The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.46           December 29, 1997 
 
 
Stop Pollution? Via Revolution  
 There is no question that capitalism has accelerated the destruction of the environment. Pollution proliferates from industries whose owners are unwilling to use existing technology to treat waste and minimize toxic emissions, because doing so would cut into their profits. The danger to health, safety, and life itself from radioactivity from nuclear power and weapons plants and their untreatable waste is not diminishing. The slash-and-burn policies imposed on farmers and carried out by big timber companies based in the imperialist countries were largely responsible for the vast fires in Indonesia this year and the ongoing burning of the Amazon forest. More of the world was on fire in 1997 than at any other time in history. These are only a few of the environmental ills that loom larger and will grow under capitalism.

Class-conscious workers, however, should refuse to join the petty bourgeois hysteria and panic by those who argue that destruction of the planet is imminent through pollution. There is no established scientific evidence, for example, that "global warming" is an unambiguous trend caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases. It may be. But no one has been able to prove it so far. Records of annual average temperatures of the earth have only been kept since 1895, just over a century - a mere blip in human history, a minuscule slice of periods registering broad climatological changes.

Working people should also refuse to join the efforts of Greenpeace, other liberals, and many radical groups that call themselves socialist or prolabor that advocate reforming the fake environmental policies of the bourgeois rulers to improve "our country." That's what the campaigns for so-called sustainable development by Global Exchange, a Bay Area-based liberal organization, and other groups are aimed at.

Class-conscious workers should also unequivocally reject the nationalist, America First campaign by the trade union officialdom to oppose the Kyoto treaty that is hinging workers' fortunes to those of their class enemy - the bosses - and walks them right into the fascist trap of ultrarightists.

The bourgeoisie really doesn't give a damn about global warming or most other alleged or substantiated long-term ecological disasters. As the debate around the Kyoto conference showed, big business is only concerned with maximizing their profits.

At the same time they should explain that Clinton, Gore and Co., who peddle Washington's fraudulent concern for the world environment, only use meetings and treaties like the one in Kyoto to advance the use of Washington's imperial power - both against weaker capitalist rivals and against the semicolonial world. The moneychangers mentality that permeated the Kyoto charade was captured by the Clinton-Gore proposal for tradable emissions permits, that is, buying the "right" to pollute.

The most important thing that any young person, any worker, or any human being genuinely concerned over the spreading environmental disasters can do is to organize and fight now to build revolutionary parties that can lead working people to take power out of the hands of the exploiting classes. Only then will humanity be able to confront capitalism's inevitable poisoning of human beings and degradation of nature.  
 
 
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