On September 17, in a desperate campaign to stop global warming, thousands of climate activists, business leaders, government officials, and “civil society representatives” will converge upon New York City for the fifteenth annual Climate Week. Co-sponsored by the United Nations, an organization born in 1945 to serve U.S. imperialism and the postwar liberal world order, the event has a bold slogan: “We Can. We Will.”
In reality, the reformists can’t—and the capitalist bosses won’t. After a summer of lethal heat waves, biblical floods, hot tub oceans, runaway wildfires, and toxic orange skies, liberal reforms cannot prevent wholesale catastrophe from climate change. Climate action has hit a wall. Greenhouse gas emissions set an all-time high in 2022, and will do so again in 2023. The rulers are wedded to heat-trapping fossil fuels for two fundamental reasons: maximum profit and inter-imperialist rivalry. From China to the United States, their system is falling into crisis. With fascism rising and World War III on the horizon, capitalism has no answers for perpetual war, massive poverty, or resurgent infectious diseases. It surely has none for the vast challenge of climate change and the racist horrors we are witnessing in real time.

Only a communist world, run by and for the international working class, can balance our needs for energy with the priorities of health, safety, and development that serve our class interests. Only the working class can be trusted to make life-and-death decisions on how to heat and power our world—to build more safely run nuclear reactors, for example. There’s no climate solution without communist revolution!

Clean energy “transition” is dead in the water
Beginning in the 19th century, coal and oil and gas fueled the rise of capitalism. They brought millions of workers out of the cold. They created modern industry and transportation—and modern wars for profit. But today, fossil fuels are Exhibit A of capitalism in decay. They’re filthy and inefficient and force multipliers of racist inequality. Climate change is deadly for workers, and for Black and Brown workers most of all. Nine million people a year die from the fine particulate matter linked to greenhouse gasses. Half a million die from extreme heat alone. In 2022, climate disasters forced 100 million workers to flee their homes. One third of Pakistan was under water.

In 2015, at a benchmark climate summit in Paris, the UN set a “binding” target for global warming of 2 degrees Celsius—or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—over pre-industrial levels. (For context, the Earth has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius.) Based on current climate policies, according to Columbia University physicist James Hansen, the planet will punch through the Paris ceiling before 2050 (“Global Warming in the Pipeline,” www.columbia.edu, 7/5). By 2100, within the lifetimes of children here today, the Earth projects to be at least 2.7 degrees hotter (climateactiontracker.org). That might not sound like much, but consider: The last Ice Age was triggered by a temperature shift of just 6 degrees Celsius. At 2.7 degrees of warming, scientists predict that the Earth will pass calamitous tipping points of no return (nature.com, 11/27/19). Coral reefs will go extinct. Polar glaciers will dissolve and drown islands around the globe (abc.net.au, 3/28/22). A billion or more climate migrants will be trapped between unbearable conditions and the bosses’ borders (economicsandpeace.org, 9/9/20).

Meanwhile, recent UN climate summits have been hijacked by Big Oil, the same monsters who for decades spewed climate disinformation alongside their carbon dioxide. This December’s conference is set for the capitalist Disneyland of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Presiding will be Sultan Al Jaber, head of the state-owned energy company. Like Saudi Arabia, another immigrant slave state, the UAE is committed to unlimited exploitation of its oil and gas reserves to 2100 and beyond.

Fossil fuels and imperialist plunder
Why can’t the capitalist rulers tackle this existential threat? The short answer is that fossil fuels remain highly profitable, at least in the short term—and capitalism has a chaotically short-term outlook. After Russia invaded Ukraine, energy markets went haywire. The price of oil soared. The “supermajors”—ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP—junked plans to diversify into renewables. With lavish financing from the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Citi, they doubled down on their old business model. In 2022, they plowed $4 trillion of record windfall profits into dividends, share buybacks, and expanded fossil fuel production. Barely half of 1 percent of their ill-gotten gains went toward clean energy (iea.org, May 2023). Exxon spent less than $3 billion on “lower greenhouse gas emissions initiatives” and $23 billion on new oil and gas projects (euronews.com/1/2).

Even as solar and wind prices have plunged, and clean electricity runs much of the world’s power grids, the fossil fuel sector keeps growing. When President Joe Biden rammed through his Inflation Reduction Act, media cheerleaders said it could stimulate $1 trillion in renewable energy investments. They glossed over the fact that Biden also greenlit the immense Willow oil project in Alaska and three huge pipelines for natural gas. His Energy Department is ready to lease eighty million acres of the Gulf of Mexico—twice the area of Florida—for offshore drilling (cnbc.com, 11/17/21).

The U.S. and Europe, which have plundered the world for centuries with the aid of fossil fuels, are at odds with emerging economies—notably China—that want their turn at the plundering. Although China dominates the solar panel and battery industries, and soon will dominate offshore wind, it also consumes more than half the world’s coal. Over the last year, China approved an average of two new coal-powered plants per week, a source of cheap energy and jobs in a country where youth unemployment exceeds 21 percent (statista.com).
In July, President Xi Jinping told U.S. climate envoy John Kerry that future cooperation on climate would hinge on U.S. policies on Taiwan and trade. All bets will be off if the two superpowers keep sliding toward world war—oil is the life’s blood of their armies, after all. The U.S. military alone consumes more than 100 billion barrels per year (ucusa.org, 6/1/14).

Carrots, sticks, and communism
It’s easy for the capitalists to shower clean energy with the carrots of subsidies and tax breaks. But no matter how much solar and wind and hydropower is deployed, global warming won’t stop until the fossil fuel economy gets mostly dismantled. That can’t happen without some big sticks, beginning with a punitive tax on carbon.

The issue with sticks is that they hurt certain bosses’ profits. With the U.S. ruling class deeply split, and the Republican Party significantly controlled by Koch Industries, coal giant Peabody, and other domestic energy interests, Biden’s Democrats have little room to maneuver. But the primary obstacles to meaningful climate action are the lack of discipline and long-range thinking within finance capital, the liberal main wing of global banks and multinational oil companies. Nor is there much appetite for sticks on the world stage. When recent climate summits floated a “phaseout” of coal or a “phasedown” of all fossil fuels, they were vetoed by China, India, Brazil, and imperialist Russia, which gets nearly half its revenues from oil and gas.

As workers join the mass movement against climate change, we need to be clear that individual actions can’t win this monumental battle. It’s not nearly enough to compost or recycle or buy an electric vehicle—or to vote for a “green” politician. The rulers and their callous greed created this crisis; the international working class will solve it. The fight for a sustainable planet can’t be set apart from our fight to smash the racist, sexist profit system that chokes the atmosphere. A communist society, led by Progressive Labor Party, will unleash the technology and creativity we need to forge a new world, one where workers’ lives and well-being come first. Join us!