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Who caused
global warming?
“Global warming is caused by
mankind, is here to stay and
is getting
worse,leading scientists have concluded”.
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So the Times (3
February) summarised the fourth assessment report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued at the
beginning of February. As the IPCC is made up of hundreds of scientists
from all over the world, specialists in the field, its findings are
fairly authoritative.
However, blaming “mankind” in general for causing the problem is
misleading since this suggests that people have deliberately chosen to
engage in the activities that have led and are still leading to global
warming. Whereas this is not the case. Most humans performing these are
just carrying out the orders of those organising them while these
latter are in turn constrained to act in the way they do by the
economic laws of the capitalist system that currently dominates the
world.
Capitalism is the impersonal process of the accumulation of
capital out of the surplus value produced by the wageworking class and
involves competition to transform this surplus value into money by
selling the products in which it is embodied. This battle is won by
those enterprises that can
sell their products at the lowest price due to their employment of more
productive methods. This investment in new productive methods depends
on making enough profits (converting enough surplus value into money).
So, capitalism is the pursuit of profits to accumulate as more capital.
Such “growth” is built into it and cannot be stopped. If ever it was,
the whole system would seize up and there’d by massive worldwide
unemployment.
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