Print this post.And OpEd by Steven Argue
On Monday, June 2nd, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally announced proposed limits on carbon emissions from power plants. This is only a draft proposal that will be open to discussion for one year and then potentially be adopted in June 2015, one year before Obama leaves office.(1)
The use of this 2005 base line rather than current emissions appears to be just an attempt to make the proposed regulations appear far larger than they really are.
The proposal outlined by EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, if adopted, is projected to cut carbon pollution from the United State’s 600 coal heated power plants by 30% of 2005 levels by 2030. This may sound significant, but due to fracking and increased use of natural gas, U.S. carbon emissions in the generation of electricity already dropped by 15% between 2005 and 2012. This is according to Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. In addition, since these emission standards would be applied on a state by state basis, a number of states, including New York, Georgia, Washington, and Virginia have already met the proposed 30% reduction standard. Those states would not need to take any action to be in compliance if the proposal is adopted. The use of this 2005 base line rather than current emissions appears to be just an attempt to make the proposed regulations appear far larger than they really are. What is actually being proposed then for potential action is a 15% reduction nationally in one sector of the economy that produces only 40% of U.S. carbon emissions, a sector where emissions are already on the decline.
Obama: A criminal demagog reflecting the putrid state of US politics. To claim the Republicans are worse leads us nowhere. (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)
This raising of smoke and mirrors by the Obama Administration comes at a time in world history when far bigger and more meaningful action is needed to help save today’s young and fairly young people along with future generations from far more devastating climate change and ocean acidification. As a result of global warming, agricultural production will be adversely impacted due to rising oceans and increased droughts, flooding, desertification, and more intense storms. Ocean acidification as a result of increased carbon from the atmosphere entering the oceans will impact ecological interactions and almost certainly dramatically decrease fish stocks and eliminate the coral reefs by the end of this century. In terms of the world’s flora and fauna, we are at the beginning of a major mass extinction event. On the question of food, food production will need to double by 2050 to keep up with the growing population demands, but global warming and ocean acidification combined with other factors like declining fossil water supplies and the destruction of fish resources through over-fishing are likely to cause food supplies to instead decrease. Increased fossil fuel demand combined with decreasing fossil fuel supplies and the failure to adequately convert to renewable energy sources may well contribute to mass starvation as well.
Emergency action is needed on carbon emissions, but Obama’s plan is not a move to action, but more talk about potentially taking action. Critical time continues to be lost as the Earth heats up and the oceans acidify. As critical time is lost, if the proposal is even adopted, it could be overturned by any president who follows Obama within a little over a year of being adopted. To say this appears to be far too little too late is an understatement. Had Obama been serious about climate change he would have taken action as soon as he took power. (He would have exercised leadership instead of pseudo leadership.—Eds)
In addition to Obama’s failure to take basic steps in directing the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, Obama has also under-regulated offshore oil drilling while also helping to cover-up BP’s criminal manslaughter and massive environmental destruction in the Gulf of Mexico with BP’s Deep Horizon Spill. Obama also allowed the massive spraying of highly toxic oil dispersants that were as deadly to human health and the environment as the oil being spilled. These dispersants have served only to hide the massive and ongoing environmental tragedy from sight as dying and declining seafood stocks are marketed for human consumption despite being thoroughly contaminated.
In addition to serving BP, Obama has also, despite strong protest resistance, so far refused to even take steps to stop the tar sands XL oil pipeline. The processing of tar sands oil into gasoline adds far more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the processing of other crude oil types. It takes the equivalent of burning one barrel of oil to process four barrels of tar sands crude oil. If Obama agrees to the XL Pipeline, it will wipe away any progress he may potentially make on carbon emissions anywhere else.
Taken As an Opportunity To Attack China
Despite Obama’s lack of actual progress on climate change, the corporate media has already begun using this latest move by the EPA to maybe take action in a year as an opportunity to attack the People’s Republic of China. Bloomberg.com, for instance, has run an article titled, “Obama’s Step Forward on Carbon Undone by China’s Steps Back”.This pro-Obama and anti-China propaganda is absolutely absurd. Besides the fact that Obama still hasn’t done anything, the People’s Republic of China has nowhere near the U.S. output of carbon dioxide. Their historic carbon output is far lower than that of the United States and their current yearly per-capita output is only one quarter that of the United States. If the U.S. were to reduce carbon output to Chinese levels, the world would be in much better shape. In addition, the Chinese socialist planned economy is carrying out the largest push for renewable energy the world has ever seen. The state owned banking system is putting massive investments into these non-polluting renewable energy sources. In fact, Chinese production of wind energy has been rapidly expanding, bringing extremely significant decreases in Chinese carbon output.
Contrary to the Western propaganda line, China’s state owned banking system is putting massive investments into non-polluting renewable energy sources.
China has long been an excuse for the U.S. capitalists to ruin the planet in their insane drive for profit, this despite their anti-China claims not being based in reality. Those attacks on China were a major component of Obama’s sabotage of the international negotiations on carbon emissions in Copenhagen in 2009. Obama, while he was betraying campaign promises and taking no action on global warming in the United States, sabotaged the Copenhagen negotiations on climate change. He did this largely using the developing economies of China and India as his excuse. The extent to how far the U.S. went to sabotage that conference was revealed by whistle blower, Edward Snowden. Snowden, now a political refugee in Russia where he escaped from Obama’s political repression, released information on how the U.S. had spied on the international negotiators at that conference. As a result, the U.S. was aware in advance of Denmark’s contingency plans to try to save the conference. The Obama administration used this information to torpedo any agreement ever coming from the conference.
Despite Obama being portrayed as concerned about global warming in the corporate media, he has in reality done much to increase carbon emissions. Obama’s only real action in the opposite direction so far has been a 2012 agreement with major car manufacturers that will require cars sold in the United States to get an average of 54.5 miles per gallon of gasoline by 2025. In reality, this is less than 49 miles per gallon when one includes air conditioning credits, and even less when actual driving conditions are accounted for. The U.S. finally reached an average of 24.6 miles per gallon in 2013 while the Chinese average was 35.8, the European Union’s was 43.3, and the Japanese was 42.6. While Obama has done much to increase carbon emissions, this, his only real significant action in the other direction so far, is an example of far too little too late.
Both Ruling Parties Bought and Paid For
An underlying problem with both the Democrat and Republican parties is the fact that these parties are bought and paid for by the American ruling capitalist class. To win in the farce of American “democracy”, candidates must have the support of America’s major capitalists who own America’s corporate media, banks, and major industries. Among those industries are of course oil and gas.
In the 2008 election cycle Obama’s campaign got a whopping $884,000 from the oil and gas industry. This despite Obama’s campaign ads where Obama claimed, “I don’t take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists, and I won’t let them block change anymore.”
Technically it is true that Obama didn’t take money directly from oil companies. Yet, the underlying reality was that this statement was deliberate deception. By law, direct corporate contributions were not allowed for any candidate, so Obama’s claim that he was different was an outright lie. In addition, Obama like all of the other mainstream corporate candidates, got contributions from corporations that bypassed this law through funneling major contributions from the oil and gas companies through employees of the industry.
While the oil and gas industries do give the climate change deniers of the Republican Party more money than the Democrats, the Democratic Party does get sizable contributions from these industries. The Republican Party gets roughly 75% of the contributions of the oil and gas industry while the Democrats continue to receive 25%. This is because the Democrat Party’s program, while admitting to the reality of climate change, is one of generally still siding with the big polluters against the future of humanity and the planet. For the oil and gas industries, giving the Democrats some support makes big sense. For them it is good to offer the American public two meaningless political alternatives, one party of climate change deniers and another party that admits to the reality of climate change but generally works against real action on the issue. In the most immediate sense, this money buys influence with both parties. In addition, in their cold profit driven calculations, it is surely far better to back a party that falsely claims to be on the side of doing something about global warming than to allow a vacuum to develop where a meaningful grassroots political alternative may more easily emerge.
As a political alternative, the Revolutionary Tendency which I represent, like any genuine party of the left, stands in total opposition to both the Democrat and Republican parties. We are part of the struggle in demanding immediate change on climate change, including EPA regulation of carbon emissions, more subsidies to public transportation, and no XL tar sands pipeline. We support and build these types of movements, but as we see it, meaningful change on climate change in the United States is unlikely to happen until capitalism itself is overthrown.
We argue this for two reasons. The first is the corrupting influence of capitalist money in bourgeois elections is preventing any meaningful democratic control of the United States from below. The second is the fact that private ownership of the economy for private profit prevents the centralized socialist planning that could easily move production in directions away from fossil fuels towards higher energy efficiency, renewable energy, electric automobiles, and free public transportation. This planned socialist economy will also easily provide everyone with a job, free health care, housing, and a free education. In addition, the establishment of a planned socialist economy in the United States will immediately eliminate the corrupting influence of the capitalist class because we will expropriate all of the holdings of the capitalists and put industry and the banks under public control. They will no longer have the wealth they use to corrupt.
People’s Republic of China Offers Alternate Model
Today, the push for renewable energy in the People’s Republic of China is an example of the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution won through their socialist planned economy. Massive state-run projects expanding public transportation, infrastructure, and housing are other examples. It is because large sections of the Chinese economy remain socialist, including the banking system, much of heavy industry, and Chinese land that China has been able to remain economically healthy despite the world crisis of capitalism. For instance, the Chinese government has been able to create massive amounts of needed housing as well as jobs through large scale government run construction projects.
The Republican Party is a thoroughly anti-science and anti-Earth capitalist party. The Democrat Party is also bought off by big oil, but their tactics are trickier.
While the United States fails to act and sabotages international agreements on global warming, the People’s Republic of China has embarked on the greatest push for renewable energy the world has ever seen. The Chinese state run economy including banks and energy companies are making this project possible. Unlike the United States, the Chinese government is able to carry out this project largely because their government is not owned by big oil, coal, and gas capitalists. In the United States those capitalists are so powerful that their money controls the Democrat and Republican parties and is extremely influential in the corporate media. With their money and power, the American capitalist class has actually been able to deceive much of the American public into thinking there is scientific debate on the impending disaster of global warming. The Republican Party is a thoroughly anti-science and anti-Earth capitalist party. The Democrat Party is also bought off by big oil, but their tactics are trickier. They don’t pretend the science is inaccurate, they just fail to act in any meaningful way, assuring big profits for their big oil contributors and paving the road of humanity’s impending doom through global warming.
Unlike the corruption of the United States, China had a thorough socialist revolution that smashed the capitalist state in 1949 and soon after overthrew the capitalist system. Through that revolution a U.S. backed dictator was thrown out of power, land was redistributed, life expectancy was doubled during Mao’s rule, land was redistributed, literacy was brought to about 100%, massive gains were made for women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery, theocracy, and feudalism in China’s most backward regions like Tibet. While many western new age spiritualists, Green Party liberals, and CIA financial benefactors to the Dalai Lama have yearned for the Dalai Lama’s return to power, the former slaves of Tibet most assuredly have not felt the same way. This was a reason for the total failure of the CIA and Dalai Lama’s attempted contra war in the 1960s.
READ BELOW ABOUT CHINA’S MAGLEV WIND TURBINE TECHNOLOGY. CLICK ON THE BAR.
[learn_more caption=”Next generation wind turbines are here”]
Renewable energy produced from the wind has garnered much attention and support in recent years but is often criticized for its low output and lack of reliability. But now a super power wind turbine has come along that may be just what the renewable energy industry needs. The MagLev wind turbine, which was first unveiled at the Wind Power Asia exhibition in Beijing, is expected to take wind power technology to the next level with magnetic levitation.
Magnetic levitation is an extremely efficient system for wind energy. Here’s how it works: the vertically oriented blades of the wind turbine are suspended in the air above the base of the machine, replacing the need for ball bearings. The turbine uses “full-permanent” magnets, not electromagnets — therefore, it does not require electricty to run. The full-permanent magnet system employs neodymium (“rare earth”) magnets and there is no energy loss through friction. This also helps reduce maintenance costs and increases the lifespan of the generator.
Maglev wind turbines have several advantages over conventional wind turbines. For instance, they’re able to use winds with starting speeds as low as 1.5 meters per second (m/s). Also, they could operate in winds exceeding 40 m/s. Currently, the largest conventional wind turbines in the world produce only five megawatts of power. However, one large maglev wind turbine could generate one gigawatt of clean power, enough to supply energy to 750,000 homes. It would also increase generation capacity by 20% over conventional wind turbines and decrease operational costs by 50%. If that isn’t enough, the maglev wind turbines will be operational for about 500 years![/learn_more]
REGULAR ARTICLE RESUMES HERE
It is through this sweeping socialist revolution across China that China’s economy continues to expand despite the world crisis of capitalism. The state run sectors of the economy are able to produce based on need without regard to profit, creating jobs and things that are needed, like for instance carrying out massive projects to build housing, create advanced public transportation systems, and develop energy sources that do not emit greenhouse gas.
Obama’s Strategy Against China
It is to destroy the remaining gains of the Chinese Revolution that the Obama administration has continued a combined U.S, imperialist policy of aggressive encirclement, containment, and economic engagement.
While U.S. policy towards China includes elements of economic engagement, the fact that the U.S. imperialists seek to isolate the People’s Republic of China is being made extremely clear by recent moves of the Obama administration. One is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, an economic agreement between the U.S. and a number of countries in the Asian region including Japan and Australia, but excluding the People’s Republic of China. Over 20 similar regional “free-trade” pacts have already been negotiated by the imperialists to exclude China.
Likewise, U.S. imperialism targets a key Chinese ally, Russia, as part of its larger goal to isolate China. This was a component of aggressive U.S. moves in Ukraine, including backing a fascist coup which has overthrown the elected government and is carrying out a murderous and chauvinistic war against the country’s Russian speaking population. This is a component of the Obama administration’s attempts to isolate and eventually destroy Russia through regime change and dismemberment under Brzezinski’s plan to break Russia up into three countries. U.S. intervention in Ukraine is part of a strategy meant to force a government on Ukraine that will carry out IMF dictates of austerity, open western areas of Ukraine to imperialist controlled fracking, and end important trade agreements with Russia. It is also meant as an excuse for massive military expenditures as Russia is vilified and the pockets of the capitalists of the military industrial complex are lined as they fill new orders for military hardware. On June 2nd Obama announced a one billion dollar increase in military expenditures for Europe. These misappropriations of the Earth’s resources for the war machine further add to global warming and misspend wealth that, in a sane socialist society, could be used for human and environmental needs.
Aggressive U.S. policy against Ukrainian sovereignty and accompanying U.S. economic sanctions against Russia have, instead of isolating Russia, driven Russia and China closer together. One component of this has been the recent $400 billion agreement between the two countries for Russia to sell its natural gas to China. Besides helping the economies of the two countries and helping them better stand up to U.S. imperialism, this agreement will bring important decreases in China’s use of coal to generate electricity and will bring with it dramatic decreases to China’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Besides efforts to cut China off economically, U.S. policy towards China also includes elements of economic engagement that allows dangerous capitalist penetrations into the Chinese economy. This imperialist strategy can be seen as serving a two-fold purpose. One is it allows American corporations to profit from value produced by Chinese labor as the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy allows the Chinese working class to be prostituted out to the American capitalists under conditions of terrible exploitation. The second is that it allows dangerous capitalist inroads into the Chinese socialist economy that may help lay the foundations for capitalist counterrevolution.
The seemingly contradictory, yet complimentary, imperialist policies of economic engagement and economic strangulation towards China are combined with a third element. That third element is U.S. military encirclement combined with U.S. military provocations against the People’s Republic of China. In November of 2013 the United States flew two unannounced B-52 bombers through the Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). This served U.S. purposes of testing China’s defense responses. It was also a deadly threat displaying the ability of the U.S. to attack China with B-52 bombers from Guam. Around the same time, coinciding with the flight of the two U.S. bombers, Japanese and South Korean fighter planes carried out the same type of provocations.
Considering America’s nonstop provocations, the Chinese military have their work cut out for them.
Those aggressive acts by the U.S. and its allies come as part of Obama’s “pivot towards Asia” policy that is directed against China and includes military pacts with countries surrounding China and the stationing of more military hardware and troops in the region including U.S. Marines, battleships, and aircraft carriers.
The Defense of China
The People’s Republic of China, for its part, has not neglected its duties to self-defense. Recent Chinese advances include jets with anti-ship missiles, advanced submarines, surveillance satellites, long-range radars, and land-based ballistic and cruise missiles. China has also developed solid fuel ICBM nuclear missiles less vulnerable to a U.S. first strike and capable of hitting the U.S. mainland.
True socialists support the right of the People’s Republic of China to defend itself from U.S. imperialism. Throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America there are countries controlled by U.S. imperialism and devastated by the same problems that plagued China before the 1949 Revolution like high illiteracy, hunger, lack of clean drinking water, slavery, oppression of women, and murderous imperialist client regimes. For many who suffer under the boot of U.S. imperialism, such capabilities to defend their self-determination from U.S. imperialist attacks would truly be a dream-come-true.
Yet, for many in the imperialist centers, hatred for China flows in part from the lies of the Dalai Lama and people like German Nazi (turned CIA asset after the war) Heinrich Harrer who wrote “Seven Years in Tibet” which was turned into a Hollywood movie. The movie fails to portray anything truthful of life in Tibet under Dalai Lama rule. In the movie, Tibet was a loving paradise. In reality, in Tibet under Dalai Lama rule most people were slaves and lived in grinding poverty without education and health care. Punishments were also brutal. People were subject to all kinds of inhumane tortures, including amputations and the removal of eyes for offenses like slaves trying to escape, or being a communist. Likewise, for decades the so-called Dalai Lama was paid a huge salary by the CIA to spread his lies about what life was like under his rule in Tibet and to speak out in favor of U.S. imperialist wars like those waged in Korea and Vietnam that combined murdered a total of six million people. Much as war president Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an absurdity, the Dalai Lama gave support to those imperialist wars while pretending to be a man of peace.
Idiot celebrities like actor Richard Gere (l) have lent a hand in the propaganda campaign to smear the image of China. (S.Rhodes, via flickr)
The People’s Republic of China today has the strongest remaining socialist economy and military of any deformed workers state based on collectivized property relations. It is an economy that continues to rapidly grow providing the Chinese people with necessities in a country that was once plagued by capitalist underdevelopment. While the benefits of the economic growth are uneven due to problems with market socialism and capitalist inroads, it is none the less the planned socialist economy that continues to lift the people up out of imperialist imposed underdevelopment. Yet, much of the left, under the influence of bourgeois public opinion and capitalist propaganda abandons the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
Among those who have abandoned the Chinese Revolution are the same fake “Trotskyist” groups, like the USec (Socialist Action in the US) and CWI (Socialist Alternative in the US), who cheered on the capitalist counter-revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s. These capitalist counterrevolutions were the ones that brought the mujahideen and Taliban to power in Afghanistan, destroyed the socialist economy of the USSR (causing a drop of life expectancy by 10 years in the first ten years of capitalism in the former USSR), and brought unemployment from zero to 50% in Poland (where it had once been zero) while outlawing abortion which had been free and legal.
Beware of these fake Trotskyists who, due to the winds of bourgeois public opinion yesterday were willing to abandon the women of Afghanistan to the CIA’s mujahideen cutthroats, and today join forces with U.S. imperialism for economic isolation and capitalist counterrevolution in the People’s Republic of China. The U.S. imperialists have no intention of lifting China up to a higher democratic ideal. Their campaigns against the People’s Republic of China are to reduce the country to the levels of servitude, poverty, illiteracy, and exploitation found before the 1949 revolution. Conditions much like those presently found elsewhere in the imperialist controlled underdeveloped world. Likewise, to force those conditions on the Chinese people the U.S. will need to attempt to impose and support the most undemocratic of governments, much as it does today in places like Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Indonesia.
∞
All carbon emissions that are being put into the atmosphere now will not go away from our atmosphere and oceans any time soon. These emissions are only counteracted either through slow geologic processes of silica weathering or massive loads of organic material being quickly and deeply buried. These processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere take hundreds of thousands of years. Carbon taxes are not sufficient, a socialist planned economy is needed to really save the planet, but as a reform that can play a role in slowing the damage and playing a role in saving the future of humanity, it is irresponsible to oppose carbon taxes, especially when done in a fair manner.As it will take a socialist planned economy to adequately slow carbon emissions, so too will it take socialist food distribution to have any chance of keeping the world’s population fed. The dominating world model of capitalist production and distribution cannot adequately deal with questions of world hunger or curtail carbon emissions. Today, the world capitalist market is already incapable of keeping the world’s people fed, even when enough food is produced to feed everyone. Into the future it is certain that the present model of capitalist food distribution for profit will deepen food insecurity as combinations of global warming, population growth, depletion of fossil fuels, depletion of fossil water supplies, the use of crop land to produce biofuels, over-fishing, habitat destruction, and neo-Luddite opposition to bio-technology increasingly interfere with the ability of the market to provide food at the prices that much of the world can afford.
As we stare into the abyss of this looming crisis, the last thing the workers and peasants of the world need are parties on the far left giving left cover to pro-imperialist, pro-austerity, and anti-environmental capitalist parties like Canada’s NDP. Yet, just as fake “Trotskyists” have abandoned the defense of the gains of the remaining deformed workers states like China, these same parties, including the ISO, Socialist Action (USec), Socialist Organizer (ICR), Socialist Alternative (CWI), and the IMT actively support the NDP. This is a policy as misguided as the Communist Party USA’s support for the Democrats in the U.S. as the supposed “lesser of two evils”. Legitimate Leninist-Trotskyists do not build pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, and anti-environmental parties like the NDP of Canada, the Democrat Party of the United States, the Labour Party of Britain, the Socialist Party of France, or the SPD of Germany. Instead, we work to build revolutionary socialist parties that fight for proletarian socialist revolutions that will abolish capitalism, end imperialism, establish workers democracy, and gear the economy to meet human and environmental needs rather than capitalist profit.
-Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency
(1) Originally published on Tuesday Jun 3rd, 2014