Dr Subarna Goswami
Primary method of generating energy, burning fossil fuels, releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating up the planet and severely altering the climate. Anthropogenic climate change poses an imminent threat to the planet’s life-sustaining ecological systems, and it represents one of humanity’s most difficult challenges to date. If we are to overcome this problem, we will need to place strict limitations on the amount of atmospheric pollution that can be emitted globally. Since pollution is a direct consequence of consumption, we must also limit the amount of resources we use. Any viable solution to climate change will therefore require a global agreement to drastically inhibit the extraction, production, and consumption of natural resources. But the capitalist system is neither designed for nor capable of consciously inhibiting its own propensity for unsustainable growth. The basic assumptions under which neoliberal capitalism operates renders it incapable of correcting climate change. Capitalism has bulldozed this planet and its organisms, gouging out mountains, exploiting fish stocks and burning fossil fuels to power the maniacal pursuit of growth and thus enrich a few people. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen drew attention to the heating of the earth’s temperature. Yet the US refused to adopt the Kyoto Protocol for the next couple of decades. In 2006, Hansen cautioned that this planet has only a decade to change the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions or face irreversible changes which would bring disastrous consequences. Since this plea was made, another decade has been passed including through the ineffectual Paris Agreement championed by the US President Barack Obama but undermined by incumbent Donald Trump. Today geologists and climate scientists are talking about a dangerous new world, the Anthropocene. It’s a world in which humans have changed planetary conditions including climate, breaking a 11 700 year pattern of relatively stable climate known as the Holocene. The word Anthropocene implies humanity’s stain on the geological record through activities like land misuse and plastic pollution. But many historians and socialists calls the problem something else – the Capitalocene. By mooting the term Anthropocene, there’s a shift from looking at production to looking at consumption. Most carbon dioxide doesn’t come from people flying around the world, although that’s a major contributor to it. It comes from production.
Capitalism as a system is highly exploitative of both people and planet. It is driven by a desperate need for profit maximization and wealth accumulation. That is its overriding priority. Capitalism is simply incompatible with social justice and living in harmony with the Earth. Author of the famous book ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate’, Naomi Klein argues that humans don’t cause climate collapse, and nor does carbon, the problem is a particular arrangement of these elements – in other words, capitalism, the whole point of which is to find resources and exploit them. She says, ‘capital has learned lots recently about using disaster as a cash cow, from Katrina to Baghdad. And there are plenty of signs that climate change will be no exception.’
‘Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centers and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, making possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy season… Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.’ – writes Frederick Engels in his ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ to elaborate the chapter ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’. Contradictions between an exploitative, short-term relationship of mankind to nature and its long-term problems are so beautifully delineated here.
Over the last half century of years, the burning of fossil fuels has released huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to trap additional heat in the lower atmosphere and adversely affect the global climate. Each of the last 3 decades has been successively warmer than any preceding decade since the industrial revolution. In the last three centuries, the world has warmed by almost one degree Celsius. Sea levels are rising, glaciers are melting and precipitation patterns are changing. Extreme weather events are becoming more intense and frequent. These changes in the climate are affecting many of the social and environmental determinants of health like secure shelter, clean air, safe drinking water and sufficient food.
WHO says, ‘extreme high air temperatures contribute directly to deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, particularly among elderly people. In the heat wave of summer 2003 in Europe for example, more than 70 000 excess deaths were recorded.’
High temperatures also raise the levels of ozone and other pollutants in the air that exacerbate cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Pollen and other aeroallergen levels are also higher in extreme heat and are triggering asthma, which affects around 300 million people.
As per WHO reports, the number of reported weather-related natural disasters has more than tripled since the 1960s globally. Every year, these disasters result in over 60 000 deaths, mainly in developing countries. Rising sea levels and increasingly extreme weather events are destroying homes, medical facilities and other essential services. More than half of the world’s population lives within 60 km of the sea. People may be forced to move, which in turn heightens the risk of a range of health effects, from mental disorders to communicable diseases.
The UN body apprehends that increasingly variable rainfall patterns are likely to affect the supply of fresh water. A lack of safe water can compromise hygiene and increase the risk of diarrhoeal disease, which kills over 5 lac children aged under 5 years, every year. In extreme cases, water scarcity leads to drought and famine. By the year 2100, climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of drought at regional and global scale. Floods and extreme precipitation are also increasing in frequency and intensity. Floods contaminate freshwater supplies, heighten the risk of water-borne diseases, and create breeding grounds for disease-carrying insects such as mosquitoes. They also cause drownings and physical injuries, damage homes and disrupt the supply of medical and health services. Rising temperatures and variable precipitation are likely to decrease the production of staple foods in many of the poorest regions. This will increase the prevalence of malnutrition which currently cause more than 3 million deaths every year. Climatic conditions strongly affect water-borne diseases and diseases transmitted through insects, snails or other cold-blooded animals.
UNICEF has already declared that the impacts of climate change put almost every child at risk. They emphasize that children are the least responsible for climate change, yet will bear the greatest burden of its impact. Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-yold Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike climate movement, has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a healthier planet to live on.
Changes in climate are likely to lengthen the transmission seasons of important vector-borne diseases and to alter their geographic range. For example, climate change is projected to widen significantly the area of China where the snail-borne disease schistosomiasis occurs. We know how schistosomiasis epidemic was controlled by the People’s Liberation Army there under the leadership of Mao Ze Dong in the 1950s. Such epidemics can again break out there in near future.
Incidence of Malaria is strongly influenced by climate. It kills over 4 lac people every year, mainly children under 5 years old in certain African countries. The mosquito vector of dengue is also highly sensitive to climate conditions, and studies suggest that climate change is likely to continue to increase exposure to dengue.
Nicholas Freudenberg, a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York School of Public Health, in a BMJ article of May 2021, writes, ‘Mounting evidence suggests that key features of 21st century capitalism add to the global burden of disease and to health inequities within and among nations. Corporate managed globalization spreads viruses, unhealthy products, and pollution across borders. Financialization leads to privatization of healthcare, reductions in worker compensation, and less attention to product safety and pollution controls. Corporate appropriation of science and technology leads to the use of discoveries in pharmaceuticals, food, and transportation not to improve wellbeing, but to increase profits.’
Since the industrial revolution, the fossil-fuelled engine of capitalist growth has conspired to put the world in its current climate crisis. But climate change on this scale is not expected to unfold in a linear way. Instead, it potentially can happen abruptly or through feedback loops further accelerating runaway climate change. For example, methane release from the Arctic ice sheet, carbon saturation in the oceans and the destruction of rain forests which all feed into the climate change crisis. As the capitalist world fails to address the climate crisis, it becomes more complex and more costly. New systems have to be developed. These would include the rights of nature, de-growth, climate jobs, socially owned renewable energy, a substantive basic income grant, integrated public transport, food sovereignty, solidarity economy and commons approaches to land, water and the cyber sphere. Policy tweaks such as a carbon-tax won’t do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. Writing in Capital, Volume 3, Marx commented, ‘From the standpoint of higher economic forms of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.’
Only a socialist system, in which public ownership, popular democracy and planning, and a new definition of wealth based not on individual personal enrichment and consumption can possibly meet the challenge.
