Pete Dickenson, author of Planning for the planet, Tower Hamlets Socialist Party
A climate catastrophe far worse than any yet seen is much closer now than when the first edition of Planning for the Planet was written in 2011. January 2025 was Earth’s hottest month ever, which followed 2024 as the warmest-ever year. The Los Angeles metropolitan area was devastated by out-of-control forest fires in January this year, a disaster made much more likely by a global increase in temperature of 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels, measured in each of the last 13 months. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022 for the first time explicitly linked current extreme weather events with increasing global temperatures.
Droughts and heatwaves have decimated access to water in many regions of the world. This is particularly true in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. According to UN data, these areas have suffered intensification of drought cycles, where 10 of the 12 driest winters since 1902 have happened in the last 20 years. Climate change is increasingly a factor leading to political unrest, for example the Arab Spring of 2011, the continuing Israel/Palestine conflict, where access to scarce water has always been an underlying issue, and civil wars in Yemen and the Horn of Africa. In Europe, devastating floods triggered a mass movement in Valencia, Spain, last Autumn.
Unfortunately, the prediction made 14 years ago that it was unlikely capitalist governments would take meaningful action to address global warming has proved to be true. Despite the warning of the Los Angeles fires, which followed a year of extreme weather events, US imperialism has taken no action to address the situation. In fact, the US and all the other big powers have backtracked on their already inadequate climate policies, a retreat that has turned into a rout after the re-election of President Trump. Not surprisingly, the US has led the way, with Trump taking a wrecking ball to any previous attempts, although inadequate, to reduce temperatures.
‘Drill baby drill’
His ‘drill baby drill’ mantra promoting the oil industry will do massive damage to the environment, but pulling America out of international climate agreements will make little difference. Climate treaties and agreements have been almost totally ineffective. The vast majority of climate initiatives between 1998 and 2022 had no significant impact on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Mercator Research Institute. Attacks on Trump by former US president Joe Biden, and his Democratic Party, are hypocritical – Biden and his predecessor, Barack Obama, presided over one of the fastest expansions of the fossil fuel industry in history, by aggressively promoting shale oil and gas output.
In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not wait for Trump’s victory to slash his much-vaunted £28 billion ‘green new deal’. He could see that the prospects for the UK to secure a profitable niche in the renewables industry were remote, particularly since the low-wage, high-tech Chinese juggernaut is rapidly cornering the market. The latest country to join the retreat is Brazil, crucial because preserving the Amazon rainforest is vital to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The replacement of the former climate denier president, Jair Bolsonaro, with President Lula was supposed to herald a new beginning. But now the country has approved an invitation to join OPEC, the oil producers’ cartel, just months before hosting the next UN international conference on addressing climate change. Also, it was one of 15 countries to ask the UN to abandon a proposed levy on CO2 emissions, the main cause of climate increase, from global shipping.
China, the world’s second-biggest economy, appears to contradict the trend of the other big powers. In 2023, it produced more renewable technology than the rest of the world put together. Total renewable investment was $1.6 trillion, accounting for all the country’s economic growth that year. Although renewables now make up half China’s electricity generating capacity, it emits by far the most greenhouse gases of any country, and this is accelerating. Burning coal is the main cause. Coal-fired power plant construction was at a ten-year high in 2024, despite President Xi Jinping’s pledge in 2021 to ‘strictly’ control this source of energy. The paradox can be explained by China’s promotion of renewables being a bid, successful so far, to dominate the world market in green technology. Tackling climate change is a secondary motivating factor at best.
Western governments like to congratulate themselves on cutting greenhouse gases and, by implication, blame China for global warming. Rishi Sunak, Tory Prime Minister until 2024, claimed Britain had the best record in the world for cutting greenhouse gases. He said emissions had halved in Britain since 1990. However, despite cutting emissions by 50%, Britain is still behind its targets. Also, emission reductions in the UK and in other Western countries are due largely to their ‘export’ to China, following deindustrialisation. If this is factored in, there has been a very minor reduction in emissions in the West.
With the partial exception of China, governments’ retreats on climate are following the lead of the big corporations. 36 fossil fuel companies are responsible for half global CO2 emissions, and well before Trump’s re-election these firms were complaining their profits would be seriously threatened by meaningful climate action and demanded a policy change. BP was prominent in this movement, when it shamelessly abandoned its earlier commitment to renewables and announced a big increase in drilling for oil and gas. Other former ‘green champions’ like Unilever and investment firm BlackRock followed suit. BlackRock, with $11.5 trillion in assets, about four times the size of the UK economy, in 2023 voted to support 20 out of 493 pro-environment resolutions at the AGMs of firms it invests in. In 2022, it backed about half of similar motions.
The top global climate institution for banks, the ‘Net-Zero Banking Alliance’, with assets of $54 trillion, will soon be voting on abandoning its pledge to align its assets with the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global warming to 1.5oC. This followed an exodus of big US banks following the second Trump victory.
Antagonisms at the IPCC’s annual climate summits deepen each year. The UN body has been in retreat since the 2009 abortive Copenhagen meeting it said was the last chance to avoid climate catastrophe. Even before the USA again pulled out of IPCC involvement this year, the body was under increasing pressure to bow to the fossil fuel lobby. The last two annual summits (COP 28 and 29), were presided over by major oil-producing states, UAE and Azerbaijan. Both meetings were marked by coordinated attempts by oil producers and their allies to obstruct and dilute any moves to strengthen climate policy. The UAE President of COP 28 said there was “no science” behind attempts to phase out fossil fuels and this would take the world “back into caves” if implemented. There were also press reports that the UAE was lobbying for oil business at the event.
Deadlock in international attempts to tackle the environmental crisis is not restricted to global warming. For decades, under UN auspices, agreement has been sought to address the destruction of the natural world. One million species are threatened with extinction, soils are becoming infertile and water sources are drying up. Intensive agriculture is the main driver of biodiversity loss, threatening 85% of the 28,000 most endangered species. Plant and insect populations are falling dramatically due to dangerous insecticides. Chemical and plastic pollution is also a growing problem.
The latest UN conference on this issue was held in Cali, Columbia in 2024. As in previous events, the main bone of contention was money, in particular the exploitation by big pharma, healthcare corporations, agribusiness and tech conglomerates in the West of the genetic information contained in certain plants and animals found in mainly poor countries. This information is used by firms to produce cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, food and other products. A key aim of the conference, as in numerous similar events before, was to ensure the benefits were shared fairly with the peoples living in the countries concerned.
The meeting was deadlocked on the key questions of who should pay, how much and when, the same issues that had derailed every summit for 20 years. After the talks collapsed, it was agreed to reconvene the meeting in March this year. Despite the mutual congratulations usual at the end of these gatherings, the poorer nations were reluctantly forced to accept a deal. The $200 billion it was agreed to ‘mobilise’ was far off what was agreed was necessary previously in 2022. Three-quarters of nations had not submitted any plans on how to meet their target.
Climate change is on the front line of the trade wars now raging between the big powers. The protectionist lobbies in the US and EU are partly driven by the massive expansion of green tech exports from China. For example, exports of Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) increased 160 times from 2019 to 2023. Even before the new Trump presidency, the EU had imposed a nearly 50% tariff on Chinese EVs, and the previous Biden government in the US had proposed non-trade tariff barriers (health and safety requirements etc.) that would have effectively banned nearly all Chinese EVs. A second major climate trade flashpoint is securing access to minerals that are important for green technology, such as lithium and cobalt. Trump made Ukraine an offer it couldn’t refuse for the US to secure the country’s lithium deposits, and the big powers are currently fighting it out in Africa to grab the continent’s huge mineral resources.
These conflicts, as well as the failure over decades to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming, have a common root cause: the quest for profit by the big corporations and, at a more fundamental level, the inevitable tendency of competitive markets to degrade the environment.
Some socialists and greens may say they do not need any more facts to be convinced of the seriousness of the situation. However, it is still necessary to answer the climate deniers’ and sceptics’ position, however baseless, strengthened by Trump’s re-election.
Many workers and trade unionists understandably fear their jobs could be threatened by going green and, more generally, are sceptical of the capitalist ‘establishment’, which promotes the false idea that it should be ‘us’ who foots the bill for dealing with climate change not ‘them’.
Any convincing response to that lie, however, must include, as well as explaining the irrefutable scientific facts, putting forward a socialist programme which includes safeguarding jobs, pay, terms and conditions as well as improved living standards for all.
Socialist programme
The key elements of a socialist programme should include:
- Prioritising research and investment into renewable energy
- Nationalisation of the energy industry under democratic workers’ control and management, with compensation paid only on the basis of proven need, in order to carry out a major switch to clean, green energy without any loss of jobs, pay or conditions
- A democratically planned, massively expanded, free to use, publicly owned transport system
- For a major publicly funded insulation and energy transition plan for existing housing stock
- An integrated environmental plan of production, as part of an overall socialist plan, based on democratic public ownership of the key sectors of the economy
Democratic public ownership is essential for a planned system to work efficiently. If the ‘hidden hand’ of the capitalist market is abolished by a planned economy, there must be an alternative method of allocating resources. Only institutions of producers and consumers – democratically constituted with real power – could play this role. It is true that modern computer and communications technology, AI etc, could play a very important part in facilitating the smooth running of a planning system, but the existence of democratic bodies will be paramount.
To build a carbon neutral society there will be a need for more jobs, as a very useful and detailed study by the Campaign Against Climate Change found. Although published several years ago, it remains very important in highlighting the possibilities for job creation. A detailed analysis of the sectors of a green economy concluded a million jobs would be created. Today, even more jobs would be needed in a green transition, many employing highly skilled scientists, engineers and technicians, such as in developing new forms of green energy like nuclear fusion or switching to sustainable air travel. Another example is decommissioning nuclear power stations. The Dounreay nuclear plant in Scotland was shut down in the mid-1990s, today there are 2,000 workers still on site, on a job which will take until 2070.
The programme outlined here, although focused on Britain, ultimately needs, in outline, to be implemented internationally.
Many green and environmental activists once put their faith in international negotiations to tackle the crisis. When this proved futile, they then tried to make the ‘establishment’ see the error of its ways by various forms of direct action. Some are now questioning this strategy.
The argument put here, that the struggles for socialism and to avoid environmental breakdown must go hand in hand is a viable, concrete approach that addresses the vital issues for environmentalists. Only the socialist organisation of society can create the conditions needed to urgently and seriously deal with the danger to the planet now. Global warming will become an even greater factor than today in world politics and social and economic relations.
Extreme weather events and other effects of climate change will be increasingly factors leading to political upheavals and mass movements, posing a challenge to the working class and its organisations. If no meaningful climate action is taken soon, there will be disastrous consequences, social and environmental. However, if the organised working class intervenes, drawing towards it the millions affected by the crisis, there will be a possibility to build a movement to transform society along socialist lines. The conditions would then be present for the first time to tackle the environmental crisis. The task is urgent. The first step must be rearming workers’ organisations with a socialist programme, in Britain and internationally.
- Planning for the Planet by Pete Dickenson, buy now for £11.99 at leftbooks.co.uk
