Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe
“Driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion”. That’s how Lee Zeldin, the new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), describes his mission. Zeldin is cutting a large number of environmental regulations, including those restricting companies from polluting waterways, emitting toxins like mercury and releasing smog.
He is also overturning the EPA’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the legal underpinning of much climate-related regulation in the US. The idea is simple—companies should be able to do whatever they want to turn a profit, regardless of the damage they inflict. For Zeldin, environmental justice “has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists”, and now it’s all about energy dominance, which, according to Zeldin, “stands at the center of America’s resurgence”.
Combating climate change is well and truly out of favour in the age of Trump. There has been a mass exit of banks from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and companies from Starbucks to Meta have been dropping climate goals and purging their websites of references to climate action. This is having effects beyond the US: EU officials are currently considering a range of measures to water down its Green Deal.
And it’s not like the situation was all that hopeful before Trump came to office. Only 15 of the signatories to the Paris Agreement (a miserable 8 percent) met the five-year deadline this February to update their climate goals (Australia was not one of them). In an irony appropriate to our twisted world, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is currently clearing miles of the Amazon rainforest to build a four-lane highway for the next UN climate change conference, COP30, this November.
The commitments in the Paris Agreement (most of which have not been kept) were aimed at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century. That goal is now a distant dream, with the planet likely to suffer temperature increases of 2.6 to 3.1 degrees by 2100, according to the United Nations’ “Emissions Gap Report 2024”. With a new wave of environmental destruction under way, we can expect an even warmer world.
A 2021 report by the Australian Academy of Science tells us what that world might look like. “The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world” predicts that the Great Barrier Reef, along with 99 percent of the world’s corals, will be gone. There would be a 100 to 300 percent increase in extreme fire days like those that created the Black Summer bushfires. “Once in a century” coastal floods would happen almost every year by 2100, and fruit and vegetable crop yields would be reduced by 14 percent. Meanwhile, the number of days each year over 35 degrees would increase from an average of 3, 12 and 11 in Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin respectively to 11, 55 and 265—meaning Darwin would face heat stress days for nearly three quarters of the year.
There is no question about who is to blame for this catastrophe. Just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of all global emissions between 2016 and 2022, according to last year’s “The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report”. These companies are run by executives whose first priority is increasing their profits and gaining an advantage over their rivals; concern for the environment only gets in the way of that. Most of us do not get to decide whether society’s resources are put towards new coal mines or wind farms, decisions that are made behind closed doors by people looking to maximise their bottom lines, supported by politicians who want to maximise their country’s economic growth.
Liberal climate activists have at times believed that certain capitalists could come to the planet’s rescue—after all, Elon Musk is building electric vehicles, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put over a billion dollars towards climate philanthropy. Yet today Musk is Trump’s DOGE lieutenant in the war on climate, and he’s profiting from it—Zeldin’s deregulation will allow Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas to carry out more freely its regular environmental violations. In March, Bill Gates shut down his climate philanthropy organisation Breakthrough Energy, soon after describing himself as “frankly impressed” by Trump.
The fundamental problem is that protecting the environment costs money. Back in 2021, Gates introduced the idea of “green premiums” in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by which he meant the additional cost associated with a business doing anything clean, whether that’s using renewables rather than fossil fuels, or sourcing something locally rather than shipping it around the world. Gates was tackling a problem that is insurmountable under capitalism—it is almost always cheaper to pollute and destroy than go “green”. So this is what businesses tend to do.
The same logic applies to states. Energy scientist Vaclav Smil estimates that affluent economies would need to spend 20 to 25 percent of their annual GDP on transitioning to clean energy for 25 years to achieve net zero by 2050. Given that many, including Australia, are currently heavily dependent on fossil fuel production and export for their revenue and economic competitiveness, the idea they would jeopardise that and channel resources towards environmental protection is fanciful. Just how fanciful is demonstrated by the huge gap between what politicians say they are committed to and what actually happens in relation to environmental policy.
States are themselves also major polluters. According to the Carbon Majors Database, only a quarter of emissions between 2016 and 2022 were attributed to investor-owned companies, with the rest attributed to states and state-owned companies. These companies want to remain competitive and minimise costs just like private companies do.
The argument that fossil fuel companies have “captured” states, and all we need is strong governments willing to stand up to them, therefore clashes with reality. States and corporations have a vested interest in ignoring or reducing environmental regulation when it stands in the way of profit. As the most valuable exporter of coal and LNG, Australia enjoys big revenues and gains important leverage over other countries. It has no interest in giving that up so long as the system of competing nation-states endures.
Increasing military competition makes fossil fuel production still more indispensable. We are now entering a new era of imperialist tensions, with Europe rearming and the US entering an arms race with China. No military can operate without oil (the US Army, for instance, is estimated to use 269,230 barrels of oil a day), and no state will give up its military. In this context, ruling classes will seek to increase oil and steel production, while wars themselves will devastate the climate. In two years Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is estimated to have produced more greenhouse gas emissions than the Netherlands does annually, according to a report by the Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War. You can only imagine what effect a new world war could have.
Advocates of climate action have often applied the analogy of wartime mobilisation to show that that sort of social and economic reorganisation is possible if the political will exists. During World War II, for example, military spending soared to over 40 percent of GDP in Europe and the US and massive economic restructuring was imposed on society. Yet today, instead of a climate mobilisation, we face the beginnings of yet another horrifying war mobilisation.
The point nevertheless stands: a green transition is technically possible; it is the logic of capitalism that makes it a political impossibility. One estimate for the cost of the global green transition is given by the McKinsey Global Institute. In its 2022 report “The net-zero transition”, it estimates an annual average of US$9.2 trillion, about 8 percent of global GDP. This is a fraction of what the combatant nations spent during WWII. Today you could take the world’s $2 trillion current military spending and $7 trillion fossil fuel subsidies and you would hit this figure. This would also greatly reduce the ability of states to carry out genocide and oppress other countries.
In a rational society, this could only be a good thing. But for capitalism, it is suicide.
The alternative is simple: socialism. A world without war and waste, in which society is built for human need rather than the power and profits of a tiny few. In a socialist world, the challenges of a green transition would be practical rather than political: What are the problems we face, and how do we deal with them?
In Australia, the first thing to do would be to stop building new coal mines and instead build solar farms and wind turbines. Take the military budget over the next decade and you could fund thirteen major rail projects like Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop. A mass expansion of public transport like this could take millions of cars off the roads, freeing up hundreds of kilometres worth of lanes and parking spaces to begin greening our cities with trees. This would reduce emissions and dramatically reduce urban heat islands, reducing peak summer temperatures by up to 5 degrees. It would also just be nice.
Globally, such a transition would mean transforming the insane operation of trade and manufacturing, to make production and distribution more efficient. It would mean getting rid of planned obsolescence, a capitalist lunacy whereby companies design products with a limited life span so that they can sell more of them. And it would mean scrapping pointless industries, like military production, that are a drain on the world’s resources for no gain.
The psychopaths who run the world are not going to let us seize their factories, transport networks and machinery and run them for people rather than profit. They won’t let us disarm their militaries either. To save the planet, we need to build a global movement capable of overthrowing them and creating a democratic alternative to this destructive system.
