With this issue, we are beginning a section on the environment that will appear regularly in The Organizer newspaper and that will present a wide-ranging series of viewpoints on all aspects of this issue, including controversial articles. It is a discussion framed by our socialist politics.

The destruction of the ecosystem is not an invention of the environmental movement. The issue of climate change and global warming, for example, is scientifically verifiable, with disastrous consequences that have yet to be grasped fully.

But control over the way the economy affects the environment is in the hands of a tiny fraction of the global population — the capitalists.

Many environmentalist groups have spent a lot of time attempting to persuade the capitalists to be ecologically friendly. The result? Neither business nor governments have delivered serious change. Commitment to environmental principles such as "sustainable development" has served as a cover for business as usual.

Promoting a "green economy," in fact, has become a highly profitable business for the multinationals. It also has provided the ideological justification for explaining that the class struggle is a thing of the past and that workers must forego their independent interests and join the newly anointed “green bosses” to save the planet. This neo-corporatist offensive is a deadly trap.

This new series in The Organizer newspaper will challenge all the false solutions to the environmental crisis being put forward by the capitalists and the non-profits (NGOs). It will expose the arguments that blame the destruction of the planet on the consumption habits of the working-class majority, or that promote the Zero Growth politics of the NGOs.

The underlying premise of this series is that the source of the environmental crisis sweeping the world is the capitalist system itself.

 As we will explain, only under socialism will humanity be able to liberate scientific research from the shackles of a for-profit system that wastes human knowledge and misdirects scientific investigation on military and corporate research. A socialist society will promote the full development of scientific know-how, removing it from service to a decaying imperialist system.

Only under socialism can we re-ignite the development of the productive forces — in a way that is truly sustainable and that respects the balance of our ecosystem. Socialism is the only economic system that would allow us to address these issues effectively, because it is the only economic system that prioritizes human needs.

To save the planet and humanity, we need to get rid of capitalism. It will only be when economic and societal decisions are made directly by the working people themselves that we can make a real shift toward renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and the rest.

Such a socialist society isn’t a utopian dream. The real fantasy is thinking that the survival of capitalism can lead to anything other than an environmental catastrophe.

We begin this series, on the eve of the Copenhagen Summit on Global Warming, with an article by Claudio Romano.

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OBAMA’S ENVIROMENTAL POLICY: PUTTING OFF JUDGMENT DAY?

By CLAUDIO ROMANO

This summer has brought some great news for world shipping companies. Thanks to climate change caused by the reckless destruction of the environment perpetrated by capitalism, the Artic polar cap will break almost entirely for the first time in recorded human history, allowing for shipping around the globe that no longer requires the use of the Suez Canal. Russian ice-breakers are fully booked to help escort the merchant ships in the still somewhat perilous navigation.

Good news for shipping corporations perhaps. Bad news for the rest of anything that lives on earth.

Such a melt, with the rise of sea levels, threatens low-lying populated areas such as Bangladesh, and other parts of the Indian sub-continent, as well as areas such as the valley of the Thames (London) and much of the Netherlands. More important, a severe disruption of the Gulf Stream could result in a temporary ice age in the further southern reaches of the cap (Siberia and North America) while resulting in severe disruption in Europe.

All this was stuff of speculation and movies until the summer melting of the Artic cap and the no-longer “eternal snows” of the Alps and the Pyrenees was confirmed. In the past five years, this has reached frightening proportions, with Arctic sea ice and glaciers rapidly retreating, rising and acidifying seas, stronger storms, more frequent and intense droughts and heat waves, looming species extinction and the climate-related deaths of 300,000 people each year. Leading scientists warn that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have already exceeded safe levels and must therefore be reduced in the next few decades to no more than 350 parts per million (ppm), from today's 389 ppm to avoid triggering catastrophic changes to the planet.

Instead, emissions continue to grow each year. As the world’s second largest contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions, the United States needs to do something very quickly. Yet the Obama government has yet to finalize, much less implement, any meaningful domestic greenhouse-gas reduction plan.

Madness?

Leading climate scientists warn that deep and rapid greenhouse-gas reductions are necessary to avert catastrophic climate change and that continued construction and operating of coal-fired power plants is fundamentally incompatible with achieving the needed reductions. Dr. James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist, along with many co-authors, wrote in a major scientific paper in 2008 that carbon dioxide levels must be reduced to 350 ppm “[i]f humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” Hansen said further that this goal could be achieved if the use of coal were phased out except where carbon dioxide emissions resulting from burning the coal were captured and stored.

So why isn’t this being done right now? We look below at the obstacles. At the end of the day, it all goes back to the conflict between the “right” of the capitalists to make a profit, and the right of humanity and other species to live on. A worldwide socialist revolution is needed to end the subordination of industry and society as a whole to the reckless and destructive profit drive of the capitalist minority.

The WTO, Obama, and the Environment

In Washington, the House of Representatives passed the Obama bill calling for reductions in CO2 emission gradually to begin in 2012, but prospects for passage of a Senate climate bill dimmed as a preparatory hearing of White House officials and Senate leadership revealed a troublesome and unsurprising roadblock: the international trade obligations imposed by the institutions of globalization set up under the Clinton administration.

Climate legislation, was supposed to begin with the enactment of this American Clean Energy Security Act (ACES). However, it collides with the World Trade Organization. Measures included in the House version would have to be weakened to fit within the limits of WTO law. These measures pertain to vehicle, boat, and train traffic, as well as emission from combustion-powered facilities of any type within 100 miles of the borders. In other words, the WTO could easily move to quash any such bill as a barrier to trade.

Why does the WTO pose an obstacle to climate-change law? Greenhouse emissions are embedded in every product and every service in virtually every economic sector, thanks to the energy, raw materials and transportation used to get them on the market. In large part, those embedded emissions reflect the climate policies and energy sources embraced by the ruling classes of the country of manufacture. Climate regulation seeks to distinguish greenhouse-gas-intensive products from cleaner alternatives, and favors the latter.

The WTO, by contrast, aims to prevent “discrimination” among products in international trade based on manufacturing methods or country of origin. In other words, a recyclable car or machine tool cannot be favored over a non-recyclable vehicle or a nuclear-powered tool. That would be a barrier to free trade. Wood obtained from clear cutting, cannot be disfavored over wood obtained from deconstruction. That would be another barrier to free trade.

Thus, even the very limited measures passed by the wing of the ruling class that seeks to address climate change in part while preserving the profit-making system clash with the WTO, an institution enforcing deregulated, maximum profit-making, export-oriented economic policies for the last 15 years.

The “cap and trade” system was designed for the purpose of replacing lost profits due to cutbacks in emissions. It places a price on each ton of greenhouse gas emissions and requires industry to hold one “allowance” per ton of emissions. These allowances, set by the state, can then be sold in the open market, at an unlimited profit.

Some increase in costs to suppliers and manufacturers, especially in energy-intensive industries like steel and iron, may result. They will no doubt seek to preserve their profits via the WTO.

U.S. manufacturers and the steel workers’ union are hand in hand pressuring the senators, claiming that emissions curbs will cause job losses, plant relocations to countries with lax environmental standards, and a resulting net increase in global emissions.

In response, Congress has authorized the giveaway of some allowances to energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries in the United States. These allowances are mainly for the industry bosses, however, and will not save the jobs of steel workers in the long term. Such jobs can only be protected by job conversions to environmentally friendly industries that maintain for the current (and future) workers the union jobs, contracts, wages and benefits won through years of class struggle.

Current Bill Is No Answer

Unfortunately, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES, H.R. 2454), the climate bill passed by the House of Representatives on June 26, does not provide the much-needed solution to the climate crisis. In fact, overall, ACES takes away some gains from the past.

ACES suffers from two central flaws. First, it provides inadequate greenhouse-gas reductions, so that even if it were fully and successfully implemented, it allows greenhouse above emission above the current level. Second, and perhaps even more important, the bill repeals existing Clean Air Act authority to reduce greenhouse pollution, placing all of our eggs in one bad basket: the newly created emissions’ cap market.

Some of ACES's provisions would actually reduce current greenhouse emissions requirements for the largest polluters and enable emissions’ increases in the short term that we cannot afford. Even if the bill were fully and successfully implemented, it would not reduce carbon dioxide levels to below 350 ppm, and would in fact allow total greenhouse gas concentration to rise to more than 450 ppm.

The very worst problem, however, is that ACES takes us in the wrong direction by rolling back important provisions of the Clean Air Act, a gain of the 1960s.

The Clean Air Act has protected the air we breathe for four decades, enabling many to enjoy a safer and cleaner environment. It is directly responsible for saving lives, improving health, and decreasing hospitalizations. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2010 alone, the act will save 23,000 lives. It will prevent 1.7 million asthma attacks, 4.1 million lost work days and more than 68,000 hospitalizations and emergency room visits. The act has provided us with trillion of dollars of benefits, which have exceeded the cost of regulation by 42 times, according to the EPA's own conservative data.

The Clean Air Act is also the strongest currently existing tool for reducing greenhouse pollution. Yet ACES guts the act by exempting greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources from pollution-control requirements. Most important, greenhouse-gas emissions would be exempted from the new source review programs.

The Clean Air Act provides a basic system for greenhouse-emissions’ reductions from all major sources in the U.S. economy and has a proven track record of success at reducing other pollutants. What is lacking is the Obama administration's political will to implement the law over the inevitable opposition from polluters. The EPA and all other environmentally oriented agencies should have their budgets increased, and indeed, the EPA should have powers to seize and nationalize all coal-fired plants and all sources of production that cannot cut their carbon foot print.

Needless to say another reformist branch has already emerged within the mass movement regarding the environment. They suggest the mass movement must go to Copenhagen this December — where the successor to the Kyoto Protocol is being negotiated — to demand the reform of the WTO treaties so that an environmental exception is created in all treaties.