Earlier this month at the Maura Loa Observatory in Hawaii the global carbon dioxide concentration briefly hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time.
This is not any old threshold at any old observatory. Maura Loa has taken consistent readings since 1958, when the carbon dioxide concentration was 315ppm. That means it has increased by a quarter in half a century.
In the early 1960s the annual increase was 0.7ppm. Now it is 2.1ppm per annum – three times as fast.
The IPCC’s fourth report in 2007 estimated that the global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increased from a pre-industrial value of about 280 to 379ppm in 2005. The last time the earth reached a 400ppm concentration — some 4 million years ago — northern Canada was covered in jungle and sea level was 30 metres higher than at present. Whilst values sawtooth during the year, the direction of travel is clear.
The planet is already heading away from the “goldilocks” zone which has sustained life for countless millennia. The Stern review said 450ppm was the limit to aim for by 2050. At this rate the limit will be breached well before 2040. NASA climate scientist James Hansen believes 350ppm is the safe limit. Already floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves are afflicting the ecology.
Despite these warnings, global emissions from fossil fuels continue to grow.
The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook registers a resurgence in oil and gas production, spurred by unconventional sources such as tar sands and hydraulic fracturing (known as fracking), with coal demand growing faster than renewables.
Contemporary climate change politics, dominated by neoliberal and ecological modernisation framings, has reached an impasse. The efforts of national states to secure a global agreement stalled at Copenhagen in 2009 and have barely gone further ever since. The suggestion last week by the Chinese government that it plans to reduce emissions from 2016 is a small sign of hope. But at present, no deal to reduce emissions is close.
The central market solution developed over the last decade (the European Union’s emissions trading scheme) has hit rocket bottom. The plan was to set a “carbon price” through issuing permits to heavy industry, as an incentive to invest in less polluting sources of energy. The net result so far has been the over-issue of free permits, leading to the undulation and now collapse of the carbon price, while generating billions of profits for fossil fuel giants.
Recent technological breakthroughs have not had an impact. In fact, the main technological drives have been towards ever-deeper drilling for oil and gas. By contrast carbon capture and storage, which the IPCC put a high premium on, has not been perfected and rolled out on a scale necessary. Nuclear technologies that burn waste products without high carbon emissions similarly remain technically possible but not yet widely operative. Progress with offshore wind technology continues, but fewer breakthroughs are visible to assist the spread of solar and tidal power, which could provide renewable energy at low cost.
In short, none of the bosses in the energy and finance industries, nor their representatives at the head of states and multilateral institutions, have come up with any significant plan to tackle climate change.
Twenty five years after they turned their attention to it, and two dozen years since the Kyoto protocol, extreme energy remains hegemonic, emissions are accelerating and extreme weather is already manifesting itself across the globe.
The result is widespread demoralisation of the climate movement and the dithering of environmental NGOs and Green Parties linked to larger or smaller capitals. The elitist, scientistic climate discourse has failed to grapple with the systemic social and power relations that give rise to global warming and climate denial continues to impede efforts. Capital has simply failed the climate challenge.
What is needed in this situation is a working class-based climate movement. It requires socialists to articulate a critique of the systemic causes of climate change and the inherent limits of capital’s approach. It necessitates an orientation to the labour movement, aimed at mobilising workers who are the immediate victims of exploitation and environmental degradation and so have a direct material interest in campaigning around climate change.
The organised labour movement also has immense social, economic and political power to deploy against capital. First of all that means transforming the existing trade union movement, sloughing off the pedestrian, pro-capitalist partnership approach of many union leaderships and mobilising union reps for climate action. It means championing efforts like the Vestas occupation in 2009, in which workers’ direct action became a magnet for solidarity.
A working-class movement will have to challenge capital’s ownership and control of the means of production, which in the hands of capital are simultaneously the means of climate destruction. Social ownership and workers’ control of the major energy firms (as well as the big banks that finance big energy) is a burning necessity to get to grips with climate change. Climate-related employment is also the direct answer to the economy mired in economic stagnation.
There is huge scope for forming alliances between the labour movement and climate activists. This includes support for and work with anti-fracking and anti-tar sands campaigns, which are taking on the extreme energy agenda. Climate campaigning cannot be a desirable add-on for the left.
It is either an integral part of the struggle for socialism, or we face a future of climatic barbarism.
