Climate Crisis is a Class Issue

Jermy Corbyn

[In a column for Jacobin, Jeremy Corbyn, labour party leader, writes that people need class politics to transform economies and save humanity from climate apocalypse. There’s no other way.]

The UN secretary-general declaring climate scientists’ report a “code red for humanity” is a critical warning.

The evidence in the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report speaks for itself: the hottest five years in recent history, tripling rises in sea levels, and the global retreat of glaciers and sea ice.

But it is also nothing significantly new. Scientists are taking an urgent tone because they have been making the same warnings for decades— while serious action on warming world has failed to materialise.

Indeed, oil giant Exxon predicted climate change in the 1970s—before going on to spend decades publicly denying its existence.

The political and economic system people live in does not produce climate change by accident but by design, rewarding big polluters and resource extractors with super profits.

This is the historical legacy. In the UK, imperial-era fortunes were made from oil from places like the Persian Gulf, where Britain sponsored an antidemocratic coup in the 1950s to preserve the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s profits. AIOC later became BP, which continues to pump hundreds of millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere at sites from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caspian. And much of the world’s fossil money is handled by City of London financial institutions which specialise in managing oil profits.

Around the world, governments continue to act on behalf of these fossil networks, even as they claim to be taking climate action. Boris Johnson has even copied the Green Industrial Revolution language leaders in the Labour Party developed. But he has copied only the words, not the actions. In June, the UK’s Climate Change Committee demonstrated that on its current course the government will fail to reach even its own woefully insufficient targets.

If this system remains unchallen-ged, one can expect a swift increase in the floods, droughts, and wildfires that have ripped through Australia, Siberia, British Columbia, East Africa, California, and much of Europe over the last year. Intense rainstorms are up by two-fifths this century. The heaviest are three-quarters stronger than they were in the 1950s, and once-in-an-epoch hurricanes are now commonplace.

But it is not just the physical consequences of these events people need to worry about; it is also the political ones. In Greece, austerity, deregulation, and the neglect of fire services have magnified the impact of horrific blazes in Evia. In Texas earlier this year, the state allowed energy firms to price-gouge on emergency power, leaving people with unpayable debts.

And from the United States to the European Union, governments are investing in surveillance technology and military equipment to attack the refugees that environmental crises help create. The billions being spent on new guards and drones in the Mediterranean is money not being spent on a green transition, instead going to the profits of a border, surveillance, and military industry deeply tied to the fossil economy. The British Parliament is even currently debating a draconian Nationality and Borders Bill aiming to make it illegal to save refugee lives at sea—putting Britain at odds with the universal law of the sea.

With military budgets ballooning across the world, powerful countries are preparing for conflict, not cooperation, to deal with the climate emergency. Such false solutions will increase all our suffering; but as ever, will favor the wealthy few while punishing the many—whether people flooded out of their homes in England or people fleeing drought in North Africa.

But it doesn’t have to be like this, and our reaction must be one of hope rather than fear. Climate scientists can and do tell us with forensic accuracy what a temperature rise of 1.5 or 3 or 5 degrees will do to sea levels, water scarcity, or biodiversity. But the reason they cannot predict what that rise will be is because it is impossible to predict the choices we will make next. Those, as the IPCC report reminds us, are still up to us.

Workers everywhere are mobilising for a global Green New Deal at COP26 this year which takes carbon out of the atmosphere and puts money back in workers’ pockets, while tackling injustice and inequality in the Global South. There is no town anywhere that would not benefit from green public transport, or rewilding with new forests, or local renewable energy, or jobs in the green industries of the future.

From climate change, to poverty and inequality, to the dangerous collective failure to get poorer countries vaccinated against COVID-19, people are living through the consequences of a system that puts billionaires first and the rest of the humanity last. The climate and environmental crisis is a class issue. It is the poorest people in working-class communities, in polluted cities, and in low-lying island communities who suffer first and worst in this crisis.

In 2019, schoolchildren striking for climate action captured the imagination and attention of people around the globe overnight. If they can do it, so can everyone.

[Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour Party member of parliament for Islington North]

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Frontier
Vol. 54, No. 12, Sep 19 - 25, 2021