For Workers' Climate Action

Broadsheet: How Socialists Think We Can Solve Climate Change

As socialists we have a different perspective from some others in the environmental movement about the way forward. This broadsheet explains our views on nationalising the big energy companies; putting industry under democratic control, and; taxing the rich to fund renewable energy.

Pandemics and the Drivers of Capital

With SARS-Cov-2 after H5N1 (or avian influenza), SARS, MERS, swine flu, Ebola, and Zika, we are living in an age of pandemics.
A widening circuit of agricultural production, consumption and exchange is pushing deeper into forests and back out into cities. Host species that historically would have been confined to deep forests are now transported to peri-urban regions with high concentrations of human bodies. Traversing a globally integrated air traffic network, pathogens previously not on the global stage are being brought to it.

Sea Levels Will Rise. How do we save our cities?

Residents of Miami, Florida are bracing themselves for their next king tide on 14-17 November. In recent years, due to rising sea levels, autumnal tides advance into town washing through the streets and houses, and turning one of the most glamorous cities on earth into an open sewer.

These sunny-day flooding events are also common on the Marshall Islands. Last month President David Kabul called for the recovery from the pandemic to involve a rapid transition to zero carbon emissions. This island nation - home to a substantial US military base and nuclear test site - will sink beneath the waves with just 0.91 metres sea level rise. It is becoming vanishingly unlikely that it will survive even if we achieve radical emissions reductions.

We know that climate change is not gradual. It accelerates. It’s accelerating now. Measurements from 2020 show that Greenland and the Antarctic are melting much faster than predicted. The seas could rise very quickly.

Climate Disaster is Already With Us

A few pages into David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, I realised with a shock that for many years I’d engaged in a soft form of climate change denial. Not the full throttle petrodollar-backed conspiracy theory-type denial but just simply not paying much attention.

I have been involved in the environmental movement for most of my adult life. But I regarded climate change as some unthinkable, apocalyptic event in the future that we would hopefully avoid, rather than a process already underway and accelerating.