Workers’ Liberty activists have been proposing and debating initiatives on climate change.

Start local for climate action

By Matt Cooper

In his article in Solidarity 512, Mike Zubrowski argues that a focus on limited local issues and (by implication) workplace initiatives “distracts from the real forces at play” which are international and require that the working class “take democratic public control” of key sectors of the economy.

I’m a first year engineering apprentice at a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant in Sheffield.

The plant takes domestic black bin waste and burns it at high temperatures to heat steam, which drives a turbine and an electricity generator.

The excess steam from the turbine is then used to heat water, which is pumped around the city to heat buildings — such as the local swimming pool.

People who worry more about climate change, correspondingly putting more effort into “being green”, are likely to live lifestyles with higher associated emissions. In advanced capitalist countries, middle-class people tend to think more about climate change. They are simultaneously living in less densely-packed areas, further from where they might travel to, and with more disposable income: more carbon-intensive lifestyles.

The call for a general strike against climate change, now gaining traction across much of the climate movement and taken up by prominent figures such as Greta Thurnberg, has a meaningful latent power. School climate strikers are calling on workers to join them in striking on 20 September.

A record breaking – and dangerous – heatwave swept much of Europe in the closing days of June, affecting the UK too, with a lighter touch.

For once, complaints of it being “too hot” seemed more than an excuse to grumble. But these unnatural temperatures are the benign end of repercussions of the global climatic instability caused by rising greenhouse gas levels.

Chernobyl was a disaster — there is no doubt about that — but what lessons should we learn from it?

Though the catastrophic meltdown and explosion of the RBMK Reactor No 4 happened almost half a lifetime ago, when police states claiming to serve the workers ruled eastern Europe, the recent HBO mini-series Chernobyl has brought that time back to life.

Though partly fictionalised and sometimes wrong (according to survivors and experts), the basic facts are correct.

Outsourced workers at the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) began a five day strike from 17 June, immediately following an outsourced workers’ strike at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (F&CO). Both strikes have had exceptionally lively picket lines.

Labour-left commentators have been stumbling over each other to congratulate Rebecca Long-Bailey on her strong words for climate change in Prime Minister’s Questions and in her video on the “green industrial revolution”.

Strong words on climate change are welcome, as are bolder visions. But what does it boil down to, and is it bold enough?

The Committee on Climate Change report, which I wrote about in Solidarity 506, tags 53% of the carbonemissions reductions as “requiring some change from consumers”. What are the changes in individual lifestyle which may be needed to get rapid cuts in carbon emissions?

One million species are threatened with extinction, 23% of all land has suffered degradation, hundreds of millions of people are at greater risk of floods and hurricanes due to loss of coastal habitats, and a huge proportion of global food production is at risk due to pollinator loss.