While the planet is on its way to recording 2024 as the hottest year that humans have ever experienced, the Iberian Peninsula has already experienced four heat waves this summer, without even having finished the month of August.
By L. R. from La Corriente Roja, Spain
In recent days a study by IS Global, published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, has revealed that in 2023 there were at least 47,690 premature deaths throughout Europe due to extreme heat. The country with the most deaths was Italy, with 12,743, followed by Spain with 8,352. What does this data hide?
Heat waves and extreme weather events hit the poorest of the poorest
The study shows that this figure was lower than in 2022, when at least 61,000 people died in Europe. According to the experts, the anti-heat plans put in place, as well as a relative adaptation of the population to excess heat in these years, have served to reduce mortality by up to 80%.
Even so, mortality linked to excess heat has increased by about 30% in the last 20 years in Europe. July 22 was the hottest day in history since temperature records have been kept, with an average of 17.16ºC across the planet, smashing previous records. Europe is the fastest warming continent, experiencing around twice the average global rate. The three warmest years recorded on the continent have occurred since 2020 and the 10 warmest since 2007.
It is a fact that the measures put in place by administrations are still clearly insufficient and lag far behind what is needed to prevent this large-scale disaster. A disaster in which victims are skewed by factors such as gender (55% higher in women than in men across Europe), age (especially high among people over 80 years old), place of residence (inhabitants of urban areas where so-called “heat islands” are formed are six times more vulnerable than those in rural areas), but, above all, by their socio-economic status. This is how poverty quadruples the risk.
According to researcher Cristina Linares, from the Carlos III Health Institute, “Poverty is the decisive factor in explaining the higher mortality associated with extreme temperatures. Income level has the strongest association with the impact of heat on daily mortality. This pattern of inequality within Spanish cities is repeated on a global scale. Exposure to heat waves over the last 40 years has been 40% higher in low-income countries.
The increase in global temperature and the successive heat waves are only one of the effects of climate change, which in turn is only one of the consequences of the environmental crisis we are experiencing. 2023 was one of the worst years in environmental terms. In addition to extreme heat, there were forest fires, droughts, severe marine heat waves and widespread devastating floods.
The countries where all these extreme weather events took place to the greatest extent were those in southern Europe, where the comparatively poorest and most socially vulnerable populations live and were doubly affected.
The EU’s ninth social cohesion report notes “that climate change exacerbates regional inequalities, affecting the coastal, Mediterranean and the southeastern regions of the EU most severely. These regions, which are already poorer than the EU average, are more vulnerable and may be disproportionately affected. The costs of this phenomenon may amount to more than 1% of GDP annually, according to the same document.”
Climate change has thus become one of the greatest challenges of this century, the impact of which translates not only into loss of human lives but also into very high social and economic costs. But, above all, it forces us to reconsider a model of production and consumption in crisis and decay that inevitably deepens all inequalities.
Capitalism is leading the climate to collapse
Although there are still those who try to deny or minimize the results, there is ample scientific evidence that climate change is only one of the consequences of the environmental crisis produced by the growing emissions of CO2 in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. C02 emissions are the result of the energy matrix of the current mode of production in which we live. Fossil fuels are not just any commodity. They are the energy base of all production and distribution of goods in global capitalism, and represent 80% of the energy used by society. At the same time, this energy source is the cause of global warming. This energy source fueled the period called “the great acceleration” in the current phase of imperialist monopoly capitalism.
The climatic catastrophe, therefore, is the result of capitalist industry and the colossal consumption of fossil fuels, the blood flowing through the arteries of capital accumulation. The main culprits are the imperialist countries and their bourgeoisies, whose industries are responsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions.
This is fatally combined with decades of social cuts, fiscal austerity, and the privatization of public services, carried out by all governments that continue to underinvest in preventing and combating the consequences of climate change. Nor have they invested in providing assistance to those most in need when natural disasters strike.
An Oxfam report in 2009, before the climate summit held in Copenhagen that year (COP 15), warned that although the money needed to help the poorest countries combat the effects of climate change was small change compared to the financial bailout received by multinationals during the 2008 crisis, “most scientists believe that we are unlikely to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius. Not because we lack the technical and social means to do so, but because they do not believe that politicians are really willing to agree to the necessary reductions in carbon emissions “3.
Governments are complicit in this situation, not part of the solution
These pessimistic words proved to be the starkest reality. All the climate summits held (the last one in 2023 in Dubai, which was a real business showcase for big oil, mining and other companies that destroy the environment) and all the promises made by governments since then, did not serve to reduce CO2 emissions and the millionaire subsidies from governments to fossil fuel industries.
In recent years, fossil fuel subsidies have continued to increase. Despite the EU’s commitment to eliminate them, environmental activists from the Stop fossils platform denounce that “every year at least 405.1 billion euros are allocated in subsidies to the fossil industry in the EU. Ten times more than the amount spent on climate policies”.
“These subsidies artificially drive down fossil fuel prices, making us believe that we are benefiting from them. But the real beneficiaries are the big corporations that every year, pocket billions of euros in profits, thanks to these tax breaks.“
The Spanish government also paid 229 million euros with public money in 2023 for excess emissions of Spanish companies. These payments are justified with the aim of curbing what is known as carbon leakage, as the transfer of the most polluting companies to countries with more lax ecological standards is called, in order to avoid paying greenhouse gas emission rights in the European carbon market.”
And not only this. In their role as managers of the business of the bourgeoisie, they are increasingly willing to repress those who oppose their plans, using laws such as the gag law in the Spanish state, which the Sanchez government refuses to repeal.
An example of this is the fines of up to 150,000 euros and prison sentences faced by five young women from Asturias, for carrying out a protest action on the access road to the Arcelor Mittal plant in Gijón, (responsible for 4% of CO2 emissions in Spain). Their objective: to warn about the incongruity of subsidizing large greenhouse gas emitters in a world where the climate crisis is accelerating. As the young women denounced to the press, Arcelor Mittal has still not come up with a serious plan for the decarbonization of its plants, despite having received a subsidy of 450 million euros, mostly from European Next Generation funds.
Much of these funds also went to electricity oligopolies such as Endesa, Naturgy and Iberdrola (the second, third and seventh most polluting companies) to build huge, unsustainable wind farms and photovoltaic plants with a huge environmental impact. One example is H2Med, which is a project to build the first green hydrogen corridor in the EU, financed with European funds, which would serve not the energy needs of the Spanish State, but the needs of German industry, something completely irrational. Another relevant part goes to the big automobile companies, with Seat-Volkswagen at the head, destined to the electric car, which is not sustainable either.
The fraud of the green transition in the EU and in Spain is becoming increasingly clear. This leads us to the conclusion that capitalism itself, the institutions and governments at its service, are the biggest obstacle to prevent and tackle climate change, some of whose effects are already and will be increasingly irreversible, if we do not remedy.
The climate crisis is the very manifestation of the historic crisis of capital.
According to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), what we do in this decade will be decisive in preventing certain key thresholds from being exceeded. The global average temperature has risen by 1.1°C since the industrial era. In 2023, the highest temperatures in 125,000 years were recorded, but the latest emission reduction commitments made by the States are totally insufficient and we are heading towards a catastrophic 3ºC. As a consequence, the Earth’s natural systems could reach a point of no return, generating an unstoppable cascade effect that will lead to climate collapse and threaten humanity.
Jefferson Chroma, militant of the PSTU-B and the IWL in his YouTube channel Ecology and Marxist politics, which we encourage our readers to check out and subscribe to, explains that “the irrationality of capitalist accumulation destroys the very natural conditions on which it is based. An IMF report estimated that the fossil fuel industry benefited worldwide from subsidies of $11 million every minute, totaling $5.9 trillion in 2020 and rising ever since. Projected investments for new oil and gas fields through 2030 are $570 billion per year. All this mountain of money could fully fund the wind and solar power needed to meet the goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as agreed in the Paris Agreement.
As long as the extraction of fossil fuels, especially oil, remains more profitable to capital, it will continue the race to explore new oil frontiers around the world. That is why, in the United States, the government is trying to implement the largest oil exploitation in history in Alaska. Russia also has plans to exploit oil in the Arctic, in Brazil the Lula government wants to exploit oil at the mouth of the Amazon River on the equatorial margin, while China opened two coal-fired power plants per week between 2022 and 2023. The logic of capitalist accumulation prevents the full and urgent development of renewable energies. The need to obtain maximum profit and competition between imperialist countries are obstacles to the so-called energy transition.
Of course the great imperialist powers also invest in the development of new energy sources, but this is absolutely insufficient to stop climate change and is only serving for a handful of corporations to obtain some kind of monopoly income with this technology. The climate crisis is the very manifestation of the historical crisis of capital. There is a famous saying: It is easier to believe in the end of the world than in the end of capitalism. But this order must be reversed. To confront the climate catastrophe, we have to overcome the capitalist mode of production that has created it.”
We need to put the working class in the driver’s seat
The Corriente Program program that we invite you to request and discuss with us says, “the working class is the one that produces the world’s livelihoods and wealth, and therefore the only one that can reorganize the economy to serve human needs and the sustainability of nature. But under capitalism, the working class does not decide what it produces, when, how much or for what purpose. For this it needs, together with its allies, to take power into its own hands.
Our proposal starts from the concrete struggles of the working class and against environmental destruction and points towards a socialist economy, under workers’ control with democracy, which has as its premise the seizure of power by the working class and its allies.
(…) We know that, if we triumph, we will have to manage the capitalist ecological disaster for a long time. But once we destroy the economic and social bases of capitalism, we will be able to advance in the construction of a new socialist system, with a new way of life in which, material needs covered, we will be richer in free time, in social relations, in quality of life, in sports, science, nature, art, culture. A system where “being” will take precedence over “having”.
