07) ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The Young Communist League of Canada will hold its Central Convention in Toronto from May 23 to 25. This article is an excerpt from the Political Resolution for the convention, online at rebelyouthblogspot.com.
Environmental problems are increasingly urgent crises that are shaping are struggles while operating on a global level.
A major danger is the escalating problem of global pollution, which is driven forward by the very wastefulness that the unplanned capitalist system encourages. Mines, industrial estates, agriculture, smelters and ore processing, pesticide manufacture and storage are all point sources of mercury, lead, arsenic, chromium, and radio nuclides as well as sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulates. The March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is one tragic example which lead to 500 disaster‑related deaths, and released a large amount of radioactive material into the Pacific. Some of this radioactive material is now is the massive oceanic trash vortexes - gyres of floating garbage, toxic sludge and tiny plastic debris, with two in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic and one in the Indian Ocean - are poisoning marine life and the food chain. All these pollutants are sources for major health problems like cancer and death, especially in children. Industrial and urban discharge, runoff and spills and air pollutants affects the health of hundreds of millions of people, equivalent to a global disease epidemic. Water pollution alone causes an estimated 14,000 deaths a day, which is equivalent to the city of Peterborough dying each week. The poorest countries by far have the worst crises.
Scientists are also warning of the steady erosion of species and biodiversity caused by habitat destruction, invasive species, over‑exploitation, genetic pollution and climate change. We are talking here about the results of millions of years of evolution being wiped out in an irreversible catastrophe that has significant impact on humans.
If youth and progressive forces had needed further proof about the relationship between social‑economic crises and the environment, the world food price crisis of 2007‑2008 clearly showed their interconnection. The United Nations (UN) is still warning of a new era of rising prices and spreading hunger, with world grain reserves at their lowest currently since the 1970s and continued danger of low harvests and drought. Food prices as well as deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity, food production, and environmental racism were among a host of environmental problems our 26th Central Convention identified, linking to the juggernaut of climate change. In fact, each of the last three decades has been successively warmer, with 1983 to 2013 likely the warmest 30 year period for the northern hemisphere in the last 1,400 years.
News headlines are replete with climate change‑related events like super Typhoon Haiyan last winter, or that Australia has experienced such extreme heat that it had to add a new colour, purple, to its temperature map last January. In fact, last autumn a UN scientific body, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), announced they now had "unequivocal" evidence linking climate change to "human activity" and that the world faced a catastrophe in two or three decades if there are not drastic cuts in GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions.
Around the same time, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii announced atmospheric levels of the main GHG, Carbon Dioxide or CO2, are now at 400 parts per million up from less than 350 ppm just fifty years ago and approaching the danger zone of 425‑450 ppm and a potentially deadly increase of global temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius. CO2 levels were last this high about 3‑5 million years ago, a long‑term record which shows how sensitive the earth's climate is to CO2 levels. As temperatures rise, unpredictable feedback loops could begin such as what scientists call the "Arctic Methane bomb" when ice sheets melt releasing that powerful GHG in huge quantities.
The crisis we described four years ago as "one of the foremost pressing environmental problems" has thus gotten much worse.
By drastic, the IPCC is floating proposals such as keeping two‑thirds of known fossil fuel resources in the ground. Corporate economists figure such government implemented climate change reforms could trigger another economic crisis as the now‑inflated value of such stranded oil, gas and coal resources would collapse. This "carbon bubble" is both a pretext for fear mongering and foot‑dragging, and an objective contradiction the capitalists resolve the climate change crisis, which is reflected in the complete failure of negotiated agreements so far.
Last year marked the 25th anniversary of a groundbreaking 1988 international policy conference on "the changing atmosphere" in Toronto, which stated that "Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war." That conference recommended a drop of 20% below 1988 levels of GHGs by 2005. However, four years later, the UN Rio conference would put into motion the "Conference of the Parties"or COP process leading to the Kyoto Protocol, which set a much lower objective: only 6% below 1990 levels by 2012 and commodified GHGs, introducing the mechanism of carbon trading.
Yet even these levels have not been met and carbon trading has now been proven as totally ineffective. The 2009 fifteenth Conference of the Parties or COP‑15 in Copenhagen forecast that Kyoto was not being achieved, proposed yet again lower targets, and sharply brought forward questions like can developing countries afford to forgo industrial development? Could they control the big transnationals even if they wanted to? How would legally enforceable agreements actually be enforced? And, how can a treaty be reached when the big imperialist countries have not only violated past agreements but done a backslide?
Those youth who have found the resources to attend the COP meetings and tried to engage with the process (civil society groups and NGOs have a 1 minute speaking time allocated to participate at certain points) have found themselves not only excluded but sometimes banned for several COP conferences for their remarks. At COP‑19 in Warsaw last December, 800 members of environmental groups walked out in protest as the meeting refused to set a target schedule, and adopted "nationally determined contributions", instead of "commitments" to reduce GHGs.
The promises of reduced emissions or "mitigation" by the rich countries have not materialized while so‑called "climate aid" funds have either never come or have now dried up.
These "adaptation" plans, trying to deal with the problems created by climate change like rising water levels, were supposed to be funded by the large imperialist countries for basically the rest of the world - loosely organized into the 133‑country "Group of 77" including Brazil, Indonesia, and India as well as the Least Developed Countries group (ie. Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, Laos, etc.), the African Group, the Alliance of Small Island States (ie. the low lying islands in Micronesia, Fiji, Singapore, Seychelles, Cuba, etc) and China. China's own GHG emissions have been over 20% since 2005, when it surpassed the US as first in the world, although both on an historic and per capita basis China at of 6.2 metric tonnes per capita and 30 years of industrial growth is far behind the contributions of Canada (19.8), the US (17.6) and Japan (9.2) which have all been major industrial polluters for almost one hundred years. China is also the fourth largest producer of wind power globally and the first largest maker of wind turbines and solar panels.
From our perspective, the way forward has to recognize that capitalism created this crisis and that a clear and deep change in paradigm is necessary - not rhetorical but revolutionary in scope. The attack to the sustainability of the environment will never be truly stopped under a capitalist framework. Instead, forms of "market regulation" have resulted in a transfer of GHGs rather than any meaningful reduction. Climate justice means Canada, the US, the European Union, Japan, and major capitalist countries have the first obligation including the unrestricted transfer of eco‑friendly technologies and even climate reparations.
These major aspects of the environmental crisis and climate change cannot be resolved under the capitalist system, making the question of socialism so urgent! As we said in the editorial of the December 2013 Rebel Youth magazine, "given the global character of contemporary capitalism, struggles waged in each country must be combined to an ever greater extent with coordinated regional and global forms of struggle. An international democratic and anti‑imperialist front is urgently required ... based on the principles of peace, non‑aggression, and global disarmament; respect for the sovereignty of all states; for the equality and rights of all nations, large and small, the peaceful coexistence of different social systems, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; fair and balanced trade and economic cooperation; respect and promotion of cultural diversity; and protection of the environment." This should act as a framework for understanding our work with international youth coalitions and federations.
(The above article is from the April 16-30, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)