COP 27:Capitalists Have Chosen Ecocide!
Time’s Up!
Capitalist ‘Leaders’ met at COP 27 and rejected environmental science. Their drive for more and more profits supersedes humanity! As George Monbiot wrote Our ‘Leaders’ Had a Final Chance to Halt Climate Breakdown. They Failed Each and Every One of Us .
The scientists of the world and environmental journalists have been warning of this for over 50 years.
Below are a few recent posts demonstrating the colossal betrayal of humanity due to the Capitalist System’s forever thirst for more profits!
‘We are in the midst of a climate emergency and there is no way out without radically changing the way society is organised. If humanity does not free itself from the capitalist drive for ever greater profits and ever-expanding economic growth, rising global temperatures alone will make the planet uninhabitable for humans and millions of other living species. We urgently need to find a collective road to a new way of living that is based on human solidarity and ecological sustainability!’ (See An Ecosocialist Manifesto: For an Egalitarian, Cooperative Road to Ecosocialism!)
70% of Animal Species Around the World Has Been Wiped Out in Just 50 Years According to a major scientific report, Earth’s animal populations have declined by an average of 69% in little under 50 years as people continue to destroy forests, consume beyond the planet’s limitations, and pollute on an industrial scale. According to the WWF and Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) yearly Living Planet Report, the quantity of birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles has declined by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 2018, from the open ocean to tropical rainforests. Two years ago, it was 68%, and it was 60% four years ago.
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency We are now at “code red” on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency. The scale of untold human suffering, already immense, is rapidly growing with the escalating number of climate-related disasters. Therefore, we urge scientists, citizens, and world leaders to read this Special Report and quickly take the necessary actions to avoid the worst effects of climate change. 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” signed by more than 1700 scientists in 1992. Since this original warning, there has been a roughly 40% increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. This is despite numerous written warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a recent scientists’ warning of a climate emergency with nearly 15,000 signatories from 158 countries (Ripple et al. 2020). Current policies are taking the planet to around 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100, a temperature level that Earth has not experienced over the past 3 million years (Liu and Raftery 2021). The consequences of global heating are becoming increasingly extreme, and outcomes such as global societal collapse are plausible and dangerously underexplored (Kemp et al. 2022). Motivated by the moral urgency of this global crisis, here, we track recent climate-related disasters, assess planetary vital signs, and provide sweeping policy recommendations.
George Monbiot : Our ‘Leaders’ Had a Final Chance to Halt Climate Breakdown. They Failed Each and Every One of Us . . . So how have heads of government chosen to use this miracle? To extend our time on Earth, earning the gratitude of all the improbable humans of the future? No. They have chosen to do nothing. Nothing that has a realistic chance, in this contest of probabilities, of changing our trajectory. They had a choice at the Cop27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh of defending the habitable planet or appeasing their sponsors. They went with the sponsors. We know how way leads on to way, how the power amassed through corrupt decisions in previous generations drives the corrupt decisions of our time. We know that the licence granted to fossil fuel companies by 50 years of failure has enabled them to make stupendous profits – $2.8bn a day on average across that entire period – and that they need invest only a fraction of this money in politics to buy every politician and every political decision they need.
Capitalist competition for profits, prevents capitalism and capitalists to act collectively to prevent ecocide. The squandering of trillions of dollars on military spending must stop and these trillions of dollars must be used to repair the environment! (In 1991, even after the end of the Cold War, military spending was almost 1 trillion dollars.); and there must be a 100 percent tax on the profits of companies that pollute!
But, since environmental illness and destruction are a global concern, it requires all of humanity to act collectively, in our overall interests for our survival as a species, to correct the problem, and to remove the obstacle of capitalism.
Thisrequires a society where humanity has social, economic, and political control over the entire environment. Such a society, a socialist society, is needed to ensure that all decisions affecting the environment are under the democratic control of humankind so that the production of goods will be done for the needs and survival of humanity instead of the production and the destruction of humanity and other species for profit.
With common ownership of the means of production and common control and protection of all property and wealth, science and society will be in harmony with the ecosystem and humanity’s future.
With these goals, we must build a more effective environmental movement. As we continue to organize against capitalism and its destructive course, we can and will transform the world!