SLP NEWLETTERS

Global Warming—

Scientists and ‘Original Sin’

By Bernard Bortnick

    “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.”

 —Karl Marx (Capital, III)

Dire warnings of global environmental havoc induced by the burning of fossil fuels are now regularly aired in various popular publications, as well as on radio, television and across the Internet. Much of what has been reported flows from the findings of reputable scientists. While neither scientists nor the media are directly responsible for the problem, together they have done much to direct attention away from the real source of the trouble and the course of action needed to grapple with it.

    Typifying the media in this regard is National Geographic magazine. For all its beautifully rendered graphics and photography, its pages are little more than a perennial chronicle of species’ extinction and environmental destruction.

    In its September issue, for example, National Geographic specifically targeted global warming and the melting of worldwide glacial and ice formations in the polar-regions, their prospective contributions to rising sea levels and inundation of heavily inhabited coastal areas worldwide. Why is this happening? “The culprit,” as the magazine sees it, “is not so much nature as ourselves.” In other words, it is our fault, we did it, and we are responsible for burning all that fossil fuel.

    Similarly, Justin Gillis, of The New York Times recently filed a report entitled “Scientists [from the UN Climate Panel] create emissions red line,” in which a cryptic “human activity” is cited as the threat, again the mea culpa theme or “original sin” disguised as a scientific conclusion.

    The “red line’’ the UN panel has established is to prevent “planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial times” meaning that “no more than 1 trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere.”

    Ominously, “over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.” Moreover, “At the rate energy consumption is growing, the trillionth ton will be released about 2040,” according to Myles Allen, an Oxford scientist and a chief contributor to the report.

    “The group has now issued five major reports since 1990, each of them finding greater certainty that the world is warming and greater likelihood that human activity is the chief cause,” Gillis noted.

    The problem with the “conclusion” of the UN scientists’  is that it is inconclusive! It does not take into account the fundamental forces that control “human activity”—namely, the capitalist system. This non-conclusion underlines the fractured nature of scientific study in capitalist and class-ruled societies. Without science and scientists establishing the link between the character of production and distribution, and most specifically, wage-slavery and production for profit, all such conclusions are sterile. Underlying the scientists’ reluctance to indict capitalism for global warming is their recognition that “big” money is at stake, and if they “spill the beans” they will be kicked out of their academic playpens.

    Broadly speaking, scientists are unwilling to recognize the overriding nature that the capitalist system has imposed upon society. Pronouncements about “human-caused” catastrophes are nothing more than reversions to the biblical concept of “original sin” in which human kind is inherently sinful because of what happened in a mythical Garden of Eden. Scientists perennially recoil from linking societal problems and the nature and structure of capitalism and class ruled society. They have absorbed the prevalent attitude that capitalism is “the best of all possible systems.” They have also absorbed the rationale that Engels described, accordingly: “The social science of the bourgeoisie, classical political economy, is predominantly occupied only with the directly intended social effects of human actions connected with production and exchange...only the nearest, most immediate results can be taken into account in the first place,” profit driven capitalists are “not concerned as to what becomes of the commodity afterwards....” (Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature) Madame de Pompadour’s infamous remark, “After us, the deluge,” is their motto.

    The coal being mined, the oil being extracted, the vehicles being produced, the bricks and concrete being made, etc., etc., are focused on profit only and profit-making is inherently the prime motive of capitalism. To avert the “red line”, environmentalists demand the capture and storage of carbon emissions in the ground such as those from coal burning electric generating utilities. Capitalists and their political representatives resist such remedies because they involve costly technologies and affect the so-called bottom line and anything interfering with holy profit is anathema.

     Underlying the scientists’ findings and proposal are the compulsions of the system—uncontrolled production for markets, that is, blind production of commodities. Given the constantly increasing productivity of labor and a finite world, as the wheels of profit-making continue to spin, the results are massive glut, waste, war, premature obsolescence and devastation. Global landfills tell their own story.

    As a current example of prospective global warming the proposed “Keystone” pipeline, comes to mind. American and Canadian capitalists are eager to exploit Canada’s shale oil, an extremely dirty source of carbon. The proposal to build a pipeline from Alberta south to refineries around Houston, Texas, has environmentalists up in arms. They maintain that the heavy crude proposed to be pushed through conventional oil pipelines courts disastrous consequences such as spills, not to mention the destruction of huge stands of virgin forest in Canada.

    President Obama has taken a stand against the pipeline but is believed to be waffling on the issue since Canada might choose to ship the crude to Canadian ports and tankers that could make their way to refineries in Texas. Supporters of the pipeline are arguing U.S. energy independence and increased jobs whereas the opponents charge that the refined oil will be sold to China and other foreign markets. The jobs ploy is phony since once the pipeline is completed it will require a dozen or so workers to operate it. As highly automated as refining is, relatively few additional workers would be needed.

    Whichever way the controversy goes, global warming is bound to intensify since large scale capital stands to gain big profits by the carbon burning binge that it currently embraces. To counter the impelling drift of capitalism toward a doomsday scenario requires an aroused working class determined to seize the industrial complex of the nation and bend it to the needs, and for the good, of society. Scientists as part of the working class, should support this and abandon their vague and Aesopian allusions to the real cause of the social calamity that the world faces. This is a colossal task, which requires working class consciousness, unity, organization, and intervention—and every scientific mind in the world should support it. Nothing else will do.