Failing carbon sink takes planet to the brink
Katya Turchin, Reading
Amidst news of hurricanes, flooding, droughts, and wildfires, new research found that in 2023 (the hottest year on record) there was a temporary collapse in Earth’s land carbon sinks.
A carbon sink is anything absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases: forests, fungi in soils, and algae-eating plankton in oceans. They serve as the planet’s climatic moderators, mitigating the effects of CO2 pollution.
Fossil fuel emissions reached a record 37.4bn tonnes in 2023, and the world’s carbon sinks are meant to absorb half of these emissions.
But climate modelling has not accounted for the possibility that carbon capture would break down. The net-zero targets proposed by the capitalists rely on such assumptions.
Instead, the climatic optimum which has sustained human productivity for the past 10,000 years is being destroyed, and the safety valves that our planet has evolved over millions of years are beginning to fail.
Research has been carried out on how to create/restore carbon sinks, including peat-bogs, forests, regenerative agriculture, but when translated into policy under capitalism, this becomes empty words.
For instance, companies pay (or convince us to pay) to plant trees or restore peatlands to offset emissions. But old-growth forests/peatlands absorb more carbon than new ones and take decades to develop – not quickly enough to offset the increasing rate of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.
Without a sustained effort to reduce emissions, such policies only mask the crisis with a green veneer.
There is only one solution to address the destruction of our planet: expropriate these polluting industries, use their obscene profits to massively subsidise sustainable energy, and implement research on regenerative ecology and agriculture on a mass scale.
For planet, not profit!
Coal is dead, long live burning rubbish!
Alex Charlton, Harrow
BBC analysis has found that the “energy-from-waste” industry – which incinerates half of household waste – is now the dirtiest form of energy, producing the same levels of greenhouse gases as coal did.
Since the government started fining councils for dumping in landfills, they have turned to the ‘green alternative’ of burning refuse. Most of the waste burnt is plastic made from fossil fuels.
Environmental scientists have described this as “insane” and “disastrous for our climate”. Many councils are locked into contracts with waste-burning companies, some lasting 20 years.
Derbyshire County and City councils terminated their contract with waste company RRS when the incinerator was found to be faulty, but they were still ordered to pay the company £93.5m in compensation.
Many of these contracts also have clauses saying councils will be fined if they do not send enough waste to be incinerated – Stoke-on-Trent council was handed a £329k fine for just this in 2010.
The current Labour government promised to make Britain a “clean energy superpower”. Yet, the current government approved another £150m incinerator site in Dorset just last month, overturning the local council’s decision to block it.
Capitalism produces mountains of waste, with its only solution burning it to make a profit. It is their system which needs razing.
The right to roam
Anton Parocki, Sheffield
Churnet Valley is a crag at the bottom of the Peak District which I frequently climb along with many others. It is a sacred place. However with the recent purchase by a rich landowner, the crag has since been closed and climbers locked out.
What a sick system! How can someone own a piece of nature, and shut it off to the world?
Nature and its beauty should not be owned but enjoyed by society as a whole. Until we build a society where this is the case, there will always be the risk that the outdoors can be placed behind a barrier or paywall, enjoyed only by the rich.
The cancer of capitalism truly seeps into everything. My attempt to escape the world we live in and enjoy the outside guides me back down the revolutionary path.
Climate crisis spells civilisational collapse
Shannon Hayes, North London
After careful monitoring of 35 of Earth’s ‘vital signs’, 15,000 scientists are sounding the alarm; we are entering an “unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
It is remarkable that in a situation in which billions are already suffering from the effects of climate change, deforestation and production of fossil fuels actually increase year on year.
“Despite six IPCC reports, 28 COP meetings, hundreds of other reports, and tens of thousands of scientific papers, the world has made only very minor headway on climate change, in part because of stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system.”
Societal collapse will be the next stage of the climate crisis: “We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence”.
The capitalists are vandals and criminals who need to be overthrown. ‘Increasing awareness’, ‘climate education’ and ‘creating additional taxes on fossil fuels’ will have limited impact compared to doing away with “those benefiting financially”.
This is our advantage as communists, offering a political solution to workers of the world! Humanity is as much part of the environment as glaciers and woodlands – it can only be us, the majority of humanity, which can save it from the brink.
