Don’t let the profit system cost us the earth!

TONY BLAIR recently claimed that tackling climate change is a
priority. But despite his commitment to reducing carbon dioxide
emissions by 20%, more than the 15% reduction in six greenhouse gases
required by the international Kyoto treaty, emissions are actually
rising in the UK!

Judy Beishon

The situation is no better internationally, with the biggest two
emitters of greenhouse gases, the US and China, not even being part of
the Kyoto targets. However, even if the Kyoto targets were met, it would
only be scratching the surface of solving global warming.

Much greater reductions are needed, but Britain’s Environment
Minister, Margaret Beckett, admitted that nothing may come out of the
current UN climate change talks in Montreal. The determination of every
capitalist government to protect their own big business interests is too
great.

Showing how deep New Labour’s commitment really is to reversing the
present emissions trend, the energy minister has said that penalties
imposed on businesses for excess greenhouse gas emissions could be
waived this winter, supposedly to avoid plant closures if there is a
shortage of gas. The energy multinationals applied pressure for this
concession, and New Labour rushed to appease them.

More alarmingly, Blair is now turning towards the idea of a new
generation of nuclear power stations to meet the country’s energy needs
and also obligations under the international climate change agreements.
But nuclear power is potentially devastating to the environment. There
is no known safe method of disposing of nuclear waste, which has already
piled up, and can last for over 100,000 years.

As well, there is always the risk of a terrible accident as happened
at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986, or a future terrorist attack
aimed at releasing nuclear radiation. The consequences could be large
loss of life and nuclear contamination in the environment that couldn’t
be removed.

Safe forms of renewable energy need to be developed urgently, and the
technology already exists to do this. Workers in the nuclear industry
could be redeployed to decommissioning the existing nuclear plants and
to safe forms of energy creation such as using biofuels, solar power and
wind power.

Britain is said to be the fourth richest country in the world. If the
New Labour government won’t take the necessary measures to develop forms
of energy that will stop global warming, then we badly need a government
that will.

A new workers’ party is now essential not just to champion the rights
of people in the workplace, the unemployed, those on incapacity
benefits, pensions and so on. It is also vital for developing a
programme on the environment that firmly rejects the nuclear option, and
stands for a massive injection of resources into developing renewable
energy.


Capitalism wrecks the environment

Why we fight for a socialist alternative

OUR ENVIRONMENT is deteriorating rapidly. In the past 50 years, human
activity has changed the ecosystem more rapidly and extensively than in
any other half-century in human history. Global warming has caused the
arctic ice sheet to halve in thickness in just 30 years. Half the
earth’s forests have disappeared as have an even higher proportion of
wetlands.

Roger Shrives and Judy Beishon

There is no point putting forward ideas about an alternative society
if we don’t have a planet we can live on. But these crises need
socialist solutions. The capitalist system cannot solve these huge
environmental problems – neither can it ensure clean, drinkable water,
food or basic services like education to the billions who lack them. It
can only offer further environmental destruction and growing economic
insecurity even to workers in the so-called advanced capitalist
countries.

Capitalist politicians such as George Bush won’t reverse this
destruction of the environment, quite the opposite. Bush had to be
dragged, kicking and screaming, even to admit that human activity is
causing climate change. He sees cutting dangerous emissions as a
non-starter – it would affect US capitalism’s profits too much.

Other capitalist governments aren’t much better. Blair boasted that
climate change was top priority for him but nonetheless carbon dioxide
emissions have been rising in Britain.

Scientific estimates say the world needs an 80% reduction in harmful
emissions. But the international Kyoto protocol – that didn’t even
include the planet’s two biggest polluters, USA and China – only commits
countries to a 5% average reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012.
Even amongst the countries signed up to Kyoto, most are unlikely even to
meet that target.

No type of capitalist government will do much better in solving these
pressing problems and delivering a sustainable environment. After all, a
capitalist government’s whole purpose is to represent the interests of
big business and the multinationals, whose main motive is short-term
profit-making rather than protecting the well-being of ordinary people
and the environment.

The capitalist class exploits both workers and the environment. They
treat the environment as a free resource and simply tell governments
that they won’t cut into their profits for measures to prevent excessive
environmental damage.

Exploiting the natural (and limited) resource of oil, Exxon-Mobil
recently reported a staggering 75% rise in profits in the third quarter
of 2005 to almost $10 billion. That’s the largest quarterly profit ever
reported by a US company! The system has developed to protect such
interests.

Big business refuses to put the necessary resources in (and massive
resources are needed that would seriously affect them). The system can
also never deliver the cooperation needed between the main capitalist
countries to solve problems like climate change. Rivalry between
different capitalist and imperialist countries prevents the high degree
of cooperation that would be needed.

Neither can capitalism – based as it is on the anarchy of the market
and private profit – deliver long-term environmental planning. As Tony
Blair confessed: "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change
is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet
this challenge."

Wasted talents

HOWEVER THERE’S no natural law that says that the system we live in
has to be one where a small minority can cream off the wealth of society
and keep doing it. An entirely different society is needed – a socialist
one where the 500 multinationals that effectively dictate our planet’s
fate are placed in public hands, under democratic control and
management.

Then it could be democratically decided to produce food and goods
entirely on the basis of satisfying people’s needs in a way that does
not damage the environment.

At present billions of people’s talents are wasted in unemployment or
under-employment. Millions of scientists work on weapons research and
other potentially harmful end products. Socialist societies could use
these massive human resources to work on ways to produce socially useful
goods and to dispose of them without harming our environment.

In particular this would mean shifting to renewable sources of
energy, making all products completely recyclable and using sustainable
methods of farming. The technology already exists to develop all these
vital aspects.

Social changes would also be necessary, such as encouraging people to
use public transport by making it very cheap, safe and frequent. Freed
from the constant demands of profit, we could encourage the use of goods
rather than their ownership, such as borrowing books from libraries
rather than buying them, or providing free laundry facilities so people
don’t need to own washing machines.

Capitalism, by its nature, is very wasteful of resources. For
example, similar products are duplicated under different labels,
capitalists deliberately build obsolescence into products, and
marketing, packaging and advertising use huge amounts of materials.
Moreover, capitalist economies go in cycles. When in recession, whole
factories and their machinery can be laid to waste, not to mention the
human cost of workers losing their jobs.

Democracy would be essential at all levels under socialism, in
contrast to the Stalinist regimes that existed in Russia and Eastern
Europe – regimes that caused environmental devastation. On the basis of
this democracy and a general rise in living standards, a socialist
society could carry out the economic planning necessary to ensure
people’s needs are met, in a way compatible with a sustainable
environment.

Capitalism is driven by the capitalists’ need to accumulate more and
more capital, but a socialist society would have no inbuilt need for
everlasting growth. So that makes a sustainable environment credible in
a way that it isn’t under capitalism.

At first, though, a society that is building socialism would need a
significant increase in production in order to end deprivation. However,
that could be done on an increasingly sustainable basis as the necessary
technology is developed.

Many green activists see increased production as a problem and argue
that the planet’s natural resources would be stretched too far if more
goods were produced. On a capitalist basis that is true but a socialist
society could apply the human talent and resources needed to raise
production without also jeopardising the environment.

In any case it would be essential to produce enough goods to satisfy
everyone’s basic needs and pleasures. A society lacking basic goods
cannot bring real freedom of choice and the free time needed for
ordinary people to get involved in the cooperation and democracy of
building a socialist society.

Capitalism cannot solve the world’s problems. Only a socialist future
can end the horrors of world poverty, wars and terrorism and solve
today’s acute environmental problems that, if capitalism is allowed to
continue, threaten humanity’s very existence.


Catastrophe in China

AN ENVIRONMENTAL catastrophe threatens millions of people in China
and Russia following an explosion which destroyed a chemical plant in
north east China. A 50-mile long slick of toxic benzene travelled down
the Songhua river polluting drinking water supplies and killing fish.

Dave Carr

Millions of people in the city of Harbin, 50 miles south of the
chemical plant, are now reliant on bottled water. Further downstream,
water supplies in the Russian border city of Khabarovsk have also been
polluted.

Yet for ten days the Chinese authorities remained silent about the
100 tonnes of toxic chemicals that spewed into the river.

The Chinese regime clearly retains many of its Stalinist methods of
secrecy. Instead, the Chinese people are now suffering the double whammy
of a repressive, undemocratic bureaucratic regime and the pollution
associated with rapid capitalist economic growth.

Consequently, while maintaining the fiction of strict environmental
protection laws, China’s cities, rivers and lakes are being overwhelmed
by pollution ie by millions of tonnes of untreated domestic and
industrial waste. Even according to the Beijing regime 360 million
people lack access to safe drinking water. 70% of its rivers and lakes
are polluted and over 100 cities suffer extreme water shortages.