Why the fox mustn’t guard the henhouse

Are exploitation and national oppression the major factors driving climate change?

Global warming is no longer a prediction. Its long-term effects are already unfolding across the planet. There are scads of scientific and news reports showing how serious it has already become for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.

In the literature dealing with this grave crisis, few if any references to the current social system can be found. Yet that doesn’t mean it is not the basic issue that has to be addressed in order to find a solution.

Perhaps the reason the issues of class exploitation and national oppression are not discussed is because control over billions of people, their labor and resources by a few fabulously wealthy corporations and banks is taken for granted.

Since most of these mega-firms are rooted in highly developed capitalist countries and, in addition to exploiting workers at home, also super-exploit the rest of the world—creating the most malicious, self-serving and racist ideologies to justify their right to do so—the issue of social change really becomes one of overturning not just local class domination but the entire imperialist world order.

Most of the scientists and technical people dealing with the subject of global warming are looking for what they believe to be practical solutions, and the notion of changing social relations on a grand scale is not on their agenda. Even those sympathetic to various struggles of the workers and oppressed for improvements in their conditions of life are not at this time looking to a revolutionary restructuring of the world.

Yet their own predictions as to the gravity of what is to be expected unless human economic activity is profoundly altered should drive them to look beyond the very small steps that they themselves admit are mere band-aids. Certainly, any social movement around this issue must tackle the question of profits versus human needs and survival.

Not a personal but a social problem

However well intentioned, appeals to people on an individual basis to change their habits—“Don’t drive a car,” “Turn off your electric lights,” “Stop being a consumer”—bring results that are trivial when measured against the problem.

If there’s no adequate public transportation, if there’s no attractive and affordable city planning that lets workers live close to jobs, shopping and recreation, how can they stop driving cars?

Ever since the mass production of cars began, big corporations in auto, steel, rubber and oil have deliberately prevented the U.S. government from developing an adequate mass transit system, directly leading to this country being the world’s worst in emissions of greenhouse gases.

People are not “consumers” by nature. A multi-billion-dollar capitalist industry called advertising constantly works on their minds to convince them that happiness comes only through buying more products. The industry itself creates enormous waste—only a fraction of a “newspaper” is news, for example. Whole forests are sacrificed every day to provide paper for advertising. Furthermore, trees absorb carbon from the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Their loss accelerates global warming.

Another direct corollary of class and national oppression is war. Today, wars are raging in the Middle East because the U.S. oil industry, which more than any other sector of capital controls the Bush administration and its foreign and domestic policy, wants undisputed control over that petroleum-rich era.

What is more destructive to the environment than war? Not only do the planes, ships and tanks of this giant
military power contribute to global pollution, but the trillions of dollars spent on past, present and future wars is rob bed from funding social programs—like housing, transportation and alternative energy—that could drastically reduce the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

The destruction and waste built into this militarized, oppressive capitalist society dwarfs whatever energy and resources may be wasted in individual consumption.

The main issue in reining in global warming is social and political, not personal: Will economic activity continue to be based on privately owned corporate entities whose survival in the struggle for markets depends on generating ever greater profits, measured in quarterly bottom lines? Or will it be based on social ownership of all productive wealth, which then allows for broad planning geared to satisfying the long-term needs of the masses of people?

This leads directly to the question of which class will lead society—the workers, in alliance with all the oppressed, or the capitalist exploiters of their labor?

Not to take up these questions is to ignore the elephant in the room. It leads to the unscientific view that greed and inertia are “human nature” and can’t be changed. We are already hearing doomsday predictions from eminent scientists. The pessimism and despair of those who limit their outlook to a future constrained by capitalism can only grow more desperate.

Profiteers lied to the public

The record of the U.S. capitalist class on global warming is undeniable.

As was pointed out in the first article in this series [www.workers.org/2006/us/warming-0720/], big business in the U.S., especially companies in the energy and automobile industries, for about two decades spent hundreds of millions of dollars to discredit the scientific view that human activity—especially the combustion of fossil fuels—had created a blanket of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere that was trapping the sun’s heat. They created benign-sounding lobbying groups to disinform the public and make sure that the government didn’t impose regulations on greenhouse gas emissions or ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the only worldwide agreement to limit these emissions—and a very weak one, at that.

A year ago, the Guardian newspaper in Britain reported that State Department documents showed the Bush administration “thanking Exxon executives for the company’s ‘active involvement’ in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable.” The documents were written shortly before Presi dent George W. Bush announced he would not sign the Kyoto Protocol. (“Revealed: how oil giant influenced Bush,” Guardian, June 8, 2005)

Not surprising, of course. The only thing surprising is that Greenpeace was able to get a-hold of the government documents to prove it.

But now industry-sponsored propaganda has been thoroughly disproved by the dramatic and tangible evidences of global warming and climate change that are all around us. So some of the worst sources of disinformation—like the Global Climate Coalition, which got most of its funding from Exxon—have closed down.

In their place have come various well-funded NGOs that acknowledge global warming but promote “solutions” that will be profitable to big business. Last article, we mentioned the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Their funding comes from the Pew family fortune, which comes from Sun Oil. There is also the Reason Foundation—which talks about “unleashing market forces” to solve global warming.

Britain’s first Special Representative on Climate Change, John Ashton, summed up the approach of these groups: “Climate change needs to be seen not as an economic threat, but an economic opportunity.”

Certainly there is much money to be made on selling autos, for example, that burn less gas. With oil prices high, more consumers want affordable hybrid cars. General Motors found out the hard way that its gas-guzzling SUVs and Hummers were losing out to lighter, more efficient vehicles.

Inventors hope to make money with new alternate-fuel devices and maybe even contraptions that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—although they haven’t figured out what to do with it once they have captured it.

The nuclear power industry hopes to make money by replacing coal-fired generating plants with nuclear.

In all of this, however, the main motivation is to make money. Push your product to make money. Ridicule the competition, bribe and even lie to prevent others from getting the contract. That’s how capitalism has always worked.

It should already be clear that, when discussing the future of the earth, decisions on how to allocate society’s resources need much more objective criteria than these.

It is precisely the drive for money and private profit on a short-term basis that has gotten humanity into this mess. And it is the control by a privileged few, who dominate even the so-called democratic political process with their huge fortunes, that prevents capitalist governments from taking the sweeping measures needed to restructure society on a rational basis.

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