Note: this article is based on the presentation at a public forum we held on Capitalism and the Environment on August 17th. The presentation and discussion at that event is available to listen to here.
Anthropogenic climate change
The Earth’s climate was changing for millennia before humans evolved as a species. Historically, changes in the Earth’s temperature and the composition of its atmosphere in response to the evolution of primitive life forms have enabled the evolution of life as we know it on the planet.
We will attempt to cover the following here: first of all, the Earth’s climate has always been changing, and there is a considerable complexity of climate system & modelling to be addressed. Changing weather patterns are not clearly conclusive, there tends to be a lack of direct experience in prominent locations, and hence it is often alleged that there is a lack of evidence. In addition, corporations profiting from green-washing scams are frequently used as a justification for anthropogenic climate change denial
Climate breakdown
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is at risk of breakdown – this includes the Gulf Stream which keeps the climate of the British Isles, Ireland, and North Western Europe warmer than regions at a comparable latitude, that is, warmer than north western Europe would be without the Gulf Stream. AMOC funnels heat northwards through the Atlantic Ocean, it is crucial for controlling climate and marine ecosystems. It is currently weaker than at any time in the past 1000 years. Modelling suggests that recent weakening can be explained by taking into account melt water from Greenland ice sheet and Canadian glaciers
If the Gulf Stream collapses as a result of global warming, our climate will become life-threateningly colder. Global warming is projected as greater than 1.5ºC within a few years, putting humanity in danger, bringing multiple climate tipping points causing catastrophic risk to billions of people. Tropical coral reefs have crossed tipping points with unprecedented die back. The Amazon rainforest also risks widespread die back from climate change and deforestation.
Evidence for anthropogenic climate change
2024 was the hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC (see chart above)
That is, global temperatures are increasing exponentially in response to the exponential increase in green house gas emissions into the atmosphere, leading to polar ice melt/retreat and glacial melting/glacier retreats. Examples include parts of the Indian subcontinent and its river systems dependent on seasonal glacial melting/retreat and refreezing for a water source. Long-established human settlements depend on this water source. A massive increase in glacial melting/retreat is causing flooding and devastating landslides, and devastation/destruction of village settlements. People in those settlements (e.g. in Pakistan) are directly experiencing the devastation of climate change, they know climate change is real
The fastest melting glaciers include those in Alaska, Iceland, the Alps; there is a profound effect on glaciers in the Pamir mountains, the Hindu Kush and Himalayas.
Corporate green-washing scams
In November 2023, prior to the COP28 summit in Dubai, the UAE firm Blue Carbon, owned by Sheikh Ahmed al-Maktoum, set up a carbon offsets Ponzi scheme using control of vast tracts of African land. The carbon offsetting green-washing scam is a Ponzi scheme for buying and selling carbon credits enabling corporate fossil fuel producers and users to buy carbon credits instead of reducing their greenhouse gas emitting activities. Buying carbon credits pays for forested land while the buyer continues their commercial activities generating greenhouse gases. But the forests cannot absorb the greenhouse gases in a time scale that off-sets them, while some of the forests used are actually lost to forest fires, often caused by global warming.
The forests used this way are commonly taken from indigenous populations, whose governments are coerced into selling the land as a way of paying off debts that they should never have been conned into taking on in the first place. Carbon credits and offsetting is a scam which entrenches and enables the increase in global green house gas emissions.
War, weapons manufacture, weapons trade
War and its profits are an essential part of maintaining the contradictory, unstable capitalist system. War and weapons are the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The West’s militaries and arms makers are growing each year producing massive profits for the corporate arms manufacturers, their CEOs and shareholders. Military emissions are at an all time high. The COP UN conferences repeatedly fail to hold the military industrial complex accountable for its emissions. The military needs to be held accountable for radioactive contamination from nuclear energy. At COP28, no documents mentioned military and war contribution to climate crisis.
Then there is the environmental impact of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. Blowing up the Nordstream pipeline released a massive amount of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, into the atmosphere. There is the use of depleted uranium, supplied by Britain, in munitions. The land littered with landmines, the disruption and pollution of water supplies, land polluted by collapse of the hydro dam system on the Dnieper River. In wars generally, land is contaminated by chemical weapons and defoliants. For example, the use of Agent Orange as a defoliant in Vietnam, which, decades later, has left land contaminated, people still being poisoned including babies being born with defects.
Environmental cost of super-rich
Capitalism relentlessly concentrates disproportionate levels of wealth into the hands of a minority, creating a global class of super-wealthy individuals detached from an appreciation of the real world. An Oxfam report in October 2024 reveals: in 1 year, 1 ultra-rich European takes an average of 140 flights, spends 267 hours in the air, emits as a much carbon as an average European in 112 years. in 1 year, a superyacht user emits as much carbon as an ordinary European would in 585 years. Less than a week of emissions from the superyachts and jets of one of the 31 of the richest people in the EU exceeded the entire lifetime emissions of a person in the world’s poorest 1%. Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets and yachts in just over 1.5 hours than an average person in a lifetime.
Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement. The total investment emissions of 36 of the EU’s richest billionaires are equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4.5 million Europeans.
See
And
Environmental cost of Gaza genocide
The UN Environmental Program (UNEP) assesses the unprecedented environmental impact of war in Gaza: Rapidly growing soil, water and air pollution risks irreversible damage to Gaza’s natural ecosystems. In the first two months of the Gaza genocide, carbon emissions from the Israeli assault were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. Any Gaza reconstruction is estimated to generate approximately 60m tonnes of CO2, more than the annual emissions of more than 135 countries.
See https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/09/17/the-environmental-cost-of-israels-genocide-in-gaza/
Health effects of air pollution
Exposure to fossil fuel air pollution increases the risks of strokes, heart and lung disease, cancer, etc, causing 8.7m premature deaths per year, equivalent to nearly 1/5 of deaths world wide. Exposure to fine particulate matter, PM2.5, from burning fossil fuels led to 8.7m deaths in 2018. Air pollution is an invisible killer, a particular risk to children, elderly, people on low incomes. People in urban areas suffer worst impacts. PM2.5 is equivalent to airborne particles of less than or equal to 2.5 microns in diameter, which are especially dangerous to young children whose organs and immune response are developing.
Food systems and agribusiness
Much of our food system is increasingly global and industrialised. This includes industrialised fishing in the form of large trawlers scraping the sea bed leading to over-fishing for profit, depleting fish stocks. There is the indiscriminate catching of non-target species, and damage to marine ecosystems. Industrially farmed fish, unsafe to eat, such as salmon, are bred for maximum profit, and are fed unbalanced diets including sea food. Such dense populations lead to disease, infecting the marine environment and are in turn treated with toxic chemicals. Farmed fish are a hazard to local wild fish and the marine environment.
Industrial farming produces monocrops using chemical inputs in the form of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, leading to depleted soils, soil erosion, contamination and damage to ecosystems. Also the loss of biodiversity, including pollinators and natural predators to pests that damage crops, and the loss of soil structure and micro-organisms plants need for healthy growth and nutrition. The run-off of excess fertilisers and slurry from intensively farmed animals pollutes rivers and water sources.
Industrial livestock farming uses imported animal feed, industrially grown as large mono-crops, mainly genetically modified (GM) soya and GM maize, which is mostly grown in Brazil and Argentina, largely on deforested land contaminated with pesticides. GM soya is engineered to be herbicide resistant. It poisons vast tracts of agricultural land and surrounding areas with herbicides such as glyphosate, poisons the environment, is ecocidal and poisonous to local residents, and particularly damaging in large parts of Argentina
Land is expropriated from indigenous populations in low income countries (e.g. parts of Africa such as Kenya) for growing food in the form of cash crops for export to richer countries such as Britain. International food systems produce trade via polluting shipping, emitting green house gases, endangering marine life from noise pollution and collisions. Globally, and in the UK, land and food production is increasingly taken over by trans-national corporate agribusiness.
Land mis-use in Britain
Wealthy British landowners, especially the royal family and aristocracy, use vast tracts of land to profit from shooting game birds such as grouse and partridge. Much of this land is moorland, including peat lands, mismanaged with breeding unnaturally large numbers of birds and destroying the natural ecosystems, native wild life and biodiversity by seasonally burning natural vegetation to accommodate bred birds and the ability to kill them easily in large numbers. The peat lands are natural carbon stores—burning them emits large amount of carbon dioxide. in 2024, 150 grouse moor estates covered 550,000 acres in England; 300 grouse estates covered 2.5m acres in Scottish Highlands.
More of Surrey is now under golf courses – about 2.65% – than has houses on it (see https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/uncategorized/more-of-surrey-is-now-under-golf-courses-about-2-65-than-has-houses-on-it). Golf courses use more land than UK homes (see https://www.cityam.com/golf-courses-use-more-land-uk-homes/) Twice as much is land used for golf courses than for housing in England (see https://londonlovesproperty.com/2x-more-land-used-for-golf-courses-than-for-housing-in-england/). Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire destroyed a site of special scientific interest on the coast.
The Environment and Communism
All these examples, on the local, the national and the world wide scale, simply epitomise the results of the organisation of the world’s productive forces by capitalism, and for the most part imperialist capitalism at that. Thus we have not only the profit motive in a mundane sense, but a form of capitalism that is desperately seeking to hang on to its domination of the world economically and politically, to safeguard its sources of profit not only domestically, but from its plundering and despoiling of weaker capitalist societies. This is what has given birth to the combination of working class revolutions and anti-imperialist struggles of oppressed capitalist countries over the past century and more. Now we see alliances of deformed workers states like China, Cuba and North Korea, with oppressed bourgeois countries like Russia (once the centre of world socialist revolution), Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, as the most powerful imperialism, the US, spirals into decline along with its European imperialist allies, whose imperialist heyday was over decades earlier.
This is producing chaos for imperialism, and opening up the possibility of world revolution. Indeed, the despoilation of the biosphere by (mainly) imperialist capitalism is what makes world revolution imperative. Environmental collapse will not be staved of by greenwashing schemes like those discussed above. Nor will imperialist-dominated bodies like the United Nations remotely be capable of doing anything about it. Tackling capitalist-generated climate disaster requires an international planning mechanism, through socialism on an international , not national scale, and not even as the sum of various different national scales, because this problem is universal— it affects the whole of humanity. Therefore there has to be a body, which we have to advocate, even if it currently seems like pie-in-the-sky, that plans the allocation and use of natural resources in a rational and sustainable manner for the future, that has a mandate to carry out this on a socialist basis, to plan things for human need, not for the profit of a few. There has to be a worldwide programme to advocate this.
Web Sources:
‘Toxic, high-sulfur fuel sent to Africa cheaply’ — David Hundeyin
GMOs and climate change: How 21st-century colonialists offload their burdens to Africa
https://swentr.site/africa/593490-climate-change-governance-africa
African countries should be aware and act in their own interests, not Western ones, when facing global challenges
For an ‘ecommunist’ alternative to degrowth and luxury communism
Stockholm Resilience Centre
https://www.stockholmresilience.org
Planetary boundaries
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
To Halt Climate Change, We Need an Ecological Leninism
https://jacobin.com/2020/06/andreas-malm-coronavirus-covid-climate-change
Bayer’s glyphosate successor – icafolin – coming to the EU?
Articles on Climate & Capitalism:
2024: Hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC
contains useful graph:
Annual global temperature anomalies relative to 1850-1900. Provisional estimate for 2024 based on 10 months (- best found yet).
An Emirati sheikh and an Italian fugitive are hoovering up land for an ambitious project that critics say will make the climate crisis worse
War and Climate
Websites
Pentagon Pollution, 7: The military assault on global climate
From the article:
“By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy … Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements … Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders.”
Excellent must read article
Military pollution is the skeleton in the West’s climate closet
Leaders at the COP26 summit have no intention of tackling the growing environmental impacts caused by their ‘defence’ spending
by Jonathan Cook / November 9th, 2021
From the article:
“US expenditure on its military far outstrips that of any other country – except for Israel, when measured relative to population size. Although the UK trails behind, it still has the fifth largest military budget in the world, while its arms manufacturers busily supply weapons to countries others have shunned.”
and:
“And emissions from the West’s militaries and arms makers appear to be growing each year rather than shrinking – though no one can be certain because they are being actively hidden from view.
“Washington insisted on an exemption from reporting on, and reducing, its military emissions at the Kyoto summit, 24 years ago. Unsurprisingly, everyone else jumped on that bandwagon.”
and:
“According to research by Scientists for Global Responsibility, the UK’s military emissions were three times larger than those it reported – even after supply chains, as well as weapons and equipment production, were excluded. The military was responsible for the overwhelming majority of British government emissions.”
The US Military is Driving Environmental Collapse Across the Planet
The US military is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined
https://qz.com/1655268/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-140-countries-combined
Videos
Making A Killing: The Weapons Trade
Rod Driver is a semi-retired academic who specialises in explaining how the world works, with a special emphasis on modern-day US and British propaganda. This relates to many topics, including war, economics, finance, corporate crime, the failings of the media, the failings of democracy, and the failings of academia.
Land abuse
More of Surrey is now under golf courses – about 2.65% – than has houses on it
Golf courses use more land than UK homes
https://www.cityam.com/golf-courses-use-more-land-uk-homes/
2x more land used for golf courses than for housing in England
https://londonlovesproperty.com/2x-more-land-used-for-golf-courses-than-for-housing-in-england
The Lie of the Land
how a tiny group of landowners wrecked the countryside
by Guy Shrubsole
published by William Collins, 2025
ISBN 978-0-00-865181-7
– includes info about the environmental devastation of grouse moors
Monarchy, privilege & the environment
The King, The Prince & Their Secret Millions: Revealed | Dispatches | Channel 4 Documentaries
How the monarchy cashes in on our seabed
The royal family has made millions from the exploitation of the seabed—a resource that belongs to us all. Is it time for people and planet to be put ahead of profit?
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/monarchy/62141/how-the-monarchy-cashes-in-on-our-seabed
Songs for WW3
Tom Lehrer – Wernher von Braun – with intro
So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)
We Will All Go Together When We Go
Tom Lehrer: New Math https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4
