Ecology and Socialism

Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis

Chris Williams

• Verlag: Haymarket Books
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781608460922
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Agricultural Public Policy

Around the world, consciousness of the threat to our environment is growing. The majority of solutions on offer, from using efficient light bulbs to biking to work, focus on individual lifestyle changes, yet the scale of the crisis requires far deeper adjustments. Ecology and Socialism argues that time still remains to save humanity and the planet, but only by building social movements for environmental justice that can demand qualitative changes in our economy, workplaces, and infrastructure.

Chris Williams is a longtime environmental activist, professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University, and chair of the science department at Packer Collegiate Institute. He lives in New York City.

CHAPTER ONE

The Science of Climate Change

“Many of the new climates will include combinations of temperature, precipitation, seasonality, and day length that do not currently exist anywhere on Earth…Something will live in these non-analogue climates, but it is difficult to guess what.”

—Chris D. Thomas, Climate Change and Biodiversity, 2005

“There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute.”

—Ben Santer, prominent climate scientist commenting on
climate denial strategy, November 2006¹

“Even given the uncertainties of the geological record, it is difficult to state this point strongly enough: human releases of carbon dioxide are almost certainly happening faster than any natural carbon releases since the beginning of life on earth…It can hardly be a surprise either that the climate is changing rapidly: what would be a surprise were if everything continued as normal.”

—Mark Lynas, author,
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet²

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While there remain unreconstructed and powerful climate change deniers, the overwhelming scientific consensus has become harder and harder to ignore, as have new and unusual weather patterns and warming trends. To name only a small number, over the past few years major reports in Time magazine, the Economist, and the Nation have outlined the threats associated with climate change.³ Even the Pentagon has gotten in on the action; its 2003 report, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security, foresees a fortress America with walls erected against a rising tide of Latin American migrants fleeing ecological disaster and stepped up policing of what it predicts will be a more war-prone world:

The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency...Borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America. Energy supply will be shored up through expensive (economically, politically, and morally) alternatives such as nuclear, renewables, hydrogen, and Middle Eastern contracts…Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rise as the U.S. reneges on the 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River…Yet, even in this continuous state of emergency the U.S. will be positioned well compared to others. The intractable problem facing the nation will be calming the mounting military tension around the world.⁴

Several of the major corporations previously pumping enormous funds into organizations intent on denying climate change, such as the environmentally friendly sounding Global Climate Coalition,⁵ have to some extent switched their millions to campaigns designed to “greenwash” even the most polluting industries.

In a tactical shift—borne of experience combating the environmental movement’s demands for government regulation in the 1970s and witnessing Philip Morris’s eventual failed efforts to deny the deleterious health effects of tobacco—many corporations have switched from a policy of outright denial to one of convincing us that they, too, can be green. However, this tactic goes on in parallel with continued efforts to sow doubt in the public mind and undermine any momentum for real change in energy production.

To take one example, in response to public criticism and too harsh a public spotlight, ExxonMobil sought to burnish its public image and along with other corporations left the Global Climate Coalition in 2002 when it became too embarrassing, publishing on its website its devotion to corporate responsibility. However, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists released in 2007 detailed the more recent activities of ExxonMobil that allowed the corporation to continue its activities behind the scenes. ExxonMobil set up, funded, and ran a highly successful disinformation campaign through a series of front organizations and individuals based on the tobacco lobby’s campaign to undermine the connection between smoking and negative health effects. According to the report, ExxonMobil has:

• Manufactured uncertainty by raising doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence

• Adopted a strategy of information laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further its desired message and thereby confuse the public

• Promoted scientific spokespeople who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings or cherry-pick facts in their attempts to persuade the media and the public that there is still serious debate among scientists that burning fossil fuels has contributed to global warming and that human-caused warming will have serious consequences

• Attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action on global warming with misleading charges about the need for “sound science”⁶

Such was the effectiveness of the ExxonMobil campaign that the British Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in the world, in 2006 took the unprecedented step of writing to ExxonMobil asking them to desist in their efforts to undermine climate change science.⁷ Generally speaking, corporations play both games. They attempt to water down or otherwise alter any potential legislation that they see as hostile to their ability to make money through a veritable army of lobbyists and right-wing or conservative think tanks. Simultaneously they crow about their green credentials and newfound concern for the environment.

The destructive power of the climate change lobbyists has become a disturbingly serious business in its own right. Since 2003, the number of climate change lobbyists has risen by more than 400 percent, from 525 in 2003 to 2,349 in 2009. That’s a somewhat mind-boggling five lobbyists for every single member of Congress.

It’s not possible to understand the well-orchestrated and successful “swift-boating” of such well-established science that has consumed the media pre- and post-Copenhagen without acknowledging the role of corporate finance, which has allowed conservative think tanks and foundations to spend millions getting the message out that climate change science is not to be tr usted.⁸

As a case in point, a March 2010 report by Greenpeace details the activities of U.S. corporate giant Koch Industries. Though most people have probably never heard of Koch, it is the second-largest privately held corporation in the United States after the huge food-processing conglomerate Cargill. It has oil and related business of $100 billion per year and seventy thousand employees operating in sixty countries. The Koch brothers who own the business are the joint ninth richest Americans and nineteenth richest in the world.⁹ Between 2005 and 2008, Koch ploughed $25 million into climate opposition groups, outdoing ExxonMobil nearly three to one. It gave money to thirty-five different groups hostile to climate science. Some of the high-profile organizations that Koch gave money to, all of whom have strong public stances attacking climate science, the need to do something about global warming, or the need to change energy policy are: The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, Institute for Humane Studies, and the American Council on Science and Health (which claims that reducing greenhouse gases would have detrimental health ef fects).¹⁰ For those who want to delve deeper into the murky waters of corporate irresponsibility, the extent to which climate change denial has been a fully fledged and rapidly expanding business for years is well documented in James Hoggan’s book Climate Cover-Up.¹¹

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It would be hard to find a more pro-business bill than the Waxman-Markey ACES Bill, which passed the House of Representatives in the summer of 2009. It gives billions of dollars in handouts to fossil fuel companies and practically a license to print money from carbon offsets and credits. Despite the pro-business slant of the legislation, some corporate entities and Republicans were nevertheless outraged at the idea of any restrictions placed on their right to freely pollute.

But the lobbyists’ efforts at subverting the democratic process couldn’t be as effective as they so clearly are without reaching the ear of an already receptive audience in Washington.

Millions of people around the world have seen Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and been shocked by the climate demons called forth by humanity’s reckless and relentless burning of fossil fuels. Yet trying to pick apart all the controversies swirling around this science-based yet highly political debate is complicated enough without having to put up with the shameless self-promotion of Al Gore as the latter-day reincarnation of Rachel Carson or the corporate media taking climate denial arguments on face value as a legitimate counterargument to those of the scientists.¹²

Basics of Global Warming Science

It is important to state from the outset that without global warming the earth would not have been able to evolve complex life—it would be far too cold and prone to wild swings in temperature. The atmosphere acts as a blanket that keeps the earth at an average temperature of 15ºC. Without this insulating layer, heat from the sun would simply bounce off the surface of the earth and immediately re-radiate to space. This atmospheric insulating blanket wrapped around the earth regulates global temperature and makes life possible. In the current context, however, an increase in average global temperatures is being caused by an increase in atmospheric concentrations of one gas in particular: carbon dioxide. Though water, natural gas (methane), and a few other compounds also contribute, CO₂ is the most significant because of its longevity in the atmosphere (around one hundred years) and because we are augmenting its increased atmospheric concentration by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. Methane is twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas, and there are significant and extremely serious threats from the possibility of hundreds of millions of tons of it being released from Siberian permafrost and underwater deposits, but it has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime due to its higher reactivity.

Carbon dioxide is the gas that animals breathe out as a waste product of respiration and plants absorb in order to grow. It exists as a very small percentage of the air—0.03 percent. However, when it comes to absorbing infrared radiation (heat energy) reflected from the surface of the earth and preventing it from escaping back out to space, this particular molecule is so effective that even small percentage changes in atmospheric concentration have large ef fects. ¹³ What is commonly known as the greenhouse effect is CO₂ performing the same function as the glass of a greenhouse by trapping heat inside earth’s atmosphere, the process that is leading to global warming and global climate change.

The greenhouse effect is not to be confused with the hole discovered in the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that became big news in the 1980s. Ozone (O₃) is concentrated in an upper layer of the atmosphere and is responsible for blocking damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun from reaching the earth’s surface. The ozone layer was found to be degraded by chemical compounds called CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which destroy ozone and were being producing in large quantities for use as refrigerants and propellants for aerosols. Two massive, seasonally fluctuating holes in this protective layer over the Arctic and Antarctic were confirmed by scientific observation in the 1980s. Professor Paul Crutzen, a world-renowned atmospheric chemist, posited a link between ozone depletion and industrialized manufacturing processes in the 1970s and eventually won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995 for his work in this area. His research, along with growing concerns about the impact of the hole getting even bigger, led to the international treaty known as the Montreal Protocol, which came into effect in 1989 and sought to phase out the use of CFCs. While some of the causes of the ozone hole are similar and CFCs are partially responsible for trapping heat, the hole in the ozone is not causally linked to global climate change.

Carbon dioxide is generated whenever a substance containing the element carbon is burned. We react some carbon-containing compound with oxygen (i.e., burn it) in order to release the large amounts of energy stored in the chemical bonds. In the process, one of the guaranteed waste products of this process is the colorless, odorless, and poisonous gas carbon dioxide. Eighty percent of the energy generated on the planet—mostly for the production of electricity—and virtually all the fuel used for land, air, or sea transportation (98 percent) depends on the burning of one or another of three types of carbon-containing substances: coal, oil, or natural gas.

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These three substances are collectively known as fossil fuels due to their common origin. Fossil fuels are the partially decomposed remains of plants and animals that have been cooked at high temperature and pressure in the earth’s crust and accumulated over tens of millions of years. By tapping these vast deposits of buried energy we are drawing down the earth’s balance of concentrated energy accrued over many millions of years. This is what makes fossil fuels an essentially finite, nonrenewable source of energy.

While the developed world has gone through two energy transitions from wood to coal and from coal to oil, much of the world’s poor, in excess of two billion people, depend for their heating, lighting, and cooking on another carbon-containing compound: biomass in the form of wood, animal dung, or other plant material.

Another 17 percent of our energy is generated from nuclear power, with the remainder, 3 to 4 percent, coming from renewable sources, mostly in the form of hydroelectric dams. Transportation accounts for more than 25 percent of global energy demand. Industrial processes count for a third of energy consumption.¹⁴ Heating and cooling of buildings in the North and deforestation in the South are among the other major contributors.

Evidence for Global Warming

To the extent that a debate around global warming existed among scientists, that debate has now definitively closed. The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. The most recent summary report for policy makers by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in November 2007, begins thus: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observ...