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Hello comrades, this is Siegfried. Welcome to Back in the USSR. I’d like to devote this week’s show, my
second show of 2019, to the issue of climate change for a number of very
immediate reasons that I’ll get to. But
first I’d like to give a salute to the Syrian Arab Army, which has just
liberated the key city of Khan Shaykoun from Turkish-backed rebel groups. Some of you might recognize the name, because
Khan Shaykoun is the same city where that unconfirmed and dubiously reported
“chemical attack” took place a few years back, which Donald Trump then proceeded
to blame on the Syrian Government even though the Syrian Government had
destroyed its stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2014 under UN supervision, and then
used the supposed “attack” as a pretext for bombing Syria. Now the Syrian flag flies proudly over Khan
Shaykoun and the rebel groups, backed by imperialist powers, are running for
their lives. This is a real victory for
the forces fighting against imperialism in the name of self-determination
around the world.
But this episode of the show is dedicated to the issue
of climate change, an issue that is intimately tied in with the forces of
capitalism and empire. I’d like to start
out with a quote from the Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro that
appeared in Granma, the Cuban national newspaper, back in 2009. In that year, Fidel wrote an article
discussing the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and this is one
of the things that he said.
“The youth is more interested than anyone else in the
future. Until very recently, the discussion revolved around the kind of society
we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will
survive. These are not dramatic phrases. We must get used to the true facts.
Hope is the last thing human beings can relinquish.”
Comrades, I believe that this passage accurately
captures the essence of the present global situation that we face today. As if in confirmation of Fidel’s words, in
2016 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report
that stated that we only have twelve years to seriously curb carbon emissions
if we want to avoid a climate catastrophe.
According to the report, the world is currently one
degree celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels. In 2018, the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued another report that noted that
things were much worse than previously thought. The predictions are very bleak:
Worsening of environmental disasters across the globe such as: forest fires,
tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, and droughts. At two degrees warming, we are
heading towards a future where the population of insects is predicted to halve,
99% of the coral reefs are predicted to die, and extreme weather events have
been very prevalent in the past few years, with heatwaves such as the 2019
Indo-Pakistani heat wave, which killed 184 people. With that said, since 2004,
India and Pakistan have experienced eleven of fifteen of it’s warmest recorded
days on record. Climate
change is happening. It’s real. There is NO turning back, only delaying the
inevitable.
That’s WHY we need Communism, or more precisely, why
we need Communist theories as espoused by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, and
why we need to build the struggle for Socialism. Putting people before profits is no longer an
empty catch-phrase to be thrown around by any two-bit activist on the
block. It’s a matter of survival. Those who struggle for socialism, for working
class-centered democratic control over the economy and society, have to realize
that they are no longer fighting solely for human progress, but also so that
human beings may have a future at all.
If profits remain in command of society, humanity dies, plain and
simple.
In 1876, Friedrich Engels, Marx’s collaborator, said
the following: “Let us not...flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
conquest over nature. For each such
conquest takes its revenge on us...At every step we are reminded that we by no
means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone
standing outside of nature - but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong
to nature, and exist in its midst.”
He could not have said better. As Michael Parenti pointed out in his book
“Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Otherthrow of Communism”: “With
its never-ending emphasis on exploitation and expansion, and its indifference
to environmental costs, capitalism appears determined to stand outside nature,”
even as individual capitalists advertise themselves and claim to be
“green”. Capitalism’s commodification
and exploitation of the planet, its resources and people (including such
life-sustaining resources as arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests,
fisheries, ocean beds, rivers, air quality etc.) has caused the very life
support systems of Earth to degrade and threaten the survival of the human
species.
One of the things that I wanted to bring up tonight
was the fires currently raging in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. There’s been an 84% increase in fires from
last year, and there’s ample evidence that illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and
mining companies have been literally putting the rainforest to the torch in
order to enhance their profits – destroying the very lungs of the planet, along
with the lands of dozens of indigenous nations, so that they can make more
money. And all the while that would-be
fascist dictator Jair Bolsonaro does all he can to facilitate this bonanza of
plunder and destruction. The same
Bolsonaro who was hailed by the CBC last year upon his election for his
commitment to free-markets and for providing opportunities for Canadian
businesses, particularly in the mining industry. And this is how he’s delivering those
“opportunities” y’all: burning up the Amazon and clearing the way for those
extractive industries that rule Bay Street.
Here’s an August 22 clip from the Real News Network that gets further
into the situation in the Amazon.
Capitalism is the problem, comrades, not the
solution. The introduction of solar
panels or any other form of green technology cannot change the underlying logic
of a system built upon the limitless exploitation of finite resources. In order for us to do anything about climate
change we need to take control over the means of production and put it into the
hands of working class people. When I say that, I mean that in order to combat
climate change, we need to put industry and commerce under the democratic
control of working class and oppressed people, and indigenous people in
particular, so that they may choose their own destiny.
Right now, we are heading towards “Climate Apartheid”. According to a recent United
Nations report, by 2030, one hundred and twenty million people will be forced
into poverty and hunger. The rich will
be able to pay their way out of facing the consequences of the Earth’s climate
change while the vast majority of people suffer. This June 2019 report by the UN’s Human
Rights Council describes how the world’s 3.5 billion poorest people are
responsible for only 10% of the world’s carbon emissions while the richest 10%
of the global population are responsible for more than half.
To quote directly: “Perversely, the richest, who have
the greatest capacity to adapt and are responsible for and have benefitted from
the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, will be the best placed to cope
with climate change…while the poorest, who have contributed the least to
emissions and have the least capacity to react, will be the most harmed…An
over-reliance on the private sector could lead to a climate apartheid scenario
in which the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict, while the
rest of the world is left to suffer.”
Comrades, we need to fight for Socialism in the world right
now because we need to ensure that there is a future for humanity, and not just
a future for the richest of humanity with the funds to hide out in luxury
underground bunkers or go to Mars. We need Socialism because our world is
changing, and just like Fidel Castro said back in 2009, today, the discussion
centers on whether human society will survive. Socialism isn’t a trend, but a
tool in the hands of working class people that they can use to secure their own
liberation and survival. Right now these
two things go hand in hand all over the world.
We need to understand how socialism can, and is,
effectively working to combat climate change today. Despite western propaganda against Communism
striving to mislead public opinion, the truth is that socialist states run by
Communist Parties, both historically and presently, have shown the successes of
Socialist economics & politics and the role they can play in managing
disasters, in fighting fascism, and in safeguarding the interests of the vast
majority.
We can take inspiration from countries such as Cuba,
that have begun to embark on a one hundred year plan to fight climate change.
Tarea Vida, or Project Life, is a comprehensive plan to combat climate change
in Cuba which was adopted in the spring of 2017 by Cuba’s Council of Ministers.
It involves eleven projects ranging from identifying and implementing actions
and projects to adapt to climate change of a comprehensive, ongoing nature, to
Ensuring The availability and efficient use of water as part of confronting
drought to the management and use
available international financial resources, both those from global and regional
climate funds, and those from bilateral sources, to make investments, carry out
actions, and implement projects related to the tasks outlined in the state
plan.
As the United States continues to show that it is not
willing to take global leadership in combating climate change, countries such
as China are showing the world their willingness to deal with the problem. In
2017 the United States withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. China stayed in it, and according to recent
data China is nine years ahead of schedule in their plan to reach their carbon
emission goals set by the Paris Climate Accord. Considering China accounts for
1/3rd of the worlds pollution, that’s massive!
In recent years, China has done things like assigning
60,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army to plant trees in an effort to
fight climate change, building the world's largest humidifier, standing at a
staggering 328 feet, which was built in
an effort to fight pollution, dramatically reducing its consumption of coal,
and constructing the largest wind and solar power stations in the world. China is also
creating experimental cities like Liuzhou Forest City which will be open
in 2020 and is set to include a million plants and 40,000 trees, can house a
total of 30,000 people and will absorb 57 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year
while producing 900 tonnes of oxygen.
This is what Ian Goodrum, the journalist for China Daily who I
interviewed for the Communist Current Podcast last month had to say about
China’s environmental efforts.
Remember the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change Report I mentioned earlier in the show? It also stated that to
successfully combat climate change, we need “far-reaching transitions in
energy, land … and industrial systems” for which there is “no documented
historic precedent.”
I disagree. There is a very well documented historic
precedent, and that precedent is Socialism.
As the progressive environmentalist John Bellamy Foster points out, the
Soviet Union in the 1980s possessed what was at the time the largest and most
active environmental movement in the world.
Over the course of that single decade, the USSR’s carbon emissions
dropped by a factor of 25% thanks to effective centralized planning, the
introduction of new technology and the shutting down and/or retrofitting of
older factories and power plants. This
was years before the issue of global warming was even being considered at an
international level. Almost twenty years
before the Kyoto Protocol was signed, Soviet scientists and ordinary citizens
had already identified the problem and put pressure on their socialist
government to take concrete steps to solve it.
As early as 1976 at the 25th CPSU Congress, the Soviet government had
decided to push for the development of new energy sources and green technology:
including wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and nuclear fusion. Lenin himself had been considering the
development of wind energy as early as the 1920s. Soviet tidal power stations had been in
operation in Siberia and on the coast of the White Sea as early as the
1960s. By 1985 solar power was being
used to heat homes, children’s summer camps and recreational centers in many
parts of the country. Geothermal electric
stations of up to 1,000,000 KW were being built in the regions of Kamchatka,
Daghestan and Stavropol, while entire cities, such as Grozny and Tbilisi, were
getting their heat from geothermal sources.
Soviet scientists had even worked out the theoretical principles of how
to tap enough heat energy from inside the earth to “power the world for three
or four millennia” according to Dr Kamil Mangushev, who headed the Sector of
Economics of the Fuel-and-Energy Industry at the USSR Academy of Sciences. The impressive example of the Soviet Union’s
achievements with regard to the environment and clean energy demonstrates why
we need the means of production to be put under the democratic control of
working class people. Because today the question isn’t Socialism or Barbarism.
Today the question is Socialism or Extinction.
