Transcript:
It is impossible to ignore the impact of the climate crisis that is already upon us.
From the acceleration of the mass extinction of hundreds of species, and disastrous weather events that are becoming more frequent and more destructive, to the mass displacement of tens of millions of people every year due to climate disasters, and the threat of drought, mass starvation, and more pandemics…
… the climate emergency is already here.
And this climate crisis has exposed the most dire and contradictory aspect of the capitalist system:
The fundamental needs of capitalism require continuous growth of production.
Increased production means increased extraction of raw materials and increased energy use.
And, in order to increase production, the continued replacement of human labor with machine labor also requires an ongoing increase in energy use.
This has locked in a reliance on fossil fuels, increased extraction, and the continued exploitation of land, resources, and labor.
That is why, despite all the lip service paid by politicians around the globe, despite every mediocre effort at mitigating the climate crisis for the past several decades, 2024 was still the largest output of CO2 emissions globally ever recorded.
This is why 2024 surpassed a global temperature rise of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, putting the planet on a course to rise over 2ºC, locking in catastrophic climate related events, and threatening all life on the planet.
That is why there have been only two years in the last 30 years that have seen significant declines in overall CO2 emissions: 2009 during the global economic crisis and 2020 during the pandemic, both only caused by significant decline in economic output.
Each year continues to shatter previous records in temperature and in carbon emissions.
The climate crisis is a crisis of capitalism.
The endless pursuit of profit leads to further resource scarcity, forced migration, and international conflict over resources.
This creates a vicious cycle where the conditions get worse and worse for the vast majority of people on Earth, while capitalists eat up resources and funnel their profits back into extracting and producing even more.
The use of biomass, fossil fuels, metals, and non-metallic minerals are growing faster than the rate of the population growth.
Natural disasters under these conditions are more intense and more unstable, which destroy land, crops, water, and entire ecosystems.
Harsher conditions and fewer resources are forcing people to leave their homelands in search of habitable, affordable, and politically stable locations, which are becoming more rare.
And war is becoming increasingly unavoidable under conditions of dwindling resources and forced migration.
And an increase in military conflicts just further drives the need for fossil fuels and resource extraction to maintain their war machines, another deadly cycle.
Oil extraction is linked to the majority of wars since the 1970s as both an effect and cause.
For decades, scientists have known about the trajectory we are on, and have easily tied it to fossil fuel usage.
Awareness has been growing and part of public knowledge since the 1960s.
Scientific research has clearly laid out the connection between increasing carbon emissions and increasing global temperatures.
And has also clearly shown the devastating effects of rising temperatures on life on this planet, including mass species extinction and ongoing extreme weather catastrophes.
But led by administration after administration, Democrats and Republicans, we see that the real commitment is not to humanity or the planet, but to the preservation of profits at all cost.
As the situation worsens, they have had to invent false signs of progress, greenwashing new capitalist markets like electric vehicles, and promoting insufficient solutions like adjusting your carbon footprint while you go shopping and go on vacation.
All of this is aimed at trying to hide the fact that it is this their system of production as a whole that is responsible for this existential threat.
And now, the Trump administration has come in and ripped off the mask — on climate policy, and many other policies, saying out loud what is usually kept behind closed doors.
Under Biden, Obama, and the Democrats we saw lip service paid to the environmental crisis, saying things like this is “the number one issue facing humanity.”
But in fact we saw record-level expansion of fossil fuel extraction under Democrats, with Biden leasing more federal land to fossil fuel extraction than Trump, and energy companies making record profits.
It is true that Obama and Biden were part of the Paris Climate agreements, but ultimately those, too, were just non-binding words that ultimately did nothing, while global CO2 emissions skyrocketed. Just six days after the Paris Agreement was signed, Obama repealed a bill that revoked a forty-year-old ban on exporting crude oil from the U.S.
So it’s no surprise for Trump to come in and pull the U.S. out of all climate agreements — they have clearly been token efforts at best.
On day one, Trump declared a “national energy emergency” and signed several executive orders to authorize the expansion of domestic fossil fuel exploration and extraction, including Coal extraction, and to direct federal agencies to accelerate all energy-related infrastructure projects, excluding only wind and solar.
The orders remove all restrictions on oil, gas, and mineral production in many previously restricted areas, opening up new areas for development, including parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
They have removed the pause on new Department of Energy permits for gas extraction nationwide, and removed any laws that raise the cost of fuel due to environmental constraints.
Trump signed a bill repealing a federal fine on methane pollution, which means there is no restriction on releasing the most potent greenhouse gas.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been ordered to cut about 20% of its workforce, and halt all climate-related research.
The tiny environmental guard rails are all being removed.
The goal is clear: unlimited access for fossil fuel extraction and mineral extraction, to give U.S. energy corporations the best chance to dominate the globe in what is clearly a race for what is left, intensifying the threat to all life on the planet.
In their eyes, what’s the point of climate research if the priorities of this profit system require further environmental destruction? If the push for global dominance necessitates unlimited access to fossil fuel?
Climate research is just a nuisance, serving no purpose.
Any research that exposes the truth about problems with this system is research that they can afford to get rid of.
This is the new period we are in with Trump. The pretense is gone.
Behind the mask of their so-called democracy lies the gruesome face of a dictatorship of capital, removing whatever restrictions to profit and U.S. imperial dominance they think they can get away with.
And we see it goes far beyond the energy industry.
The ruling class wants to implement tax breaks for the world’s richest billionaires and corporations, so they are making massive cuts to programs that benefit poor and working class people, like Social Security, Medicare, the department of Education, Veterans Affairs, National Parks, and more.
In their plans, federal agencies that aren’t directly tied to the military or industry can be gutted, closed, or privatized. Like the Post Office, the FAA and more.
Collective bargaining agreements for thousands of federal workers have been torn up, effectively overruling their right to unionize.
They intend to privatize the workforce, or impose contracts with huge cuts to workers.
This administration may not have deported as many people as Biden or Obama, but their arrests and deportation policies are much more aggressive, targeting people at public spaces, and previously protected sites.
They have targeted people with permanent residency status, and temporary protected status.
They want to terrify immigrant workers, and put them into more precarious situations, to increase their vulnerability along with their exploitation.
They use immigrants and trans people as scapegoats, to try to divide the population as they intensify their attacks on all of us.
When the attacks are so blatant, when the priorities are so clear, of course they expect resistance.
And that is why they are ramping up their highly publicized attempts at repression. They want to terrorize people into silence.
Punish people for calling a genocide a genocide.
Charge protestors with acts of domestic terrorism.
Withhold federal funding for schools that tolerate protests, or allow curriculum that is critical of Israel’s genocide, or U.S. policies.
And Trump is not alone. We are seeing similar moves internationally.
The only truth behind Trump’s slogan Make America Great Again is its acknowledgment that the U.S. is no longer as great as it was.
The kind of unrivaled dominance that the U.S. held after World War 2, which lasted for a long time, and increased after the fall of the Soviet Union … that dominance is clearly over.
Today U.S. imperialism is being challenged economically by China, aligned with Russia, Iran, and others.
The U.S. no longer has the ability to go wherever it wants and do whatever it wants.
That is what is behind this administration. A desperate attempt to reestablish the dominance of U.S. empire.
Even the stated aim of these tariffs is to pressure the world to make a decision between the U.S. and China.
But it gives us a glimpse into the kind of thinking: the U.S. is accelerating the intense rivalry with China and wants the rest of the world to pick a side.
This is a desperate attempt, that can only lead to greater and greater destruction.
This is why the annexation of Greenland or Canada and Panama are being said out loud.
The goal is to lock down U.S. control over what they think are their rightful spheres of influence, while they have set their priorities on confronting Chinese capitalism.
Not all of this is brand new. Obama and Biden both prioritized a real shift towards a confrontation with China.
Part of the unrelenting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, from Biden to Trump, is a doubling down of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
Supporting a blatant genocide also sends a message of what the U.S. is ready to do to defend its interests. An attempt to normalize mass death.
And central to this confrontation, underpinning every part of the economy, fueling every part of the military, is energy.
Energy production means power and leverage. Energy independence means even more power and more leverage.
The U.S. is a net exporter of energy, while China is still a net importer. Energy dominance is an advantage.
This rivalry doesn’t mean war is imminent, but after economic confrontation escalates, military conflict becomes increasingly possible.
Everything is heading towards a fever pitch.
And it certainly means every policy — domestic, economic, energy, military — is all being oriented to give U.S. capital an advantage…for U.S. companies to have unconstrained fossil fuel extraction, and economic production that is not restricted by weak but still irritating, token climate policies.
This further ensures that environmental destruction will be accelerated, not reduced. That they are prepared to take humanity to the brink.
Trump’s strategies may prove to be totally reckless and backfire even in the short run for the ruling class.
And Democrats certainly want us to believe that we should just wait for the next election.
But even though their version may not rely on the same means as Trump, it is headed towards the exact same ends.
No election can put a stop to this path that they are on.
They have delivered us to a fork in the road:
Humanity is on one side, and their system of climate destruction, mass murder, and war is on the other.
While we can clearly see that it is a fantasy to expect a solution to the climate crisis under capitalism, that does not mean that things are hopeless.
The general solution to the climate crisis is rather simple: to reduce CO2 emissions to zero as quickly as possible, while increasing efforts to sequester carbon (to remove carbon from the atmosphere).
But carrying out this rapid reduction in carbon emissions is absolutely opposed to the profits of the global economy — that is, it is opposed to the functioning of the system itself.
On the contrary, much of the technology and knowledge to begin to quickly confront the climate crisis already exist, and are simply waiting to be implemented.
Whether it is renewable energy, or zero emissions mass transit, or the elimination of utterly wasteful industries like the military, or alternative methods of agriculture that sequester carbon out the atmosphere and into the ground, or other technologies. Much of the initial steps to address this emergency are already available to us.
To take just one example: Solar energy.
Solar energy is now so abundant and cheap that it could be used to saturate the existing power grids globally.
However, having abundance is not beneficial to capitalism, which needs to profit off energy.
Too much capital is already invested in current methods of energy production and distribution.
So, solar remains marginal, not prioritized to scale, even though it could be used to meet global energy needs in a short period of time.
This is just one example of many solutions that exist for us but that are not incentivized and in fact incompatible with this system.
Agriculture, power grids, energy sources, carbon absorption — all have the possibility to be developed and restructured to prioritize the ecology of the planet.
But none of this can be implemented with the scale and speed that is needed to halt the ever-rising emissions under capitalism.
For this system, any efforts to restructure the economy to prioritize a healthy climate means massive capital losses and of course mass layoffs, and economic crises.
It is not a question of waiting for future research, or waiting for the markets to shift priorities on their own, or waiting for world leaders to finally come around — we will be waiting until it is too late.
It is simply a question of power: of who is in charge and who is making the decisions.
If the climate emergency is going to be addressed, it will not be with the ruling class in charge.
It will be under the power of a revolutionary government of the vast majority of the world’s working class in power.
Only then could we prioritize the reorganization.
But more than a reorganization of the economy is necessary — the society as a whole needs to be reorganized, where we live, how we live, where we work, how we work, who works, how we travel and more.
Society will have to guarantee the foundations of all life to all people, nutrition, housing, transportation, health care, education and more.
Hundreds of millions of jobs will need to be shifted towards new industries, many that may not even exist today, without workers losing their means to survive.
What we are describing here is not the mere emergence of a few new industries — this is a social revolution, where those already keeping these facets of society running take control over how we restructure them based on people’s needs.
That is the task that is in front of us.
But to do so, will take a unified fight, harnessing the power of the whole working class, which makes this system function.
Already, millions around the world are already mobilized by the attacks on our Earth and on humanity.
And Trump’s onslaught of attacks targeting every aspect of our lives are intended to divide us, to fracture our forces and get us to focus only on the issue that is most directly impacting us.
But this is exactly this moment when we can see clearly how all of these attacks are interconnected, and underpinned by a ruling class trying to protect their interests and defend their system by any means necessary, even if it means death and suffering to billions of people as a result.
Trump, and the forces of reaction all around the world have opened up an opportunity and the absolute necessity for us to fight against their system as a whole, unified locally and internationally.
We have to be clear with what we are seeing take shape: this is a new period of intensifying competition and conflict, a race for what’s left, an acceleration of environmental catastrophe, the threat of increasing wars, a blatant attack on the working class, a ramping up of repression, major attacks on the poor, and the most vulnerable.
This is all in a desperate, reckless and utopian attempt to strengthen the U.S. empire.
This is a future we cannot accept.
And let’s let the protests of last Saturday (the Hands off Protests with over one million people taking part in cities and towns across the country in every state) be a glimpse of the kind of power and potential we have in this country alone.
As they try to construct a fortress for themselves, more and more people are increasingly clear about which side they are on.
It is the billionaires on one side, and the vast majority of humanity on the other.
It will take a lot of work.
Calling elected officials who have facilitated these attacks won’t work.
Boycotting industries that are so powerful that they control entire markets won’t be enough.
Showing up in the streets at protests is important. But alone, it, too, will not be enough.
Building our power starts with taking stand with those around us, in our communities, our schools our workplaces.
It means making new connections and taking actions, however small, with those around us.
It means we have to build up our forces, to use our collective power.
This is not a fight to pressure the system to shift its priorities away from profits, and towards humanity.
That would be a fantasy.
This is not just a fight to get rid of Trump; it’s not just a fight to stop their attacks; it’s not just a fight to put an end to this system of violence and destruction.
This is a fight for the future of all of humanity.
This is a fight for a different world entirely.
We need to take power out of their hands and into our own, because our lives and our future are more important than their profits.
