The last weeks have witnessed long-standing temperature records tumbling repeatedly by repeated heat waves in Ireland and the UK making it hard to deny the reality of climate change. Across the EU authorities have had to deal with melted tarmac and buckled rail tracks and estimate 10,000 ‘excess deaths’ occurred as a result.
Met offices and climate scientists have said these are not a random act of nature but a direct consequence of climate change. The super El-Nino weather event declared earlier this year was expected to give rise to heat waves in the northern hemisphere but its effects are far from over. Temperatures in the east Pacific ocean continue to surge.
Aside from their scientific cause, these heat waves are emblematic of the crisis in capitalism. A system with an insatiable need to burn fossil fuels to generate ever more profit is poisoning the climate and creating extreme weather events that spare no one but which hit hardest the poorest and most vulnerable.
Environmental crisis – the legacy of capitalism
For centuries, the bourgeois class built their wealth on primitive accumulation from domestic theft and indenture as well as superprofits from colonies and slavery. They continue to profit from the modern and globalised industrial and financialised economy. At every step of the way, has been industrial-scale extraction and burning of carbon creating the most rapid increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in earth’s history.
The solutions offered by the capitalist class to a problem they created are, of course, no solution.
The last twenty years have witnessed countless international agreements and conferences to discuss and plan for carbon credit markets, green-washing schemes like carbon offsets and green finance and the roll out of ‘climate plans’ without no input from the workers whose lives will be affected by them. The rise of the far-right and the breakdown of the old international order have added outright withdrawal from climate agreements, delays and even retreat from net zero commitments to the mix.
All the while, the capitalists have continued to pump ever more methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – and the profits have kept rolling in.
Class politics and climate change
Globally the billionaire, and now trillionaire, class are buying themselves escapes in ‘future-proofed’ locations while millionaires build and retreat to air-conditioned penthouses and private gardens. Working people – delivery drivers, warehouse pickers, construction workers, care home staff – have no option however but to continue to work in excessive heat, without shade or aircon, without adequate water, often in precarious gig-economy contracts that deny sick pay.
Decades of austerity has left public housing, care homes and health facilities being concrete greenhouses without adequate ventilation or air conditioning. The elderly, the homeless, the isolated, the reserve army of labour – all those surplus to capital’s requirements – suffer and die without remark.
This is not just a climate emergency. It is a heightened form of class war, intensified by a mode of production that treats air, soil, water and human endurance as costs to be externalised.
Rail tracks buckle not because of extreme weather but because privatized infrastructure prioritizes shareholder dividends over maintenance. Workers suffer and die in the heat because governments in the pocket of big business refuse to pass laws to compel employers to put in place protections or mitigations.
A socialist alternative
The heatwaves expose the lie of carbon budgets and markets and all the other forms of capitalist green-washing. It confirms that survival requires common ownership of energy, transport, housing and the big industries.
We need a planned economy, democratically controlled to reduce emissions not through market gimmicks designed to make even more money for the billionaire class. We must end the dominance of production for profit entirely.
Instead of capitalist policies which seek to make working class people pay the price for a crisis they didn’t cause – and one they cannot afford to escape – socialism would deliver a genuine Just Transition.
Decided democratically, socialist planning would support workers in outdated, polluting or non-socially beneficial sectors to be retrained and reskilled – at full pay – and allowing them to build the industries of a future socialist green alternative. With accelerating ecological breakdown increasingly manifest before our eyes, there is an urgent need for work to commence to restore our environment, create sustainable production and put in place mitigations to ensure resilience and survival despite the changes which are now unavoidable.
As the mercury rises, so must class consciousness. Either we break with capital, or we burn under it.
