Climate change is a class issue

DECEMBER 19, 2024

A new free-to-download book,Climate change is a class issue, by activists Sarah Glynn and John Clarke.

“In the end, climate change impacts everyone,” argue the authors of this useful new book. “So why claim it is a class issue?”

First, the top 1% produce most carbon dioxide. They have bigger homes and more cars,  go on more flights, have more possessions and throw away more things. Their wealth is based on businesses and investments that produce carbon dioxide and boost consumerism.

Second, those at the bottom feel the effects first. This is especially true globally, with climate change impacting both food supplies and people in precarious environments.

Thirdly, elites use the crisis as an excuse to squeeze the rest, just as they did with the 2008 economic crash. “Every disaster has been used as an opportunity for the wealthy to take back more of the world’s resources, and environmental collapse is no exception.” An example: “Failure to meet modern insulation standards has been used as an excuse to demolish social housing and sell the land to private developers.”

Fourthly, countries that pollute the least will suffer the worst. Poorer countries are often least protected from rising sea levels and the extreme weather conditions resulting from climate change. Historic colonial exploitation and more recently privatisations imposed by the World Bank have left them without the infrastructure needed for coping with mass disaster.

But, above all, the system that exploits the planet to destruction is the same one that depends on class exploitation. Likewise, the changes needed to bring the world back from the precipice are the same that would end this class exploitation – and the agents of this change will be the working class on whom the functioning of the economy depends.

Sarah Glynn is a writer and activist.  She played a central role in establishing and running the Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network and now works for the Kurdish Freedom Movement and writes a weekly column on Kurdish news. Here she sets out a manifesto for change, outlining how services can be run to meet the needs of local communities and how increased public involvement in the economy would also allow everyone to be given a guarantee of a job doing socially useful work at a decent wage and with decent conditions, with progressive taxation geared to cutting inequality.

John Clarke helped to form a union of unemployed workers in Ontario in the 1980s and in the !990s became an organiser with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. He now teaches a course for union and community activists at Toronto’s York University.

Here he explains the necessity of class struggle to tackle the impending climate catastrophe, as workers face ever more severe climate impacts. Justice for Migrant Workers, for example, which organises migrant farm workers in Ontario, Canada, is demanding that the provincial government implement emergency measures to protect farmworkers from extreme heat – farmworkers are 35 times more likely than the rest of the population to die of heat exposure.

Other workers are taking similar action. The International Labour Organisation reckons that “more than 2.4 billion workers (out of a global workforce of 3.4 billion) are likely to be exposed to excessive heat at some point during their work.”

“The worsening climate crisis will require decisive community-based resistance as well,” argues Clarke. An estimated 33 million people lost their homes, land or jobs in the 2022 floods in Pakistan and, with little state support, families are still dealing with the disastrous consequences. Meanwhile, as elsewhere, the government is imposing austerity on its population at the behest of the International Monetary Fund, in order to pay the interest on a punitive loan. The world’s poorer countries are forced to allocate 38% of government revenues to debt servicing, 54% in the case of African countries.

The conclusion of this book is stark: “Capitalism’s inability to create a sustainable relationship with the natural world is having devastating and rapidly worsening consequences for the bulk of humanity. Left to their own devices, those with economic and political power won’t address the factors that are driving the crisis, or deal properly with the now inevitable climate impacts. The class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival and the goal of a rational and just society. In the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.”

This book is free to download here.