Workers need jobs, not China-bashing

The Obama administration has announced it will investigate China for subsidizing its clean-energy industries, which produce wind and solar energy products, advanced batteries and energy-efficient vehicles. This is supposed to be a move for “free trade” and to help U.S. workers, the logic being that if China is forced to give up these subsidies, that will somehow create jobs here.

If the U.S. government really wanted to help the workers and at the same time combat global warming, it would create a jobs program here and employ millions of workers to upgrade and green the infrastructure. This move by Washington has nothing to do with helping U.S. workers, who are in their worst crisis of unemployment since the Great Depression. It is all about blaming China for U.S. capitalism’s debacle while pretending to be friendly to labor in an election year.

This move by the government shows its completely two-faced attitude toward China. On the one hand, it has tried to blame China for global warming — a ridiculous charge, but one repeated endlessly by the imperialist media. On the other, it shows its complete contempt for the environmental movement and science itself by trying to obstruct China’s development of green technology.

Capitalism and global warming

The problem of global warming and climate change, more than almost any other sociopolitical issue, shows that the world’s people need socialist economic planning and cooperation in order to take control of today’s enormously advanced science and technology.

If the means of production continue to belong to a highly privileged few who develop them for their private profit, however, the disastrous changes that have already begun will only multiply and intensify the misery of the masses of people — no matter how many spectacular breakthroughs are made in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology.

There cannot be a turnaround in this dismal situation until the rule of capital has been broken.

It is the people of the United States who most need to grasp this concept, because it is the U.S. ruling class that has done far more than any other to sabotage the setting of limits on greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) — the main factor in global warming and climate change.

It is this country that for more than a century, with its tremendous industrial growth and its equally huge consumption of oil, coal and natural gas, has spewed carbon dioxide into the air. Some 25 percent of the CO2 presently trapped in the earth’s atmosphere came from the U.S., a country with only 5 percent of the world’s people.

Because of the power of the corporations and banks that control the energy industry, the automobile industry and the real estate industry, we have no rational system of mass transportation, no green upgrading of city housing, no efficient electrical grid, no city planning to alleviate long commutes, and little green space to moderate summer heat.

Because of the power of the military-industrial-banking complex, the people’s tax money that could be spent on improving all this is instead wasted on vicious wars that big businesses — especially Big Oil — hope will strengthen their weakening grip on the oil-producing countries of the world.

These same banks and corporations control the political system. Because of their financial hold over legislators, judges and officials, Congress and the White House can’t even consider taking any meaningful steps to cut back on GGEs. Even worse, the political field is more and more dominated by politicians who deny that the problem even exists, despite all the scientific evidence.

So it was not surprising that last December, when 192 countries met in Copenhagen for a U.N. climate summit, even the limited goals that had been proposed by a majority of the countries were blown out of the water by the U.S. delegation. The U.S. rejected attempts to set strong limits on global warming, leaving developing countries, especially in Africa, faced with imminent disasters from climate change.

Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan, chief negotiator in Copenhagen for the G77 group of 131 developing countries, was in tears when he said that the final agreement had “the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. ... It locks countries into a cycle of poverty forever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.”

China-bashing based on myths

Washington’s tactic, then and now, has been to blame China for the failure to reach a meaningful international agreement that would begin to turn around the problem of CO2 emissions.

China bashers like to cite the fact that more than a year ago China’s CO2 emissions surpassed those of the U.S. But that is only one-quarter of the story.

First of all, China has four times as many people as the U.S., so China’s per capita emission of greenhouse gases is still only one-quarter that of the U.S.

Secondly, China’s economy has been growing despite the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. Its industrial sector consumes 70 percent of the country’s electricity. Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output has been declining in recent years, especially since the 2007 economic downturn.

Also, many U.S. manufacturers that used to operate in the U.S. have moved to China and other low-wage countries, moving their consumption of energy and the related emission of greenhouse gases offshore.

U.S. emissions in 2008 (the last year for which figures are available) actually declined by 2.2 percent from 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. According to the EIA itself, this decline was due to three factors: higher energy prices, economic contraction and a lower demand for electricity. (www.eia.doe.gov) None had anything to do with action taken by Washington to curb greenhouse gases.

The truth is that China, not the U.S., has made some very significant moves to begin to wean its economy away from dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy.

China is leading the world in the production of wind turbines, solar panels, energy-efficient lighting and energy-saving technology. It included in its current five-year development plan, which will be completed this year, a 20-percent reduction in energy use per unit of gross domestic product. A similar drive to improve energy efficiency is expected to be included in the next five-year plan, beginning in 2011. (Financial Times, Oct. 18)

The U.S. has no five-year plan or even a one-year plan. This is not a planned economy, it is a capitalist economy. Capital rules, and whatever produces the biggest profit wins out. Capitalists are not held responsible for what they do to the environment; they make profits while society as a whole loses.

For a sustainable, green world we need to get rid of capitalism.