Solving the Climate Crisis Will Require Revolution

Nothing Less

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Iowa City — at least I thought it was until I reflected on how ridiculously warm it was for a Midwestern December and I looked up to see not one or two but seven or more different airplane jet streams up in the flyover sky.

The reflection and the sightings are related.  The planet is being turned into an overcooked Greenhouse Gas Chamber by the reckless mass extraction and burning of fossil fuels and air travel is one of the leading per capita carbon burners. “Around 2.4% of global CO2 emissions come from aviation. Together with other gases and the water vapor trails produced by aircraft,” the BBC reported last year, “the industry is responsible for around 5% of global warming” – even though less than half of people fly annually in wealthy nations.

The warnings about the grave existential danger that is “anthropogenic” (really capitalogenic) climate change naturally get more grave with each passing climate report. Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a terrifying study warning that the next five years are nearly certain to bring a “surge” in average global temperature taking us past the 1.5 C degrees (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) tipping point that science has long told humanity not to breach if it wants to enjoy a decent future. We will hit this extreme thermal danger zone earlier than previously expected because the world capitalist system continues to recklessly burn coal, oil, and gas on a mass scale.

No nation has done more to create this crisis, the biggest issue of our or any time (there’s no social justice, beauty, science, poetry, sport, and love on a dead planet), than the United States of America.  It’s the entire global capitalist order that is pushing humanity over the climate cliff, to be sure, but the American role in creating this nightmare is unmatched. America is First when it comes to historical carbon pollution.  Its vast military empire is the leading institutional carbon emitter on the planet. It has the world’s highest per-capita carbon emission rate. And now, under the lead of the supposed climate-friendly US president, the imperialist warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden, The New York Times reports that:

“American oil fields are gushing again, helping to drive down fuel prices but also threatening to undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions…Only three years after U.S. oil production collapsed during the pandemic, energy companies are cranking out a record 13.2 million barrels a day, more than Russia or Saudi Arabia. The flow of oil has grown by roughly 800,000 barrels a day since early 2022, and analysts expect the industry to add another 500,000 barrels a day next year…The United States Is Producing Historic Levels of Crude Oil…. ‘We’re achieving energy security and reducing inflation by leveraging high-emitting, carbon-intensive oil production,’ said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University. ‘We’re going to need to address that conflict.’…The United States now exports roughly four million barrels a day, more than any member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries except Saudi Arabia…Most of the new U.S. oil production is coming from the Permian Basin, which straddles Texas and New Mexico. There are also some new projects and expansions in Alaska and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico…The bonanza has helped American consumers. This week the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.25 a gallon, 25 cents below what it cost a year earlier and nearly $1.80 below the record price set in June 2022…”

According to the Times, “American oil production is hitting record levels, delivering economic and foreign policy benefits but putting environmental goals further out of reach.” Wow: “putting environmental goals further out of reach”? Try “putting human survival in ever more grave peril.”

The Times correctly notes that Biden – let’s call him “Ecocide Joe” – has  betrayed his climate-friendly campaign promises by “hector[ing] oil companies to increase production in an effort to drive down prices for consumers,” by “approv[ing] a large drilling project in Alaska over the objections of environmentalists and a small number of offshore oil and gas permits.”

Okay. True dat.  But the Times leaves two things out of the story. First, that’s who Joe Biden is. He’s a deceptive and disingenuous corporate imperialist with a depressingly long record of lying to the  American people. (For a review of his ugly record of fabrication and fibbing through the summer of 2019, see my essay: “No Joe: On Character, Quality, and Authenticity,” CounterPunch, September 20, 2019).

Second, as the Environment Writing Group of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA correctly argues, it's not really about who the POTUS is, it'about the capitalism:

“The sobering and inconvenient truth is  that it is IMPOSSIBLE for this system to interact sustainably with the environment. Fossil fuels are poured into the foundations of capitalism-imperialism, and to reduce and abolish their use with the urgency, and on the scale and scope, needed would require nothing less than a revolution to overthrow this system and replace it with a radically different, liberating, and ecologically sustainable socialist economic-social system.”

Indeed. The climate catastrophe will NOT be averted under the profits system. 

Let me repeat that: The climate catastrophe will NOT be averted under capitalism.

This is for at least six reasons:

* Capitalism is based on constant expand or die competition between and among capitalist firms and states, competition that prevents them from leaving what’s left of the world’s fossil fuels to rival companies, governments, and militaries.

* Capitalism is too strongly and deeply invested in fossil fuel extraction, refining, and burning to divest in time to avert catastrophe.

* Capitalism itself must ceaselessly expand, commodifying and polluting an ever-larger share of the planet to maintain a minimally decent average rate of profit.

* The are still more than enough fossil fuels left on the planet for capitalism to extract and burn to the point where runaway warming becomes irreversible.

* Capitalism has no serious interest in the long-term common good: it is a socio-pathological system dedicated to no power higher than the short-term bottom line,  private accumulation, and profit.

* The world capitalist system is broken up into more than 200 sovereign states, something that militates against the coordinated, species-wide, and planetary climate (and broader environmental) action required to avert disaster.

The great left intellectual Noam Chomsky says that we can’t wait for socialist transformation to solve the rapidly moving climate crisis. It will have to be solved under capitalism, he claims, arguing for a Green New Deal.

But the notion of solving the climate crisis under capitalism is about as realistic as the notion of 60-something five foot nine me becoming a starting power forward in the National Basketball Association. And please see this important RCP Environment Writing Group essay on “Five Reasons the ‘Green New Deal’ is a Misleading and Dangerous Part of the Problem.”

A common left intellectual maxim says that “people today can more readily imagine the end of life itself than then they can imagine the end of capitalism.” If that’s so, then “people” better reconfigure their imaginations quickly. Capitalism is the end of life itself and it is moving humanity over the cliff at an ever-accerlating pace.

If you liked this essay you might also went to read Paul Street, “Too Bourgeois: A Review of Atlantic Council and Guggenheim Fellow and Nice Guy Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First,”  The Paul Street Report, September 14, 2023.