Climate change bill won’t stop crisis

Submitted by Anon on 7 April, 2007 - 11:36

By Paul Vernadsky

Hardly anyone now doubts the reality of global warming, that this is mainly the result of human productive activity and that if it continues unabated, both nature and human societies will suffer terrible destruction. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published this week will further clarify the consequences of rising carbon emissions.

Climate change encapsulates what Marx called the “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature — a rupture caused by the insatiable drive of capital for profit — a drive that knows no bounds and disregards ecological and social consequences. The period ahead will be “an epoch of geo-biological crises” as Trotsky put it in 1919, “when the laws of natural selection assert themselves with all their fierceness and lead the development over the corpses of vegetable and animal species”.

The Blair government presents itself as a world leader in the battle against climate chaos, yet for all its rhetoric, its response is miserable, inadequate and entirely within the logic of capitalism.

On 13 March amid great fanfare, the government announced its draft Climate Change Bill, which includes a target to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 and by between 26 and 32% by 2020.

Yet last week the government’s own provisional figures for carbon dioxide emissions in 2006 were 560.6 million tonnes, the highest level since 1993. And a new report for WWF-UK revealed that the UK power sector’s carbon emissions have rocketed by nearly 30% since 1999 — with a rise of 6% in 2006 alone. As long as the logic of capital prevails, carbon emissions will fall only when it is profitable to reduce them.

There is a gaping chasm between ends and means in the government’s position. Most carbon emissions are generated for work, particularly when transport emissions are included (homes accounts for a quarter).

In the Budget last month, Gordon Brown announced a series of palliatives that will barely scratch the surface of carbon emissions. Brown announced plans to increase fuel duty slightly, double Vehicle Excise Duty on 4x4 cars, cut VAT on energy efficient appliances, phase out conventional light bulbs and standby, introduce “smart” meters and some grants for pensioners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.

All these measures, especially the taxes are about trying to make the price system reflect the “external” costs of pollution. But as Marx pointed out in Capital when he distinguished use-value from exchange-value, the bosses will never rationally “value” nature, in the same way as they do not “value” the reproduction of labour power. Instead they appropriate, plunder and exploit what they can for the purposes of profiteering.

The same is true of the carbon-trading scheme, which has simply enriched the large energy companies without making inroads into the emission of carbon dioxide. Capitalist relations of production — with the voracious appetite for profit its very DNA — are incompatible with “sustainability”. Only socialism can rationally regulate humanity’s metabolism with nature and ensure “the conditions of life required by the chain of human generations”.

What is needed now are serious measures which cut carbon emissions at the expense of the bosses not workers. Such a transitional programme would mean cutting working hours to drastically reorganise work and life patterns (and travel) without loss of pay. It means a crash insulation programme — starting with the poorest homes. It would include cheap or free public transport, run by public bodies rather than private companies. It requires the labour movement to take up the issue of climate change by making real inroads into the system of capital. Nothing less will avert the impending crisis.

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