8-20-07, 10:00 am
Editor's note: Marc Brodine is a contributing writer for Political Affairs and the author of a report titled 'The Dialectics of Climate Change.' An excerpt of the long report will appear in the September issue of Political Affairs, and the full report can be downloaded here.
PA: Can you describe what climate change is and what are its causes and consequences.
MB: Climate change has been part of the world’s atmosphere and natural system for millennia as a naturally-occurring thing. The same is true of carbon in our atmosphere. We rely on the fact that there is carbon in the atmosphere to keep the earth warm enough for human life. However, when we add by human action too much carbon to the atmosphere, it traps more and more of the sun’s heat and keeps it, heating the earth’s atmosphere, and we end up throwing those natural cycles out of whack, and out of whack in ways that can hurt humanity.
When the temperature rises and global warming happens there are chains of consequences that come from that. Glaciers melt, ice at the poles melts, the ocean heats up, there is more water in the atmosphere. The ocean expands because it is warmer and hence there is a rise in the sea level. There are increasingly intense weather patterns, more storms, more intense storms – so all of these things are chains of consequences linked to global warming. Now, in global warming, we are burning fossil fuels like coal and oil, which add carbon directly to the atmosphere. And that’s the root cause of all of these chains of consequences.
The earth exhibits many contradictory phenomena because of this. It is not a mechanical process; it is not a simple, straightforward process. Some areas will get more rainfall, some areas will get less. There will be more droughts and more floods. There is a whole range of consequences that ripple throughout the natural system of the world which humans depend on. The earth will find a new way to have a balance and nature will survive, but the question is what will be the impact on humanity? In other words, we are doing this to ourselves, and if we want to improve life for ourselves, we’d better change the way we operate.
PA: In your essay, you link Marxist philosophy with your discussion of climate change, and I’m wondering why it is important to do that?
MB: Well, as I said, the world is a linked system. We have to approach it holistically. The world is a series of gigantic feedback loops. There are some things, for example, which increase carbon, and some things which absorb carbon. We have trees which absorb carbon and emit oxygen. We have the permafrost, in the northern areas of Siberia and Scandinavia, and Canada and Russia, which has absorbed carbon and been frozen for millions of years. So we depend on these contradictory systems to keep us in a balance that works for humanity. We can’t look at the systems one at a time or separate from each other, and we can’t separate humans out of them. Marxist philosophy helps us look at things in dialectical ways, not linear ways. We have to understand the world as a place of constant change, as systems and networks of interlocked processes which react on each other. And thinking in that way is different from what science has typically done, which has been to break systems down and break processes down into their component parts and try to understand the details of that process. That is an essential step, but we haven’t always taken the next step, which is to put them back to together and understand how they work together, and that is what Marxist philosophy can help us do.
PA: One of the most important things you advocate in this article is the fundamental transformation from capitalism to socialism, but then you argue that more is needed to ensure that we can avoid environmental disaster. What do you think that extra something is that is needed?
MB: Well, I think that capitalism is a significant part of the cause of the environmental problems that we are facing. Because we can’t separate out how we produce things and how we finance things, and how we distribute things, and how we sell things, from our interactions with the natural world. That is why we are burning all this carbon – to produce lots and lots of commodities that capitalists think they can sell profitably, whether that’s actual goods like plastic bags or little toys, or the gas that we put in our car, or use for chemical processes like making plastic for example. So capitalism is part of the cause, and we have to change our economic system, because it is directly linked to why we have these problems. However, socialism does not automatically solve such problems for us. We have to unite socialism with the latest in science. When Marx and Engels were developing their philosophy and theories of history, they paid a lot of attention to the latest in scientific knowledge at the time, but there has since been something of a lag. We now understand that we cannot produce infinitely. The capacity of the earth to absorb waste, the capacity of the earth to give us the raw materials we need, is not infinite. There is a limit to the amount of coal, there is a limit to the amount of oil, and we can’t just keep drawing on them indefinitely. We have to understand those limits, and those limits have to be integrated into socialist economic systems. The planning that is the strength of socialism, the economic planning, the democratic control of the economy, has to include what nature needs in order to renew itself. Because we depend on nature, and if we draw upon the soil, the water, the atmosphere, and if we overuse the resources to extinction, then human beings will become extinct too.
PA: Somebody out there is going to say that global warming is a communist plot. What do you think of that kind of thinking?
MB: It’s patently absurd. The idea, for example, [put forward] by Michael Crichton in his book, State of Fear, that global warming is just a plot by scientists to get grants is about as absurd as it gets. We are seeing the results of global warming happening already. We are seeing it in more intense storms, we are seeing it in tornadoes in New York City, we are seeing it in increased rainfall in some areas and increased drought in others. We are seeing it in rises in the sea level, even though they have been small thus far. We are seeing it in the very rapid shrinking of the ice fields and ice sheets at the poles. This is going to affect us, and we can’t wish it away, we can’t make it vanish by some odd conspiracy theory. They are physical realities, and humans depend on nature, and all these conspiracy theories end up trying to deny that, that human systems and natural systems are linked, and that we have to work together. Nature doesn’t have to care about humanity, but humanity has to care about nature.
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