The Apocalypse Now
Climate in the Anthropocene
Part 1: Crimes of Big Capital
Climate change on Earth has been going on for the life of the planet itself. Geological periods and epochs come and go over hundreds-of-thousands and millions of years. Human beings, and our hominid ancestors lived through the most recent epochs, although Homo Sapiens almost didn’t make it through the last Ice Age. In the last 10,000 years however, we have been living in a delightfully cool and stable epoch called the Holocene.
Weather was of course important, but the climate was stable, seemingly unchangeable; different only based on where you lived on the planet. Of course, there were climate disasters periodically in different areas, such as famines and droughts, but overall conditions remained steady. We developed agriculture, societies, and eventually states based on the inequalities of class divisions, and the emergence of ruling classes.
Now, after 10,000 years of dependably steady climate, we are suddenly becoming aware that the climate is changing very rapidly, and we don’t like what we see.
The industrial age
After more than a century-and-a-half of industrialization, burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and large scale mechanized “factory” farming, quantities of greenhouse gases have risen to record levels not seen in three million years. A report in the New Scientist establishes that energy consumption, which was about 20,000 in terawatt hours in 1900, rose to 160,000 in 2019, almost entirely from coal, oil, and gas (hydro came in at 6.1 percent, wind two percent, and solar one percent.) In the 1960s, there was about six percent in low carbon sources, mainly nuclear, and 14 percent in 1994. Since then, there has been stagnation: all sources are increasing.1
Thus, there has been an increase in the earth’s atmosphere, mainly CO2 but also significantly of methane, which has also been steadily increasing, as well as other harmful chemicals. The result has been a global warming of about one-degree Celsius since the pre-industrial period, although most of that has occurred since 1970. The 20th Century was the hottest recorded in the last 2,000 years. Compared to climate variability in the past, current warming is also more uniform around the planet.
The “tipping point” has tipped
The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is now at least 400-parts-per-million (ppm), a level not seen since the Pliocene Epoch, roughly three to five million years ago. And it could go higher: a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from preindustrial levels, from 280 ppm to 560 ppm is possible.
Climate changes are proceeding in every region on Earth, and they are unprecedented in thousands and hundreds-of-thousands of years. These changes are irreversible: global mean temperatures will continue to increase, and sea levels will rise for thousands, even hundreds-of-thousands of years. The damage has been done over the last century-and-a-half. Even if emissions of greenhouse gases were to stop tomorrow, these climate changes will continue, because the CO2 takes centuries to break down in the atmosphere. Methane breaks down much more quickly, 25 years or so, but it is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, and its release has been steadily increasing in recent years, thus constantly increasing its threat to the climate.2
An irreversible change
We are now in a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, which will be much hotter than it is now. We don’t see the full effects of this yet, because the climatic reaction to an increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere takes some time. Global temperatures in the atmosphere over land happen relatively quickly, but over the oceans the rise is slower. Temperature rise in the oceans is occurring and sea level is rising, although the full impact will take longer, and temperatures in the deep ocean take a lot longer. Meanwhile, the poles are heating up more quickly than other regions, and ice in the Arctic and Greenland is melting. The vast Antarctic ice cap is also melting, although more slowly. (A complete melting of the South Pole ice sheet would raise sea levels by nine feet or more.) We face devastating changes, such as we humans haven’t experienced in 10,000 years, and that we can only begin to comprehend. This change is happening much faster than previous estimates and predictions.
What we see today—more powerful storms, devastating fires, droughts and floods—will get worse as the warming continues. The worsening droughts and fires are already quite familiar to anyone in California, and the smoke from them has reached as far as New York City. Fires have devastated Greece, Portugal, Alaska, and Siberia, along with many other regions. Flooding due to massive downpours is also now familiar to New Yorkers, as well as people in Germany, the Netherlands, and more. There is already a pattern of migration of animals to cooler areas, and a sixth extinction is underway. And the list goes on.
As glaciers recede, river water sources in many agricultural regions around the globe, all essential for human survival, will be threatened, and eventually eliminated. This alone could put 25 percent of global population in dire straits. There will be famines and mass migrations, dwarfing the already high migration of refugees we see today. Ethnic and class conflicts will intensify. Societies, countries, governments will begin to lose control and likely collapse.
What will those alive today see
Elders today certainly, and even some children, may live out their lives perhaps without seeing all of this climate change and societal collapse. But in geological terms this is happening very fast indeed, even instantaneously. It is very similar to the last great extinction, the fifth extinction, which killed off the dinosaurs. This extinction event is attributed to the impact of a large asteroid called Chicxulub 66 million years ago in what is now part of the Yucatan peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico. It is called the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction, and it is portrayed as an instantaneous event. But were its affects really as sudden as the asteroid impact itself? No, they were not.
Archeologists have identified fossils of dinosaurs who lived years after this event. Some argue that the real cause of the extinction event was a series of volcanic explosions happening around that time. Granted, there were volcanic eruptions, but the asteroid impact is undeniably the chief source (its impact may have caused some of the volcanic explosions.) Though some dinosaurs lived for some time after the impact, they were affected by the sudden creation of a new epoch, in which their ecosystem was fundamentally changed. Any animal larger than a dog eventually died out—mammals were just small creatures at that time. One dinosaur species, birds, made it through to the Holocene, only to be threatened now in the new epoch, which is happening just as fast as the fifth extinction.
Climate change is class war under another name
Climate change is universally referred to as “human-caused.” The now widely accepted term for the new epoch, Anthropocene, is defined as the age of human effects on the environment. Of course, this is true in the long view: if it hadn’t been for the Homo Sapien species, none of this would have happened. But as the Anthropocene threatens to send us back to the Stone Age in a century or two, with a drastically reduced population, the idea of “human-caused” change is way too simple.
Is the average worker who takes a diesel-powered bus to work, or drives the only gas-guzzling car he/she can afford, to blame for this crisis? Are the people who get sick and die from cancer or other disease caused by the pollution of their environments from oil and gas drilling responsible? How about coal miners who die from coal dust they inhale at the only job that is available to them, or the hundreds-of-thousands whose towns and cities that were inundated by coal dust during the 19th and early 20th centuries? “Human-caused” lends itself to the view that individuals can be the solution by adopting a “green” lifestyle, or buying an electric car (as yet unaffordable to most), etc.
The real culprit on climate change and environmental disaster is the capitalist class, which has always seen the working class as its enemy. And the environment/climate criminals among these profit hogs are many.
Crimes of Big Oil, and their governments
In the U.S., taxpayers are forced, at the hands of paid-off lawmakers, to subsidize the fossil fuel industries with federal government payments to these corporations even now, as the climate crisis is upon us. This shows that the government is the servant of the ruling class, and not working to prevent the destruction of the environment, or climate change that is the result. And that is just the beginning of the story. Let’s look at some specifics.
A senior Exxon company scientist, James F. Black, made an important report to a room full of powerful oilmen in Exxon headquarters toward the end of the last century. He reported on independent scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels would double the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere, and this would increase global average temperatures by two to three degrees Celsius (four to five degrees Fahrenheit), and maybe as much as ten degrees Celsius in the poles. Black also said that humankind “has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” This was in 1977!
Exxon conducted research on this topic, including outfitting a tanker with special equipment to test CO2 concentrations around the globe, for about ten years. It was the only oil giant to do so. Some of its research was sent to scientific journals. But then it shut down its research, banned any more releases of its findings, and worked instead to fund organizations that deny climate change is real.3
Chevron dumps on Ecuador, literally
In 2011 Steven Donziger, a dedicated environment lawyer and Harvard Law graduate acting pro-bono on behalf of the Cofan tribe in the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador, won a $9.5 billion dollar settlement against Chevron. The corporate giant had hoped the Ecuadoran courts would acquit them, but it did not. The crime? Chevron subsidiary Texaco had dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste in the Amazon. Tribal leader Emergildo Criollo testified in court that his three-year-old son had been killed by taking a dip in a lake polluted with oil sludge.
This sludge dump covers a huge swath of the Amazon. You can put a stick into any pool of it, and it comes out covered in this gunk. Chevron admitted that it dumped the sludge, but it has refused to pay a dime on the judgement to this day, nor has it moved to clean the stuff up, which was also demanded in the court ruling.
Chevron’s response instead was to organize a legal lynching of Donziger, by hiring 2,000 lawyers to find a compliant, right wing, corrupt judge to go after him, which they did: Judge Lewis Kaplan of New York. He was a former tobacco industry lawyer who had also done work for Chevron. He appointed Chevron attorneys to do the prosecution when the government refused, and he ordered Donziger to turn over his cell phone and computers, so that Chevron could see which whistle blowers were after them! He refused, and the judge seized all his meager assets, denied him a jury trial, and convicted him of criminal contempt. No lawyer ever gets jail time for contempt of court, but Donziger did.4 [See article “Steven Donziger Sentenced to Prison” in this issue.]
Offshore Oil Drilling
Offshore oil drilling is a massive disaster for the environment. It is dirty, dangerous and there is no safe way to do it. Most of the drilling platforms are old, rusting and battered by weather and storms, making them more vulnerable to the extreme typhoons now being caused by climate change, as in Hurricane Ida which hit Louisiana this year, before it delivered unprecedented rain and flooding in New York.
The recent spill off Huntington Beach in southern California, reportedly of 144,000 gallons of crude oil, could take months to clean up, although cleaning can never be complete. Estimates of the amount of the spill have gone down, and the Beach has been reopened, but destruction of the underwater habitats of animals can’t be restored. Bodies of fish showed up on beaches, and whales and dolphins swimming through the area will be consuming poison. Birds soaked in oil have been given a death sentence, since they cannot fly or keep warm (mass media is saying some of them are being treated.) Spills like that of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 leave residues of sludge on shorelines which can still be seen to this day.
A flawed system
The Huntington Beach spill revealed a systemic flaw: warning systems designed to detect leaks don’t always work or are ignored. It took 12 hours after the first warning alarm for the spill to be reported by operatives. One excuse given for that is that there may have been a small slit opening up in the pipe carrying the crude to shore from the ocean platform. Then the pipe was ruptured and dragged along the ocean floor by a ship passing through.
So far the biggest oil spill ever was the Deep-Water Horizon explosion and ocean floor leak in the Gulf during Hurricane Ivan. The explosion and sinking of the platform in the Gulf killed 11 workers, whose remains were never found; and caused a gushing of 210 million gallons of crude for five months before the well was plugged up. While British Petroleum (BP) was trying to figure out how to stop the oil that was blasting out of the hole on the sea floor, a camera was placed on the sea floor. People all over the world saw this torrent of oil blasting up every day on the nightly news. It is estimated that 100 x 10-to-the-sixth-power gallons (!) of oil still remains in the Gulf. Four-million-nine-hundred-thousand gallons of oily gunk was allegedly cleaned up from the shores of Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama. But patches of the gunk are still showing up on these shores.
It goes on: oil slicks were still showing up in the Gulf in the days and weeks after Hurricane Ida. This is due to the Gulf floor being “dense with pipelines,” many of them unused, old, and abandoned without being cleaned or removed. Also, pipelines are known to be disturbed by ripples in sea bottoms caused by big storms. This hasn’t stopped the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement from announcing that all evacuated platforms from the storm will re-start drilling if the platform is not damaged.5 President Biden chimed in with a promise of lots more permits for drilling in the Gulf to make up for any losses suffered by the oil companies.
“The corporations are poisoning our communities,” said Naomi Yoder, a scientist with Healthy Gulf.6
Rampant corruption
Most of New Orleans lies below sea level, and so it has been hit hard in the inevitable hurricanes it faces. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the worst on record. First, its levees did not hold up against the flooding because they weren’t built strong enough or to the height that was required. That was just the first indication of capitalist/government corruption.
The Ninth Ward was the lowest ward, and closest to the water; and it was where the homes of most of New Orleans’ Black population lived. It was flooded and devastated, so many residents, with their homes destroyed, tried to cross a bridge to get to safety. They were met with police who forcibly prevented them from crossing. Some inadequate shelter was provided, but in the end, many of them were simply bussed out of town to other localities, i.e., they were gotten rid of. The racist city officials, in league with President “W” Bush, also used the hurricane as an excuse to get rid of the public school system and replace it with private schools.
Following Hurricane Ida, New Orleans residents were faced with an electrical black out that lasted for most of a week, in very hot weather. After Katrina, they had a power outage that lasted over a year. Both times, the local power company, a subsidiary of Entergy Inc., complained that the storm had wrecked its power lines. Yet after Katrina, Entergy posted an increase in profits of 24 percent. How did that happen?
Cashing in on hurricanes
In 1986, investigative reporter Greg Palast was called in by local regulators to find out why Entergy could not keep the lights on while citizens’ electric bills soared. He found that Entergy is a racketeering scam parading as a power company. Its New Orleans branch was going broke because of the eye-popping cost of buying wholesale power—four times the national norm—from a company called “Middle South Utilities.” Middle South was 100 percent owned by Entergy! The government regulators ordered an end to the shell game. That was when there was still some regulation. But soon “W” Bush followed Reagan’s lead in deregulation by abolishing federal oversight of the wholesale market.
After Katrina, the long power outage was due to Entergy selling off the city’s electrical power allotment elsewhere on the wholesale market, which explains the 24 percent jump in profit. A U.S. Department of Energy office issued a report which, allegedly, forced utilities to harden its power distribution infrastructure with guy wires on transmission towers, mobile generators, and transformers, etc. Corporations refused to do this to resist any more than category-three winds (not category four or five.) Entergy didn’t do any of that, because power companies don’t profit off power transmission, only from selling power to rate payers. Instead, Entergy built a new power plant, which it promised would produce power in emergencies, which it didn’t after Ida, because transmission lines were down.!7
Climate crime: deforestation
At the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, it is estimated that 57 percent—about six-billion hectares—of the world’s habitable land was covered with trees. Today only four billion remain. Early class-dominated societies are to blame for some of that, but the bulk of the loss took place under capitalism, starting with the colonial conquest of the Americas, and the industrial age. But that is not the whole story.
Forests which are under attack from too much logging, road building and fires, as well as drought conditions, do not consistently absorb more carbon than they release. They can turn from carbon sinks into carbon sources. That is what is happening in the critically important Amazon Rainforest, according to a report by Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) and confirmed by an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
The Brazilian section of the rainforest, by far the largest, is the worst offender. While the parts of the forest in Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Venezuela, and others were still carbon sinks, the Brazilian Amazon out-numbered all of them for a negative total of more emissions than carbon captures overall in the rainforest.8
The rightist regime of Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, is largely (but not exclusively) to blame for this disaster happening in the Amazon. Although logging and land grabs in the forest for cattle raising by setting fires have been going on, Bolsonaro (who said he is “bored” with hearing about Brazil’s high numbers of COVID-19 cases,) has accelerated this trend with his support for cattle ranchers and logging enterprises. A road cut through the Eastern section of the forest, has particularly boosted this trend, and led to a severe decrease in the amount of water in rivers flowing south into Argentina.
The road ahead is rocky
All the issues of climate change, refugees fleeing “failed states,” rampant racism, and political control in the hands of the mega-barons of capitalist imperialism, are interconnected. The fate of the victims of “human-caused” climate change is, as of now, in the hands of those who oppress them. The whole world will experience ruling classes using their wealth to save themselves, and the rest be damned, unless there is revolutionary change.
Adapting to the future is a very big problem for humanity. The U.S., with its complete lack of socialist opposition parties, weakened labor unions lacking in revolutionary class-consciousness, a deepening left-right split in which the right is moving toward fascism, the so-called “left” side is equally a party of capitalism, and which is the dominant imperialist power in the world, may well see the worst and most destructive crash.
Adaptation to what is inevitable is what is needed now, and the ruling class is in the way. Yet adaptation to big climate problems has happened before among our species, and it can happen again. It will require a world-wide revolution such as has never been seen.
Part 2 will focus on what has been done with climate problems in the past, what is being done now, and the revolutionary solution.
1 Michael Le Page, “A New Energy World,” New Scientist, August 7-13, 2021.
2 See “Methane Hunters,” Anna Kuchment, Scientific American, September 2021
3 “Exxon’s Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels’ Role in Global Warming Decades Ago,” September 16, 2015, insideclimatenewas.org.
4 “Donziger: Why Am I the One Locked Up and Not Chevron,” by Nicole Powers, Greg Palast, and Dennis Bernstein, Flashpoints (KPFA), August 13, 2021. kpfa.org.
5 “Substantial Oil Spill Spreading Off Louisiana Coast,” New York Times, September 5, 2021
7 See Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse, Plume Books, 2007, and gregpalast.com.
8 “Amazon rainforest is a carbon source. No longer a carbon sink,” https://menafn.com/1102738871/Amazon-rainforest-is-a-carbon-source-No-longer-a-carbon-sink
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