Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Ignore the reality of climate change and we risk dislocating the world economy to a greater extent than it was dislocated during the Great Depression, the First World War or the Second World War. That is according to the Stern report on the economics of climate change presented to the British Government in 2006. In fact, the author of the report says that he underestimated the position. According to the World Health Organization, 250,000 human beings may die every year from issues now related to climate change such as malaria, malnutrition and heat stress.

This discussion needs to focus far more on a key question, namely, whether the world organised as it is, with resources including energy resources controlled by a tiny capitalist elite, is compatible with sustainable environmental policies. I believe that big business and its drive for profit is the number one threat to the environment in the world today. In 2013, the Climate Change Journalstated that 90 major companies were, between them, responsible for 63% of the cumulative global emissions in the world in the past 250 years.

The collapse of the Stalinist dictatorships in Russia and eastern Europe, whose own environmental records were disgraceful, gave way to capitalist globalisation in the 1990s and noughties with capital free to move to wherever labour costs were lowest or environmental regulations the flimsiest. As early as the early noughties, a World Trade Organization official could boast that the WTO was enabling challenges to almost any measure designed to reduce global gas emissions. By 2011, the Carbon Tracker initiative, a London based think tank, was able to state that big energy multinational corporations now owned and controlled 2,795 gigatonnes of carbon. Let us put that in context. In order to keep global temperatures to the 2° Celsius maximum by 2015 that has been mentioned, the most amount of carbon that can be used up and burnt is 565 gigatonnes. This is, in other words, one fifth of what these corporations are saying they will burn in order to put forward their prospectuses on the stock exchanges and so on.

Deputy Gino Kenny referenced Naomi Klein. I will quote her excellent book as well. She states, "[The] industry has announced...to [its] shareholders that [they have] determined to burn five times more fossil fuel than the planet's atmosphere can begin to absorb." These big business interests are controlling government policies and hugely shaping them. In the US alone in 2013, big oil and big gas spent $400,000 a day lobbying congress and government officials. Pro-market governments tweak the situation, but no more, which is why we have had 19 climate change conferences since 1992 without major progress on these issues. At the last conference, the Paris conference, the final document did not even mention fossil fuels and made recommendations that were not binding on governments.

It is clear that bold measures which strike against the agenda of the profiteers are needed. We need massive investment internationally in public transport. We need massive public investment in renewables. We need to step up massively the research in green energy and that will only come about through public investment. We need to convert the car industry to renewable sources of power. Again, public ownership is necessary. How can these measures be funded? According to the United Nations, a 1% billionaire's tax could raise $46 billion. According to the European Parliament, a moderate global financial transactions tax on shares and derivatives could raise €650 billion.

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However, we cannot control what we do not own. Therefore, to plan rationally and defend living standards while maintaining sustainable environmental policies it will be necessary for big oil, big gas, the car industry, the banks and the 170 giant multinationals that control 40% of the world economy to be taken into public ownership under popular democratic control. A glimpse of the wealth that would be available to promote and defend the environment was shown following the revelations in the Panama papers of wealth hidden away in tax havens.

A little over 100 years ago the great Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg, speaking on the subject of capitalist militarism and the First World War, said that the choice facing humanity was a choice between socialism and barbarism. In the context of the looming global environmental crisis, her comments are perhaps even more relevant today.

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