Humanity is heading for an ecological collapse created by capitalism
Saturday, October 24th, the world will commemorate the International Day against Climate Change, one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
Climate Change is an anthropogenic phenomenon, that is, produced by human activity, as a result of more than one hundred and fifty years of industrialization, extractivism and a lifestyle promoted from the centers of power where the main motive has been profit.
The amounts of greenhouse gas elimination have increased to levels never seen before. The most widespread, representing two-thirds of all types of greenhouse gas (GHG), is carbon dioxide, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal or natural gas). This is compounded by the increase in dams, changes in the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles and the dramatic loss of biodiversity. Exxon Mobil, Shell, British Petroleum and Chevron are some of the main companies emitting pollutants.
Between 1751 and 2010 only ninety companies were responsible for 63% of accumulated carbon emissions. Currently the United States and China emit 40% of GHGs.
The effects of climate change affect all regions of the world; the main damage is evident in the Cryosphere with: the melting of sea ice in the Arctic, Antarctica and the ice sheet in Greenland. In the biosphere it is evident in the devastation of the boreal forests, the Amazon rainforest, the warm water coral reefs, plus the thawing of the permanent frozen ground layer the permafrost and the alterations of the Atlantic marine currents (between the Caribbean and the Sahara).
And what has been done from the top of governments and multilaterals, at the global level, about climate change? In 1988, almost 10 years after the First World Climate Conference in Sweden, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established. The serious accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986 and the "oil slicks" in Alaskan waters in 1989 caused by spills from oil tankers such as the Exxon Valdez generated a turning point.
The IPCC and the Second World Conference on Climate Change would propose a global treaty on the subject. Together with the UN General Assembly, they moved towards a framework convention, adopted in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro called the "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" (UNFCCC), which came into force in 1994.
The Rio Declaration was a turning point, where notions, commitments, conventions on climate, biodiversity and desertification appeared. A new legal engineering emerged, which, although it wrongly prioritized first development and economic growth and then attention to environmental issues, included two essential principles to protect the environment: the legal principles of precaution and prevention, which were absent from the old codes.
When the UNFCCC came into force, the First Conference of the Parties (COP) was held as the supreme body of the Convention, with the aim of stabilizing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.
From 1995 to date, twenty-five COPs have been held, one of the most hopeful being the third one held in Japan, where in 1997, 83 countries signed and 46 ratified the Kyoto Protocol (now ratified by 192 countries, without the US agreement since 2001). There, binding targets were set for 37 industrialized countries, which between 2008 and 2012 were to reduce GHG emissions by 5%, with respect to the 1990 level. The protocol was legally binding for 30 countries, the so-called developing countries like China, India and Brazil accepted to assume their responsibilities, without including emission reduction targets.
The years passed and the successive summits on climate change were a fiasco, at the same time that capitalism in its neoliberal version was radicalizing its predatory mode of production.
In 2015, the parties to the UNFCCC reached a so-called "historic" agreement with the aim of combating climate change and accelerating and intensifying the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low-carbon future, known as the Paris Accord. The agreement contains some unforgivable omissions, such as the fact that the final document does not mention key words such as "fossil fuels," "oil," and "coal. References to human rights and Indigenous peoples were omitted, its character was defined as non-binding, it has remained good intentions without concrete and verifiable commitments. Highly polluting sectors such as civil aviation and maritime transport were left out of the agreement. Nor were the laws of the international speculative financial market affected. The last COP held in December last year in Madrid continued with a series of failures, without producing agreements and consensus.
The current world scenario is developed between denialism and awareness and its struggles. The first category currently has notorious political exponents such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Scott Morrison, along with them are broad ultraliberal sectors, a handful of scientists, the oil companies and the speculative financial system.
On the other side is a good part of the scientific community and a wide pluralistic world space, of organizations, movements, networks, with different degrees of development and scope that denounce the inaction and complicity of governments. A good number of them point to the basic theme "we must not change the climate, we must overcome capitalism".
Millions of people are working on the construction of viable alternatives such as ecovillages, sustainable farms, agro-ecology, in line with the Good Living proposed by many native cultures that have much to contribute and teach in the coexistence with nature.
We humanists are clear that the solution to climate change lies in the collective struggle against transnational corporate power and not in the lying discourse that says that the responsibility for ecological collapse lies with human beings (and therefore with each and every person). The system imposes the belief that the human collective is responsible for the ecological collapse and eludes the true responsibility that falls on a cruel minority that promotes a materialistic culture.
The planet, as a major sphere of coexistence, needs civilization to consume less and better, having as guiding criteria for that, everything necessary in health, education and quality of life.
The positive thing is that a new sensibility is being born, especially in the new generations. There is a growing ecological awareness and understanding that we must unite to fight for climate justice. There is more and more support for developing clean energy technologies. More and more people are willing to organize to reverse the process of climate change and stop the ecocide of large corporations. From our Federation we maintain that we cannot promote solutions to climate change without a fundamental change in economic power. For this reason, it is essential and urgent to build popular power as an alternative. That power that is at the social base, often asleep in the commune, the municipality, the mayor's office, the neighborhood. A courageous popular power, a protagonist, a builder, empathetic with its fellow man and with life. A power that can break down the capitalist wall that keeps us in human prehistory, for that it is necessary in the broadest sense, the union of all the humanists of the world.
Coordination Team International Humanist Party