It sounds like the lead-in to a comedy routine. On June 27, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill stating that global warming is a “reality.” The bill passed 272-155.
One can only suppose that the polar bears that drowned while trying to swim between melting ice caps feel validated.
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The bill has not yet been debated in the Senate. The topper is that the White House has threatened to veto the $27.6 billion bill, which would increase federal investments in basic research on climate change and establish a new scientific commission on the subject.
Global warming is no joke, of course. Nor is it anything new. Congress is late to even acknowledge the issue. Tackling it seriously is not in the cards for the imperialist legislative body.
Workers in the United States and the rest of the world, however, are increasingly feeling the heat. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently stated that working-class people worldwide would suffer first from the predicted increases in temperatures, rainfall, and extremes like drought and flooding that will be caused by global warming.
“There’ll be two types of impacts on poor and the hungry—firstly, the increases in temperature because we’ve predicted an increase in heat waves. This increase has health implications,” Pachauri told journalists.
“The other major impact would be on agriculture.” He noted that much of the world “lives in rural areas and the bulk of them are in developing countries,” he added.
Pachauri emphasized that even in European nations with well-developed healthcare systems, ill and elderly people have struggled with heat waves in recent years.
Similarly, an increase in summertime heat waves from global warming could mean more deaths among Americans each year, a study by Harvard researchers suggests. Heat waves triggered a 5.7 percent increase in deaths, especially among the elderly and people with heart disease, according to Dr. Mercedes Medina-Ramon of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her colleague Joel Schwartz.
In addition, a recent paper issued by the European Union warned that climate change will cause water shortages in the Mediterranean, flash floods along the Rhine, and extremely hot summers in Europe.
“Risks for damage and disruption due to storms and floods, but also due to heat waves, fires and landslides, are generally expected to increase,” warned the EU Environmental Commission.
In Asia, the World Health Organization has warned that global warming has the potential to trigger a health crisis. “Increasing temperatures are among the variables that affect malaria, and the disease is emerging and re-emerging in places where it did not exist before, or for a long time,” said Shigeru Omi, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific.
The mosquito-borne disease had been found in the highlands of Papua New Guinea this year, he added, after reemerging in South Korea in late 1990. Rising temperatures had also driven a surge in dengue fever in Asia, Omi said.
Long story made short: climate change is a serious problem for the entire planet.
Amid all the reports and resolutions coming from the various agencies and institutions, there is no one pointing to the real culprit—unchecked capitalist industrial development based on fossil fuels. Nor do any of these experts tell the truth that a socialist planned economy is the only way to address the environmental crisis faced by the world today.
