Averaged as a whole, the global temperature across land surfaces for June 2016 was 1.24°C (2.23°F) above the 20th century average—tying with 2015 as the highest June temperature in the 1880–2016 record See source. In June the CO2 level reached an all-time high of 404.48 ppm. That compares with 381.82 in July 2006 and peaks of only 300 ppm in the last 400,000 years. See source.
The government’s response was to scrap the Department of Climate Change. Climate change is now the “responsibility” of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and will have no one in Cabinet to make the case for action to oppose it. If problems went away by ignoring them, this would be a masterstroke. Unfortunately, they don’t and it isn’t.
There is also a danger that, in the heat of battle over getting Jeremy Corbyn re-elected as Labour Party Leader, the Left, and even the Communist Party, could also lose sight of this issue. This must not be allowed to happen. Global warming may, according to Marxist theory, act as a fetter on the growth of productive forces and thereby lead to the replacement of capitalism with a higher form of social organisation, i.e. socialism, but this is not the only possible outcome. Global destruction – a Sixth Great Extinction – is another. Indeed, according to Barnosky and others Nature 2011, it has already begun, but it will only become irreversible if we allow the capitalists to ignore it.
The 54th Communist Party Congress will be held on the weekend of 19-20 November. We are currently in a pre-Congress discussion phase when members and supporters debate anything and everything on the Members and Supporters site. It’s important that we take this opportunity to keep Global Warming at the forefront of concerns.
Croydon Communists 