01.06.09
Hothouse earth
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ISR Issue 62, November-December 2008
Hothouse Earth
Capitalism, climate change, and the fate of humanityBy CHRIS WILLIAMS
Part One of a two-part article.
Chris Williams is a physics and chemistry teacher based on New York City. He is active in the antiwar movement and is vice president of his adjunct professor’s union at Pace University.
IT IS no exaggeration to say that the generation growing up today will be, in all likelihood, the last to know climate stability. Nor is it doom-mongering to argue that if humanity continues on its present course, effecting only minor technological changes over the next ten to twenty years, civilization on anything like the current scale cannot be sustained.
A world economic system predicated on relentless expansion, devouring increasing amounts of raw materials and energy, has produced a whole series of environmental threats: species extinction, air and water pollution, genetically modified organisms, desertification, deforestation, soil depletion, and the increasing possibility of nuclear warfare, to name only a few.1 However, the most urgent and all-encompassing threat is global climate change. Among the problems scientists say climate change will bring: rising sea levels submerging island and coastal areas, crop failures, droughts and floods, more extreme and frequent hurricanes, as well as a 20 to 50 percent reduction in planetary species. Indeed, even the most recent scientific estimates seem to be underrating the pace of change.2 Worldwide carbon dioxide emissions rose faster between 2000 and 2004 than in the worst-case scenario reported by the United Nations (UN) in the middle of 2007.3 And despite all the rhetoric about implementing more benign and less-polluting energy technologies and the hype about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol-the summit of world leaders that made a commitment to reduce greenhouse gases-CO2 emissions rose faster in the first years of the twenty-first century (3.1 percent per year) than they did in the 1990s (1.1 percent).4 This means that even some of the more alarming predictions about the effects of climate change may actually be underestimates.
While there remain some unreconstructed climate change deniers, the overwhelming scientific consensus has become harder and harder to ignore, as have new and unusual weather patterns and warming trends. The once majestic polar bear, reduced to starvation due to dwindling Sea Ice in the Arctic, is only the latest forlorn poster child for the forthcoming global ecocide that human civilization is visiting upon the Earth. Over the past few years, major reports in Time magazine, the Economist, and the Nation have outlined the threats associated with climate change.5 Even the Pentagon has gotten in on the action; its 2003 report, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,”6 foresees a fortress America with walls erected against a rising tide of Latin-American migrants fleeing ecological disaster and stepped up policing of what it predicts will be a more war-prone world.
In a tactical shift-born of experience combating the environmental movement’s demands for government regulation in the 1970s and witnessing Philip Morris’s failed efforts to deny the negative health effects of tobacco-many corporations have switched from a policy of outright denial to one of convincing us that they, too, can be green. Several of the major corporations previously pumping enormous funds into organizations intent on denying climate change, such as the environmentally friendly sounding Global Climate Coalition,7 have largely-though not completely-switched their millions to campaigns designed to “greenwash” even the most polluting industries.
Millions of people around the world have seen Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and been shocked by the climate demons called forth by humanity’s reckless and relentless burning of fossil fuels. Yet trying to pick apart all the controversies swirling around this science-based yet highly political debate is complicated enough without having to put up with the shameless self-promotion of Al Gore as the latter-day reincarnation of Rachel Carson.8
This article will attempt to delineate the main contours of global warming and climate change, what the near- and longer-term future will potentially hold in store, and what can still be done to avert a calamitous and irreversible journey into global climate instability. Some prominent environmentalists, such as James Lovelock, author of The Gaia Hypothesis and The Revenge of Gaia, argue that it is already too late to make significant changes.9 Others believe there is still time to avoid planetary meltdown. However, we are at such a precipitous point, having done essentially nothing for so long, that swift, decisive action of a revolutionary nature is now required. This cannot mean replacing oil and coal with nuclear energy, which has its own potentially catastrophic environmental problems. Nor can we accept the Pentagon’s apocalyptic vision of fortress United Stated vsersus the rest of the world.
Solving the problem of global warming requires understanding the relationship between capitalism and the environment, examining the solutions on offer within the framework of the system, and determining whether those solutions are up to the task of preventing a runaway greenhouse effect. The world system of capitalism has been, and will continue to be, largely impotent in the face of climate change, not because there are evil, uneducated, backward individuals in power-though this is arguably true in many cases-but because capitalism’s own social relations prevent effective solutions from being realized. The blind, unplanned drive to accumulate that is the hallmark of capitalist production-the profit motive-has created the problem of climate change, not individuals’ profligate natures or overpopulation. Therefore, the system of economic production and distribution needs to be transformed or we will be living on a much less hospitable planet.
Full: http://www.isreview.org/issues/62/feat-hothouseearth.shtml