of the key sectors of the economy, with democratic control and planning. This would allow the full use of society’s resources and human skills to transition to clean energy, upgrade buildings to save energy, create high quality public transit and long-distance freight, and develop green and healthy cities. It would also allow for global cooperation to meet the pressing human needs in Canada and internationally. There would be many good union jobs in the planned transformation of society.
We can create a world in which life is infinitely richer and natural resources are not wasted. Workers of the world unite! We have our only home to save!
