Climate Change: What About the Marxists?
Photo Source Akuppa John Wigham | CC BY 2.0
Author John Steinbeck in 1962 asked, “Why must progress look so much like destruction?” (1) In fact, ever-expanding production of things – progress, in other words – promotes destruction in the form of climate change. Perpetrators of boundless production dominate in our governments and society, and so climate change has advanced. The story might have been different had capitalism never existed.
Cuban president Fidel Castro said as much on June 12, 1992. He was addressing the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development – known as the “Earth Summit” – in Rio de Janeiro.
Castro declared that, “An important biological species — humankind— is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it.” He mentioned that “consumer societies … consume two-thirds of all metals and three-fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers … They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer … Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”
At the Earth Summit that day, 154 nations signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Now, however, “the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions.” This was according to a scientific paper published August 6 bythe National Academy of Sciences.
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