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International Socialist Review Issue 40, March–April 2005

Global Warming
Year of Unnatural Disasters

By LANCE NEWMAN

Lance Newman is an assistant professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos, and the author of Our Common Dwelling: Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

IN SOUTH Asia, December 26, 2004, will live in history as “Black Sunday.” The tsunamis that hit that morning provide a perfectly clear example of how capitalism turns natural events into unnatural disasters. More than 250,000 were killed by waves. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that as many as five million were left homeless, hungry, and at vastly increased risk of contracting illnesses like dengue fever, cholera, malaria, measles, and dysentery. WHO officials warn that epidemics of disease could double the death toll in coming months.1 The U.S. media focused on the relatively few European and American victims of the floods, even though the vast majority of those killed were poor and working-class Asians who lived in fishing villages and coastal slums. The before-and-after satellite images show stark differences in the effects of the waves: Well-built structures like mosques and office buildings remained standing, while whole neighborhoods of cheap working-class housing were reduced to rubble.2

Tsunamis are quite rare events in the Indian Ocean, but cyclones with accompanying floods are not. The North Atlantic witnesses an average of almost nine cyclones per year with winds in excess of seventy-five miles per hour. Since 1947, at least fifteen major storms have hit Bangladesh alone. In 1991, a huge cyclone swept the low-lying country, creating a storm surge that killed 138,000 people in exposed coastal areas. But even though they are natural and quite common events, the disastrous effects of these storms are intensified by the way that capitalism has organized the societies in their paths.

In an interview with Socialist Worker newspaper, environmental historian Mike Davis observes,

The single most important social process or phenomenon on the planet right now is urbanization. Ninety-five percent of future human population growth will be additions to the populations of Third World cities. And increasingly, large parts of that human increment are housed in the most dangerous conditions possible—in flood plains, in low-lying coastal areas, in unstable slopes.

In other words, capitalism concentrates poor people in vulnerable locations so that when natural phenomena like tsunamis occur, the devastation is unprecedented. As Davis puts it, “the great burden of disaster and death and economic destruction is faced by poor societies.”3

Moreover, the damage done by capitalism to the environment magnifies the force of storms and floods. In South Asia, as much as 50 percent of coastal mangrove forests have been clear-cut in the last two decades. These thick ranks of trees once formed buffers, like natural seawalls, physically shielding the shoreline from the force of waves. Observers across South Asia agree that in locations where the forests are intact, the effects of the Black Sunday tsunami were negligible in comparison to areas where the coast was unprotected.

Asia’s mangrove forests have been cut mainly to make space for aquaculture farms that raise tiger prawns. Rather than feed local populations, these prawns are sold on U.S. and European markets to raise funds to service debts imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.4 These same U.S.-dominated financial institutions are also responsible for privatization schemes that are sharply intensifying the difficulty that tsunami survivors face as they try to find clean water.5

The summer of storms

As we enter the twenty-first century, unnatural disasters are becoming more common, not just in Asia but across the globe. Workers in Florida and the rest of the southeastern U.S. are still struggling to put their lives back together after a summer of storms during which four hurricanes hit the region in six weeks. In August and September of 2004, hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne killed at least 120 people in the U.S. and caused an estimated $42 billion in damage to homes, businesses, public facilities, and infrastructure.6

As in Asia, the hurricane damage disproportionately affected workers and the poor. “Poor areas tend to do poorly,” Richard Ogburn, principal planner for the South Florida Regional Planning Council, told the New York Times. As Ogburn put it, “Their structures tend to be the least robust.” Low-income housing in much of the South consists of flimsy mobile homes that explode in hurricane force winds.7

Workers were also hit hardest by damage to the economy. Florida reported 14,000 additional jobless claims as a direct result of the storms.8 Also, the state’s citrus and other crops were destroyed, throwing thousands of undocumented immigrant workers into unofficial unemployment just when they most needed extra cash.

The White House response to the devastation was no surprise. George W. Bush used the misery to stage campaign photo ops, making four separate visits to the state to pose with his brother, Jeb, in front of downed trees and shattered homes. Ironically, this is the same president who withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto Accords on greenhouse gas emissions (which were pathetically inadequate even when the U.S. had agreed to participate).

It turns out that the devastating 2004 storm season was intensified by higher than average sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. Many atmospheric and climatic factors affect ocean temperatures, which fluctuate normally from year to year. But temperature increases have become much more pronounced in recent years, and global warming caused by pollution is the likely culprit. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, as the planet continues to warm, we should expect Atlantic hurricanes to get increasingly severe.9

Is the Earth really getting warmer?

Prominent climate-change skeptics, many funded by large energy corporations, have attacked the idea that global warming is actually occurring. But the evidence continues to mount. Direct records of temperature go back about 150 years. According to the NOAA, all ten of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1990.10 But scientists can extend the record back thousands of years further by studying tree rings, ice cores, and other data. The combined evidence shows that the 1990s was the warmest decade of the millennium and that the twentieth century was the warmest century. The Earth’s average annual temperature rose a little over one degree Fahrenheit over the course of the twentieth century, a pace of change faster than at any time in the last 600 years. One degree may not seem like much difference, but the change is distributed variably over the surface of the planet and over the course of any given year. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the average annual temperature may actually decrease in some areas, while in others, it may skyrocket.11

Colder areas of the planet are acutely sensitive to the changes. Thus, glaciers all over the world are receding rapidly, including in the Alps, the Himalayas, and Mount Kilimanjaro, as well as at Glacier National Park in Montana and Glacier Bay in Alaska. The Arctic ice pack has lost about 40 percent of its thickness in the last forty years, provoking speculation that the Northwest Passage will open up, allowing ships for the first time to travel from the North Pacific across the North Pole to the Bering Sea and on to Asia.12 At the other end of the globe, the Larsen B ice shelf separated from Antarctica in February 2002. The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that the detached shelf measured about 3,250 square kilometers, or about 20 percent bigger than Rhode Island.13

Because of melting, as well as thermal expansion of sea water, sea levels have risen between ten and twenty-five centimeters during the twentieth century and are predicted to rise by as much as ninety-five centimeters (about thirty-seven inches) by 2100.14 A three-foot rise would flood most major coastal cities, including New York and London. As much as 30 percent of the world’s cropland could be destroyed. In Tuvalu, one of the world’s smallest countries, 13,000 people live on nine atolls in the South Pacific that total about twenty-five square miles. Each spring, there are especially high tides, “king tides,” that have been getting higher in the last decade. In 2002, for the first time, one of the islands was completely submerged.15 The government of Tuvalu has been using money earned by licensing its Internet domain name—“.tv”—to fund UN membership, allowing it to lobby for limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases.16

What causes global warming?

Human-produced greenhouse gases account for more than half of the problem. These include methane from decomposition in landfills and from rice and cattle production, nitrous oxide from industrial fertilizers, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from refrigerants and aerosol propellants, and especially carbon dioxide. Every year, the planet receives the energy equivalent of 1,000 trillion barrels of oil in the form of sunlight. Much of this energy bounces directly back into space off of shiny surfaces like snow and ice, while the rest drives the air and water cycles that make up the planet’s weather. Greenhouse gases trap part of this energy, especially in the longer wavelength form of heat, preventing it from being reflected back into space.

The most important element of the greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is released naturally by animals when they breathe, by wildfires, volcanic explosions, and other sources. The amount in the atmosphere is regulated by its storage in plants and the ocean. But the delicate balance of atmospheric gases has been thrown off balance in the last century by the burning of fossil fuels on a massive scale and by unprecedented rates of deforestation. Electricity generation, cars, and trucks account for just over half of human-produced carbon dioxide. All together, the burning of fossil fuels adds six billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year.

Of course, some parts of the world are dirtier than others. Since 1950, eleven countries have released 530 billion tons of carbon dioxide. The U.S. alone is responsible for 186 billion tons or about 35 percent of this total. The European Union (EU) is in second place with about 128 billion tons, or 24 percent. The next six countries: Russia, China, Ukraine, India, Canada, and Poland together released about the same amount as the U.S. alone. The U.S. and the EU, the two richest societies on the planet, with a little over 10 percent of the world’s population, are responsible for just under half of worldwide carbon dioxide release. Industrialized countries produce sixty-two times more carbon dioxide pollution per capita than the least developed countries.17

Today’s levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are 30 percent higher than pre-industrial levels. In The Heat Is On, Ross Gelbspan predicts that if the rate of release continues to grow at the current rate, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach double its pre-industrial level sometime in the next century. Even if the wealthy countries do manage to cut oil and coal use, the effects will likely be far outweighed by a surge in carbon dioxide production by China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and others as they race to catch up.18

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts an increase of 5.4˚ F (3˚ C) over the next century as a result of carbon dioxide pollution and other greenhouse gases. This is the same difference as between the last Ice Age and the present.19 One of the most worrisome things about global warming is that it may create positive feedback cycles. For instance, when Earth’s temperature rises as a result of greenhouse gases, the cycle of evaporation and rainfall speeds up. More water in the air in the form of clouds, means even further decreases in the planet’s ability to reflect light and heat. Scientists can measure light reflected from the Earth—its albedo—when the light hits the part of the moon in the sun’s shadow. The average annual albedo of the planet fell about 2.5 percent over the last five years. 20

How will warming change the Earth?

Will we have more hot days and fewer cold days, longer summers and shorter winters? Not necessarily. First, as we saw in 2004, warming will increase both the unpredictability and the severity of extreme weather events—blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, monsoons, floods, droughts, and so on—across the globe.

And, again as we saw in 2004, the world’s poor will suffer the most. Ninety-six percent of all deaths from so-called natural disasters occur in developing countries. The economies of poor countries are especially vulnerable as well. For instance, when Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in 1998, harvests of staple foods such as rice and sweet potato were destroyed and virtually all the banana plantations that provided the region’s chief export crop were flattened. Carlos Flores, the president of Honduras, said: “We lost in 72 hours what we have taken more than 50 years to build.” At the time, Honduras was paying $1.5 million per day to service international debt. But its creditors, including the IMF and World Bank, refused to write off a penny.21

Global warming will also change longer term weather patterns. As the water cycle absorbs more energy and speeds up, increased evaporation will mean increased overall precipitation. And this will produce wetter climates in some areas. But there will also be more drought and desertification in others. Last year, as the Southeast was drowning in hurricane floodwaters, the Southwest was experiencing the longest and most severe drought on record. The big reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead that provide water to desert cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego are at their lowest levels since they were built.22

As weather patterns change around the planet, plant and animal species will be forced to shift their range and behavior. For instance, forests up and down the West Coast from Baja California to British Columbia are suffering epidemic infestations of pine bark beetles. In many forests, one in four trees has been killed by the beetles in the last few years and is standing dead. These are one of the biggest sources of fuel for the recent catastrophic wildfires. The beetles have been able to spread aggressively because drought and warm winter temperatures have weakened the trees’ resistance.23

Along with these larger organisms, microscopic pathogens will also migrate. As a result, we will likely see more, and more severe, epidemics of communicable diseases. One early indicator of this trend is the encephalitis caused by the West Nile virus that first arrived in the eastern U.S. in the summer of 2000 and later on the West Coast in 2003.24

Just as individual species will migrate and/or go extinct, so will whole ecosystems. As rainfall patterns change, icepacks will retreat, forests will burn, deserts will expand. Even the oceans that cover the planet are showing signs of wear. Fish populations are in steady and sharp decline. And coral die-offs are becoming common. In 1997–1998, in large areas of the Indian Ocean, more than 90 percent of the corals died. By late 2000, 27 percent of the world’s living reefs had been lost and it’s expected that another 25 percent will be lost within twenty years.25

The world’s agricultural systems will feel these ecosystemic changes and migrations especially sharply. And while agribusiness corporations will be able to relocate, hundreds of millions of peasant farmers will not. The number of environmental refugees worldwide is already estimated at twenty-five million, more than all other categories of refugees combined. The most devastating effect of global warming may well be what it will do to exacerbate an already developing global water crisis. According to Vandana Shiva, in her groundbreaking study, Water Wars, “In 1998, 28 countries experienced water stress or scarcity. This number is expected to rise to 56 by 2025. Between 1990 and 2025 the number of people living in countries without adequate water is projected to rise from 131 million to 817 million.”26

The politics of climate change

The Bush administration is famous for stonewalling the world on the issue of global warming. In addition to dumping the Kyoto Accords soon after he took office, Bush recently suppressed a Pentagon planning document that argues global warming “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern” far more significant than terrorism. The report predicts that abrupt climate change could provoke global anarchy as countries struggle over dwindling food, water, and energy resources. According to the Pentagon, by 2020, “disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life.”27

Despite such warnings, the White House has pushed forward with a domestic agenda that has one goal: enrich the energy corporations that pay the bills and lift all restrictions on capitalist exploitation of labor, land, and resources. Former Halliburton CEO, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney released a draft of a national energy policy a few months after taking office. Before long, it was revealed that Kenneth Lay—the president of Enron, the huge Houston-based energy corporation that gave millions to Bush, bilked California taxpayers of billions, and then went bankrupt—probably wrote most of the policy.28

Not surprisingly, the Bush plan called for building almost 2,000 new coal, gas, or nuclear power plants over twenty years, and proposed removing most environmental restrictions on exploration for new sources, including in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the North Slope. It cut the budget for research on efficiency and alternative sources of energy by a third. And in place of requiring an Environmental Impact Statement for new developments and projects, the administration proposed requiring an Energy Impact Statement that government agencies would have to produce to show how any regulation they promulgated would affect energy production. On its cover the energy policy features a pleasant quote from Bush, “America must have an energy policy that plans for the future, but meets the needs of today. I believe we can develop our natural resources and protect our environment.”29

In line with the hypocrisy of its published policy, a central Bush administration strategy has been to defund federal agencies, making it impossible for them to enforce existing regulations. Another effective ploy has been to stack agency bureaucracies with anti-environmentalists. One of Bush’s first cabinet nominees was Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, who had formerly worked for one of the most notorious anti-environmental organizations in the country, the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Likewise, the last two heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman and former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, are both staunch Republicans who specialize in finding ways to give industry what it wants and then make the decision sound environmentally friendly. Whitman oversaw the opening of once-protected wetlands to development, relaxation of the 1972 Clean Air Act, and the rollback of “new source review” regulations that had required power companies to upgrade their pollution-control equipment whenever they made significant renovations to their plants.

Leavitt’s first act after taking office in late 2003 was to establish a pollution-credit trading system for power plant emissions of mercury. Instead of forcing dirty plants to clean up their acts, Leavitt’s plan allows them to buy permission to pollute from so-called clean companies. It turns out this “regulatory” system was designed by lawyers for the power companies it’s designed to regulate, and that White House staffers revised the text of the document to downplay the health risks of mercury toxicity. They justify this with the same neoliberal rhetoric about the power of free trade that they use to explain their foreign policy. Deregulation, privatization, and markets will solve all of the problems of the world. But just like free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pollution-credit markets are just elaborate schemes to allow corporations to pollute at will.30 Ironically, Leavitt’s newest appointment is to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

It’s important to recognize that Bush’s blitzkrieg is just one part of an overall backlash by corporate America, and especially the energy industry, against environmentalism. Exxon, Shell, Ford, GM, and the rest of the big oil, gas, and car corporations spend millions every year on public relations campaigns that are designed to paint what they do as earth-friendly. They fund radical-sounding non-governmental organizations like the Global Climate Coalition that push the idea that climate change is a hoax. They greenwash themselves the way BP did with a $100 million per year PR campaign to build a new corporate identity centered on a new logo that looks like a green sun.31

Also, the corporations hedge their bets. They don’t just give millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Republicans, they give just as much to the Democrats. Here are a few of the companies that contributed more than $1 million to both the Republicans and the Democrats in the past ten years: Archer Daniels Midland, ARCO Coal/ Chemical, AT&T, Philip Morris, and RJR Nabisco. Altogether, corporate interests gave over $1 billion in 2004 to the Republicans and Democrats, on a 57:43 percent split.32

Despite this open secret, many environmentalists spent much of 2004 working to elect Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. On his campaign Web site, Kerry packaged himself as a lifelong environmentalist, bragging that he spoke at the first Earth Day and played a part in the international negotiations over global warming. But on the campaign trail, Kerry hardly ever spoke about environmental issues. This was part of his central campaign strategy: try to out-Bush Bush while ignoring the issues that matter to the vast majority of ordinary people. Many rank-and-file Democrats are sincere environmentalists and hoped that Kerry secretly agreed with them, but the sad fact is that their party belongs to the corporations. If Kerry had been elected, the environment would be no better off, and we can be sure that he’d have done nothing to slow global warming.

In fact many of Bush’s policies just accelerate policies that were mapped out under Bill Clinton. Clinton’s first priority in office was making free trade agreements like NAFTA and the General Agreement of Tarrifs and Trade (GATT). These treaties allow American companies to relocate to offshore free trade zones where environmental and labor standards are drastically lower. They also allow any existing environmental regulation or labor standard to be challenged as an unfair trade restriction. Clinton’s environmental record was bad in other areas, as well. According to Jeffrey St. Clair, many environmentalists found out quickly that Clinton wasn’t their friend,

At the top of the Clinton administration’s agenda on the environment was restarting logging in the forests of the Pacific Northwest—logging that had been stopped under the elder Bush. Clinton and his interior secretary Bruce Babbitt approached the heads of the top environmental groups in D.C.—I call them “Gang Green”—and they said, “as a gesture of goodwill, you have to get rid of this injunction and allow us to begin logging again in the forests of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington.” There was a mouselike squeak of “no” that lasted about ten minutes, and then the environmental groups capitulated. They gave Clinton and Babbitt what they wanted, as a gesture of good will. They have been cutting old-growth, thousand-year-old trees, in Washington, Oregon, Northern California, and Southeast Alaska ever since.

How bad was it under Clinton’s time for forests? Every year under Clinton, they were cutting six times as much old-growth timber as George W. Bush has cut in four years in total.33

The Clinton/Gore strategy was to roll out the cameras for high profile ceremonies to establish new national monuments, while behind the scenes they were pushing pollution markets, deregulating the energy industry, and paving the way for the California energy crisis and the blackout throughout the Northeast and parts of the Midwest in 2004. In other words, Kerry’s promises about the environment would have lasted about as long as Clinton’s promises.

Capitalism and the environment

Eighty percent of Americans consider themselves environmentalists and most feel the need to do more about climate change than vote once every four years. This should come as no surprise. In our capitalist society, the working class suffers not only from poverty and exploitation, but also from the environmental destruction their bosses perpetrate. Workers get exploding mobile homes and toxic air, while Bill Gates has a $100 million, 40,000-square-foot “ecology” mansion on Puget Sound that filters everything including sunlight. Working-class soldiers get Gulf War syndrome from airborne radioactivity, while the politicians who sent them to die for oil profits drink bottled water for $5 a quart.

The dominant idea about how to be a good environmentalist is summed up in the popular slogan, “Think Globally, Act Locally.” Localism takes many forms. Some people are positively religious about litter and recycling. Others focus on green consumerism, buying organic local produce and hand-made clothing. The problem with these strategies is that they attack the problem with our weakest weapon, our power as individual consumers. Meanwhile, multinational agribusiness companies are taking over organic food production, bringing down standards, and squeezing local farmers out. Fighting ecological disasters based on what we choose to eat, wear, or drive is like trying to kill an elephant with a pea-shooter. Driving a hybrid may help us feel better about ourselves at best, morally superior at worst, but it won’t put a dent in global warming.

When it comes to energy sources, fuel efficiency, emissions, and so on, the decisions that matter are not made at the individual level, they are made at the level of whole societies. The technology exists to generate all the electricity we need and more without burning fossil fuels. Photovoltaic cells and wind-driven turbines cost about 15 percent of what they did twenty years ago. Solar energy produced by a modern system installed in a new home costs about twenty cents per kilowatt-hour. Wind-generated power costs about ten cents per hour. Electricity bought at retail off the grid averaged just less than nine cents per kilowatt-hour in 2004. Large-scale federal investment in research and development would make it feasible to generate electricity from non-polluting sources for costs comparable to power from traditional sources.

In short, environmentally friendly energy could be cheap and practical, but it doesn’t get developed because entrenched oil corporations use their economic and political power to defend their control of the market. They have invested trillions of dollars in a particular production process and they are committed to that process for the long haul, no matter how dirty it is. The energy capitalists who run our world will not abandon the filthy oil economy they have built unless they are forced to do so.

Besides discouraging innovation, capitalism also encourages pollution. Energy markets are intensely competitive. In order for companies to survive, they have to make their product, whether it is gasoline or electricity, at the lowest cost possible. If they can be undersold by hostile competitors, they will be driven out of business. One of the first places companies turn to reduce the cost of production is the environment. It is expensive to dispose of by-products or to install pollution control equipment. It is much cheaper in the short run to pour toxic waste into the nearest river or blow it out the top of a smokestack.

Environmental destruction has been a central feature of capitalism since its beginnings. In “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” Karl Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels describes the destruction of forests by monocultural production of coffee in the Caribbean:

What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!34

For Engels, this example of irrational and destructive environmental behavior was not simply a matter of greed or ignorance, but an inevitable result of a system based on competition: “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.” Individual capitalists are “in relation to nature, as to society…predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.” In other words, even corporate CEOs who think of themselves as environmentalists must operate according to the logic of the market. And that logic, the capitalist logic of cutthroat competition for profit, makes it impossible for them to be environmentally responsible.

Engels also argued that “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature.” Rather, “we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and…all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” In order to make our relationship with nature sustainable, we will have to make it rational, and not just on an individual basis. We will have to take control of energy—along with transportation, food, and everything else we need—out of the hands of corporate bosses locked in competition, and instead plan our economy democratically, collectively, and scientifically.

In short, stopping global warming will take permanently changing the way our society does business. That means not just challenging corporate power, but getting rid of capitalism altogether and replacing it with a socialist society in which decisions about how we live on the planet are made according to human needs, including the need for a clean and healthy planet.