Global
Warming: Who’s To Blame?
By Nicole Colson
30 May, 2007
Socialist
Worker
Nicole
Colson looks at the facts about the devastating consequences of global
warming--and explains why a system that puts profits before all else
is to blame.
It’s no secret that
the wealth of available scientific evidence shows man-made global warming
exists.
But recent studies suggest
climate change may be happening at an even quicker pace than previously
thought--and the consequences are already proving devastating for the
environment and for huge numbers of people across the globe.
According to reports issued
in February and April by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), a body consisting of more than 2,500 of the world’s leading
climate scientists, global warming is “unequivocal,” with
the current concentration of carbon dioxide and methane--two important
heat-trapping gases--in the atmosphere exceeding “by far the natural
range over the last 650,000 years.”
In its most recent report,
the IPCC notes that 11 of the last 12 years ranked among the 12 hottest
years globally since 1850, when sufficient worldwide temperature measurements
began. Over the past 50 years, “cold days, cold nights and frost
have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves
have become more frequent.
The IPCC cites evidence of increasingly severe weather patterns already
caused by global warming, including an increase in the intensity of
hurricanes in the North Atlantic over the past 30 years; drier conditions
in the Sahel (the boundary zone between the Sahara desert and more fertile
regions of Africa to the south), the Mediterranean, southern Africa
and parts of southern Asia since 1900; and longer and more intense droughts
since 1970.
Global biodiversity is being
severely impacted as well. An estimated 150 species of plants and animals
already disappear each day due to climate change, and an increase of
just 2 degrees Fahrenheit could mean “up to 30 percent of the
species at increasing risk of extinction,” according to the IPCC.
Glacier mass and snow cover
have declined, as has ice in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas. Ocean temperatures
and sea levels have risen.
Warming and related changes
in monsoon and trade winds have triggered an alarming retreat of Himalayan
glaciers. Given their current rate of shrinkage, the IPCC predicts that
Himalayan glaciers could be gone by the year 2035. Currently, glacial
runoff in the Himalayas is the largest source of freshwater for northern
India. Half a billion people in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region and a
quarter billion downstream will face the impact.
EVEN CONSERVATIVE estimates of the likely consequences of continued
global warming read like a doomsday scenario for much of the planet’s
population.
As NASA researcher James
Hansen wrote in the New York Times last year, “We have at most
10 years--not 10 years to decide upon action, but 10 years to alter
fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions”--or
else catastrophic change could be inevitable.
The world’s poor will
bear the brunt of the climate crisis. As many as 250 million people
in Africa alone will have increased “water stress” by 2020,
according to IPCC data. Climate change will put an additional 50 million
people at risk of hunger by 2020--rising to an additional 132 million
and 266 million by 2050 and 2080, respectively.
Crop yields could decrease
by up to 30 percent in Central and South Asia by 2050, while rain-dependent
agriculture could drop by 50 percent in some African countries by 2020.
“Many millions”
living in coastal and low-lying areas will be threatened by rising sea
levels. According to a recent report by the British charity Christian
Aid, an estimated 1 billion people across the planet could be displaced
by the effects of global warming by 2050--including an estimated 250
million forced from their homes because of floods, droughts or famine.
“It is the poorest
of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous
societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” IPCC Chairman Rajendra
Pachauri warned journalists in April. “People who are poor are
least able to adapt to climate change.”
That includes people like
Lakhan Bibi, leader of the indigenous Kailashi people of the Hindu Kush
Mountains in northern Pakistan. At a recent news conference called by
the UN, Bibi told Inter Press Service that her people are already seeing
drastic changes. “We had never seen before what are seeing now,”
Bibi said. “Our herds are running away. Our homes are getting
buried in huge glaciers.”
In North America, the village
of Newtok in Alaska, once built on stable permafrost, is now literally
sinking into the mud, as warming air and ocean temperatures have caused
the permafrost to melt.
An impoverished community
of the Native American Yupik tribe, Newtok is home to 315 residents.
Their houses and boardwalks are now sinking into the mud, while the
village itself has been literally turned into an island due to rising
waters.
Though there are tentative
plans to relocate the village, Newtok leaders say the federal government
has been slow to come up with the money. The Bush administration has
set aside just $1 million in funds--but cost to move Newtok alone (not
to mention the dozens of other villages facing similar problems) will
be an estimated $130 million.
EVERY CREDIBLE report indicates that only drastic action will be able
to mitigate the more severe future consequences of global warming.
But many environmentalists
point to individual solutions--encouraging people (particularly those
in advanced industrial nations) to drive and consume less, use energy-efficient
light bulbs and recycle, for example--that will have little impact.
The driving factor behind
global warming is the system of modern capitalism, dominated by wealthy
nations and companies that rely on the use of fossil fuels, and therefore
have a stake in ensuring that environmental considerations don’t
cut into their profits or access to markets.
The Bush administration is
a prime example. With strong ties to powerful oil and energy companies,
the administration not only allowed the energy industry to literally
write many of its environmental policies, but has consistently attempted
to block or water down international assessments of global warming.
Thus, working behind the
scene, the U.S. succeeded in downplaying estimates in the most recent
IPCC report of how many people will suffer food and water shortages
because of global warming.
And though new targets on
reducing emissions were to be discussed at June’s G-8 summit of
world leaders, Greenpeace recently leaked a document from an unnamed
U.S. official showing that the Bush administration plans to reject any
action which would impose mandatory cuts in emissions--no matter how
minimal.
Such disregard for the environment
is the norm in a system that puts profits over human life.
As environmentalist John
Bellamy Foster noted in Monthly Review, under capitalism, “the
natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination.
Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched-earth
strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing,
a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing
capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential
expansion.”
Take, for example, recent
Greenpeace revelations that international logging companies have been
stripping huge areas of the world’s second-largest rainforest--centered
in the Democratic Republic of Congo--in return for minimal taxes and
gifts of salt, sugar and tools to indigenous tribes.
According to the Britain’s
Guardian newspaper, the Greenpeace report shows that more than 20 companies,
mainly from Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Singapore and the U.S., have
signed more than 150 contracts.
If all the forests identified
for logging are felled, an important natural “carbon sink”
would be eliminated, and an additional 34 billion tons of carbon would
be released into the atmosphere by 2050--the same amount that Britain
has emitted in the past 60 years.
But that means little to
the timber companies, which used all kinds of methods to get their contracts.
In the village of Lamoko,
on the Maringa river, for example, representatives of a major timber
firm secured the “rights” to log thousands of hectares of
forests for the next 25 years--in exchange for building the local village
a few schools and pharmacies, and giving the village chief 20 sacks
of sugar, 200 bags of salt, some machetes and a few hoes.
The cost to the company?
Approximately $20,000--in return for the right to log exotic trees that
can sell for as much as $8,000 each for the next 25 years.
While logging operations
have been going since February 2005, the villagers have yet to see their
schools and pharmacies. “We asked them to provide wood for our
coffins and they even refused that,” one local man told the Guardian.
As such stories illustrate,
the lack of substantial action on climate change is not simply a case
of “political inertia,” as Bellamy Foster points out. Rather,
it is the logic of capitalism, which must continually expand in the
drive for profit.
“Capitalism is by its
very nature an unceasing treadmill of production,” Bellamy Foster
and Brett Clark noted on the MR Zine Web site. “There is no conceivable
alternative scenario within such a runaway-train system that leads toward
a sustainable relation to the environment, much less a just society.
What is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation
to nature, and thus of global society itself.”
In any rational society,
the threat of global warming would have gotten attention a long time
ago, with every possible resource devoted to measures to slow climate
change and alleviate its effects. But under capitalism, greed and profits
come first--even at the risk of far-reaching global devastation.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.