This is the bitter reality of 2023: Climate change, driven by the massive burning of fossil fuel by the system of capitalism-imperialism, is taking the planet to a place it has never been.

• Earth is warmer than it has been for 125,000 years. 
• The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, its ice sheets are melting and forest fires are burning in places rarely before burned. 
• Melting ice and heat have raised ocean levels roughly eight to nine inches in the last century, in some places much more, and they will go up much more in years to come. 
• Life on the seas and on the land is increasingly threatened, with some predictions of one million species going extinct. 
• People everywhere, but especially in the oppressed countries of the Global South, are being hit, hard, by storms, fires, heat, rising oceans, with more to come. The UN calculates that 21.5 million people have been driven from their homes by climate disasters since 2010, with projections of hundreds of millions in decades to come.

It was in this fraught situation that nearly 200 countries sent delegations for 11 days of the just-concluded COP28 (the 28th annual imperialist-dominated and -controlled Conference of the Parties on climate change). They came to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which is a police state in an oil field, supposedly to negotiate a response to climate change, supposedly to deal with the reality that the capitalist burning of fossil fuel has set the earth ablaze.

“This Is How We Lose a Planet...”

Scientists have known and been sounding the alarm for many decades that the burning of fossil fuels is driving a planetary catastrophe. These COP conferences are supposed to be the world governments’ biggest and best response to an environmental catastrophe that threatens the end of human civilization. But the system of capitalism-imperialism—and especially the hand of the U.S.—has set up and dominated every single COP since the first in 1995. And they made sure that no COP final agreement for the last 28 years would even mention the words “fossil fuels” let alone say that the world must stop burning fossil fuels! 

So what happened at COP28 with the world on fire? The final agreement, after days of argument, did manage to mention that the world should “transition away from fossil fuels.” Speaking for U.S. imperialism, head of the U.S. delegation John Kerry claimed this was a huge advance. You gotta be kidding... people are supposed to hail a conference that pays lip service to climate science 101? 

Far too many, including some leading environmentalists, echoed this in some way, even if halfheartedly. And the supposed advance was pathetic and the words lies and bullshit. There was no actual call to eliminate fossil fuels, no time frame, no unified plan and no enforcement—and the COP28, after much debate over language, actually refused to say that fossil fuels should be “phased out.” In other words, the Conference refused to say that the burning of fossil fuels should end… ever. Climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus said: “everyone is celebrating the first ever inclusion of ‘fossil fuels’ in a COP stocktake [overview], whereas I feel this is shameful. 28 years? to simply mention the cause of this global heating nightmare?... this is how we lose a planet.”

This IS how we lose a planet. This was no agreement to end fossil fuel, but was in fact an agreement to keep on drilling, refining, and burning fossil fuel. And rapidly expanding drilling, digging up, and burning fossil fuel is exactly the publicly announced plan of the major energy powers, and especially the U.S.—the #1 producer and exporter of oil and gas today, #1 historic emitter of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 

Keep this statistic in mind for a reality check: in the less than 30 years or so since these UN climate conferences began, the world has emitted more carbon dioxide that causes global warming than it did in all the prior thousands and thousands of years of human history!

Capitalism-Imperialism Will Not, and Cannot, Stop the Devastation of the Planet 

A big scandal in the course of COP28 was the fact that Ahmed Al Jaber, big-time oil executive, was made the head of the conference. But to give “credit” where it is due, the U.S. was the decisive power that fought at every point to keep fossil fuels in the center of the global economy at COP28. It fought for the oil kingdom of the United Arab Emirates to be the site of COP28. It decisively backed Al Jaber to head up COP28. (Al Jaber 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.) It backed Al Jaber when word leaked out that his company was planning to use its role in COP28 to get more oil contracts. Finally, it was the U.S. that played a decisive role in ensuring that COP28 would not even promise that fossil fuels should be “phased out.” 

The COP28 final agreement was, in reality, a declaration that the capitalist-imperialist system will not stop burning fossil fuel, a declaration that this system is ecologically bankrupt, a declaration that this system is destroying the planet and cannot stop. An activist from Uganda at the conference called the agreement a “death warrant.” If this system continues to dominate the planet, it IS a death warrant.

Capitalism-Imperialism Is NOT the Only Choice We Have

But capitalism-imperialism dominating the planet is NOT the only choice we have. We can make revolution and build a whole new, and radically different world. Bob Avakian put it well:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

The hour is late. The planet is changing in ways that are terrifying the scientists. These changes, and the complete bankruptcy of the system as it is unable to do anything to stop climate change, are one part of the “rare time” we are in. Revolution is not something remote but is possible in this “rare time”—emerging out of the intense contradictions tearing apart our society and world right now—IF we seize the time.

And there IS a whole better world that is possible through revolution. In the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, you can find a framework for a socialist society that puts the emancipation of humanity and taking care of the environment at the center of its economic and political functioning. This world is possible, and urgently needed—and the only chance humanity has to save our planet and its diverse ecosystems.

Resources: The underlying reasons that this system cannot stop destroying the environment have been addressed deeply in the writings and talks of Bob Avakian and in articles on our resource page on the environment. We urge people to dig deeply into this material. We face existential stakes in whether people confront the actual reality of what this system is doing to the environment, and go to work with the revcoms now in preparing to make revolution to bring a fundamentally different system into being.