“Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory.” This was the opening of a recent report in the journal Bioscience on the state of the planet’s climate in 2023. The article goes on to speak of the urgency of the situation, “Unfortunately, time is up…. [A]n alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”

A major UN report, just issued, is titled Broken Record: Temperatures Hit New Highs, Yet World Fails to Cut Emissions (Again). Both meanings of “broken record” apply: temperature records were smashed and broken this year; and the world’s governments respond in the same way they have for decades as climate change has transformed the planet—they promise, like a broken record, to do something about climate change, and they don’t do anything remotely close to what is urgently needed. 

And keep in mind—the reports cited and others in this article are written by scientists and others who are operating in the framework of this system—and are issued by major institutions of this system. And even from that framework they are sounding the alarm and calling out the failures, though they are pulling punches and not exposing the reality that it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving climate change and blocking the solution.

As Bob Avakian put it, this system and its rulers “…care nothing for the rich diversity of the earth and its species, for the treasures this contains, except when and where they can turn this into profit for themselves... these people are not fit to be the caretakers of the earth.”

And on November 30, like pigs on parade, the world’s governments will gather in the annual COP (Conference of the Parties)—this time, COP28—to lie to the people, to each other and to themselves about climate change, to attempt to throw blame and gain political and economic advantage over each other, and to fail, once again, to do what must be done to save the planet. And to put an exclamation point on just how tight the stranglehold of the capitalist-imperialist system is on this conference, this year’s meeting will be in Dubai, a city state that is part of the major, world oil-producing United Arab Emirates. The chair of the meeting is Ahmed al Jaber, who is also the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology of the United Arab Emirates, and managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

2023 has been a year of unprecedented climate shocks. Scientists are searching for answers to why climate change is accelerating so quickly this year. Here are just a few examples: 

• The warmest summer in 125,000 years. Phoenix saw 31 straight days over 110 degrees which was responsible for 579 deaths. One study found that 2 billion people will be living “outside the niche of human habitability” by 2030 and 3.7 billion by 2090.

• Ten percent of the forests in the world are in Canada and a third of that burned this year. Toxic air from the fires reached Greenland and darkened skies in New York City. Even more, the character of the fires themselves is changing. Journalist David Wallace-Wells writes, “They produce such thick walls of smoke now that tanker planes sometimes can’t fly into them; they throw embers over what were once considered uncrossable fire breaks; they burn and smolder underground through winter; they get so hot that firefighters risk second-degree burns just approaching them.”

• A new study suggested that the number of species at risk of extinction may be 2 million, double the previous estimate from 2019. The Amazon, the largest rainforest on earth, home to immense variety of plant, animal, and insect life, may have already reached a point of no return.
• The Guardian newspaper reported, “Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut. The implications for sea level rise are “dire”, scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned.”

 USA: #1 Destroyer of the Environment

In the run up to COP28, the website of the U.S. State Department said, “[T]he United States is scaling up action at home and abroad to put the world on a path to reach net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050.” The website also quoted John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, saying, “There is more than hope. There is progress.”

This is the “progress” that The Production Gap Report¹ found for the U.S.: 

• The U.S. is the top oil and gas producer in the world and is fourth in coal production.
• U.S. oil and gas production will remain at record high levels until 2050.
• Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which too many people regard as a major step forward on the climate—mandates four new oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and makes wind and solar development contingent on further oil and gas lease sales. For more on the IRA see Raymond Lotta’s important article, Worse than Fine-Print Trickery... Biden's Imperialist Climate Bill: The Devil Lies in the Big Picture.
• In March 2023, the federal government approved the largest single oil project on federal lands, the ConocoPhillips Willow project in Alaska, which is projected to produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day.

We Need a New System

Why does fossil fuel production and emissions continue to rise despite the increasingly ominous warnings for the future of humanity and the natural world and the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists that there must be NO new development of fossil fuels and what does exist must be phased out rapidly? The basic answer is that this is a system that treats the environment as something to be plundered in the pursuit of profit and rivalry to dominate the world. And the basic solution is that we need a whole different economy to meet the fundamental needs and serve the highest interests of the people. (See the excerpt below from We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System.)

We encourage people to dig into this on the Special Environmental Crisis Resource Page on revcom.us. But, most importantly, join with us in fighting to bring down this system and bring a truly emancipating one into being. We don’t have time to lose.