Trump/Pence Super-Predators Speed Up Danger of Climate Change
We Need to Drive Out the Fascist Regime... AND We Need a Whole Different World

April 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The danger of global environmental disaster due to climate change has become clearer and clearer in recent years. Then came the Trump/Pence regime—and in their first 100 days, they’ve put this rush toward environmental catastrophe into overdrive.

Climate change is already having devastating impact on the natural world and people’s lives. Arctic ice and glaciers are melting at an accelerating pace, contributing to rising sea levels. Coral reefs—home to an incredible variety of sea life—are dying. Extreme weather—record-high temperatures, longer-lasting drought, more powerful storms—is forcing tens of millions out of their homes to become “climate refugees.”

There is overwhelming consensus among the world’s scientists, reached through decades of careful research, that climate change caused by human activity is real—and that increased levels in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) produced by the burning of fossil fuels are causing rising global temperatures, which in turn have all kinds of effects that threaten life on earth. An environmental emergency looms over humanity and the planet as a whole.

In this situation, a regime of climate change deniers and anti-science lunatics now heads up the world’s top economic and military power—with Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” at the lead. While they may uphold science and technology that serve their “America First” agenda, they are undermining science in critical areas like public health and climate change through huge funding cuts and witch hunts against scientists. Scientists and others are frantically trying to preserve scientific data, because of fears that it could be lost to the storehouse of human knowledge through the actions of Trump/Pence.

The executive order signed by Trump on March 28 moves toward eliminating what small measures the U.S. has had in place to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. His order directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to essentially gut Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by modest amounts. The order also calls for opening up public lands for leasing to coal mining, eliminating regulations that limit emissions from coal-fired power plants, doing away with standards that limit emissions of methane (another key greenhouse gas), and getting rid of other environmental protections.

If the Trump/Pence fascists are able to consolidate their hold on power, it will be a nightmare for humanity. They must not be given the opportunity to wreak years more of irreversible harm on the planet and life on it. This regime of super-predators must be stopped and driven from power, as soon as possible.

Trump has not yet officially pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. But Trump’s initial actions on the environment have already made clear that his regime has no intention of meeting the U.S. goals for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris accords, as inadequate as those goals were. This could cause other countries, fearful that the U.S. capitalists could gain a competitive advantage, to also abandon the Paris treaty—leading to even more greenhouse gases pouring into the earth’s atmosphere.

Let’s look at the Paris agreement, supposedly the crowning achievement of the U.S. and other powers “leading” the fight against climate change. The dominant forces behind that treaty openly said that they were not even aiming for measures that would keep the global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—which is what climate scientists say is needed to keep the global environment from plunging into disaster. Even if all the countries were to meet the voluntary goals for cuts in greenhouse gases—which is highly unlikely—that would still lead to unacceptable global temperature rises. The agreement does not even mention the U.S. military, the largest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

This just scratches the surface of why the Paris accords—even if put fully into practice—can only somewhat slow down the approach of environmental catastrophe, at best. It does not do what is urgently needed to deal with the threat of climate change in a real way.

The Trump/Pence regime must be driven out before they can do even greater harm. The reality is that Trump is an extreme concentration of a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—that had already been pushing the world toward environmental disaster before Trump. The answer is not to go “back” to the Paris agreement and supposedly more “sensible” and “saner” capitalism-imperialism. Under this system, nothing can be done unless, ultimately, there is profit. It’s a system where different capitalists and blocs of capitalists compete against each other under the ruthless commandment of “expand or die”—compelling them to rapaciously exploit the environment without regard for consequences for humanity and ecosystems, the complex web of life on the planet.

What is needed is an actual revolution that uproots and sweeps away this system. A revolution that brings into being a whole new economic and political system—with a state that has a completely different orientation and ethos than what exists under the current system, including in relation to the environment. There is, in fact, a blueprint for such a society: the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. We invite all who are agonizing over the state of the world and seeking real solutions to the horrors and dangers facing humanity to get into this inspiring—and viable—vision of a whole different world that is possible.

 

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