The 8 Places Most Affected by Climate Change
(UN World Food Program 4/21/2023)
1) South Sudan – Floods & Drought
2) Madagascar – Cyclones, Drought & Floods
3) Pakistan – Floods
4) Somalia – Drought
5) Sudan – Drought & Floods
6) Chad – Drought and Floods
7) Sahel (Includes Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali) Drought, Wildfires & Floods
8) The Dry Corridor (Includes El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) – Drought, Hurricanes & Floods
Within the last month, capitalist climate change helped create two torrential hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. They left behind massive destruction and hundreds of deaths and injuries from Florida to Virginia—including the “climate haven” of Asheville, North Carolina, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Massive flooding drenched the Mexican states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan.
First Hurricane Helene claimed the lives of more than two hundred people in the southeastern U.S., becoming the deadliest U.S. storm since Katrina in 2005. Just two weeks later, Hurricane Milton and its dozens of tornadoes devastated Florida, killing at least 25 and wreaking incalculable damage to roads, highways, homes, and public services. It left three million people without electricity and thousands without access to drinking water.
While hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires are all natural phenomena, their recent frequency, intensity, and unpredictability are anything but “natural.” They are the direct results of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, that clog the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions are produced by the unchecked burning of oil, gas, and coal. Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of capitalist production and imperialist war machines, and the source of hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits for rulers in the U.S., Europe, China, and Russia. The blood of the workers killed by the wave of recent storms is on the bosses’ hands.
The international working class can stop global warming—but only if we smash the selfish parasites who have caused it. The only solution to climate change is communist revolution.
Hot and getting hotter
Since 1880, around the advent of capitalist industrialization, the average temperature on Earth has risen by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The last ten years have been the hottest in recorded history (climate.gov 1/18), and 2024 is on track to be the hottest of all.
Despite all the noise about clean energy and clean technology, each year sets a record for fossil fuel emissions. Given the relentless capitalist drive for maximum profit and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry, that trend looks unlikely to reverse any time soon. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently bragged that she and Joe Biden had overseen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because…we cannot over-rely on foreign oil” (apnews.com, 9/13). For once, Harris wasn’t lying. In August, U.S. oil production rose to an all-time high of 13.4 million barrels per day (mercurynews.com, 10/13). This unchecked use of fossil fuels and resulting warmer ocean temperature made a storm of Helene’s size and intensity up to five hundred times more likely (Yale Climate Connections, 10/9).
In Ashville, North Carolina, a “climate haven” high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Helene killed more than a hundred people; a hundred more are still missing (Forbes 10/15). In general, though, the worst climate carnage happens in places that are least responsible for carbon pollution—in such countries as Belize, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Sudan, Madagascar, and Pakistan. The effects of global warming have created more than 20 million climate refugees since 2010 (https://climatechampions.unfccc, 6/21/21).
Failing capitalist infrastructure
On top of making storms worse, capitalism has deepened the misery of the working class by failing to maintain basic infrastructure to control flooding. The bosses have compounded this crime by moving more and more workers into the most vulnerable areas. U.S. levees and flood control ponds, built to last no more than thirty years, are on average fifty years old (theconversation.com 5/10/2023). Infrastructure gets neglected because the world’s biggest capitalists are funneling trillions of dollars into their militaries to fight ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—and to prepare for an ever more likely World War III.
Poorer workers have been pushed by unaffordable housing costs into homes built in cheaper flood zones. When the inevitable floods come, under-insured workers are forced to sell their homes at basement prices to developers, who then repeat the process while raking in massive profits (The Real Deal 7/30/2019).
Harris and Trump: two fossil fuel stooges
With the U.S. presidential election looming, global warming promises to get worse regardless of who wins. It’s clear that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump are willing or able to protect workers from the worsening climate crisis. Trump represents a camp of capitalists that owns domestic energy firms—his motto is “Drill, baby, drill.” Harris, a willing stooge of the multinational oil companies and the big banks that finance them, is even more dangerous. Whatever lip service she pays to climate action, she’s not about to bite the hand that feeds her. The main wing bosses she represents need fossil fuels for their bottom line and for the massive military that protects U.S. ruling-class interests around the globe. Harris understands who she’s working for. Like all bought-and-paid for politicians, her rhetoric is designed to mislead workers, but her policies will always serve her capitalist masters.
In 2020, Biden and Harris campaigned on a promise to end new leases for oil and gas production on protected federal lands. Since then, their administration has signed over six thousand new leases, surpassing the massive number cleared under Trump (Center for Biological Diversity, 1/24/23). The huge Willow project by ConocoPhillips in Alaska, approved by Biden, will do as much annual damage to the environment equal to two million gas-powered cars (NRDC, 11/13/2023).
Save the planet with communist revolution!
There is no rational reason to power an economy with oil and gas. In addition to spawning super-storms and lethal floods, fossil fuel air pollution kills more than eight million workers a year (seas.harvard.edu, 2/9/21). Much of the technology to transition to clean energy already exists. What’s slowing it down is the profit system, and the bosses’ reliance on oil and gas to fight their wars.
The working class can do so much better. Stripped of the profit motive, a communist society would slash the use of fossil fuels because production would be based on the needs of the working class. We would use the sun, the wind, and nuclear energy. But as long as there is money to be made, the world won’t stop warming in time to prevent even more extreme weather events. For a safe and secure future, we must organize to smash capitalism.
There are two things we can do right now. One is to build solidarity among the working class to help the victims of these climate disasters around the world. In Florida and the Carolinas, workers are helping each other survive the latest capitalist nightmare. We can all be a part of this by going to our jobs and schools and organizing people to help with sending money and taking on the oil bosses. Whenever workers around the world are hurting, we should help them and fight for the working class.
The second thing—the most critical thing—is to build Progressive Labor Party and the movement for communist revolution. Only by ending production for profit can we build a society that serves the needs of the working class. Join us!
