The climate crisis is raging and it’s easy to feel paralyzed. We had massive, international protests in 2019, yet we keep passing disastrous benchmarks: 2024 is set to surpass 1.5 ℃ of warming over pre-industrial temperatures. Working class people are dying and losing their livelihoods in increasingly-occurring natural disasters, while the billionaires fly away in their private jets. Capitalist leaders have stopped even pretending to fight climate change, despite the crisis only growing more urgent every year. Instead of investing the trillions of dollars necessary to fight climate change, capitalist governments are pouring trillions into beefing up their CO2-emitting militaries.
War & Militarism
The rising inter-imperialist conflict between the US and China is ramping up militarism across the world. Major global powers are already involved in multiple wars and many conflicts are threatening to explode into even bigger wars. That means capitalist governments are rapidly moving to invest in their militaries so that they aren’t caught unprepared and undefended.
Total global military spending reached $2.443 trillion in 2023, an increase of 6.8 per cent in real terms from 2022. In 2024, 23 out of 32 NATO member states will spend more than 2% of national GDP on the military, up from 10 in 2023. China is increasing expenditure by 7.6%.
Increased militarization is devastating for the climate. The $2.443 trillion going to global militaries is money not going into expanding renewable energy and public transportation. In fact, the UN climate chief recently said that neo-colonial nations need $2.4 trillion annually in investment from rich countries to keep climate goals in reach. Imperialist countries have offered just 5% of that. I wonder where we could find the rest of the money? But that’s not the only problem—militaries run on fossil fuels and emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. If the world’s militaries were a country, it would emit the fourth most CO2 of any country in the world. The US military alone emits as much CO2 as the entire country of Sweden.
The world is moving toward more war, and therefore drastically worsening the climate crisis, because imperialism is inherent to capitalism itself. Capitalism requires constant expansion, but infinite expansion is impossible on a finite planet. As they seek endless profit, capitalists need to secure ever more resources– raw materials such as fossil fuels, cheaper labor—and access to new markets. The modern capitalist state was originally developed as a way for capitalists to have more control over markets concentrated in one area. When national capitalists have saturated the market in their own country and used up the bulk of their country’s natural resources, conflict inevitably breaks out. They end up fighting with other capitalists from other countries over control of new markets and raw materials.
Right now, the US and China are fighting to be the dominant global superpower with control over key regions. This imperialist conflict is driving the world to the brink of disaster, both through deadly war and the rapidly-worsening climate. To effectively fight climate change, we need international cooperation and planning; the current trajectory towards war shows that will never be possible under capitalism.
Imperialism’s “Solutions”
Just a few years ago, capitalist governments were pretending like they would take coordinated global action on climate change. Although the 2015 Paris Climate Accords were toothless and non-binding, they set ambitious decarbonization goals and 174 countries signed on. Capitalist commentators argued that the market would develop more green energy and electric vehicles (EVs) because they represent new sources of profit for the capitalist class. But despite $2 trillion being invested globally in clean energy in 2024, oil and gas drilling has increased, and global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are on track to reach a record 37.4 billion metric tons this year. Capitalism isn’t going to stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon.
EVs are a small part of the solution, but even this meager solution is being undermined by imperialist conflict. China is the world leader in the production of solar panels (80%), electric vehicles (62%) and EV batteries (77%), but instead of collaborating, the US is slapping tariff after tariff on Chinese products in order to undermine the Chinese economy.
Meanwhile, imperialist scramble for access to the raw materials needed for green technology is heating up. In Africa, the US and China are fighting over access to lithium and cobalt, two key elements for EVs. In Bolivia in 2020, the US backed a coup because of its lithium mines. The imperialist scramble for resources is incapable of getting us any closer to a green economy. We don’t need green-washed imperialism, we need socialism.
The capitalist system is incapable of the international coordination needed to actually solve the climate crisis, especially in the context of inter-imperialist conflict between the US and China. With an international planned economy under socialism, we could pour trillions into a rapid transition to green energy instead of war. We could retool weapons factories to produce trains and solar panels. Socialism is the climate solution we need. So how do we get there?
The Struggle To Save The Planet
Popular revolt against the capitalist tendency toward constant expansion, connecting the climate movement to the anti-war movement, is the only way to save the planet.
The 1970 Earth Day protests offer us valuable lessons about how to fight. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire, and that blaze ignited a mood to fight for the environment. Inspired by tactics from the anti-war movement, on April 22, 1970, 12,000 events were organized in city centers and colleges. 20 million people attended events; the movement encompassed all layers of society, but the organized working class was its engine. Unions—most notably the UAW—printed and mailed pamphlets at their own expense, donated money, and, crucially, turned out their members to the events. Following this, people got organized in Environmental Action Now (ENACT), and forced the creation of the EPA under Nixon.
Now under Trump, we need to learn from these movements. He threatens to gut the EPA; we need a mass movement to defend already-existing environmental protections. However, our fight can’t just be defensive: we need to fight for a massive green union jobs program, to take the top polluting corporations into democratic public ownership, and for government relief for climate disasters. We must combine that struggle with the fight against imperialist war, like Greta Thurnberg advocates for. Ultimately, hard-fought reforms under capitalism can be taken away like Trump threatens to with the EPA. To truly end wars and salvage as much of the planet as we can, we need socialism.