Bush and Global Warming
Editorial, THE PEOPLE
It is said that Nero fiddled while Rome burned in 64 A.D. The Bush administration, defending the material interests of big coal, oil and auto capital and other segments of the capitalist class, is doing even worse while the crisis of global warming continues to gather intensity. Incredibly, though some scientists are reportedly wondering if our planet isn't approaching a global warming 'meltdown,' the Bush administration is still trying to deny that the crisis even exists. It recently proved exactly how far it would go to continue denying the crisis.
At press time, the release of an Environmental Protection Agency report on the state of the environment was imminent. Documents leaked to The New York Times showed that, as The Guardian put it on June 20, before okaying its publication 'White House officials...cut details about the sudden increase in global warming over the past decade compared with the past 1,000 years and inserted information from a report that questions this conclusion...which was partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute.'
One memo circulated among staff within the agency in April said the report 'no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change.'
The People is no arbiter of scientific validity. Neither is the Socialist Labor Party. But when even the bureaucracy of the misnamed Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges publicly that 'scientific consensus on climate change' is that the crisis exists and that auto and industrial emissions are at least partly to blame, it is no doubt beyond time to act.
The EPA has since its establishment proven that it is primarily window dressing-an underfunded, toothless agency intended to promote the idea that something is being done about the massive rape of our environment and poisoning of our air, water and land by the profit mongers of 'free enterprise.' The service it provides in so doing is that of fending off demands that more must be done-or worse yet, demands that an economy that produces such poisoning should be scrapped altogether.
In 2002 the EPA finally suggested, much to the chagrin of Bush, that 'human activity' might be at least partly responsible for the phenomenon. This year the administration is apparently taking no chances, editing out any passages it thinks offensive to the interests of its capitalist benefactors before the report is published.
Denying the problem or its cause at this late date should mark this administration for exactly what it is-the unabashed and criminal toady of those who wish to continue raping and poisoning the environment for profit no matter what it means for the future of the planet.
According to The Guardian , 'Up to six degrees of warming is now predicted for the next 100 years by United Nations scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if nothing is done about emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, the chief cause of global warming.' Bristol University researchers in England recently reported that their studies of the Permian geological period 'show that six degrees of global warming was enough to wipe out 95 percent of the species which were alive on Earth...250 million years ago.' Species diversity did not reach what it was before the cataclysm for another 100 million years.
Some scientists now worry that rising temperatures may cause a 'runaway greenhouse effect' that cannot be stopped. In this worst-case scenario the polar ice caps and even Arctic tundra melt, oxidizing organic matter previously frozen in the ice, and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and another greenhouse gas, methane.
Emissions of greenhouse gases are not being significantly cut because emission controls diminish profits. Take away the profit motive in capitalist production and replace it with socialist production for human needs and wants and such controls become not only possible, but desirable. While capitalism reigns on Earth, the chance exists that the profit mongers will simply keep on fiddling until it is too late. Join the Socialist Labor Party and the fight for a future under a democratic socialist economy capable of halting and eventually reversing the damage done to the planet and all its inhabitants by the voracious capitalist system.
K.B. Editorial, THE PEOPLE, July-August 2003, Vol. 113, No. 2