Capitalism is to blame for ecological disaster!

The summer of 2026 began with three terrible heatwaves, the first being the earliest on record and the second the most intense ever recorded. A double record, then, with summer barely underway. And a new heatwave is under way as we publish this article.

The consequences are extremely serious: temperatures are soaring in homes and workplaces, wildfires are multiplying and infrastructure is under strain, hospitals are overwhelmed, the death toll is mounting, and initial reports indicate several thousand victims. The death toll will certainly run into tens of thousands, on a par with the 2003 heatwave, or even higher.

The bourgeoisie is incapable of dealing with the situation

We are once again witnessing a total inaction on the part of governments in handling the crisis. While heatwaves are set to become increasingly severe, the bourgeoisie has proved incapable of dealing with the situation: the number of deaths at home rose by 40 per cent during the first heatwave episodes, yet no provisions were made; preventative measures have been swept under the carpet everywhere. Even those admitted to hospital had to endure appalling heat due to unrenovated buildings – veritable thermal sieves – often fitted with old, inadequate air-conditioning systems…

The state has been reduced to improvising and advising the public to avoid going out during the hottest hours of the day, while, amid the chaos, imposing a shift in working hours in the sectors most at risk, where workers find themselves forced to work at night to ensure production continues. Every day, people find themselves crammed together like cattle on public transport, where temperatures are unbearable.

In the absence of suitable housing, people are asked to seek refuge in ‘cool zones’ such as cinemas, libraries, etc. Not only does this place the responsibility on each individual – who, alone, can do nothing about the heatwave – but, with the climate situation worsening, these ‘measures’ will no longer be appropriate or sufficient within a few years. With no long-term solution in sight, relying on individual resourcefulness forces everyone to find their own ways of coping with the heat: installing air-conditioning at home, renovating their property… and, for those who cannot afford it: drinking water!

This stands in stark contrast to the governments’ empty promises assuring us that “everything is in place to cope with the heatwave”. In reality, the ‘lessons’ of 2003 were never truly taken on board due to a lack of resources. Twenty years on, more than 75 per cent of European homes are still ill-suited to heatwaves, with some homes even prone to overheating. Budgets for building renovations have thus been drastically cut. In France, for example, the Green Fund, intended to “accelerate the ecological transition”, has been cut by a factor of four; the few pieces of equipment that were procured were bought on an emergency basis, in dribs and drabs, by which time the heatwave had already set in.

All this confirms the bourgeoisie’s chronic inability not only to meet social and health needs, but worse still, its inability to prepare for them, even though the issues have been known for several decades… and bureaucratically filed away in drawers! The bourgeoisie is utterly powerless to cope with the increasingly uncontrollable effects of climate change.

Yet we are only at the beginning of the serious problems that lie ahead. We can therefore only expect, in the coming years, increasingly unbearable disasters.

Faced with the environmental crisis, capitalism is at an impasse

Faced with its own inability to act, the bourgeoisie no longer even pretends to try to find solutions or slow down global warming. It now speaks only of ‘adapting’ to ‘inevitable’ disruptions.

But the ‘solutions’ advocated by the bourgeoisie are themselves riddled with absurdities. The United States is a perfect example of the disastrous consequences of the glaring inadequacy of what are presented as solutions: in the South, buildings are designed not to adapt to the extremely hot environment, but to rely heavily on air conditioning. This, however, gives rise to a whole host of problems. First of all, energy consumption on this scale is such that, during heatwaves, power cuts are rife due to the colossal amount of electricity consumed by air-conditioning systems. As the buildings are not designed to withstand the heat, they overheat very quickly. And even if the electricity grid could cope, the hydrofluorocarbons released as gases by air-conditioning systems cause a greenhouse effect hundreds of times more potent than CO2, actively contributing to climate change. And as if that were not enough, air-conditioning merely displaces hot air to the outside. In city centres, it can cause temperatures to rise by 1 to 2 °C in concrete-covered areas that already accumulate and radiate intense heat. And all this because the construction industry must standardise its materials to increase its profit margins, building the same buildings everywhere, regardless of the region’s climate.

The capitalist system, with its logic of profit at any cost, creates and exponentially exacerbates environmental problems. With the acceleration of the economic crisis, the expansion of militarism and the wastefulness inherent in arms production, along with increasingly brutal trade wars and growing chaos across the planet, the bourgeoisie’s already woefully inadequate environmental concerns have been pushed into the background. Seeming environmental standards are crumbling one after another. Production is optimised at the expense of the climate, and overproduction means that the majority of this output will be the result of resource plundering carried out for no reason other than to fuel the crisis even further. [1]

The direct consequences of the spreading wars are also largely ignored, even though they have an enormous impact on the environment and the climate: destruction on a massive scale, the disappearance of ecosystems, the release of gases, and the mass production and destruction of highly polluting advanced weapons (drones, missiles and the like) as well as large-scale military, transport, and logistics vehicles.

A deepening economic crisis, climate change, war and devastation, a plunge into poverty, deteriorating living conditions… All of this is intrinsically linked, and capitalism in decomposition only amplifies and intensifies all these phenomena, which constantly interact with one another in a kind of infernal and uncontrollable whirlwind.

It is therefore not by asking the bourgeoisie to deal with the unmanageable consequences of its own system that we will be able to put an end to these ecological disasters, but by fighting to defend our working conditions and means of subsistence, thereby confronting capitalist exploitation head-on – the only terrain on which the prospect of overthrowing this system, rotten to the core, can develop! As long as capitalism exists, we can only expect increasingly frequent and violent disasters, with ever more disastrous and deadly consequences.

Julie, 3 July, 2026

 

---

[1] Read our Manifesto on the ecological crisis