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Stop Pollution? Via Revolution
                                                          {editorial}
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from the Militant, vol.61/no.46                     December 29, 1997


   There is no question that capitalism has accelerated the
destruction of the environment. Pollution proliferates from
industries whose owners are unwilling to use existing
technology to treat waste and minimize toxic emissions, because
doing so would cut into their profits. The danger to health,
safety, and life itself from radioactivity from nuclear power
and weapons plants and their untreatable waste is not
diminishing. The slash-and-burn policies imposed on farmers and
carried out by big timber companies based in the imperialist
countries were largely responsible for the vast fires in
Indonesia this year and the ongoing burning of the Amazon
forest. More of the world was on fire in 1997 than at any other
time in history. These are only a few of the environmental ills
that loom larger and will grow under capitalism.
   Class-conscious workers, however, should refuse to join the
petty bourgeois hysteria and panic by those who argue that
destruction of the planet is imminent through pollution. There
is no established scientific evidence, for example, that
"global warming" is an unambiguous trend caused by emissions of
carbon dioxide and other gases. It may be. But no one has been
able to prove it so far. Records of annual average temperatures
of the earth have only been kept since 1895, just over a
century - a mere blip in human history, a minuscule slice of
periods registering broad climatological changes.
   Working people should also refuse to join the efforts of
Greenpeace, other liberals, and many radical groups that call
themselves socialist or prolabor that advocate reforming the
fake environmental policies of the bourgeois rulers to improve
"our country." That's what the campaigns for so-called
sustainable development by Global Exchange, a Bay Area-based
liberal organization, and other groups are aimed at.
   Class-conscious workers should also unequivocally reject the
nationalist, America First campaign by the trade union
officialdom to oppose the Kyoto treaty that is hinging workers'
fortunes to those of their class enemy - the bosses - and walks
them right into the fascist trap of ultrarightists.
   The bourgeoisie really doesn't give a damn about global
warming or most other alleged or substantiated long-term
ecological disasters. As the debate around the Kyoto conference
showed, big business is only concerned with maximizing their
profits.
   At the same time they should explain that Clinton, Gore and
Co., who peddle Washington's fraudulent concern for the world
environment, only use meetings and treaties like the one in
Kyoto to advance the use of Washington's imperial power - both
against weaker capitalist rivals and against the semicolonial
world. The moneychangers mentality that permeated the Kyoto
charade was captured by the Clinton-Gore proposal for tradable
emissions permits, that is, buying the "right" to pollute.
   The most important thing that any young person, any worker,
or any human being genuinely concerned over the spreading
environmental disasters can do is to organize and fight now to
build revolutionary parties that can lead working people to
take power out of the hands of the exploiting classes. Only
then will humanity be able to confront capitalism's inevitable
poisoning of human beings and degradation of nature.



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