By John Pickard
The gap between what needs to be done to minimise and mitigate against climate change is wide and getting wider. What is also now presenting an even great danger to green policies is a growing movement on the right – exemplified by Donald Trump – that denies or has a cavalier approach to all climate science.
What is the current climate situation? According to the Copernicus Climate Change Services, 2024 “was the warmest on record globally, with an average global temperature of 1.6ºC above the pre-industrial average”. This organisation also found that last month was the warmest January ever recorded.
At a time in the regular climatic cycle when it would be expected that global warming would slow down a little – we are now currently in a ‘cooling’ La Niña period – these latest figures have shocked climate scientists. January saw the third biggest monthly anomaly above pre-industrial levels, with a surface air temperature of 13.23oC – 1.75oC above the 1850-1900 average.
The Financial Times graphic below shows how the effect of La Niña usually cools global temperatures slightly, the opposite to the warming effect from the equally regular El Niño effect. It now seems, therefore, that this long-recognised climatic cycle is being overtaken by much more significant warming from the activity of humans by the emissions of greenhouse gases.
Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, was quoted as saying that the January data was “both astonishing and, frankly terrifying”, adding, “On the basis of the Valencia floods and apocalyptic Los Angeles wildfires, I don’t think there can be any doubt that dangerous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown has arrived. Yet emissions continue to rise.”
Yet, astonishingly, among those countries most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions – the richer countries of the northern hemisphere – political trends are towards fewer, rather than more measures to cut emissions. Leading the charge in climate change denial and removing those policies already in place to reduce carbon emissions is Donald Trump. It is as if the large increase in ‘anomalous’ weather events, including the devastating fires in Los Angeles, had never taken place.
One of Trump’s first acts on becoming president was to withdraw the USA from the Paris climate accords, and although in practice this agreement only offered half-promises and empty commitments, at least it pointed in the right direction. Trump has followed that with a freeze on all federal funding for electric car-charging programmes. He has effectively closed down USAID, which at least provided some meagre financial support to poorer countries suffering from climate change.
But like all reactionary book-burners, he is also censoring the science. He is having all references to climate change removed from government websites. No doubt, as far as it within federal powers, he will do the same to school science books. Meanwhile, US climate scientists are angry and dismayed, even as they collaborate in the release of the new climate data. Perhaps Trump will also get around to banning US facilities and satellite technology from even measuring global temperature rises.
But unfortunately, Trump is not unique. He is part of a reactionary movement across the globe, where we see other ‘populist’ leaders elected to ‘change’ things in the face of declining living standards and diminishing public services. This is not the place to detail the reasons for the rise of the new right – it has been dealt with in other articles on this website (see here, for example). Suffice to say that it is the responsibility of labour leaders in every country to point a way out of the crisis in which capitalism has found itself.
Socialist measures are the answer to the insecurity and uncertainty blighting all workers’ lives at the moment. But it is the failure of the labour leaderships to offer such an alternative that has allowed lying demogogues on the right to gain electoral support. Part of the programme of this new right is, in almost every case, to deny climate change and roll back green policies.
In Germany, for example, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – which is polling second in opinion polls – is not only threatening to block new wind farms (as Trump has done) but has promised to “tear down” those already built. In Austria too, the Freedom Party, which could eventually become a partner in a new coalition, having won the most seats in last September’s election, campaigned on reversing climate measures. Last week in Madrid, at a Europe-wide rally of far-right parties, leaders competed with each other to hit out at what they called “green deal ideology”.
It has been the perceived threat from these new far-right movements that has led other ‘mainstream’ political parties to dilute their own green policies in a vain attempt to win back support. Thus the favourite to take over as leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, Mark Carney, has described some of the Liberal government’s green policies as “divisive” and in need of scrapping. In the UK, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves between them are gradually, salami-style, whittling away at their remaining commitments on zero-carbon targets.
Given the shift in politics, it is hardly surprising that businesses are following suit, and back-tracking on their relatively modest (in reality ‘green-washing’) measures and targets to cut carbon emissions. There is far less pressure on big business now to reduce emissions.
There are two important lessons to note from this growing divide between what policies need to be implemented and the political and economic likelihood of them ever being put into practice. The first is to understand that what we are seeing is the norm for modern capitalism, in the sense that capitalism is nowadays dominated only by short-term interests and quick profits.
In the boardrooms of the giant corporations that dominate so much of the western economies – particularly the USA and UK – no account is taken of the long-term needs of the company itself, let alone the national or world economy as a whole. In the scramble for higher share prices and to increase this quarter’s earnings, climate change comes a long way down the list of priorities, assuming it is even on the list in the first place.
That explains the dearth of investment for the future and the increasing tendency to hand money to shareholders in the form of share buy-backs. As bad as US capitalists are (see graphic), companies based in the UK are worse.
The big oil and gas companies – and this includes state-owned companies, managed in the interests of governments in essentially the same way as private companies – are not interested in the long-term needs of the world’s environment. They want to maximise their profit figures, in the shortest possible period, for as long as they can, and as for climate change, they wait for their rivals to blink first.
Have America’s industrial giants forgotten what they are for? – https://on.ft.com/4hI2TAC via @FT
There can be no realistic climate change policy that does not include the public ownership and democratic management of all of these big energy giants – which brings us to the second important lesson. Although there are many green activists who are on the left, and even the Green Party has a ‘socialist’ wing, all too often the issue of climate change is treated as something removed or ‘separate’ from everyday politics and economics.
The issue is linked, too, to the growing support for people like Trump, Farage and far-right parties elsewhere. These demagogues, supported financially by the very economic establishment they claim to oppose, feed on the genuine worries and day-to-day concerns of working families. Any ‘green’ policies that do not take into account the increasing economic uncertainties of everyday life are doomed to fail.
Individual climate activists might have great personal courage from time to time, but one has to question the value of stunts like vandalising artworks or blocking roads, so that workers have difficulty just doing their every day jobs. This is not an approach designed to reach out to ordinary workers, and for that reason it is failing.
When workers are increasingly worrying about their living standards and how the next few months’ bills will be paid, they will struggle to understand the needs of the planet over the next few decades. The best way to turn these workers off a green agenda is to tell them they need to make more sacrifices, as if their lives weren’t already being hollowed out by the depredations of capitalism.
Some degree of global warming is now inevitable, but the struggle to minimise it and to prepare human society to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, must be part of the fight to also defend living standards and the services on which workers depend. Jobs, even in carbon-based industries, cannot simply be ditched without alternative training, redeployment and guarantees in place.
All of this requires a democratic plan, in which the resources of the planet and human skills can be harmoniously combined to work for all, to create a better future, or simply to make sure there still is a future. The startling global warming data for last month must be a wake-up call. Humanity has no long-term future on the planet without a completely revolutionary change and that means the abolition of a system focused on nothing else but tomorrow’s profits.
