War and militarism are among the most obvious expressions of how today’s capitalist system is a total failure. More and more of society’s resources are being spent on blowing people to pieces, forcing millions to flee, flattening cities and villages, while exacerbating the environmental and climate crisis, as if it were not acute enough anyway.
At a moment when a transition of society to tackle the climate crisis is absolutely urgent, the world’s major powers have their focus elsewhere — on an escalating nationalist and imperialist power struggle that is unsettling the world and sabotaging real climate action. The food shortage caused by a war between two of the world’s biggest grain producers is also in itself a harbinger of things to come if climate change is not tackled.
The latest IPCC report states that global climate investment will have to increase three to six fold by 2030 to have any chance of keeping the global mean temperature rise to between 1.5 and 2 degrees. The increasingly hot Cold War between the world’s major powers, of which the Ukraine war is increasingly an expression, has instead meant that investment is going towards weapons of mass destruction. According to SIPRI, the world’s total military spending rose to $2113 billion last year — equivalent to about 2.3% of world GDP.
According to the latest IPCC estimates, world military spending alone would be enough for between 44 and 88% of the total global climate investment needed annually to meet the 1.5 degrees target (including investments in energy production, energy efficiency improvements, transport, agriculture and forestry). The transition is of course not just about money for climate investments. Under capitalism, capitalist competition and lack of planning means that all investments become inefficient and the focus is shifted away from needs to profit and power — while capitalism’s continued environmental degradation, class divisions and wars counteract the potential of the investments that are made.
While the Swedish government, which is hosting the Stockholm +50 environmental summit, was able to cough up SEK 30 billion for new arms purchases overnight, climate investment is lagging far behind. Sweden, for example, has the potential to easily reduce energy demand from buildings by 36%, but without sufficient investment, less than a third of that potential is being realized (GREEN LOGIC — The socio-economic potential of energy efficiency in buildings).
Even the global climate investment fund to help poorer countries adapt has still not reached the $100 billion a year promised back at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. While the US is pumping tens of billions of dollars worth of arms into Ukraine, in what increasingly looks like a proxy war between Russia and the US, only one billion was added to the global climate investment fund, far short of the already inadequate 11.4 billion Biden has promised.
The main adversary of US imperialism on the world stage, Chinese imperialism, plans in its new five-year energy strategy to increase the production of coal, oil and gas, in order to ‘secure’ its energy supply in the new Cold War era.
War and militarism demonstrate with devastating force what the main interest of the ruling elite is — to strengthen its power at any cost, including the survival of human civilisation, and to make the super-rich even richer. To fight militarism is to fight the inherent logic of capitalism.
As climate disasters strike one after another — most recently extreme heat in South Asia and an impending disastrous famine after years of drought in East Africa — the share values of war companies are soaring. Since the outbreak of war, the share price of Sweden’s SAAB has risen by 100%, Britain’s BAE Systems by 26% and Northrop Grumman of the US by 21%.
Militarism not only diverts resources from necessary investments in climate action, health care, education, housing, etc. The world’s war machines are themselves huge emitters of greenhouse gasses.
All official figures are of course secret for “national security reasons” but research from Durham University and Lancaster University shows that the US military alone is one of the biggest emitters in world history — in 2014, its greenhouse gas emissions were equivalent to the total emissions of Romania. According to Scientists for Global Responsibility, the world’s military forces account for a whopping 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, emissions which are also exempt from the Paris Agreement.
War itself, in addition to the terrible human suffering, causes enormous emissions and environmental degradation. Bombs and subsequent fires cause major air pollution, while bombed areas remain contaminated with heavy metals and other harmful substances for hundreds of years.
“You can look at some areas in Northern France and Belgium affected by World War I where you still can’t farm because there’s unexploded ordnance in the ground — or the soil is contaminated by heavy metals and residues from chemical weapons,” says Doug Weir, Research and Policy Director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS).
The invasion of Iraq is still hurting people because of the depleted uranium the US used in its bombs. The war in Chechnya has left 30% of the territory contaminated which now “does not meet environmental conditions for life”, according to research by the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program.
The war in Ukraine is particularly risky because eastern Ukraine has been one of the world’s most industrialized regions for 200 years. A total of 10 billion tonnes of industrial waste is found in the Donbass region alone and the war there since 2014 has already flooded 36 mines and polluted the groundwater (Action on Armed Violence).
In addition, there is the insane risk of accidents at nuclear power plants in the region, of which we all became frighteningly aware when the images of the fires at the nuclear plant at Zaporizhia were broadcasted across the world.
The indirect global effects of the Ukraine war are perhaps even more serious:
The “energy war” resulting from Russia’s invasion has meant that old fossil fuel infrastructure is being reopened or kept running longer. Romania has restarted coal-fired power plants and in the Czech Republic, the life of plants has been extended. The US is expected to INCREASE coal exports over the next few years and is planning eight new LNG export terminals. EU countries are planning major investments in fossil LNG solutions — far more than the expected shortfall from Russia — investments that will “pay for themselves” for decades to come, which is time we do not have.
The EU’s new €300 billion so-called REPowerEU plan also includes increased ambitions for energy savings and renewable energy production, but the plan’s implementation depends on each EU country’s national decisions — which currently do not point towards increased climate ambitions at all — quite the contrary.
To limit oil price rises and “save the economy”, the US has opened up its oil reserves and the rich industrialized countries are pushing for oil producers to increase production.
The biggest oil companies continue to have big expansion plans, despite the fact that the planet’s carbon budget cannot afford to open new oil fields. The world’s 15 largest fossil fuel companies, which currently have a combined production equivalent of around 25 billion barrels of oil per day, have very concrete plans for new production equivalent to another 93 billion barrels of oil per day, according to the Global Oil & Gas Exit List. The same source reports that 95% of the fossil fuel companies they are monitoring are planning for increased production. All this points to more coal, oil and gas, while the latest IPCC report shows that emissions must turn downward within 2–3 years. The already inadequate promises made at COP26 are more distant than ever — not least in the US where Biden’s climate package has crashed and his administration has “paused” the ban on fossil projects on public land.
The war has meant that the process of increased imperialist power struggle has accelerated to turbo speed. When international cooperation is more necessary than ever to minimize climate change, capitalism has only nationalism and war to offer. This year there were hopes that an environmental summit in China would lead to a new “Paris Agreement” for biodiversity. Although we know that these meetings are mostly just a “talking shop” and that agreements hardly are worth the paper they are written on, any hopes of such symbolic measures are now dashed. Rising nationalism is combined with increasingly authoritarian capitalism, where fossil-fuelled regimes seek to suppress workers and young people to avoid discontent with rising inequality, war, racism, sexism, climate denial and so on.
The war risks pushing the already fragile capitalist economy over the edge into recession, which would hit what are already inadequate climate investments. Higher interest rates mean that the economic situation of poor countries has deteriorated catastrophically — but even in richer countries, higher interest rates mean that more climate projects become “unprofitable” under the logic of capitalism.
Finally, the war takes from us what we may have the least of — time. The focus on war, rearmament and devoting all resources to fighting one’s opponent in the imperialist power struggle means that what little was planned to reduce emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change falls even further down the priority list.
However, climate change waits for nothing, not even war. In the shadow of war, scientists have measured atmospheric carbon dioxide at 420 ppm — the highest level in human history. We are getting closer to new tipping points, such as the loss of the Arctic ice cap and Greenland glaciers and the transition of the Amazon from rainforest to savannah. Within a few years, there is a 50% chance that global temperatures will rise above 1.5 degrees, at least temporarily.
But climate change and its devastating consequences in a society also ripped to pieces by extreme class divisions and wars also mean other tipping points — tipping points in the consciousness of the world’s workers, young people and oppressed masses. Already we are seeing uprisings against inflation and food shortages — like in Sri Lanka and Peru — and protests against reactionary attacks on human rights, such as the abortion rights struggle in the US, anti-war protests in Russia and the feminist wave in China. Anti-capitalism is becoming more widespread, both in the climate movement and in society as a whole.
It is in these human tipping points that the seeds of change are sown. By uniting environmental and climate struggles with other workers’ and youth movements — which are also fundamentally opposed to the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system — we will have the strength to turn the tide.
By turning the focus to the core of the problem — the profit interests of billionaire class, big business and their representatives in today’s state and ruling elites — we also see the solution: a socialist struggle for public ownership of big business and banks, to enable democratic planning of the economy and society, for a rapid transition in line with the planet’s resources and in accordance with the needs of the world’s workers and poor people.
