On March 20, 2023, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report. It is a synthesis and overall summation of the IPCC’s multiple reports and findings over the last few years. It is intended to raise public awareness and is part of preparations for the next round of United Nations (UN) climate negotiations, known as COP28. We recommend that readers watch the segment from last week's The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show which discusses this latest IPCC report and gives an overview on the climate emergency, as well as our previous coverage that analyzes the content of these various earlier reports (read here, here, and here, and watch this RNL show clip).

Here we want to highlight four essential and inescapable truths from this latest report, as well as another essential, yet inconvenient, truth that is NOT in the report.

1. Global temperatures have risen by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.98 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era in the late 1700s. It is unequivocal that human activity—primarily the burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas, as well as deforestation and other land use change—has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. In fact, global temperatures have increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2,000 years, with carbon dioxide (CO2) levels higher today than they have been in at least 2 million years. And global temperatures are continuing to rise.
2. Climate change has already caused substantial destruction to the planet's ecosystems, and is bringing about increasingly irreversible losses. Every region of the world, and every major ecosystem, is currently being impacted by the climate crisis, with worse yet to come.
3. The people who are the most vulnerable to, and most impacted by, climate change, those in the oppressed nations of the global South, have contributed the LEAST to the climate crisis. Currently, about 3.3 billion people—over 40 percent of the world's population—live in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change: food insecurity, clean water insecurity, drought, flooding, sea level rise, extreme weather events, etc.
4. The level of global greenhouse gas emissions (gases, especially carbon dioxide, which trap the sun's heat in the earth's atmosphere and which the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas is most responsible for) is continuing to rise, despite the fact that the basic scientific understanding of climate change has been known for decades. Without rapid and comprehensive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, global warming will increasingly threaten the very existence of a stable climate for humanity and much of the planet. The report says such reductions must come “this decade.” Yet no country—no major contributor to global warming—is currently on track to do this (and to this we would add that no country has or is acting on meaningful plans to do so!). IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee sounded this warning: “The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.” (emphasis ours)

The Missing, Inconvenient, but Liberating Truth

What’s missing from this report is the sobering and inconvenient truth that it is IMPOSSIBLE for this system to interact sustainably with the environment. Fossil fuels are poured into the foundations of capitalism-imperialism, and to reduce and abolish their use with the urgency, and on the scale and scope, needed would require nothing less than a revolution to overthrow this system and replace it with a radically different, liberating, and ecologically sustainable socialist economic-social system.  

There is a strategy for this revolution, a blueprint for this society, and the leadership to get us there. And this is not some far off pipe dream—this is a time when such a revolution becomes more possible in this very country. Making this revolution would give us the only real chance to seriously address and truly act on this crisis. Those who agonize, who are filled with dread and rage, over the climate crisis NEED to become a part of this revolution.