Susan Price (Socialist Alliance, Australia): Capitalism is incompatible with preventing catastrophic climate change

To say “Capitalism kills” is not hyperbole. Capitalism is simply incompatible with life on Earth.

From what Karl Marx called the “original expropriation” of wealth and resources by the imperialist powers in the Americas, to the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples and land theft by English pastoralists on the country now called Australia, to the theft of precious drinking water by Coca Cola and Nestle, accumulation and the pursuit of profit have outweighed respect for human life and the natural environment.

Amid the threat of world war and nuclear annihilation — and overwhelmed by the horrors of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Indonesia’s bloody occupation of West Papua, Morocco’s ongoing occupation of Western Sahara and Turkey’s war on Rojava — the choice between ecosocialism and barbarism is sharply posed.

Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen predicted in January that, based on current projections, the 1.5°C warming ceiling would be “passed for all practical purposes” by May. Hansen contributed this to the El Niño weather pattern and, more lastingly, the decrease in Earth’s reflectivity due to diminished sea ice and cloud cover. Based on current evidence of warming, Hansen confirmed this prediction on May 16.

1.5 degrees is the tipping point for four major Earth system elements: the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, the tropic coral reefs and the abrupt thaw of the boreal permafrost. Beyond 1.5 degrees, it is likely all these systems will start collapsing — even if we cut emissions rapidly.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in June that the global concentration of carbon dioxide had hit 421 ppm, a 50% increase on pre-industrial times and the highest in millions of years. This is a record-breaking rise over a 12-month period. The latest reading from Mauna Loa shows the world at around 426 ppm.

Carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm for almost 6000 years of human civilization. Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are trapping heat and driving climate change, resulting in more extreme weather events.

This month, Egypt was hit by a heat wave that raised temperatures to 50.9 degrees — the highest temperature ever recorded in the country and the African continent. This was preceded by a heat wave that hit Pakistan and India in late May , making them the hottest places on Earth with air temperatures above 53 degrees.

Deadly heat wave killed 1300 people on their pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Only a month ago, the country was hit by flash flooding in some areas.

In Europe, heat-related mortality has risen by about 30% in the past two decades. Since the 1980s, Europe has become the fastest warming continent, due in part to the amount of land in the Arctic that is the fastest warming region on Earth, but also to changing weather patterns.

In Australia, 66% of all heat-related deaths occur in areas of socioeconomic disadvantage, based on 2001-18 figures.

Heat waves combined with prolonged drought conditions and increased dry lightning sparked deadly fires in Chile in February, killing more than 100 people. Fires are still burning in Guatemala, Belize and California.

Storms that began in April triggered record-breaking and catastrophic flooding in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. The ongoing climate disaster has affected about two million people, left at least 170 dead and displaced more than 600,000.

While people in the Global North are starting to experience the realities of climate change, the peoples of the Global South have been living with its consequences for decades. Those least responsible for the emergency bear the brunt.

The only way to prevent catastrophic climate change is to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and urgently intervene to repair and restore the climate, including drawing down existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In addition, climate financing for mitigation and adaptation measures, and technology transfers from the rich nations to the poorest nations are needed.

The biggest obstacles to such actions are fossil fuel capitalists and the governments that do their bidding. While investment in renewable energy has nearly doubled, profits from fossil fuels are higher than renewables and banks such as JP Morgan are increasing investments in the industry. In fact, since the Paris Agreement on climate was adopted in 2016, the world’s 60 biggest banks have committed A$10.4 trillion to the fossil fuel industry and governments around the world continue to subsidise the fossil fuel industry to the tune of US$7 trillion, or 7.1% of world gross domestic product, according to the IMF.

In Australia this amounted to $14.5 billion in 2023–24, a rise of 31% on the previous year, according to The Australia Institute.

Just 100 fossil fuel corporations account for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The countries of the Global North are responsible for around 90% of cumulative emissions, which are driving climate breakdown. Yet the South suffers 80‒90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown and around 99% of all climate-related deaths.

As we learnt thanks to the work of the late Mike Davis and others, land-use change, intensive livestock production, wildlife trade and climate change are all linked to the emergence of pathogens with the potential to jump from animals to humans. This occurred with Ebola, HIV and SARS COV-2 – responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, which took hold 4 years ago and has killed 7.1 million people, according to the World Health Organisation.

For 2023, the total global pharmaceutical market was estimated at around US$1.6 trillion dollars. This is an increase of more than US$100 billion compared to 2022. New York based Pfizer, responsible for one of the COVID-19 vaccines, has about 9% of the global market share.

Countries of the Global North with strong pharmaceutical industries are blocking consensus for a global pandemic treaty. This would provide for nations to give access to pathogen data in exchange for automatic access to vaccines, medications and tests developed using those data. Also in dispute is a requirement that vaccines and drugs developed with government funding be shared more equitably than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, Avian Flu (H5N1), which emerged in 1997 in China and jumped to humans in South East Asia with a mortality rate of 40‒50%, is spreading among animals, impacting the world’s biodiversity. As reported in Nature: “On 25 March, US health officials announced that H5N1 had been detected in dairy cows for the first time. As of 5 June, infections have been confirmed in more than 80 dairy herds in nine states and in three dairy farm workers, all of whom had mild symptoms.”

According to Diana Bell, Professor of Conservation Biology, University of East Anglia, H5N1 “has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years”. According to the Centre for Disease Control’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, 26 countries have reported that at least 48 mammal species have died from the virus since 2020, including 13 species of aquatic mammals, among them sea lions, porpoises and dolphins.

Migratory birds have been found to spread the disease. The first cases of H5 virus were detected in Antarctica in February, resulting in mass deaths of penguins among other species. Meanwhile, different strain of bird flu (H7) has been affecting poultry farms in Australia. One million birds were culled in Victoria and 250,000 at an egg farm in Hawkesbury, New South Wales.

A complete overhaul of poultry and egg production is the only way to stem bird flu. Moving away from factory farming and food production, including ultra-processed foods would have positive impacts on diet and public health.

Protecting biodiversity and avoiding a sixth mass extinction requires radical moves to protect habitat from destruction for mining, grazing and development. But the best that global governments can come up with is the “Thirty by thirty” target for protecting 30% of the Earth’s land and sea by 2030.

Capitalist economies allocate a zero value to the nature all life depends on, treating it as an “externality”. Capitalism has also created regular economic crises, and distorted the development of the world. It has led to a handful of rich countries and a majority of poorer, super-exploited countries. The rich countries are the base for most of the giant global corporations that monopolise key sectors of the economy.

The governments of rich countries maintain powerful militaries to protect their global economic hegemony. These countries have launched a new arms race, which not only risks escalating into nuclear war but also drains public funds needed to address the climate emergency and social needs.

Faced with this existential threat, we must build movements and alliances powerful enough to challenge the power of fossil fuel capital and take popular control over the economic levers of society. This is required to shift from a market-based economic system to a needs-based economy that puts people and nature at its centre. Critical industries, such as energy, transport, agribusiness and the financial institutions that invest in them, need to be brought under social control.

All this points to the urgent need to replace capitalism with an ecosocialist society, which could address gross injustices and repair capital’s rift with nature.

The corporate rich that now rule the world, stole much of their starting capital directly or indirectly through colonial plunder. They destroyed numerous societies around the globe, many of which were organised for thousands of years around Indigenous social values of egalitarianism, cooperation and co-existence with nature.

An ecosocialist future would require a return to these principles, with the benefit of technological advances used for social good. Human creativity needs to be liberated from the drudgery of long working hours. Grassroots democracy must allow communities to have control over their destinies.

The movement in solidarity with Palestine reminds us that people’s political consciousness can develop rapidly in the process of sustained collective struggle. Such movements are schools of direct democracy. They can also give birth to new institutions of popular democracy. Therefore, it is of critical importance to build mass movements around immediate and transitional demands that point a way beyond capitalism.

In the context of the climate emergency, such measures could take the form of a radical Green New Deal. Or the universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to scale down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule, while enabling countries of the Global South to access the energy they need for development.

It could also include the demand for the Global North to compensate the Global South for additional mitigation costs that climate change imposes on them — estimated at $192 trillion between now and 2050. This could be paid for by a wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the Global North.

The Socialist Alliance seeks to build such a movement and to utilise whatever platform and means we can to popularise it, including electoral campaigns. But we understand that only an independent mass movement mobilised beyond the limits of electoral campaigns has the potential to change the system.

Join us in building that movement.

This article is based on Susan Price’s presentation to Ecosocialism 2024. Price is a Socialist Alliance national executive member and a Green Left editor.