To state the obvious, the climate emergency is a global emergency. Global warming and rising sea levels cannot be stopped by any one nation state, and no country can wall itself off from their impact. The solution has to be international. This basic fact must inform our efforts to avert the coming climate catastrophe. Narrow nationalist ideas are a disaster for the climate movement. We need a global movement, and to get it we need an internationalist political orientation.
Governments everywhere are already trying to divide us on national lines to derail any attempt to confront the problem. For example, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison claims that Australia is doing more than its fair share to reduce carbon emissions, and that shutting down coal mines here would only mean the loss of “Aussie” jobs. Morrison wants to blame developing countries such as China for the problem – conveniently ignoring that Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia. When exports and domestic use are combined, Australia ranks 5th behind China, the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia in responsibility for carbon dioxide pollution from extractive fossil industries.
These industries are extremely profitable for Australian capitalism. The capitalists, and the governments that serve them, hope to deflect popular anger about the ongoing pollution by playing the nationalist card. So defending the coal industry and other destructive industries has become part of defending jobs and the “Aussie” way of life. But for the majority of people in Australia, and throughout the world, maintaining these polluting industries is an absolute disaster – and not just because they threaten the planet.
Coal mining historically has been one of the most dangerous occupations in Australia. The recent re-emergence of the deadly black lung disease – which Morrison and others have shown little concern about, despite their supposed love of coal miners – is just the latest example. Nor do politicians or mining bosses care about jobs and workers when mines are closed due to low profitability. The only thing consistent about their actions is securing massive profits, which matter more to them than workers or the planet. They disguise this by invoking the national interest.
The other way governments deflect concern about climate change from their big business friends is by blaming the victims. By their logic, the millions of people fleeing the effects of climate change are the greatest threat, not the destruction of the planet that leads to mass displacement. Refugee bashing, already a mainstay of the political right, will come more and more to the fore as larger areas of the world become uninhabitable. We will be told that the climate criminals are our friends, and that refugees are our enemies.
The climate movement must answer this attack. It must stand with the victims of environmental destruction and against the climate criminals. It must link up with and fight alongside all those immediately affected by the crisis – whether they are former inhabitants of Pacific islands, the tens of millions in low lying areas of Bangladesh facing flooding, those affected by fires in the Amazon or the hundreds of millions set to be driven from their homes by lack of water, desertification, wild storms and uncontrollable bush fires. We need these people on our side if we are to have any hope of winning. And we must resist the divide and rule politics spewed out by climate criminal capitalists trying desperately to preserve their system.
Today, the political right – the Donald Trumps, the Boris Johnsons, the Jair Bolsonaros and the Scott Morrisons – by and large are climate denialists. At best, they ignore the crisis. But as its impact is increasingly felt, climate denialism will become untenable. It is likely to be replaced not with serious environmental action, but with authoritarianism. Just as today they treat climate activists as criminals and polluting multinationals as friends, right wing governments (and Labor too: see Queensland) will respond to the social chaos caused by climate change with terror and force rather than humanitarianism and reason.
If history is anything to go by, this will involve putting the supposed national interest above all else; a “beggar thy neighbour” approach of fierce competition for scarce resources, increased military build-ups and the further militarisation of borders. Some argue that such a scenario would run contrary to the interests of the capitalist class. This echoes an argument frequently made about war: that the enormous destruction and human cost of war are a deterrent to the world’s governments engaging in it. But time and again it has not played out that way. National governments have accepted huge financial losses and millions of deaths in pursuit of their “national interests”. There is no reason to think it will be different with the environmental crisis.
As it is now, capitalism will react to this crisis in a way that exacerbates it. Shortages of water, energy and food – which should prompt a rational reorganisation of the economy according to human need – are likely to result in resource wars. Measures such as rationing will be revived, along with crackdowns on civil liberties to ensure resistance is contained. Things will become worse for the mass of people, and the planet more unliveable.
These authoritarian non-solutions make perfect sense to defend the profits of the rich and powerful rulers of each nation state. And as with war, the rich won’t bear the worst consequences. They will retreat to their air-conditioned bunkers in the hills and their walled-off communities protected by armies of security guards while the rest of us will be left to fend for ourselves.
So while the climate movement in every country must force its national government to slash carbon emissions and take protective measures to defend people from rising sea levels, water shortages, bush fires and wild storms, piecemeal reforms on a national basis will not be enough. The capitalists will stubbornly resist any meaningful reforms that threaten their profits, and the mainstream political parties will back them. Their power will have to be challenged. Much more revolutionary change will be necessary.
The climate catastrophe will be successfully confronted only by the mass of working class people and the oppressed taking determined collective action in every country of the world. Because workers produce all the wealth in our society – because they are the class that keeps the system running – they can shut down the flow of profits and wrench the power from the tiny minority of parasites at the top. And because workers are a collective class, whose immediate interests are in common (unlike capitalists, driven by economics to compete with each other), they can re-order society and deal with the climate emergency on a democratic basis.
Crucially, the working class is an international class. Hospital workers and firefighters all around the world do the same work, as do construction workers, maritime workers, agricultural workers, truck drivers, railway workers, hospitality workers and so on. They all have the same fundamental interest in a decent life free from exploitation, oppression and the threat of environmental destruction.
The rich and powerful have repeatedly used nationalism and racism to divide us – to undermine our capacity to fight for a better world. We need to build a powerful anti-racist left in the climate movement to prevent that happening again.
