The world is facing an environmental crisis that is mounting day by day.
The main elements of the crisis are serious and widespread. Underlying all of them is the profit-driven capitalist economic system and the domination of the world by U.S. imperialism.
Global warming and climate change stemming from the massive combustion of fossil fuels; deforestation and the destruction of carbon dioxide-absorbing tropical forests; the weakening of the ozone layer that protects humans and other life forms from the sun’s ultraviolet rays; acid rain, which destroys lakes, forests and other forms of vegetation; destruction of top soils and expansion of deserts by predatory agricultural practices; contamination of land and surface waters through industrial dumping and excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; pollution of the oceans and seas and much more—all of these pose grave threats to billions of working people around the world. The list is hardly complete.
Historically, the material environment we live in—land, water and air—has been treated as infinitely durable. But it has always been destructible, either by natural processes or human intervention. Since the dawn of capitalism as a global system several hundred years ago, the never-ending search for profit has put growing pressure on the earth’s resources.
Environmental deterioration is built into the capitalist system. The cause of the crisis in the environment is the gap between the demands placed on the environment by the global industrial economy and the capacity of nature to meet these demands.
The recent destruction wrought by Hurricanes Rita and, in particular, Katrina, has raised questions about the immediate and long-term effects of environmental degradation on people in the United States. Many scientists and politicians agree that tropical storms are more intense and longer in duration due to global warming. But few offer any explanation about the real economic causes of global warming and how to stop it.
Hurricanes and global warming
In this year alone, hurricanes have done more damage to the United States than in the past 35 years put together. (The Independent, Sept. 25, 2005)
Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast in late August. It brought with it more than one thousand deaths and billions of dollars in destruction and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Hardest hit were working-class areas of New Orleans and Mississippi.
Hurricane Rita followed Katrina less than a month later, devastating urban and rural Texas residents only a few hundred miles away. Two hurricanes with the power of Katrina and Rita have never occurred in the same season. And the intensity of these calamitous storms is no coincidence.
Scientists increasingly attribute the rising intensity of hurricanes to global climate change. Two recent studies conclude that warmer ocean temperatures are giving hurricanes more power and duration. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado published an article in the journal “Science” on Sept. 15 linking a sharp increase in powerful hurricanes since 1975 to rising sea temperatures. Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist and professor Kerry Emanuel published similar findings in the journal “Nature” in July.
Warm ocean temperatures evaporate water into the atmosphere, which condenses and then heats the air, fueling a hurricane. Even a slight amount of heat makes a big difference in a hurricane’s strength. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sept. 16, 2005)
Katrina began as a relatively small storm that did little harm to the coast of south Florida. But it became supercharged by the warm surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
Many scientists say that the increased temperatures were caused by global warming. Human-produced greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide trap the sun’s radiation and cause global temperatures to rise. The emission of these gases comes largely from unchecked production in non-renewable, fossil fuel-based industries like coal and oil. The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 25 percent of all greenhouse gases, the most of any country.
Hurricanes like Katrina and Rita, along with other powerful storms, are products of this alarming global trend.
“The total amount of power generated by hurricanes globally over the last 30 to 50 years has increased somewhere on the order of 70 percent to 80 percent, a really big increase,” according to MIT’s Prof. Emanuel. (National Public Radio, Sept. 13)
All signs indicate that global warming will continue to make hurricanes stronger in the future. “The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the Earth’s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases.” (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
The menace of global warming does not only bring fiercer storms. As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts and more severe downpours, renews the proliferation of dangerous diseases, causes more sea and land species to die out, and brings blistering heat waves.
This summer was the hottest Arctic summer in 400 years. The arctic ice cap—roughly the size of the contiguous United States—could disappear completely within 100 years thanks to global warming. (London Daily Mail, Sept. 29, 2005)
With this unwelcome development, a host of troubles lie ahead. One of the most important is the increased flows of meltwater and icebergs from glaciers and ice sheets, leading to an accelerated rise in sea levels, which are already rising. This will pose a greater threat to coastal areas. (New York Times, Sept. 29) Whole villages in low-lying countries like Bangladesh, the Netherlands and portions of India eventually could fall into the sea. Small Pacific islands would be engulfed.
World’s coastal cities at risk
New Orleans offers an immediate example. For decades, scientists had predicted that a storm like Katrina would come and wreak havoc on the population of New Orleans.
Capitalist expansion uprooted many people from rural areas, forcing them to move to vulnerable urban areas on the coast, like New Orleans, in search of jobs. This put a new stress on the Mississippi Delta and surrounding environment. All the natural barriers that protect from the ravages of a major storm have disappeared over the past 50 years. No freshwater marshes, no forests or barrier islands remain.
In fact, the land on the coast of New Orleans is sinking into the sea at a rate of 50 acres per day. “It’s the fastest disappearing land mass on Earth,” says activist Mike Tidwell, author of “Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast.” (National Public Radio, Sept. 9)
Much like the destruction of mangroves and coral reefs in south Asia, which made way for the tourist industry and compounded the recent tsunami’s human toll, the disappearance of natural barriers in Louisiana is directly attributable to capitalism.
The drive for greater profits caused big business to expand on the Gulf Coast at the mouth of the Mississippi River, an important trading route. The region is also rich in oil.
As sea temperatures increased over the years because of global warming, the sea level did too. New Orleans, built on delta sediment, began to sink slowly as the sea rose. Thus, the floodwaters resulting from Katrina were more easily able to overcome the inadequate human-made barriers, the levees.
Now, in the wake of Katrina, a disaster caused in part by capitalism’s wear-and-tear on the environment, people moving back to the affected region face a multiplicity of environmental hazards: air and water toxicity from destroyed oil rigs, refineries and gas processing plants; food contamination; toxic soils and sediment; widespread bacteria-infected wastewater; destroyed animal and plant habitats and much more.
Increasingly powerful tropical storms in the coming years will continue to batter at-risk cities like New Orleans, threatening similar problems. Millions more oppressed people will be affected by the confluence of rising oceans and vanishing barriers.
“If you want to see what Shanghai; Gdansk, Poland; Bombay, India and New York City are all going to be obsessively dealing with 50, 75, 100 years from now, look at New Orleans, because that same sea level rise from global warming will cause all kinds of problems to cities” built on coasts around the world, notes author and activist Mike Tidwell.
U.S. imperialism: enemy of the environment
Preventing further environmental ruin is not a priority for the U.S. government or its masters in the capitalist class. The United States is the largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world. But SUV owners and individual consumers are not the main culprits. The criminals are the owners of capitalist mainstay industries.
ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, has increased its greenhouse gas emissions over the past few years. If current trends continue, the United States will have increased its carbon emissions by about 300 million tons by 2010. (Twinside.org, June 26, 2001) Researchers say that to allow the climate to halt the pace of global warming, world emissions must be cut by 70 percent.
The U.S. capitalist class, however, will not agree to cut emissions by even the smallest amount. It has refused to sign the extremely weak protocols of the Kyoto treaty on global warming, designed to reduce emissions by only 5.2 percent by 2012.
When President Bush took office, he continued the Clinton administration’s opposition to Kyoto, calling it “fundamentally flawed” because it does not include binding commitments from developing countries. But this bogus argument blames the victim—a common imperialist device. It shifts the onus onto historically underdeveloped countries instead of faulting the countries really to blame—the United States and other imperialist powers.
Revolutionary Marxists defend the right of oppressed nations, capitalist or not, to develop their own economies as they see fit. It is part of the essential right to self-determination for the oppressed. Oppressed nations should not be measured by the same environmental standards or forcibly bound by the same agreements as highly industrialized, exploiter countries. They generally do not have the same level of technology available to them. Nor can they develop it as freely. For centuries, countries like China, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Venezuela and Argentina have been colonized and super-exploited by more developed capitalist countries for profits.
To force oppressed countries to accept the same regulations as the highly developed capitalist countries would be to forever doom them to the same position of exploitation that they experience today.
Bowing to international pressure after failing to sign Kyoto, this year, several non-Kyoto countries, led by the United States, formed the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The stated goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions in the signatory countries by half by the end of the next century. They propose to do this by developing and implementing the industrial use of more environment-friendly forms of technology. But, unlike Kyoto, it sets no binding targets or deadlines. (The Age, Australia, Sept. 22, 2005)
The agreement is meant to make the U.S. government appear to care about the welfare of the environment, while not requiring big business to do anything to improve it.
Under capitalism, Kyoto and similar pacts are destined for failure. Not only will the most aggressive polluters, like the United States, not sign them, the signatory countries often fail to live up to their agreed-to standards. For example, the European Environment Agency reported in 2004 that 11 of the 15 European Union Kyoto-signers “are heading toward overshooting their emission targets, some by a substantial margin.” Although modest, the targets interfere with the unbridled expansion of capital.
The Kyoto fiasco demonstrates the inability to tackle even a narrow aspect of the looming environmental crisis within the framework of the capitalist system.
What can save the environment?
Various movements for environmental conservation are urging the U.S. government to pledge to take concrete steps to halt and, if possible, reverse global climate change. Many community groups also are opposing the racist impact of environmental decline. The tangible examples of Katrina and Rita have given these calls renewed importance.
These movements have succeeded in imposing certain limits on the more destructive depredations of uncontrolled capital throughout the years. But the protections can be undone under any pretext. The Bush administration is currently capitalizing on Katrina’s destruction as an excuse to throw out as many environmental standards as possible. This is done in the name of rebuilding and reconstruction, but the real agenda is to alleviate “unnecessary” restraints on the flow of capital.
While reform efforts are worthy and should be supported, no amount of simple reform can curb capitalism’s destructive drive. As long as people’s need for a safe and clean environment is placed beneath private profits for a handful of billionaires, further destruction is inevitable.
The capitalist class sees the natural environment as a means to an end—for profit-making and greater capital accumulation at all costs. Environmental degradation is rooted in the anarchic, unpredictable nature of the market economy. It is a necessary evil for the capitalists.
The only alternative to the waste and environmental decline inherent under capitalism is socialism—a social system based on the planned and balanced use of resources for need, not the anarchy of “free enterprise” for profit.
In the first decade following the 1917 Russian Revolution, the socialist leadership paid considerable attention to environmental conservation. An effort was made to integrate production with the laws and limits of nature. And revolutionary Cuba, with socialist leadership and planning, was the first country to adopt organic agriculture on a national scale. These viable beginnings toward truly addressing environmental deterioration were only possible because capitalism had been thoroughly defeated in those countries.
That is not to say that there have not been environmental problems in countries that have had socialist revolutions. The needs of economic development have justifiably been put above immediate environmental concerns. In other cases, poor planning led to environmental problems. But socialist planning is the only way that decisions about the environment, economic development and improved standards of living can be addressed in a creative, rational way.
A socialist planned economy is the essential tool to begin to tackle the problem of global warming and other dire environmental threats that will surely arise in the future.
Photo: Les Stone
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flooded oil refineries in the Gulf region.
Photo: Reuters/Richard Carson
