Reply To: The Climate Emergency
People are missing the point the New Scientist writer was making — that the worst case scenario of business as usual and emissions continuing at their 2014 level is now off the table, precisely because business has not continued as usual as governments have taken some steps to try to reduce them.
In other words, average global temperature will not rise to 5 degrees about the pre-industrial level. It still might rise to 3 degrees above it, but that’s not the same. Even so, as he says, a “warming of around 3°C by the end of the century” is “still dangerous, but not hellish.”
To accept that the worst case scenario is not going to happen doesn’t weaken our case against capitalism that, by its nature as involving a competitive struggle for profits between capitalist enterprises from different states, it is unable to deal with global warming and the climate changes it brings in a rational way, and that only socialism, as a world of common ownership and production directly to satisfy people’s needs, can.
It does, however, weaken the case of XR and others that the problem is so dangerous that we should forget about socialism and make trying to deal with it (in effect within capitalism) the over-riding priority.