Faced with the environmental crisis, capitalism is leading us towards catastrophe

Submitted by ICConline on

With global temperatures reaching record levels, and the latest UN report predicting that the planet is heading rapidly towards a 1.8% rise above pre-industrial levels, the summer of 2026 is already demonstrating the devastating impact of global heating. It is no exaggeration to say that large parts of the Earth are on fire:

  • We have seen wildfires in Europe (Spain, France, Italy, Belgium) and around the world (Algeria, Canada, China, Hawaii, India). According to The Lancet, air pollution from wildfires caused a record 154,000 deaths worldwide in 2024.
  • The accelerated melting of glaciers leads to raging mudslides, such as the one that occurred on August 26 in Nepal, where the water level rose by nine meters locally within half an hour, burying hundreds of people and leaving nearly 1000 people dead.
  • In a wide area across Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, a devasting combination of drought, a ‘super’ El Niño and ruthless industrial exploitation of forests and peatlands have given rise to extensive wildfires and a toxic smog “which in some areas has fuelled ‘acutely unhealthy’ pollution more than 15 times the World Health Organization's recommended level”.[1]
  • Heat waves cause tens of thousands of additional deaths. During this summer's heat wave, an additional 35,000 people died in Europe. This figure is based on the data from half of Europe's countries.
  •  In July 2026, the French department of Ardeche was rocked by a historic and violent hailstorm, a descent of giant hailstones, which caused extensive damage to cars and property.
  • There is also a growing shortage of fresh water. Due to a prolonged heat wave last summer, several major European rivers ran dry, making transport by boat impossible for an extended period of time and, over a longer period, changing the flora and fauna

And what is the bourgeoisie, a class that boasts of being in charge of the world capitalist system, doing about this growing disaster?

As ever, it is sacrificing the natural environment to the imperatives of economic competition and ‘growth’ (i.e. the accumulation of capital). Trump’s policy of “drill baby drill”, backed by his idiotic insistence that global warming is nothing but a hoax, is only the most brazen statement of the bourgeoisie’s utter disregard for dealing with the ecological crisis. Climate denialism represents a growing trend within the bourgeoisie, a class ‘managing’ a system in full disintegration, and thus more and more incapable of developing a lucid vision of the planet’s future, more and more retreating into the fantasy worlds of worn-out mythologies. The number of populist regimes around the world that deny global warming is on the rise. These regimes often reject climate science, prioritise deregulation, resist multilateral cooperation, and redirect resources toward investments that go in the opposite direction to a coherent climate policy. “The nature of climate and environmental politics is abstract and technical, and thus populists can easily portray them as elite-driven and detached from citizens’ everyday needs”[2]

But the more ‘sensible’ or ‘responsible’ factions of the ruling class cannot escape the system’s lack of perspective and are increasingly adopting a purely pragmatic approach, from Macron’s ‘we will just have to adapt’ to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s decision to continue drilling for North Sea oil. Another telling example: until autumn 2025, the International Energy Agency had estimated a peak in global fossil fuel demand by 2030 and said there should be an end to new investments in coal, oil and gas projects in order to reach net zero emissions by 2050. But in a sharp shift in tone the agency signaled, in its latest outlook, that oil demand should keep growing through to 2050 and that more investments are needed in new conventional fields with fossil fuels. This retreat on peak oil demand by the IEA signified “a major shift” from its position over the last five years.

And above all, the bourgeoisie is everywhere engaging in wars and war preparations which run directly counter to any real mobilisation aimed at responding to the heating of the planet.

War increases the poisoning of the Earth

The wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine have pushed the issue of global warming completely into the background. Governments are cutting back projected ‘green’ measures in order to pour more financial resources into war. The massive destruction of buildings and infrastructure is leading to a rapid increase in carbon emissions, and the weapons deployed in all this bring the added ‘benefit’ of several forms of pollution of air, water, and soil.

For example, during the first 90 days of the war in Gaza, airstrikes by the Israeli military resulted in the emission of 281,000 metric tons of CO2. The Iran war has unleashed a toxic mix of chemicals, heavy metals, and other pollutants that threaten everything from agriculture to drinking water to people’s health – and will leave behind environmental damage and health risks that could persist for decades. In addition, the military blocks on grain and fertilisers, both in the Black Sea and the Straits of Hormuz, are worsening the impact of famines resulting from the agricultural shortages caused by worldwide drought, wildfires and floods.

The interaction of war and ecological destruction, driven forward by the world economic crisis of overproduction, is the central component of what some parts of the bourgeoisie call the “poly crisis” and what we refer to as the “whirlwind effect”. This is the menacing shape of capitalism in its phase of terminal decline or decomposition, which has been accelerating since the beginning of the 2020s and has shifted into a new gear with the war on Iran.

Renewable energy consumption at an impasse

Numerous bourgeois pundits, at least those who accept that the ecological crisis is real, tell us that the solution lies in the “transition” to renewable energy. No doubt a really human society will be largely powered by renewable and non-polluting sources of energy, but a "green transition" under capitalism is increasingly shown to be an illusion. 

At this moment, renewable energy on a world scale accounts for 13% to 18% of total global final energy consumption, while policy changes in the U.S. (the elimination of the subsidy for wind and solar projects) and China (a new renewables pricing mechanism in 2025 that removed a guaranteed rate of return) have slowed the growth of renewable energy. Renewable energy sources are indeed growing, but global fossil fuel consumption in the world is reaching new highs in absolute terms. Global coal consumption in 2023 was higher than ever before.

China is the largest renewable energy growth market in the world, adding more wind and solar capacity than any other economy. This has led leftist ‘degrowth’ advocates like Jason Hickel to sing the praises of China, which he claims is not driven by the law of value and the need for imperialist expansion[3]. But at the same time, it is still the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, responsible for over 30% of global fossil carbon emissions. This is typical of the contradictions capitalism is facing: the country that leads the way in the implementation of renewable energy technologies still produces the largest number of global CO2 emissions. And behind this contradiction lies the reality of China as a capitalist, imperialist competitor in its own right, and by no means, as Hickel pretends, a ‘victim’ of imperialism, whose definition he restricts to the so-called “West”. China’s increasingly successful race to lead the world in the development of AI, and above all its “New Silk Road” project, a global enterprise with both economic and military aspects, are perhaps the clearest demonstrations of the Chinese bourgeoisie’s (openly stated) intention to overtake the declining US and establish itself as the world’s leading power.

The effort of capitalism to facilitate the transition to renewable energy is further thwarted by the system's growing chaos, which causes events (such as wars) to obstruct all previous plans and to set this process back by years. The world is undergoing a process of fragmentation in which the “every man for himself” mentality and practice has gained the upper hand, and international cooperation (within the limits of what is possible under capitalism) is in essence a thing of the past.

Capitalism has no solution to the ecological crisis

Global warming and the destruction of nature are not natural phenomena, but the inevitable product of capital’s need to maximise profit, to commodify everything, to invade the last remaining corners of the planet, to exploit human labour power and natural resources to the maximum possible extent. There can be no capitalism without this drive, any more than there can be a capitalism which puts international cooperation above economic and military competition between nations.  

The only alternative to the impasse of the capitalist mode of production is an entirely different mode of production, determined not by the endless expansion of value but exclusively by the satisfaction of human need. Production for use, not profit, for free distribution not sale; the abolition of borders and the end of nation states. In a word, communism.

The only force that can bring about this alternative is the exploited class, the proletariat, which is driven to fight against capital by the system’s need to intensify exploitation to face up to its own internal contradictions.

Capital’s economic crisis, its wars, its drive towards destruction oblige the working class everywhere to recognize its common interests and to develop a revolutionary perspective for the future. But the very decomposition of the system engenders powerful obstacles to the proletariat even recognizing itself as a class, let alone developing the vision of the communist future. Mounting ecological disasters, like the proliferation of wars across the planet, are, for now, tending to arouse feelings of powerlessness and ‘no future’ within the mass of the proletariat, while the minority who begin to glimpse the connection between the climate crisis and the capitalist system are only too often derailed into supporting protest movements and parties which claim that the way forward is to appeal to the conscience of world leaders or look for green alternatives inside the existing order, in particular those who follow Greta Thunberg, or the various Green parties, or the more radical activists in the tradition of Extinction Rebellion.

Nevertheless, a minority within the questioning minority are discovering the marxist tradition, the tradition of the communist left, the treasury of its analysis of the relationship between capital, nature and humanity, and the revolutionary nature of the international working class. The emergence of such minorities is a product of an underground process of maturation, a signpost to the future, when a class that is going beyond divided, corporate struggles and is fighting on an acknowledged class ground will have to integrate its response to all the various dimensions of this system’s downfall into the historic project of overthrowing the reign of capital.

Amos

[3] see for examle the podcast How to Overcome Capitalism | Jason Hickel on Socialism, China, and the West, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5WU51sVn3Y&t=4634s

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Transition or revolution?