The Montreal summit

In its first term the Bush gang not only unilaterally sparked aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, and tried to bully China, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela—it also thumbed its nose as the rest of the world attempted to come to grips with global warming’s link to greenhouse gases. That is, Washing ton refused any cooperation with the Kyoto Protocol, a first and limited international attempt to lessen damage to the environment.

Now, 30 months of Iraqi resistance have shown that building a foreign policy based on fear of the Pentagon can expose U.S. military weaknesses and lead to a disastrous quagmire. Hurricane Katrina has shown in a most devastating way that the global warming threat goes beyond South Pacific islands and the frozen tundra in the North. The war, and the water, can come home to the U.S., which produces 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions with only 5 percent of its population.

After a precedent-setting hurricane season coupled with a shift in the Gulf Stream and a long-lasting drought in—of all places—the Amazon basin, a large majority of scientists and a solid majority of people, including in the U.S., are convinced that global warming is real and that it is connected with burning oil, gas and coal. The Bush gang, however, still think they can unilaterally flip a finger at the world.

They showed this arrogance once again at the 10-day-long Global Warming Summit in Montreal that ended Dec. 12. Washington came in once again as the major world power refusing to cooperate with plans to at least slow down the climate’s descent into chaos.

The world demanded much more from the summit. There were protests in New Orleans and 40 other U.S. cities, as well as in Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey—a total of 100,000 people on Dec. 4. Some 10,000 people marched through London, carrying banners linking Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as “climate criminals.” That can be added to the charges against them for war crimes against Iraq.

The biggest demonstration was in Montreal itself, where Inuit people from the far north explained how the melting ice is ruining their home economy of fishing and hunting.

Many U.S. mayors took part in the summit, but the Bush administration remained dead set against in any way subjecting the economic strategy of the major U.S. private corporations to the needs of humanity. There, it is clear, is the crux of the problem. The Bush administration, still in bed with the oil monopolies and serving their greed, refuses all cooperation. But the other capitalist governments also have their hands tied to profit-hungry corporations. The forces involved represent competing capitalist economic entities and their bottom line is—the bottom line, that is, profit.

Every attempt should and must be made to slow down the rush toward environmental disaster that unrestrained capitalism represents. But the only way for humanity to get a grasp on the vast problems caused by global warming is for the means of production to be in the hands of that section of humanity that doesn’t live off of profits—the working people. Only they can decide how to control development so that the world economy develops without putting the world itself in peril. That means socialism.