This year’s five summer heatwaves in Britain, and much more severe heat surges across Europe and other continents, ought to be a wake-up call to the working-class movement in all countries, whether in the imperialist world, or those who are the victims of imperialism. We have now seen the disaster on the border of Nepal and Tibet, with many hundreds killed by sudden flash floods, which appear to be the result of the collapse of a Himalayan glacier due to climate change. This is very ominous in today’s context with the accelerating damage that capitalism is inflicting.
The lower limit that the Paris climate agreement of 2016 sought to avoid, of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperature levels, has been repeatedly breached over the last several years, with 2026 as the worst by a considerable distance over the summer. The upper of the two limits that Paris sought to avoid, 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, looms. The additional complicating factor is that this surge in temperatures coincides with the recurring El Niño climate phenomenon, which tends to push temperatures upwards considerably when it occurs, as it appears to do around every 8 years.
The El Niño phenomenon itself is undoubtedly being magnified by anthropogenic climate change, whose fundamental cause is the capitalist mode of production. The technological basis for removing fossil fuel emissions from industrial processes has existed for many years now. In China’s deformed workers state, large-scale endeavours are underway to deploy these technologies, including solar power and other renewables. Centralised state planning makes that possible on a massive scale. Even Wikipedia, which it is right to be dubious about because of its pro-Western, pro-Zionist bias, reports:
“China is the world’s top electricity producer from renewable energy sources. China’s renewable energy capacity is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity. China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025, reaching a total installed renewable capacity of over 2.34 TW by the end of the year. The country aims to achieve peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060; emissions may have already peaked in 2024, six years ahead of the 2030 goal.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China)
What this shows is that this is possible. China’s planned economy makes this possible. Even though there is extensive latitude for capitalism in China, it really is an expanded version of what used to be called ‘market socialism’ and the decisive power remains in the hands of the workers state and its labour bureaucracy, headed by the party of that labour bureaucracy, the Communist Party of China. (CPC). China, unfortunately, is a severely deformed workers state, led by a labour bureaucracy that has long sought peaceful co-existence and collaboration with world capitalism, which makes it impossible for it to provide a genuinely universal alternative to the threat that capitalism poses to human existence. That requires the rebirth of a mass political working-class movement equipped with the world-revolutionary programme of Bolshevism, which requires that such a party – a new revolutionary Communist International – be created on an international scale, ultimately to replace the narrow, nationalist labour bureaucracy in China with a revolutionary internationalist leadership based on working-class democracy; though even the nationally-limited, planned expansion of renewables in China show clearly what would be possible on a planetary scale if there was an internationalist, Bolshevik leadership.
Russia has not been a workers’ state since the 1991 destruction of the USSR. It is currently run by a peculiar kind of capitalist regime that is heavily deformed by the continued presence in much of the society of the old labour bureaucracy of the degenerated USSR. This is because the USSR, however stunted, began the construction of a socialist mode of production in that state, a mode of production that is more advanced than capitalism, and which had taken root for almost 8 decades. Thus, the counter-revolution was limited in its scope and was forced to retreat before mass discontent at the end of the 1990s. The mass discontent was directed through the old labour bureaucracy. Yeltsin was forced out and replaced by Putin, a classic man of the apparatus, who though no longer adheres to any sort of ‘communism,’ rolled back much of the neo-liberal attack on the masses, jailed, exiled and, in some cases, eliminated the worst Imperialist stooges among the oligarchy, and created what is a mixed economy, over 50% ‘statified,’ which is very much at odds with the demands of neoliberalism; but, that has not translated, unlike China, into any major expansion of renewable energy. In the early period of his presidency, Putin was a sceptic about climate change, but appears to have changed his view, though this has led to very little action, no doubt because Russia, as is well known, is one of the world’s major producers of oil and gas.
As for the West, the situation is far worse, as the populist Right, which has dominated US politics for at least the past decade and has made major inroads in Europe, overtly denies that human activity, and capitalism, is the cause of global heating. The fossil fuel industry has spent enormous sums funding climate change denial and persecuting climate activists. Not only that, but the Zionist and Western wars particularly in West Asia and Ukraine have been an extraordinary source of carbon emissions. The US’s bombing-sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline in 2022 – as part of the Ukraine proxy war – was an incredible piece of climate vandalism that gave rise to the emission of 330 million pounds of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The pulverisation of Gaza and now Lebanon by Israel, and now the US/Israel war on Iran, are just as potent a source of emissions if not more so. All these wars are clearly wars of choice waged by imperialism to defeat states that they want to destroy in pursuit of a strategy of imperialist conquest: the ‘Global Chessboard’ as the US ideologue Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, or Greater Israel whose provenance is well-known. To do away with this deadly danger to humanity, imperialist capitalism needs to be overthrown by the working-class led by a new revolutionary, internationalist, communist movement in the tradition of the Bolsheviks, the Third International of Lenin, and the early Fourth International of Trotsky.
Capitalist Threat to Survival: Its food production and supply system
There are many facets to the way capitalism destroys the biosphere and threats human existence. Planet Earth is very resilient and the notion that ‘the planet’ is threatened by human activity misses the point; which is that human existence, and human civilisation, is threatened by what humanity has been doing to the biosphere in the period since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century. The rapid fire burning of fossil fuels and the unplanned advance of technology for profit allows activities that constitute a long-term threat to aspects, if not the totality, of human existence, to dominate industry and industrialised agriculture simply because they generate profits for an exploiting minority, not because they are rational from the standpoint of future human development or even survival.
For instance, the nature and availability of our food is determined by capitalism’s relentless drive for ever-increasing profits at the expense of human labour and natural resources. The methods used to produce crops and animals for meat, eggs and dairy produce are aimed at high returns at the expense of long-term soil fertility and the maintenance of natural ecosystems. This involves the large-scale use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides; cheap, expendable labour; large areas of mono-crops managed using heavy machinery powered by fossil fuels, commonly diesel; intensive rearing of animals for meat, eggs and dairy produce.
Food and animal feed growth are outsourced to parts of the world where production may be cheaper, often resulting in deforestation, such as destroying parts of the Amazon Forest in South America, to make way for big agribusiness and land degradation. Farm workers and local inhabitants suffer severe damage to their health from exposure to pesticide spraying. Genetically modified (GM) soya beans are grown across large areas of Argentina for export to be used to feed intensively reared animals in places such as China and across Europe, including Britain. Thus meat, eggs and dairy produce sold in Britain very likely comes from animals fed on GM soya while the impact on human health of eating the products of intensively farmed animals, fed on GM crops, is unknown. Large areas of forest are cleared, destroying the natural habitats that animals, such as orangutans, depend on, to produce large quantities of palm oil for export for use in western processed foods. Without cooking everything we eat entirely from basic ingredients; it is extremely difficult to avoid palm oil. Vegetables grown using land in low-income countries such as Kenya for export to Britain and Europe deny the use of that land for growing food for the indigenous people. Quinoa and avocados grown in South America take resources of land and water away from the local people.
The production of artificial fertilisers, pesticides, GM crops and intensively reared animal feeds is also the product of the insatiable corporate drive for profits driving global, and British, environmental damage. The use of some artificial fertilisers progressively damages soil structure and reduces natural, organic fertility. This is compounded by many chemical pesticides which can destroy vital soil micro-organisms, natural pest predators as well as insects, such as bees, vital for pollination. Organisms such as worms play a vital role in maintaining soil nutrients and structure. Soil structure is often further damaged by the overuse of heavy farm machinery. Imprecise, overuse of such fertilisers causes leaching of these nutrients from the soil into ground water, waterways and rivers. Intensive raising of farm animals for meat, eggs and dairy for high profit produces unsafe food with poor nutrition, subjecting the animals to unacceptable levels of suffering. The faeces and urine from these animals produce slurry, which is generally treated as waste instead of being recycled as natural fertiliser resulting in a run-off, further polluting the ground water and rivers flowing out to sea.
This results in marine dead zones globally, an example being in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. Annually, the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers carry about 1.6 million tons of dissolved nitrogen into the Gulf of Mexico. The spring and early summer peak flow causes massive growth of marine organisms that sink to the bottom to be composted by microbes, consuming oxygen. The resulting low levels of oxygen kills marine species, such as molluscs, sea anemones and worms, thus disrupting the food chain and habitat. This creates a dead zone covering an average of 11,000 square kilometres, and reaching 17,366 square kilometres in 2024. This dead zone lasts until cooler weather or storms promote downward mixing of oxygen-rich surface waters.
The dissolved nitrogen pouring into the Gulf of Mexico each year is 23% of the amount applied to crops in the Mississippi River basin. The US Environmental Protection Agency in 2008 began an attempt to reduce the size of the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic (low oxygen) zone by 2015. The corporations profiting from agricultural chemicals and the overproduction of corn and soya successfully resisted state and local agencies’ attempts to require changes to protect the waterways. The Baltic Sea dead zone is larger and perhaps more destructive than the one in the Gulf of Mexico. The attempts by Finland, Sweden and other nations on the Baltic Sea coast to improve the environment in the Baltic Sea, failed in the same way as the attempts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico.
Decades, even centuries, of removing natural forests, trees and hedgerows to maximise the land area for cultivation and to accommodate ever-increasing sizes of farm machinery, have damaged the soil and essential ecosystems. In periods of low rainfall and drought, soil is turned to dust from loss of structure and nutrients, getting blown away where there is nothing to protect the soil from the wind. In periods of heavy rainfall, flooding occurs washing away topsoil. Dried out ground cannot absorb water, while, without trees or hedges, there are no deep roots to absorb or trap and retain water to prevent run-off.
78% of the atmosphere is nitrogen, mainly in the form of inert dinitrogen (N2) molecules, requiring the high energy and heat of lightning bolts to split them, which only happens in very small volumes. N2 diffuses from the air into soil and surface waters. Leguminous plants, such as beans, peas, lentils, clover (often used as a cover crop), fix nitrogen from N2 with the aid of numerous species of micro-organisms in root nodules to produce nutrients in the soil taken up by plants. Micro-organisms also convert nitrogen compounds to return nitrogen, in the form of N2, back to the air. The nitrogen cycle in natural ecosystems thus limits the amount of nitrogen in reactive, unstable compounds in the atmosphere. This natural regulation is bypassed by the use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser leading to an increase in nitrous oxide (N2O) in the atmosphere. Since nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser is contributing to global warming.
Solar energy in the form of ultra-violet and visible light is partially radiated back to space as infra-red energy, that is, heat, from the Earth’s surface. A very small fraction of the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of greenhouse gases; that is, gases with a molecular structure that enables them to absorb long wave radiation (that is, heat) reflected back from the earth’s surface. These gases re-emit this heat towards the earth’s surface, resulting in warming. The major greenhouse gases are: carbon dioxide (CO2); methane (CH4), a natural gas used for heating; and nitrous oxide (N2O), originating from the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and explosives used in weapons
The restriction of shipping access through the Strait of Hormuz, in response to the Israeli-US war against Iran, has resulted in increased costs of fossil fuels used for power on farms and price increases and shortages of artificial fertilisers that rely on fossil fuels for their production has occurred over the same late spring and summer months as record-breaking heat waves and drought. Outsourcing of food production with long complex international supply chains is also affected by this increased cost of fossil fuels, in turn increasing food prices.
Today’s drought is causing problems with essential water and irrigation for crop growth while the high temperatures slow plant growth with some plants dying from heat stress, even when they receive adequate water. Both problems could be mitigated by tree and hedge cover providing shade and retaining soil moisture. Thus, there is an urgent need to repair ecosystems, such as improving soil structure, restoring natural fertility and soil organisms, to support food production by moving towards organic methods of production in harmony with natural ecosystems. This requires reducing artificial fertiliser to the minimum amount needed for plant growth while, ideally, replacing it altogether with organic fertiliser such as cover crops and mixing raising animals with growing crops, vegetable and fruit so the animals can fertilise the soil naturally.
Perversely, to increase, or even just maintain, profit levels, the “logic” of capitalism requires even more exploitative food production methods, thus worsening the current problems in a vicious cycle. In Britain, particularly in England, the extreme weather, combined with increased costs of diesel and artificial fertiliser, means smaller farms are producing food for either very low returns or even at a loss. Some farmers thus go out of business and sell up while others install solar panels on agricultural land to provide an alternative income. The result is less food produced in a country that already relies on imports to feed its population. Consequently, we are now facing a combination of ever-increasing food prices while decades of austerity mean people have less money to buy food at the same time as worsening food shortages, which potentially threaten widespread malnutrition and hunger. While we need more of our food to be produced organically, for our own health and the improved fertility of agricultural land, increasing austerity is reducing personal incomes, so fewer people can afford the higher prices of organic food, making it less profitable, so less is produced and available.
AI and Data Centres
Just as we are facing food shortages driven by a combination of a dysfunctional food system, heat waves and drought caused by exponentially increasing global warming, there is a push to dramatically increase the number of data centres, serving the explosion in AI, globally, including an order of hundreds of proposed new data centres in Britain. The data centres in the queue to connect to the UK’s electricity grid represent around 73GW of demand, while the peak winter electricity demand for the entirety of the UK is around 47GW. Facilities using water to cool their computing equipment threaten a significant drain on the local environment and water supply.
The proposed data centre in North Ockendon, as one of Europe’s largest projects, would produce more than 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year if approved by Havering Council. The East Havering Data Centre Campus (EHDCC) is set to be built on 218 hectares of London green belt land. Google plans a data centre in Essex, expected to lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions of 568,727 tonnes CO2 equivalent per year during operation. The Wapseys Wood, Buckinghamshire and Quest Park, Bedfordshire data centres will use 1.3GW of power and will produce more than 4.5m tonnes of carbon emissions annually. Because of the long wait to connect to the grid, these data centres are seeking to build their own on-site gas-fired power stations.
The environmental impact of proposed hyper-scale data centres in Scotland, such as in Edinburgh and at Auchtertool in Fife, is also a serious concern. No decision should be made without local working-class people even knowing how much electricity and water these sites will consume, what strain they will place on the grid and whether they will rely on diesel generators for backup power. The Auchtertool development could consume the equivalent of the annual electricity use of around 1.6 million typical households.
These are just some of the data centres planned for England and Scotland. Their environmental costs will not only be the power and water they use, but also the intolerable noise pollution they cause, including sound below the human hearing range, which urgently needs research into its harmful effects on both human health and the environment. In January 2025, Keir Starmer’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, pushed by the notorious Zionist Peter Kyle MP, merged the planning zone framework with the AI and data centre push, announcing AI Growth Zones with accelerated planning approval, priority grid access, and energy price discounts, all publicly funded, for data centres in designated regions. Andy Burnham has inherited the national AI Growth Zone programme as Prime Minister. Though he sacked Kyle, he replaced him with the similarly odious Zionist Liz Kendall. Effectively, data centres have been removed from democratic planning controls.
In support of the corporate interests set to profit from the expansion in AI and data centres, the standard alleged benefits of the capitalist gods of ‘growth’ and ‘jobs’ are trotted out. Growth equates to the relentless increasing drive for exploitation and profits destroying the natural environment we depend on. This demagogy about ‘jobs’ is artificial since capitalism deliberately forces a proportion of people into idleness to keep labour cheap, while preventing public finances being used to cover the cost of filling job vacancies of genuine social value.
The UK government is promoting AI and data centres as critical infrastructure, allegedly for security reasons, claiming the need to hold the population’s data domestically in in the UK, for services such as banking and health data, and for the UK to maintain a ‘competitive advantage’ in advanced technology. This anti-democratic nature of British imperialist nationalism is evident here, as although the infrastructure exists for local digital services, as a result of the government’s decisions, neither health data nor the data of other government departments are protected from exploitation by sinister capitalist economic predators, such as Palantir, (co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp), the data-mining company with deep CIA and defence intelligence roots. This is now embedded in NHS data infrastructure, UK defence contracts, and the data architecture of multiple government departments.
The current massive expansion in the use of AI and data centres is for surveillance, targeting of weapons and drones for killing people, creating data sets for propaganda, and targeted advertising for pushing over-consumption. These are international, socially and environmentally destructive activities consistent with capitalism’s inherent push for profits by means of authoritarian control, war, and perpetually expanding markets.
There are potentially useful applications for AI, such as scientific research, economic planning, climate modelling and weather forecasting, which need to be made use of on an international level to benefit the global working-class population, but it is certainly not our interests these predators have in mind. All this technology urgently needs to be placed under workers control, and the profit motive totally eliminated from any decisions about the possibility of its deployment, or non-deployment, which should be a collective decision of class-conscious, working-class movements internationally. Where such movements do not exist, they must be created, as working-class control here is a matter of life and death. Workers’ control is something that can only be achieved by a political working-class movement, one that has an organised mass base and sufficient support among organised workers to be able to initiate mass, political strikes.
This is where trade union economism reveals its complete bankruptcy. Trade union misleaders, and bureaucrats like Sharon Graham of UNITE, support the war drive against Russia over Ukraine, partly due to racist, Russophobic and anti-Communist ideology, but also because expanded war expenditure delivers ‘jobs.’ Never mind that such ‘jobs’ endanger the existence of the working-class by pushing the planet towards a potential nuclear confrontation. But it is not difficult to imagine such terminally stupid bureaucrats supporting these data centres on the grounds that they will deliver ‘jobs.’ The jobs in these cases contributing to frying the working-class population in their own homes, and killing off the young and the old in particular. This is where crude social-chauvinism and economism becomes a literally suicidal programme.
Non-deployment – i.e. total veto should be the default option for the foreseeable future – until sufficient environmentally sustainableenergy sources exist to run such things without affecting those that working-class people depend upon for their lives and well-being. Zeroattacks on the environment of this type are acceptable. We need mass strikes to stop them, and working-class mass actions that may indeed result in, by one means or another, the closing and even demolition of such facilities.
Socialism or Barbarism
As James Connolly wrote in 1907:
Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek,
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, whene’er they speak,
That we demand too much.
‘Tis passing strange, yet I declare ,
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.
There is undoubtedly much more evidence that could be adduced about environmental degradation around the world caused by the drive for profit that is built into capitalism. This is not, as the ideology of neo-liberal capitalism preposterously maintains, something that ‘trickles down’ to the masses as the capitalist economy grows. It was recently noted in a widely circulated internet meme that the world capitalist economy is 700% larger today than it was in 1970, whereas the average person has only seen his/her income grow by 8%. But this economic growth under capitalism has led to the near doubling of greenhouse gas emissions over the same period, from 23 billion tons in 1970 to 53 billion tons in 2024. This shows two things; one being that capitalist economic growth overwhelmingly benefits a tiny minority of parasites; and, secondly, that despite that, the technology in use does not simply, mechanically extend greenhouse emissions in a linear manner as it grows. This shows that the propaganda of the climate deniers is false and purely self-interested, and the reactionary drivel that is being pumped out today that alleges over-population, not capitalism, is the source of dangers to humanity, is a lie. It is perfectly possible with global economic planning to reverse the trend that, if it is allowed to continue, will change the biosphere and make it unsuitable for human existence and habitation, likely for millions of years.
The solution, contrary to the fatalism promoted by the bourgeois politicians, is in the hands of the working-class movement internationally. The class struggle to reverse the neo-liberal attacks of the last 50 years, which represent a concentrated effort to solve the problems of crisis-ridden capitalism at the expense of the working class, must coalesce with the struggle to use economic planning to change the basis of the future socialist society to sustainable energy use. There needs to be an emergency programme to do just this. Capitalist ‘Net Zero’ policies invariably include attacks on the working-class and are a set-up for populist agitation to defeat them, as the bourgeoisie certainly are not prepared to try to solve the environmental crisis at their own expense. This is why ‘Green’ capitalism is a completely illusory idea. We need our own version of the ‘Net Zero’ programme at their expense, involving the capitalist class being relieved of their property on an international scale, by an international working-class movement led by conscious Communists. That is the only way we can get the economic and material changes needed to sustain human existence. The alternative to socialism has always been the collapse of capitalism into barbarism, and an environmentally driven collapse of human civilisation is a real danger today because of capitalism. It must go!
