Lindsey German on climate chaos and capitalism’s inability to deal with it

Europe is burning. Temperatures are at record levels. Its major capital cities – London, Berlin, Paris, have had highs in the past week of top 30s or even over 40 degrees. In London there have been two record-breaking heatwaves in a month. This is early in the summer, before the traditionally hottest months of July and August. Schools have been closed, rail journeys curtailed, offices shut, crops destroyed, open-air events cancelled, health services stretched.

This is the climate emergency that campaigners have been warning of for years. For many of those years, they were ignored or ridiculed, while climate change deniers were feted by the BBC and scientific evidence ignored. Then when governments did take more notice, they agreed a series of international policies which were always inadequate, too often evaded, and under constant political attack.

Now however – in the face of such overwhelming evidence that we are at burning point – governments are showing themselves incapable of dealing with this huge crisis, and policies are moving in the opposite direction. Hence the row even within the Labour Party about Heathrow’s third runway, or about drilling in the North Sea. Hence the rolling back of deadlines for electric car provision, or the lifting of building regulations to help developers, or the cutting of grants for heat pumps and insulation.

The harsh truth is that capitalists will always override concerns on climate change and safety more generally in the interests of profit. Any attempt to restrict the ‘freedom’ to make money by the state is constantly lobbied against and very often defeated. This disregard for the safety of the population is justified in the name of competition and the needs of big business.

This is why the current emergency is being dealt with so inadequately. It should be cause for an immediate series of crisis proposals put in place, similar to those during the Covid crisis. These include maximum work temperatures, cool spaces, top temperatures for schools and nurseries, provisions for the homeless, help for the disabled and vulnerable, water points throughout the country, the opening of private air-conditioned buildings to the public, emergency shelters for people whose housing is overheating. These are just the bare minimum to relieve the current situation. But it is obvious that much more fundamental changes are needed. These will require much greater levels of public investment, including in liveable and ecologically friendly housing, schools, hospitals, libraries and other buildings. It will also require investment in sustainable cheap public transport as the alternative to private cars.

With the partial exception of London and the centres of other cities, public transport is simply unavailable to millions of workers. Where it exists it is expensive, unreliable and does not recognise shift or Sunday working. Bus routes are repeatedly cut or are so convoluted it takes an hour to do what would be a short car journey. Where bus travel doesn’t exist or only goes rarely, as is now the case in most villages and a good many towns in Britain, it forces workers to pay for expensive private car travel in order simply to get to work.

At the same time new hospitals are built on cheaper land outside city centres, shopping centres and supermarkets which rely on car use are destroying high streets, and Labour’s housing plan is for out-of-town expensive housing estates which have few public transport links and no local amenities. Workplaces too are often on the edge of towns, handy for motorways but not much else.

Allowing climate change to create this havoc and adopting policies which actively exacerbate it is immensely costly to capitalism in terms of lost productivity, and extra costs. But capitalism is not logical, it is anarchic and unplanned because its driving force is accumulation and profit. So the losses when parents have to care for children from closed schools rather than work, or the damage that the heatwave does to health, are substantial, but they are regarded as something to be endured rather than dealt with.

This is simply because to challenge the whole basis of capitalism – its car industry, its wars, the way housing and work are organised, its privatised and individualistic nature – would be to recognise that the system not only does not work but is destroying itself and the planet with it. The shortsightedness of those unions like Unite and the GMB, who support oil and gas drilling and weapons manufacture in the name of ‘creating jobs’ is criminal and does a huge disservice to their members.

There is a class basis to this. The rich have their air-conditioned houses, offices, schools and hospitals. While they may have individual concerns about climate change and the environment, they are happy to travel in their private jets, on their massive yachts, in the luxury cars which are supposedly ecologically safe but do huge damage to the environment. It is their system of exploitation which is driving environmental destruction, yet they are able to cushion themselves from it in ways millions of construction workers, small farmers, and factory workers are not.

Climate change and environmental crisis must be fought around class, recognising the predatory nature of capitalism in helping to create and sustain it. At present the general approach to it is to try to change individuals’ habits rather than change the fundamentals. These attempts are founded on good intentions. It is better to get people to walk or cycle rather than drive. It is better for people to eat organic food rather than that produced by supermarket driven factory farming. It is better to have environmentally friendly homes than to rely on expensive and destructive fossil fuel energy.

But all these individual changes put together come nowhere near the environmental impact in damage of new AI centres, of air travel by the richest sectors of society, of the constant demolition and rebuilding of expensive office blocks, of the impact of wars and militarism, which are some of the worst polluters. Working-class people are very scared at the threats of global warming – they fear for their children and grandchildren. They are not to blame for this crisis and lecturing them on the need for more recycling or low traffic neighbourhoods misses the point. Very scarily, climate change and wars are both hotting up – and the opposition to destruction of the planet and its populations has to be a collective working-class one. There has to be a fundamental change to the system and the unions need to be part of that fight, not going along with the bosses’ agenda.

This week: I’m waiting in anticipation for Andy Burnham’s speech on the economy, which I fear will be another point at which he sounds like Keir Starmer but with a (slightly) more interesting persona. By 17 July, I fear it really will look like a change in presentation rather than in politics which most people want. A friend has been involved in making a film called Birds of War, about the love story of a Lebanese journalist and Syrian cameraman. Sounds very good and will try to catch it.