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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Lead article Capital fans global warming, puts human habitat at riskby Franklin Dmitryev Staggering as it was, the
sudden collapse of Antarctica's 720-billion-ton Larsen B Ice Shelf could not for
one minute deflect President Bush from his onslaught against all international
initiatives to rein in global warming. Nor was he fazed by scientists declaring
the collapse was "a wakeup call to expect more collapses"—including
in the France-sized Ross Ice Shelf—with "a dramatic effect on global
climate." On the contrary, Bush pressed
ahead with an assignment from oil giant ExxonMobil to oust Robert Watson as the
head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN's
scientific body on global warming. Joined by coal, electricity, and auto
companies, ExxonMobil called for a "team that can better represent the Bush
Administration interests." ExxonMobil is also credited
with having Bush withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto treaty to limit global
warming. For this environmentalists have awarded it with an international
boycott, and it is one of the charges ExxonMobil will face at a mock Crimes
Against Humanity Trial being held May 28 in Dallas. No radical, Watson is also
chief scientist of the World Bank. But what Exxon-Bush want to silence is the
international scientific consensus articulated in IPCC reports, that the globe
is warming mainly due to burning of fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas. Bush tried to evade the facts
last year by having a U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel reevaluate
the 2001 IPCC reports. Even this panel, which contained previously skeptical
scientists, had to endorse the IPCC's conclusions. As an international consensus,
the IPCC reports are more cautious and conservative than many other scientific
projections. Yet even the IPCC concluded that global warming is already having
ecological and social impacts. Current and potential impacts include: • Infectious diseases and
heat stress striking or killing more people. Currently, waterborne diseases kill
five million and malaria kills one million people yearly. With warming, diseases
spread by insects may threaten half the world's population. • Greater risk of flooding
for tens of millions of people. • Greater frequency and
severity of droughts, floods, heat waves, forest fires, avalanches, and
windstorms such as cyclones (hurricanes) and tornadoes. • Increased soil erosion,
landslides and mudslides. • Scarcer water in many
already water-scarce regions. Today, 1.1 billion people lack safe drinking water
and millions of women and children must carry water long distances daily. • Declining crop yields in
most tropical and subtropical regions, and, if temperatures climb more than a
few degrees, in the mid-latitudes. At present, more than enough food is produced
for all of humanity, but due to the world capitalist order, an estimated 790
million people in developing countries are undernourished. • Increasing species
extinctions and biodiversity loss. • Rising sea levels may
submerge many islands and inundate extensive coastal areas. A one-meter rise
would displace seven million people in India and 11 million in Bangladesh and
cut off a large proportion of cropland. Much of southern Florida would be
underwater, and all coastal countries would be affected. Moreover, the IPCC states,
"The impacts of future changes in climate extremes are expected to fall
disproportionately on the poor....The effects of climate change are expected to
be greatest in developing countries in terms of loss of life and relative
effects on investment and the economy." Much as Bush cherishes the
illusion that there is no need to face the burning question of global warming,
it is not only a future threat. It is making itself felt today. Nowhere is that
clearer than in the small South Pacific island nation Tuvalu. Five years ago, Tuvalu lost 50
hectares (150 acres) of its land during the cyclones which have been hitting it
more frequently in the past decade. Higher tides flood its islands more often.
Floods and storms are eroding more of its land now. Salt water is degrading
drinking water and cropland. Tuvalu has become the first country to plan to
evacuate its population as environmental refugees. RADICAL CLIMATE CHANGES Bush justified his rejection of
Kyoto by playing on the inevitable scientific uncertainty and the illusion that
climate change will be gradual and manageable. But another NAS study released in
December found that, rather than a gradual linear increase as assumed by the
IPCC, abrupt climate shifts have occurred repeatedly in the past 100,000 years.
The more greenhouse gases humanity pumps into the atmosphere, the more likely
"large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events" are,
drastically undermining ecosystems and human settlements. The report continues: "The
new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system has been well established
by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and
scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and
policy-makers." In the face of all this, on
Feb. 14 Bush announced his plan to do—nothing. This oily valentine to the
energy industry is part and parcel of the energy policy they wrote for him: a
drive to expand the production and use of fossil fuels and nuclear power while
giving lip service (plus some sneaky budget cuts) to conservation, efficiency,
and renewable energy. So reactionary and dangerous is Bush's energy policy that
250 scientists issued an open letter last May denouncing its misinformation and
social and environmental effects. The Bush climate plan includes
voluntary efforts only, and its "goal" is the same rate of growth in
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions as has occurred in the past decade. His
scriptwriters tried to hide this fact by inventing a new term: "greenhouse
gas intensity," which means the proportion between emissions and economic
output. As technology improves, this proportion declines, though actual
emissions keep growing. To put the meaninglessness of
this measure in perspective, consider the African country Sierra Leone, whose
devastation by armed groups has been met with indifference by the West. One of
the poorest countries in the world, Sierra Leone has among the lowest carbon
emissions per person in the world, yet its "greenhouse gas intensity"
increased by 230% during the 1990s—precisely because of the economic
devastation. The Bush non-plan was widely
denounced, not only by environmentalists who labeled it "Exxon-Mobil
Approved," but by the U.S.'s European allies. The European Union declared
its opposition, estimating the plan would allow the U.S. to increase emissions
by 33%. At the April 12-14 meeting of
G-8 environment ministers, the depth of the environmental crisis shattered the
diplomatic veneer that normally covers meetings of the rulers of the seven
richest, most technologically advanced countries, plus Russia. The Bush
administration came under sharp public critique for rejecting the Kyoto accord
on greenhouse gas emissions. European ministers declared
that climate change can only be tackled through an international treaty with
full participation by the number one greenhouse gas emitter in the world, and
they slammed Bush's alternative climate plan as "business as usual." Canada too came under fire for
backing away from Kyoto. While Canada and the U.S. succeeded in keeping it off
the formal G-8 agenda, Kyoto in fact came up in every discussion and
overshadowed all other issues. Reflecting a serious political
defeat for the U.S. and Canada, the meeting's final consensus statement referred
to the harmful "effects of climate change," affirmed "the need to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions," and even referred to the European
countries' commitment to ratifying Kyoto. GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL
CAPITAL Even by meeting in remote
Banff, Alberta, the ministers could not evade the protests that have dogged such
international summits since Seattle 1999. The environmental dimension, including
the demand for action against global warming, is an inseparable part of these
protests, in both the highly industrialized and the less technologically
developed countries. So pervasive have been the environmental struggles and the
demonstrations against global capital that this opposition is the element that
evoked this rift between the U.S. and Europe. As much as Bush distorts
scientific facts, his ideology does conform to objective reality—not the laws
of nature but the laws of capitalist society: everything is subordinate to the
accumulation of capital. Rejecting measures that might limit the growth of
production, he declared that "economic growth is the solution, not the
problem." No one has described this mentality better than Karl Marx: "Capital, which has such
"good reasons" for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers
surrounding it, allows its actual movement to be determined as much and as
little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the
human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every
stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must
come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he
himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. After me
the deluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist
nation." FROM ALARM TO PROTEST The Bush non-plan is only the
latest swindle of humanity's future. The Reagan administration sabotaged support
for greenhouse effect research. The first Bush administration gutted the climate
change treaty signed at the 1992 Earth Summit, forcing removal of binding goals
and deadlines. Industrialized countries pledged to limit carbon dioxide
emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, but actual U.S. emissions increased
by 17% in the 1990s. The uselessness of that purely voluntary treaty is what led
to the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997—but the Clinton administration led the
charge to fill Kyoto with so many loopholes that emissions would keep growing. Kyoto has also sparked overt
opposition from environmental, anti-globalization and indigenous peoples'
movements in both industrialized and developing countries. During the final
round of negotiations in Marrakech, Morocco, demonstrations were held from South
Korea to the Netherlands. Even in Marrakech, where authorities had forbidden
their planned street action and the UN denied them a table inside the conference
center, 42 Moroccan groups held their own conference, despite police harassment. From this convergence of
movements has emerged a new category of "climate justice" linking the
problems of climate change to racial justice, workers' rights and social
transformation. (See "Kyoto Treaty Scandal," December 2001 N&L.) While most of the mainstream
environmental groups see Kyoto as ineffective but still important as a
"first step" in creating institutions that will eventually become
meaningful, what is being institutionalized is a direction leading away from the
only thing that might avoid global catastrophe: a drastic cut in the use of
fossil fuels. While emissions-trading
protesters are correct to join the movements against global capital in
challenging corporate power and neoliberalism, it is still true that nothing
short of a total uprooting of capitalism can alter this society's basic
direction: accumulation of capital at the expense of both nature and humanity. Capital's destructive drive for
self-expansion is rooted in its inner nature as a system. As capital, dead labor
dominates living labor and imposes its imperative of "economic
growth"—the self-expansion of capital—at the expense of both the worker
and the natural conditions on which human society depends. A totally new direction will be established when the opposition from below realizes itself in theory and in practice as the quest for a new society where humanity is no longer driven by capitalism's destructive impulses but self-develops as free social beings within nature. |
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