As I write this, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving their homes to avoid fires in France and Spain. Surrey is on fire, and parts of Scotland are still covered in ash. It’s a trite point, but events like this have been happening in poorer parts of the world for decades. Yet as the weather turns on us in Europe and America, it suddenly becomes a much bigger story.
It was in this context that I was listening to a debate about a wildfire in America. A man, introduced as working for a university, claimed that climate change couldn’t be blamed for the fire—it was simply the result of a downed power line.
This sent me back 15 years to a conversation at university, inside a smoke-free bar. Booze had been consumed, and a man I’d met five minutes prior was explaining to me that he wasn’t single because he had cheated on his partner, but because she had found out.
Climate change is a stress multiplier. It makes bad things that happen anyway worse. When you hear of a forest fire, what you don’t hear about are the dozen consequences it brings for working people: more strokes, more lung cancer, and more premature deaths. The same is true of all the disasters made far more likely thanks to climate change.
Climate change is the result of CO2 and other gases being poured into our atmosphere, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space. This leads to a series of ever more complicated and dangerous environmental consequences—floods, droughts, fires, and everything else filling the news right now.
So what produces these gases? Our industrial system, our methods of food production, and how we transport ourselves. Because we live in a capitalist society, decisions about how these sectors are run are made by the tiny minority who own our society.
That tiny minority makes decisions based on the core organising principle of capitalism: that the strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
In an industrial context, that means producing and transporting goods in the cheapest possible manner. If that means pouring more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere and fuelling more disasters, then so be it.
Climate change is now an existential threat to organised human life on Earth. Remarkably, this remains true even when it is now cheaper to produce green energy than it is to burn gas or oil. How is this possible?
It’s possible because, despite the fact that we can produce cheap, environmentally friendly energy, plenty of massive corporations have invested heavily in carbon-emitting infrastructure. To extract profit from those legacy investments, they use their political and economic power to secure state protection. In America, they do this by controlling both the Republican and Democratic parties, ensuring the state continues to subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. They also criminalise protest movements, going so far as to bypass trial by jury when juries show a reluctance to lock away the younger generation just to protect corporate profit margins.
But why does this happen? Why are political parties that are supposedly meant to represent working people actively accelerating the potential end of organised human life? It is arguably the greatest crime in human history, and in the US, it is playing out in broad daylight.
It’s happening for two reasons. First, representative democracy in Western nations is structured to systematically ignore the needs and interests of working people. Second, these political parties serve wealthy elites. But why would these elites allow the world to end? They live here too.
The truth is, they believe they can survive the environmental apocalypse in their billionaire bunkers. In fact, with the rise of AI and automation, the rich no longer require the poor in the same numbers. A planet that vomits out excess humanity is, to them, quietly convenient—it saves them the trouble of getting rid of us themselves.
I’m not sure how they imagine the political economy of a billionaire bunker working long-term. Personally, I hope the last thing the CEO class sees is a working-class security guard’s hands wrapped around their neck, drool falling from the guard’s mouth. More likely, though, they’ll find a way to keep the few remaining slaves they need alive.
The only way to build a society where the climate isn’t sacrificed for profit is through genuine worker control of the economy. If every business, factory, school, and office is run by democratic committees truly representative of the people working in them, we won’t allow the Earth to be burned for profit. Such a system abolishes the drive for endless accumulation, eliminates environmentally destructive production, and reduces unnecessary work altogether.
So if we need to rebuild the economy on democratic grounds for the long haul, what can we do right now? Alone, you can do nothing; collectively, we can change the world. Start by getting involved with your local anarchist group or a radical trade union. At the same time, we need to build local mitigation strategies—planting trees, creating urban gardens, and taking back space. The state and charities won’t do it for us, so look for a local guerrilla gardening group and get your hands dirty.
Eric
