The climate crisis can no longer be denied. A report from the World Meteorological Organization published this past March confirms that 2024 was the hottest year on record. It also showed that the earth’s ten hottest years on record are the last ten.
Extreme weather events have become a regular occurrence. From freak storms, to floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires; you may not be interested in the climate crisis, but the climate crisis is interested in you.
For years, we have been lectured about how we are all to blame for climate change. We are preached to about the value of individual actions and carbon footprints. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions are still going up and we are all feeling the effects.
What has become increasingly clear is that this is happening, not because “we” have collectively failed, but because the rich are actively killing the planet for profit.
It pays to pollute
For communists, this situation is not at all surprising. This is because all of the “solutions” thus far put forward by liberal environmentalists have had the same flaw. They have all left private ownership and the profit motive intact.
This is why ideas such as the carbon tax, cap and trade, appeals to change individual purchasing habits and banning things like plastic straws have all failed to make any meaningful impact.
The economy is dominated by privately owned companies who are motivated above all else by the profit motive. This is so fundamental to the capitalist system that no manner of taxes, regulations, or state-mandated carbon pricing system can change this.
At the end of the day, the profits of the shareholders trump all other considerations. Those companies who do not do everything in their power to increase profits—even if it means hyper exploiting workers or destroying the environment—will ultimately lose out to the competition.
The economies of countries whose governments have implemented liberal climate policies such as the carbon tax become less competitive on the global market. Capital investment—the main driving force of the economy under capitalism—tends to go to markets where they can make the most unhindered profit. This is all the more true as the crisis of the system gets worse and the capitalists search for more profitable fields of investment.
At the same time, these market based “solutions” conveniently shifted the blame away from the capitalists and placed the burden onto the backs of ordinary people. While they claim to “factor in” the cost of “externalities” (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions), corporations always shift these costs onto the consumer. In other words, they end up being a regressive tax on the workers. This has only undermined the environmental movement itself as the backlash against the carbon tax demonstrates. Why should working people be taxed, when according to a recent study by Oxfam, it is the one per cent who “emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity.”?
It is therefore unsurprising that companies and governments around the world are all abandoning their liberal climate policies. Canada has led the charge in this regard.
Mark Carney removed the carbon tax at the federal level in April of this year. The carbon tax in British Columbia, which was put in place in 2008, was also axed by the BC NDP government at the same time. In Alberta, the carbon pricing system which places a price on pollution is also on shaky legs. While the price per tonne of emissions was supposed to increase to $110 by 2026 and $170 by 2030, the UCP government has frozen it at $95. The reasoning was that they didn’t want to “price our industries out of global markets.”
Similarly, Canada’s five largest banks pulled out of the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance this year. This global climate initiative was ironically spearheaded by Carney back in 2021. In addition, RBC has abandoned its target of providing a $500 billion commitment to “de-carbonization efforts.”
As the capitalist system decays, the ruling class in country after country is now forced to abandon even the pretense of a climate policy. If it wasn’t already obvious, this is because the ruling class has a direct interest in destroying the environment. All attempts to make them environmentally conscious were always doomed to fail.
Change the system
After decades of climate conferences, targets, commitments and lots of noise from liberal environmentalists, everything seems to be rolling backwards. In spite of the fact that 80 per cent of the global population wants stronger action on climate change, nothing happens.
This has left many people feeling depressed. Doomerism and “eco-anxiety” are widespread phenomena as people fear for the future and lose hope. Capturing this mood perfectly, David Suzuki, longtime figurehead of the environmentalist movement, in an interview this year concluded: “it’s too late”.
But this is only the logical result of the climate movement bashing its head into the wall of liberalism. Solutions based on the capitalist market fail, climate change gets worse, but no new solutions are put forward to get us out of this impasse. This is a finished recipe for doomerism.
The absurdity of the situation is glaring. Everyone knows society has never been so wealthy and productive. There is no real material reason why we cannot turn things around and tackle climate change. But capitalism stands in our way. All of the major decisions impacting the environment are not made in climate conferences or in the parliaments of the world, they are made in corporate boardrooms.
The starting point of any approach to tackling the climate crisis must be a rejection of the capitalist system. Communists propose to nationalize any large corporation like the big banks and the oil companies who have proven, time and time again, that they prioritize their profits over protecting the environment. Only by bringing the means of production under common ownership and democratic control of the working class, can we begin to find a solution to this existential problem.
The climate crisis puts the stability of life as we know it at stake. Half measures won’t work. We need to pool the resources of humanity and institute a vast economic plan of production, breaking from the anarchy of the market and its production for profit.
With the working class in power, we could take the vast wealth of society and use it to satisfy human needs, in harmony with the environment. We could construct infrastructure for public transportation, investing in the most efficient and clean way to move people. We could carry out a mass reforestation campaign to restore the planet’s ability to sequester CO2. We could prioritize green energy sources and transition away from oil and gas with no job losses.
The working class could decide what to produce based on the materials required, how energy intensive it is, what the waste product is, and how it best serves our needs. Instead of making decisions based on profit, these decisions could be made democratically and rationally.
The only way to save the planet is to take the wealth and control out of the hands of the billionaires. This is what Communists fight for.
