AnarchoBolshevik

Climate change is a long-term shift in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional and global climates. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that the “scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” According to NOAA, the Earth’s temperature has risen by an average of 2 degrees Fahrenheit since record-keeping began in 1850.

Furthermore, the rate of warming since 1982 has tripled, and the majority of this warming has occurred since then. This warming is caused by human activity, referring to the extreme amount of greenhouse gasses emitted under the industrial capitalist mode of production. The United States is the largest per capita contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and studies indicate that climate denialism, as a cultural and political phenomenon, is most pervasive in the United States.

These weather events are made more frequent and severe because of the rapid heating of the oceans, atmosphere and land. What were once in a lifetime weather events are becoming annual or semi-annual events.

The United States’ aging infrastructure has exacerbated the effects of this extreme weather. Recent tornado storms in Ohio, which were caused by the mixture of humid air from hurricane alley and cool temperatures from a low-pressure ridge in the Midwest, have caused severe power outages in Cleveland.

As of Aug. 18, nearly 300,000 people had been without power since Aug, 12. Meanwhile, Texas has been dealing with a power outage affecting 2.7 million people since Hurricane Beryl made landfall on July 8. That category 1 hurricane has devastated large parts of Texas because of the state’s particularly faulty power grid infrastructure.

In order for capitalism to develop and sustain its need to maintain and increase profits, it must exploit the environment at a steadily increasing pace. Capitalism requires infinite growth in a world with finite resources. It plunders workers and ecological systems throughout the world.

Class systems perpetuated by capitalism also make poor and oppressed peoples more at risk of climate-related health issues. Poor people are often the first to suffer and the last to be evacuated during disasters; they receive the least effective medical care. Often, they lose their land or assets permanently without proper compensation. All capitalist politicians do is make empty promises and spread climate denialism.

To end this existential threat workers must unite and implement the integration of science into economic planning under socialism.

See also: Consciousness raising: personal and social — The struggle for change

Overwhelmed by the severity of the climate impacts and the resulting human suffering, Abramoff, who was completing her postdoctorate in France at the time, began volunteering for Extinction Rebellion, helping proofread the activist group’s documents and media statements. Once she returned to the U.S. to take up her position at Oak Ridge, she was ready to risk arrest, which she did when she joined the global Scientist Rebellion protest in Washington, D.C., on April 6.

She couldn’t sleep the night before, she recalls. However, she wasn’t nervous about the experience of being in a processing cell “but of not actually being able to accomplish the task, which was to chain myself with four other women to the White House gate”, she says. “And we managed it.”

Abramoff went on to be arrested six more times, most recently for chaining herself to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, whose approval U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law last year. The $6.6bn pipeline, which is set to carry 56.6 million cubic metres (2 billion cubic feet) of shelled gas a day across West Virginia and Virginia, is estimated to emit 89 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times that she penned shortly after her dismissal from Oak Ridge, Abramoff describes how being a “well-behaved scientist” did not have any tangible effects. “I’m all for decorum, but not when it will cost us the earth,” she writes.