Last week, climate scientists confirmed that our planet has permanently crossed a climate change tipping point when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reached 400 parts per million (ppm). There is scientific consensus that the climate change tipping point—the point at which climate change is irreversible—lies between 350 and 400 ppm, 350 representing conservative estimates that assume a more fragile climate and 400 assuming a more flexible and durable climate.
Crossing 400 ppm therefore leaves no doubt that our planet has passed the climate change tipping point, even given the most generous assumptions about the recoverability of the climate situation. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had reached levels this high was 4.5 million years ago, during the Neogene Period—before humans existed as a species. At these carbon dioxide levels, climate change cannot be reversed, since the regular checks on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are either no longer adequate or even have reduced impact.
Phytoplankton, for example, are one of the most significant converters of carbon dioxide into oxygen. While this process is usually associated with trees and forests, phytoplankton make the oceans the single most significant factor in reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Given the rise in carbon dioxide levels, global temperatures can now be expected to rise 2°C over the baseline that has hosted human life. At that point, the rise in global temperatures causes a corresponding rise in ocean temperatures, triggering a series of chain reactions that result in more acidic oceans. Because phytoplankton cannot adapt to more acidic waters, they die off and release the carbon in their bodies, causing the oceans to switch from a massive absorbers of carbon dioxide into massive emitters of carbon dioxide.
Chain reactions such as these generally spring into effect around 2°C warming. At this point, tundra loss also causes the land to emit stored greenhouse gasses, formerly trapped under the frozen surface. Rain pattern changes due to higher temperatures cause forest tree loss, reducing their carbon sink effect. Rising sea levels cause the earth’s surface to absorb more heat, since water absorbs more heat than reflective ice.
We are facing a crisis. The latest numbers show not only that climate change is here, but that runaway climate change is here. The fact that we are today already facing a runaway climate catastrophe means we are also facing all that brings with it: devastating crop failure, inland drought, coastal flooding, extreme weather and rising sea levels. Taken together, humankind faces perhaps its greatest test: mitigating and surviving the sixth mass extinction.
What can be done?
It is common for revolutionary socialists to pose the question, “What is to be done?” It is a question posed from a position of authority and power; we are the movement of the producers, the people who make society run. It begs the question of the correct course of action in particular circumstances.
In the present circumstances, the question, “What is to be done?” can read more like, “What can be done?” In the past week since Scripps Institution of Oceanography discovered the new carbon dioxide levels, cynical headlines like “Enjoy Earth While it Lasts” have spread like bats in the evening sky. Climate cynicism—a belief that we are living in the last days of Earth—is an enemy to climate action. Why would anyone act on climate change if we cynically say that we are living in the end times for our planet and species?
While the gravity of the problem is obvious, and any solution to it would need to be comprehensive, rapid and decisive, the best chapters of human history are times when peoples have been similarly imperiled. The heroic Soviet, French and Italian resistance to fascism were the decisive forces to end the Holocaust before the complete extermination of Jews, Roma, LGBTQ people and other oppressed peoples under Nazi rule. The Vietnamese people united in struggle against, first the French Empire, and then against the United States at a time when the United States was prepared to wage war against the only other world super power. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, had access to almost no major industrial base and could only rely on the resolve of the people in resisting imperialism.
What binds these struggles together is more than the level of heroism and sacrifice necessary to overcome these immense challenges. The essence of each—the basic driving principle behind them—is the centrality of class struggle. Nazism represented the most backwards and militarized sections of the German ruling class, but they were defeated by communists all over Europe and especially by the Soviet Red Army. The Vietnamese mobilized the whole Vietnamese people—mostly peasants—against the most powerful capitalist empire in history.
Climate change too requires a massive class uprising. It is impossible that capitalism can respond as comprehensively and rapidly as the situation demands. The system built on infinite profits alone—not meeting needs, not safeguarding the people and planet—cannot rescue life on Earth. Even absent climate catastrophe and all the shortages, supply disruptions, infrastructure destruction and crop failures it brings with it, capitalism cannot provide for the basic needs of people. Even in the United States, the richest country in human history, we have tens of thousands of homeless people, people facing shutoffs for their water, gas and electricity, hungry children and other basic features of scarcity even though we live amid plenty.
Put another way, capitalism is failing to provide for people’s basic needs now, and it is the worst kind of naiveté to believe that somehow capitalism can absolve us of the pollution it generated. This means that while any of the reduction plans put forth at climate summits, like the Paris Climate Agreement last year, are welcome since action is so long overdue, they are absurdly inadequate.
The only rapid and comprehensive economic transformations in modern history have been socialist revolutions. The Soviet Union transformed Russia from one of the most underdeveloped regions of the world to the first or second most powerful in the world just 30 years after its revolution. Cuba today now feeds, clothes, shelters and employs its whole population, in spite of the U.S. blockade and a severe shortage of native natural resources. Both countries have only been able to do so due to economic planning, which is irreconcilable with capitalist competition for profit and resources.
Socialism is life
Without a revolution to win socialism, today’s millennials will face the beginnings of the greatest catastrophe in human history. But victory is possible. We are today in the midst of a period of significant unrest and rebellion. Native Americans’ struggle to defeat the Dakota Access Pipeline and defend their nations’ sovereignty over their land is today one of the major social movements in the United States. The Movement for Black Lives against police terrorism is one of the most significant uprisings in the U.S. history. The fight for a living wage is a defining dividing line in this year’s election only because of low-wage workers’ strikes, walk-outs, slowdowns and other actions to demand a decent living.
Many have dared to struggle and win against great odds before and continue to do so today, in other words. There has been talk by many politicians on the need to declare war on climate change, but a war on climate change without a war on capitalism is absurd. It is a blood transfusion to a bleeding patient. Capitalism has declared war on the peoples of the world first by exploiting and oppressing us and now by adding our extinction.
Today, an immediate and complete cessation of fossil fuels is necessary, along with a global economic plan to meet people’s needs using the already-developed industries of the developed countries such as the United States to compensate for the colonial underdevelopment of most of the world. Only a revolution in the developed countries can fulfill this need, although revolutions in formerly-colonized and oppressed countries, such as Nepal, can help accelerate a global revolution; whether the revolutionary initiative takes hold in the developing and oppressed countries or in the centers of world capitalism, global revolution is imperative. Moreover, technological development to manage the climate crisis, including measures to protect coral reefs and to eventually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas content, are needed on a scale not possible under capitalism, which cannot immediately profit in such massive investments. Rationalizing food production to prioritize sustainability and efficiency is essential, especially minimizing long-distance food shipments and prioritizing local production.
Ultimately, joining the movement for revolution against the cause of climate change and for an economic reorganization of the economy to directly respond to and plan for the needs of people and the planet is the only solution. We cannot stay passive: joining the revolutionary socialist movement is self-defense, and we are already under attack.
