‘Planning for the Planet – how socialism could save the environment’ is essential reading for anyone serious about ensuring urgent global action is taken to prevent the growing threat of environmental catastrophe.
Back in 2011, the link between rising Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and the increase in extreme weather events was still just a theoretical debate. Now it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, based on measurements of ocean temperatures.
But, as Pete warns in his Introduction, the “gap between the green rhetoric of governments in the industrialised capitalist countries and their feeble policy response has become a chasm”. The prospect of even limited cooperation over climate change between those capitalist powers is receding rapidly as global antagonisms rise following the election of Trump, a man who has repeatedly described climate change as a ‘hoax’.
Pete stresses that the arguments of climate deniers like Trump have to be taken up and answered. Their attempts to describe global warming due to human activity as “fake news” have no basis in reality. However, these denials are being pushed by ‘Big Oil’ in pursuit of continuing profit. But they also feed into working-class scepticism about what they are told by big business in general and corporate sponsored science in particular. These fears are heightened by some economists proposing supposedly ‘green’ eco-tax policies that place the burden of paying for the crisis onto the shoulders of the world’s workers and poor, instead of pursuing a socialist solution.
Pete writes that the “warning lights are clearly flashing” that temperatures will continue to rise, based on present trends to at least 2.9◦C above pre-industrial levels. That would leave around 30% of the global population exposed to the risk of flooding, and well over a billion to drought. These kind of temperature rises are also likely to trigger disastrous ‘tipping points’ in global systems, which risk accelerating global warming uncontrollably. These include the disruption of ocean currents, melting of ice sheets, and release of methane presently trapped in permafrost.
But Pete is clear from the outset of the book that, while making clear that the threat to global climate is at a critical level, we must challenge any fatalistic idea that nothing can now be done. It’s true that some changes may already be irreversible, sadly such as the future of most, if not all, of the word’s coral reefs. That alone is an indictment of the profit system. But the latest scientific conclusions, summarised by the 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are that “it is still possible to avoid the worst effects of global warming if decisive action is taken in the near future”. However, if left to capitalism, then that’s a very big ‘if’ indeed!
Pete’s book provides a concise and compelling summary as to why “only the socialist organisation of society can create the conditions needed to urgently and seriously deal with the danger to the planet”.
Chapter One of the book summarises the evidence for climate change and its effects. Pete stresses that, given the complexity of global climate systems, there is inevitably uncertainty about predicting exactly how quickly future warming will accelerate. However, both the trends and the threats are undeniable. The question is not whether we risk an imminent global climate disaster, but whether – and how – mitigating actions can be urgently taken to prevent it.
Pete raises the possibility that, faced with a climate crisis, capitalist leaders might suddenly panic and rush to quick ‘geo-engineering’ fixes to try and reverse global warming. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson have already been funding research into ways of injecting mineral particles into the atmosphere to reproduce the kind of ‘global cooling’ experienced after major volcanic eruptions block the sun’s rays. But major eruptions also have unpredictable effects on rainfall patterns too. These approaches could create more problems than they solve.
In Chapter Two, Pete summarises some of the different ways that capitalism has been responsible for pollution and environmental destruction in the pursuit of profit. He includes nuclear fission power as one of those threats. Some, such as prominent environmentalist George Monbiot, would disagree, backing nuclear power as being the ‘lesser evil’ compared to burning fossil fuels for electricity generation. Pete disagrees, stressing that nuclear power is always susceptible to the risk of the kind of serious accidents that took place at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. While the chances of an accident happening may be low, the consequences if one does occur can be very serious indeed.
Moreover, the main unresolved issue with nuclear fission reactors remains how to safely store its toxic radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years to come. This, along with the expense of decommissioning nuclear power stations, presents a huge long-term cost which the supporters of nuclear power tend to ignore. Pete points out that, by 2023, there was already 88,000 tonnes of nuclear waste in storage in the USA alone and concludes that “no safe storage method has yet been found, an unresolved problem it is irresponsible to increase by generating yet more waste”.
In Chapters Three and Four, Pete analyses why capitalism will never be able to resolve the climate crisis that it has created. He points out that evidence of the looming climate threat caused by GHG had been emerging for decades but was never taken seriously, let alone acted upon. As long ago as 1938, a paper presented to the British Meteorological Society had already proposed a link between increased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from the burning of fossil fuels and an increase in global temperatures. The computer modelling that became possible from the 1960s predicted – with some accuracy in retrospect - significant temperature increases due to CO2 emissions by 2000.
However, it was only in the late 1980s that capitalist leaders internationally began to acknowledge that global warming was a genuine threat. But Pete explains that, even then, the convening of a series of UN climate summits, the first held in Rio in 1992, generated plenty of publicity and backslapping but achieved very little in terms of concrete actions. This was inevitable given that the supposed ‘solutions’ on the negotiating table were always rooted in neo-liberal capitalist market approaches, rather than employing direct state intervention to ensure action was taken to invest in green jobs and sustainable energy production.
The 1997 Kyoto summit agreed to a ‘cap and trade’ system of carbon trading permits that allowed polluting companies to offset their ‘excess’ emissions in return for sponsoring ‘green’ projects in poorer nations. The model was always flawed, with caps set at too high a level, and with numerous loopholes that meant it effectively sanctioned a continuing rise in GHG emissions. But even if more rigorous emission caps had been stringently enforced, the refusal by both the US and China to participate always meant that these market mechanisms were doomed to fail.
Even blocs like the EU that stated they would agree larger emission cuts were cynically making their commitment contingent on the USA doing the same – which they knew wouldn’t happen. The EU’s offer of a 20% cut was also, in reality, just half of that because the other 10% was to be met by phony ‘offsetting’. A particularly cynical type of ‘offset’, pushed in particular by the UK as part of the negotiations leading up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit, was for rich nations to be able to buy ‘forest credits’. This would supposedly discourage further clearances of globally essential CO2 absorbing rainforests. But plantations cleared for agriculture were to be included in the definition of ‘forest’, so encouraging the exact opposite result in practice!
But the 2009 Copenhagen summit collapsed without any agreement on the way forward. The 2015 Paris summit (COP21) attempted to patch together a global deal but only managed to do so through what Pete describes as a “completely voluntary, non-binding” agreement that marked “a major retreat, if not surrender, in attempts by the ‘international community’ to seriously address global warming”.
Before COP21, global nations had been asked to come to the summit with pledges that might at least restrict global temperature rises to a maximum of 2◦C above pre-industrial levels. But the pledges made, even in the unlikely event that they had been stuck to, would only have limited rises to a disastrous 2.7◦C to 3.0◦C!
Since then, the backsliding on firm commitments has only got worse, while actual global CO2 emissions have increased. This when the IPCC states that a 45% cut in carbon output is needed by 2030 to have any chance of keeping global warming below the 1.5◦C target agreed at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021!
In short, even though the more far-sighted representatives of capitalism can see that global disaster is looming, the demands of their decaying profit-driven system of ‘monopoly capitalism’, or to be more precise, ‘imperialism’, prevents them from taking the required action.
Pete sets aside four pages of his book to summarise Lenin’s theory of Imperialism, and to explain how the features of this ‘highest stage of capitalism’ apply in today’s global economy. He explains that “despite globalisation, the nation state has grown in importance as the defender, by force ultimately, of monopolies under its jurisdiction … and [while it continues to exist] makes international agreement necessary to reverse global warming a remote possibility”.
Economists have shown that the costs of the dire consequences of climate change far outweigh the costs of acting now to mitigate them. But no individual corporation is going to take action that threatens its short-term profits and allows its international competitors to gain at their expense.
Pete looks at the position of US corporations, rooted in a nation state that produces 11% of global emissions with only 4% of its population. They will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to strike a global deal that makes the “polluter pay proportionately”, just as the fossil fuel lobby have worked hard to subvert the threat of Biden’s ‘Green New Deal’ provisions cutting into their profits.
In turn, US corporations fear that they have no way of enforcing any deal on its Chinese rivals. They know that, just like the USA, China - now the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases with 27% of global output – will evade taking any serious action if it threatens their economy.
‘Planning for the Planet’ includes the latest figures from China showing that, since the Covid crisis, GHG emissions in China have started to rapidly increase again – by an average of 3.8% in 2021-23 – driven by the rapid expansion of carbon intensive industries like construction. Yes, the Chinese state has extensively invested in renewable energy sources like wind and solar energy, although driven by a strategic interest in cornering the market in green technologies, rather than any concern for the environment. At the same time, it has massively expanded coal fired power stations too. As Pete concludes, “there is little reason to think that China will meet its self-declared target of emissions peaking in 2030”.
As Chapter Five states, “the culpability of imperialism … for the developing environmental catastrophe is also accepted by many if not most green activists”. However, the solutions argued for by too many of those activists fail to recognise the need for imperialism to therefore be challenged and overthrown.
Instead, some greens look to more ‘humane’ market systems as a solution to the crisis, to a society where small local firms run the economy instead of the polluting exploitative monopoly corporations. But, just as Marx analysed, the laws of the capitalist market would inevitably lead to the development of monopolies at the expense of rival producers.
Another commonly held approach, one that has often underpinned Green Party policies in the UK, asserts the need for a ‘steady state economy’ that fixes limits to both global population and production, to provide sustainability. But doesn’t that approach imply that further economic growth is therefore a problem, and that the world’s poor will just have to accept that it remains in poverty?
Pete explains that some greens recognise this flaw in the ‘steady state’ approach and instead argue for ‘green growth’ that would allow for growth in the ‘Global South’ as well as tackling climate change. But their strategy usually depends on the imposition of ‘eco-taxes’ which would not only hit the poorest hardest, as they have to spend a greater proportion of their incomes on energy, but would also be fiercely resisted by big business and imperialism.
‘New Technology’ – for example in the form of sustainable energy and transport systems - is also seen as enabling ‘green growth’. But sclerotic capitalism is unwilling to invest the sums required unless there is a clear short term profit to be made.
Others look to a form of ‘Green Keynesianism’, “a combination of borrowing, printing money and taxing the rich … to pay for a switch to renewable energy and other measures to cut emissions”, as Pete puts it. These activists also look to trade union action as a way of pressurising both individual companies to switch to renewable production and on national governments to carry out such a radical program.
Trade union action is undoubtedly always essential in forcing through gains at the expense of the bosses. However, what is gained in struggle is taken back again eventually as long as ownership and control remain in their hands. And a serious program of taxing the rich would provoke a storm of opposition from the ruling-class, along with demands from the money markets that other swingeing cuts were made to pay for the cost of investment in climate interventions.
Faced with that level of opposition, Pete explains that trade unions would need to organise general strike action, where “environmental struggles were linked to a broader movement of the trade unions …. This would inevitably raise the issue of capitalism or socialism”.
And that’s the issue that’s going to prove decisive when it comes to preventing climate catastrophe. As Pete argues, “The evidence is now overwhelming that despite their fine words, the ruling classes in Britain and internationally, do not intend to take any meaningful action to tackle climate change in the foreseeable future …. Sustainable growth on a capitalist basis is not feasible, partly because the methods it can employ to achieve this are inadequate and flawed, but mainly because imperialist rivalry will prevent the international co-operation that is essential to make progress. Unless the capitalist system is replaced, the world will continue to hurtle headlong to disaster since the environment will still be treated as a 'free good' by the multinationals that dominate production and will be exploited at virtually no cost to themselves”.
In Chapter Six, Pete sets out both the main elements of a socialist programme for the environment and also of the democratically planned nationalised economy required to implement it. He stresses that “no technological breakthrough is required, just the wider adoption and further development of existing technology, including wind and solar power”.
He points out that Britain has the potential to develop a surplus capacity in wind energy, while some other parts of the globe could do the same from solar energy. These renewable sources need to be linked together in a national - and international - power grid, alongside developing ways to store ‘excess’ energy that might be generated on, for example, particularly windy days. This could include the generation of ‘green hydrogen’ from the electrolysis of water, which could become an important fuel for energy-intensive applications such as cement manufacture.
One supposed ‘solution’ that Pete discounts is the use of bio-fuels produced from corn and palm oil. In practice, their production does “not lead to a net reduction of greenhouse gases”.
As cars and lorries account for a significant proportion of GHG emissions, Pete stresses the importance of expanding public transport and rail freight. He also sets out a ‘Green Programme for the Car Industry’ that includes retooling factories and retraining workers to develop alternative production. That could include electric vehicles but also an expanded green energy industry, such as parts for wind turbines, as well as for tram and rail transport.
Pete raises the question as to whether air travel would have a place in a future sustainable world. Aviation emissions are another major contributor to GHG output. However, the development of international links and travel can also contribute to the global co-operation vital to build the required globally planned socialist economy. Investment in a subsidised high-speed international rail network could certainly provide part of the solution.
It might become possible to develop viable hydrogen powered air travel, but this would require considerable further development. That’s also true for other potential ways to cut CO2 levels such as nuclear fusion power and the development of safe ‘carbon capture’ systems like carbon mineralisation, which would allow CO2 to be safely removed from the atmosphere. The energy efficiency of all manufacturing production and of housing also needs to be urgently improved.
But the key message in Pete’s book is that none of these solutions will ever be implemented under the capitalist market and inter-imperialist rivalry that is currently destroying the planet. Instead, the key firms that dominate the world’s economy need to be nationalised to allow rational democratic global planning.
Pete points out that just “the biggest 200 global firms had sales that were equivalent to 28.3% of world GDP … the wealth controlled by these corporations is significantly greater”. Bringing these firms alone into democratically planned public ownership would save energy by avoiding “the duplication of resources, planned obsolescence and wide-scale destruction and then rebuilding of factories, plant and machinery in capitalism’s slump/boom cycle … At a more fundamental level, the inevitable tendency of competitive markets is to degrade the environment. The remedy of a democratic, planned socialist society put forward to combat the danger of climate change, equally applies when addressing other environmental threats”.
The book also stresses that, while workers lose their jobs and livelihoods when capitalist firms decide to switch production, this would not be the case under a socialist plan of production. Instead, “if conversion took place in a planned manner over a period of one or two decades, where all decisions were democratically determined and profit was not the deciding factor, then jobs and living standards would actually benefit”.
The combined savings made by ending unemployment and freeing the creative power of the working-class, and from ending the waste of luxury expenditure for the super-rich, arms spending and advertising, would easily provide the resources to carry out a programme to rescue the planet from environmental disaster, and to raise living standards too.
A carbon neutral society would also require more skilled work than will ever be available under decaying capitalism. Pete recommends a study by the Campaign Against Climate Change which calculated a net gain of 1.6 million jobs in the UK, in areas like renewable energy generation, home insulation and renovation, and public transport industries. Nuclear power workers also need not fear for their future as the work of decommissioning and safeguarding existing plant will be necessary for many decades to come.
Chapter Seven of the book is of a more specialist character, summarising how a planned economy would operate with reference to the writings of Marx. It also draws on Wassily Leontief’s ‘Input-Output Analysis’, initially developed when he was researching the Soviet economy in the 1920s. As well as providing a theoretical underpinning to the socialist programme for the environment outlined in the rest of the book, this chapter is also very useful for anyone who is interested in finding out more about the details of how a planned economy could operate in today’s world.
Techniques such as ‘Input-Output Analysis’ would help to ensure that different sectors working within an overall economic plan maintain a mutual balance. In the 1960s, Leontief himself also recognised how his techniques could be usefully applied to include environmental costs. This would help a socialist planned economy to identify sectors with the highest CO2 intensity.
However, Pete points out that “planning is not primarily a technical question. Rather, its success will depend on creating institutions the working class can use to democratically control production from the workplace upwards. The key element will be the conscious control of working people, on a day-to-day basis, of the decisions that shape their lives”.
He describes how such planning would operate at three levels: setting overall priorities nationally and internationally, not least environmental ones; efficiently planning production to meet demand at an industry or sectoral level, while also taking into account its pollution overheads; then, in turn, planning with input from the ‘shopfloor’ at the level of an individual enterprise. A balance has to be struck between centralisation and decentralisation, made possible through the operation of democratic bodies that exercise real control at all levels.
Projections of demand would be “determined by obtaining information from powerful proactive consumer bodies and by using the very sophisticated market research tools developed under capitalism. To organise the movement of goods between industries, avoiding bottlenecks, it will be possible to use techniques such as operational research, developed by big capitalist monopolies to plan the complex movement of goods between their operations around the world”. Such democratically elected consumer bodies would also have a role in planning the range of consumer choice available and in ensuring high quality goods are produced, alongside some element of market mechanisms that might be necessary, certainly at the outset.
Pete stresses the importance of rearming the workers’ movement, thrown back ideologically since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, to advocate the viability and necessity of democratic socialist planning.
Chapter Eight, “In Defence of Socialist Planning”, addresses the reasons behind that collapse, which stemmed from the undemocratic command system of economic management under Stalinism. Nevertheless, Pete explains with comparative production data how the potential of socialist planning, even in the distorted form that developed in the Soviet Union, was initially demonstrated by its unprecedented speed of industrialisation and its rapid recovery from the destruction of World War Two.
However, top-down directives became increasingly unsuited to planning a more complex technologically based consumer economy. Its privileged bureaucrats also became increasingly indifferent to the environmental destruction that resulted from their misrule. “Missing was the essential element of democratic control in the allocation of resources, where the consumers’ needs are fed back to the planning bodies and acted upon … As a result, economic growth went into long term decline and came to a halt almost completely in the mid-1980s”.
Pete answers the criticisms of capitalist economists that suggest a planned economy will always fail because prices need to be set by the workings of the ‘free market’. Instead, Pete explains the mechanisms that would be used to set prices within a socialist plan of production.
He also counters Green arguments that continued growth means inevitable ecological devastation and even, from some of them, that the world’s population needs to be forcibly controlled. Any such top-down impositions will understandably provoke a hostile response from the world’s poor, setting back the international solidarity needed to produce planned global solutions. Their application would require a totalitarian police state – more of a regime of “eco-Stalinism” than “eco-socialism”, as Pete correctly points out.
Pete argues that it will be the security of living without poverty that will “lessen perceived need for the protection of big families” as well as “access by women to education, good jobs and the provision of free contraception”. He adds that “there is a trend away from conspicuous consumption among the affluent middle classes, where leisure time for personal development is increasingly being put above further consumption. Under socialism, as living standards go up, free time increases dramatically and opportunities for individual development rise, a similar trend away from commodity consumption will appear. The acquisitive habits of individuals fostered by the market economy, the driving force of economic behaviour in a society based on scarcity, will gradually disappear as uncertainty and worry about the future recedes and high-pressure selling is removed. These factors indicate the possibility will exist for a gradual levelling-off of [global] consumption, albeit at a higher level that exists now, into a steady-state equilibrium”.
The final chapter of this excellent book summarises its key evidence and arguments. It points out that we face a world where inter-imperialist rivalry is on the rise, and where ‘green technology’ – and competition to secure the supplies of lithium and cobalt required for them - form a key part of the sharpening trade wars. Yet, at the same time, the imperialist powers – and corporations that once pretended to be ‘green’ like BP and Unilever - are retreating rapidly from taking the urgently required action needed to tackle global warming. The UN COP summits continue to be convened but are no longer able to reach any kind of unified global agreement.
It is against this background that Pete ends his book with a telling “Warning to the Workers’ Movement”. He is adamant that, while the situation is grave, it would be wrong to accept that it is too late to reverse climate change and that we just have to adapt to its destructive effects.
However, that also requires “political lessons to be drawn from the 30 years wasted by the representatives of capitalism in the battle against climate change … A change in the social system is the only way to allow us to live in harmony with the natural environment … . This needs common ownership of the means of life”.
The book ends on a note of optimism, reflecting on how climate change induced drought was a factor behind the revolutionary uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011. Yes, if the workers’ movement fails to act to challenge the environmental and political crisis, then far-right forces could grow from the ensuing chaos. “On the other hand, if the organised working class intervenes with a socialist programme to draw around it the multi-millions affected by the crisis there would be a possibility to build a movement to transform society and as a result, for the first time, seriously tackle the environmental crisis”.
