Earth was a planet on fire in 2023: 

• greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—that come from burning coal, oil, gas, and which drive up the global temperatures, continue to pour into the atmosphere, and reached new levels in 2023¹;

• month after month through the summer of 2023, temperatures on land and sea not only reached record levels but broke records for how much they were breaking the old records; 
• extreme weather—devastating fires, hurricanes, unbearable heat—drove people from their homes and livelihood across the globe and acutely in the Global South; 

• the oceans rise, as the Arctic and Antarctic heat up and massive ice sheets melt, and the oceans get warmer and more acidic as they soak up heat from the atmosphere and absorb more and more carbon dioxide, which threatens life in the oceans.

This is all a product of the system of capitalism-imperialism. The devastating consequences of this for the people and the planet now, and for the people and the planet in the future as climate change continues, are almost incalculable. One scientific report stated: “We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.”²

Starting on November 30, representatives of 195 of the world’s states gathered for COP28 (the 28th Conference of the Parties). The annual COP is the only gathering of almost all of the governments of the world with the stated purpose of addressing what to do about climate change. The stark reality is that these governments have met over and over again, piously proclaiming that they are all about dealing with climate change—while their actual plans have always been to burn, burn, burn fossil fuels. And a few days into the 13-day COP28, you can already see the outlines of why it will fail, once again, to do what must be done to save the planet.

These conferences have a two-fold character. On the one hand, they are obscene charades of empty promises and pledges to curb global warming, as this capitalist-imperialist system hurtles the planet towards catastrophe. Keep in mind that the most basic, the most fundamental action to be taken right now to avert climate disaster is to immediately and massively cut and phase out fossil-fuel production. But that has not been on any of the COP agendas... indeed it has been ruled off the agenda! 

On the other hand, these conferences are arenas in which the imperialist great powers, like the U.S., China, and West European imperialists, use climate policy to wage rivalry with each other for global advantage AND use their financial and technological power to dictate terms for how the oppressed countries of the Global South will "adapt"—under imperialist domination—to this accelerating crisis.

Look Who’s Hosting and Chairing This Year’s Global Climate Conference

This year’s meeting is in Dubai, a city-state that is part of the United Arab Emirates, one of the top oil producers in the world. 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. And a few days before COP28 was to open, documents from that company were released which outlined plans to use their position in COP28 to cut deals for selling more oil with the countries coming to COP28.

They put a big-time oil executive on top of a meeting which must limit the production and burning of oil, and secret documents emerged revealing insider plans to sell all the oil they could at the meeting! Some called this “corruption,” and it is more or less the definition of corrupt dealing. 

But look beneath the surface and what you see is that Al Jaber is running the show, because the capitalist-imperialist system has had a tight stranglehold over COP1, COP2, COP3… and if it is possible, even tighter on COP28. And the hand of U.S. imperialism is right in the center of the whole process. It is not just that the U.S. is the #1 historic emitter of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that the U.S. is the biggest producer of oil and gas in the world and setting new production records this year, that the U.S. is expanding oil drilling on federal lands. What you see here is that the U.S. is actively wielding its power to keep the burning of fossil fuels at the core of the global economy: chief U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was one of the firmest and most decisive backers of putting Al Jaber in charge of the conference. 

America Pays Next to Nothing to Victims of Its Climate Destruction

One question COP28 is supposedly addressing is the injustice expressed in the fact that the imperialist countries have contributed vastly more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than the countries in the Global South, but it is those countries which are the hardest hit by climate disasters, and which have the least resources to deal with this because they have been plundered—by the imperialist countries. Just one of many examples all over the world was tropical cyclone Freddy in February and March of this year. It hit Mozambique and Malawi (two countries in southeastern Africa), killing 679 people in Malawi and 165 in Mozambique, and over 659,000 were driven from their homes. 

When the question of “loss and damage,” which is about aid to ALL the countries that are devastated by climate change, came up in COP27 in 2022, the U.S. committed to pay a miserly $24.5 million. This is one three thousandth (1/3,000) of the $75.7 billion that is in the latest Biden proposal to fund the imperialist war in Ukraine and the genocide in Israel.³

The U.S. is responsible for roughly one-fourth of the total greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere and are driving climate change and tearing apart the planet—and the U.S. is refusing to do shit about what it has caused. Kerry, when testifying before a congressional committee in July, made this crystal clear. Kerry was asked whether the U.S. should have to “pay some other country because they had a flood or they had a hurricane.” Before the congressman could finish the question, Kerry jumped in saying, “No. Under no circumstances,” and added, “Why don’t you create an exclamation point beside it too?”⁴

Radical Reductions in Burning of Fossil Fuels Must Start Now!

In this time of extreme and accelerating danger to the planet from climate change, we are seeing increasingly sharp warnings from climate scientists that radical reductions in the burning of fossil fuels must start now if the grave threat to the climate and environment is to be avoided. 

A major report that came out shortly before COP28, the Production Gap Report⁵ compared the plans of the major energy producing countries with what is needed to keep global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius (the number scientists say cannot be safely passed without grave consequences). The report sounded the alarm about how governments plan to produce more than twice the amount of greenhouse gases in 2030 than what is needed to meet keep the increase of global temperatures below 1.5!

After over 35 years of climate scientists presenting compelling evidence before the world that climate change is a grave danger and that the burning of fossil fuels is the driving force causing it; after one international conference on climate change after another (this IS COP28!), the best this system has come up with is to continue to burn fossil fuels at a disastrous pace—with the U.S. in the lead.

Capitalism-Imperialism Cannot Stop Climate Change—We Need Revolution!

In this intense situation, the bankruptcy of COP28 and the imperialist system behind it jumps out. CleanTechnica said, “…reports this week indicate it [COP28] may be little more than a dog and pony show, a fake conference intended to convince the rubes that serious action is being taken to reduce the use of fossil fuels while behind the curtain, secret deals are being made…”⁶

The truth is that COP28 IS in some important ways a “dog and pony show.” But the deeper, and starker, reality is that the problem is not that COP28 is “corrupt” but that the entire global system of capitalism-imperialism is not planning to do anything real to stop climate change, and even more fundamentally, CANNOT stop climate change.

Why? In short, the production, control, and burning of fossil fuels is foundational to the profitable functioning of the entire capitalist-imperialist economy, and the way the major powers, and most especially the U.S., control the world. This does not mean that humanity could not respond to climate change. A fundamentally new and radically different socialist system, brought into being through a real revolution, COULD. But THIS SYSTEM cannot. As Bob Avakian put it in BAsics 1:29, 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.”

The underlying reasons that this system cannot stop destroying the environment has 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.

A Whole Other World Is Possible—and We Must Urgently Struggle for It, Starting Now!

The hour is late. The planet is changing in ways that are terrifying the scientists.⁷ 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. In We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, A Fundamentally Different System from the revcoms (revolutionary communists), there is a crucial distillation and urgent call to make this a reality:

A Whole Different Economy—To Meet Fundamental Needs and Serve Highest Interests

With the new socialist economy, everyone will be guaranteed employment, and people will no longer be forced to labor, under conditions of life-stealing, soul-crushing exploitation, to create wealth for capitalist parasites. The technology and other means to create wealth will be converted into the common property of society and utilized by the government, in a planned way, to meet the needs of the people for a decent life, worthy of human beings, materially as well as intellectually and culturally, on a continually expanding basis, and to carry forward the revolutionary transformation of the new society, and the whole world, with the ultimate goal of emancipating all of humanity. The new socialist economy will not function on the basis of global supply chains of exploitation and plundering the planet’s resources. There will be systematic and ongoing attention to developing the economy on an environmentally sustainable basis. The ideas and proposals of the masses of people will be drawn on as an important resource in the planning and development of the socialist economy. The creative potential of people—which is so often suffocated under this system of capitalism-imperialism—will be unleashed to contribute to the emancipating goals.

And:

With the urgency the situation requires

WE DECLARE AND DEMAND:

The Existing Capitalist-Imperialist System And Institutions Of Government In This Country Must Be Abolished And Dismantled—And Replaced By A New, Socialist System Based On The CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA.