Skip to main content

Climate Change Wracks the Planet—This System and Its Rulers Take Humanity Over the Cliff

from a member of the Environmental Writing Group, revcom.us

Fire burns in Brazils Jacunda National Forest, part of the Amazon rain forest.

 

Climate change has led to extensive forest fires, like in the Amazon rain forest of Brazil.    Photo: AP

In 2021, the disastrous impact that climate change is already having became apparent for all to see. This year we have seen:

* The Amazon rainforest, the “lungs of the planet,” so degraded and burned down by this system that for the first time it is starting to release more carbon than it absorbs.1

* Massive heat waves hit Greece, Turkey, the Pacific Northwest in the U.S., and many other places.2 In Pakistan temperatures reached 124 degrees! Over a billion sea creatures in the Pacific Northwest were cooked to death by hot ocean water.

* Fires burned across northern Siberia. Siberia has the lowest winter temperatures on the planet outside of Antarctica but now summer temperatures reach 100 degrees F. “Zombie fires” smolder underground and never go out, emitting smoke from under the snow.3

6-Somalia-flood-May2020-AP_20139492415105-600px.jpg

 

Somalia flood related to climate change.    Photo: AP

* Add to this the hurricanes, massive floods, tornadoes and drought that have ravaged people around the world; the ice caps and glaciers melting; the growing mass extinction of species; the rising, warming and increasingly acidic oceans. Many thousands are already dying as a direct result. This is the world that NOW EXISTS and we are barreling down the tracks for much worse as long as capitalism-imperialism continues to rule.

Extensive rubble surrounding candle factory after tornado hit Mayfield, Kentucky.

 

Tornadoes and severe weather caused catastrophic damage across multiple states, killing at least 85 on December 10. The tornadoes were part of escalating extreme weather events that have been linked to climate change. Here, workers dig through the rubble of the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory in Mayfield, Ky., where at least 8 people were killed.    Photo: AP

In 2021, the science of human-caused climate change also became even more definitive and even more alarming. In August, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report made even more clear that climate change is happening NOW and accelerated in its effects, which are already quite bad, and can be observed in every region of the world—and that the planet is careening, if current trends continue, towards a catastrophic situation (see here and here).

The Existential Nature of What We Confront with Global Warming Came into Even Sharper Relief

What has been the response of world “leaders” to all this? Nearly all the world’s governments gathered at climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, bickering and fighting among themselves, reaching no agreements even in words to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions; to keep oil and coal in the ground; to transform human society’s relation to the planet. Instead, they produced phony claims of “advances”—a thin gloss over capitalist-imperialist business as usual. Raymond Lotta called this out for what it is, “an obscene, annual charade of empty promises and pledges.” In case there was any confusion, “climate leader” Joe Biden went home from Glasgow and led the way by announcing the largest ever sale of oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

In Glasgow, and countries throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets demanding the climate crisis be recognized and acted on as the existential emergency it is. This sense of urgency and desire to act, this sense of responsibility to all inhabitants of our planet, especially the exploited and oppressed in the global South who have borne the greatest burden of the climate emergency, is something to be welcomed and that people in far greater numbers must join and further energize. 

Glasgow climate march November 6

 

Glasgow, November 6, 2021.   

Meanwhile the streets were almost completely empty in the U.S.—the country most responsible for CO2 emissions [!!]—where all-too-many people tried to ignore the crisis humanity is facing and go on about their lives… or else wallowed in despair… or put their hope and energies into pressuring the Democrats to Build Back Better Bullshit and other dead-end illusions and pathetic non-solutions.

COP26 Protest 20211105 Glasgow Climate Criminals Marc Baptista

 

Protesters at COP26 in Glasgow dressed as "climate criminals."    Photo: Marc Baptista

In 2022 all this must be urgently challenged and radically changed! Millions in this country and around the world need to wake up and confront reality: The environmental clock is ticking. This capitalist-imperialist system and its rulers are taking humanity over the cliff. Only revolution gives us the chance to save the planet.

Help Make 2024 Our Year—a Year of Revolution! 
Donate to Revcom.us

From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War. 

Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has developed a strategy to prepare for and make revolution. He’s scientifically analyzed that this is a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible, and has laid out the sweeping vision, solid foundation and concrete blueprint for “what comes next,” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America

The website revcom.us follows and applies that leadership and is essential to all this. We post new materials from BA and curate his whole body of work. We apply the science he’s developed to analyze and expose every key event in society, every week. Revcom.us posts BA’s timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists), including his social media posts which break this down for people every week and sometimes more. We act as a guiding and connecting hub for the growing revcom movement nationwide: not just showing what’s being done, but going into what’s right and what’s wrong and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force.

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but goes up to a whole different level!

So what should you give to make 2024 our year—a year of revolution? 
Everything you possibly can! 
DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!    

Your donations contribute to:

  • Promotion of BA on social media and the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show 
  • Strengthen revcom.us as an accessible, secure, robust website able to rise to the challenge of meeting the extraordinary demands of navigating the storms and preparing for revolution in this pivotal, unprecedented year
  • Fund revcoms to travel to national “hotspots,” where extreme contradictions are pulling apart the fabric of this country and creating the possibility of wrenching an actual revolution out of this intensifying situation
  • Expand the reach and coverage of revcom.us
  • Printing and distribution of key Revcom materials including the Declaration and Proclamation