One year too soon — and where the socialists have been wrong for half a century

Today, after yesterday reading a depressing forecast of hot and dry weather for the next week, and after a windy and unpleasantly grey afternoon that left me hoping for some rain whilst a “medium” possibility existed in the BOM forecast, it has come to me that the runaway climate change I had predicted almost exactly one year ago is now with us.

There was — I kept looking and looking all night — no rain anywhere in sight, and the forecast is getting hotter and hotter day by day with no sign of rain, although it is pointless to look for it! Although Melbourne had 0.2 millimetre of rain on the first day of this month — actually this rain fell in July but was counted in August — it is virtually certain that there will be no further rainfall this month. I made a safe bet of $100 with my mother than there will be no rain for the rest of this month, but almost certainly it will be much, much, much worse. Turning on the tap always makes me realise that Melbourne’s dams will be dry before any significant rain ever occurs again! One cannot — must not —make less dire or less gloomy predictions for the rest of this year, or next, or the year after that, or ever.

The solution to runaway climate change has been, as documented by groups like Socialist Alternative, the former Democratic Socialist Party, and the present Socialist Alliance and Red Flag Magazine alongside such ecosocialist writers as Richard Seymour and Richard Smith, known for a very long time. It is the expropriation of the corporate polluters’ present profits and accumulated wealth without the tiniest compensation and the transfer of every cent to rapid decarbonisation. As early as 1990, this was envisioned in Environment, Capitalism and Socialism. Experiencing worse and worse climate change both locally and globally makes me more and more convinced the ecosocialists are fundamentally correct that there can be no solution to or even amelioration of the climate crisis without total expropriation of the global capitalist elite. It is also clear to me that education on environmental issues could be made much plainer, simpler and more truthful if this were clearly understood at school, where teachers invariably dodge or minimise or cover up irredeemable flaws in the profit system.

Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a deep flaw in the thinking of the Trotskyists that I feel I have to note. That is their failure to recognise adequately the true culprits behind the inability to counter global warming except in the most farcical way. I myself failed to adequately recognise it for over two decades. The undoubted culprits for runaway climate change are, alongside Australia, the Arab Gulf oil monarchies, the only nations with higher per capita (more accurately, per-citizen) emissions, but who have been even more than Australia, able to totally resist the tiniest calls for environmental justice. Even the tiniest such call would have seen the Gulf States and Australia required to cut emissions by something insignificantly different from 100 percent, alongside less extreme cuts by other supply nations. Once supply is cut off, the profits from unlimited emissions would be eliminated, and a rapid shift towards carbon-free production at a global level become possible.

What is striking on reflection is how little the socialists discuss the Gulf States as culprits when they discuss climate change. They tend to focus upon industrial nations and the pollution from industry, although the Gulf States — like Australia today — engage in virtually no local manufacturing, and unlike Australia have never engaged therein historically due to extreme scarcity of labour. (Actually, the very absence of manufacturing serves to eliminate the one thing, an activist and concentrated working class in the tradable sector, capable of restraining greenhouse gas emissions). Moreover, the core Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qaṭar and the United Arab Emirates are much larger total emitter than the EU or Japan, and remain larger even if measured cumulatively since the preindustrial era. Ever since the 1973 oil crisis the power of Gulf lobby groups has most likely blocked or radically slowed shifts to non-polluting energy sources, even in resource-poor Europe and Japan. Despite this undoubted power, the radical left parties so essential to merely ameliorating climate change tend to see even Saudi Arabia as a product of Western imperialism. Actually the Al Sa^cud — today the richest family in the world — established itself as ruler in the Arabian Peninsula in the middle eighteenth century and has almost continuously ruled most of that region since (there was a break between 1891 and 1902.) Moreover, the Al Sa^cud has always aimed to expand its rule in the name of puritanical “Wahhabi” Islam, which eliminates the most basic human rights and — I hope to discuss this later — establishes exactly the type of state the global capitalist elites have desired for a long time but never observed.

Despite these fundamental facts, which I intend to discuss more in a subsequent post, socialist groups have never singled out or even called upon the Gulf States for sanctions, although they have unquestionably deserved the harshest and most uncompromising sanctions ever since the Kyōtō Protocol. At that protocol — which if based upon true environmental justice would have called upon the Gulf States (and Australia) to:

1. reduce their emissions to real zero (not just net zero) no later than 2010 and preferably by 2005
2. pay the full costs of climate change everywhere else in the world
3. accept the most uncompromising sanctions if they fail

the Gulf States evaded even attendance and Australia was allowed to increase emissions. In response, socialist groups gave Australia substantial but inadequate attention, and did not discuss how the highest per capita emitters evaded attention let alone just targets, or their ability to inhibit reductions elsewhere in the world by lobbying.