As of September 4, 1,300 people have been killed and 4,000 are missing in the disaster in Nepal. The stage for this was set by climate change. The planet has been set on fire by the burning of oil, gas and coal by the global system of capitalism-imperialism. Just a month ago, deadly heat waves across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America caused 10,000 excess deaths in Europe alone. Wildfires now burn with such intensity that they create their own weather which further intensifies the fires. Floods that engineers once expected only once every hundred years are coming one after another. 

The places hardest hit by climate change right now are those which have been the most exploited by the system, have the least capitalist development, and have contributed almost nothing to the problem, as in Nepal. This is a sharp expression of the profound injustice of the system, and of the climate catastrophe, in this world that screams out for revolution.

Disaster in the Himalayas

On the morning of August 26, a huge mass of ice and rock nearly a half-mile wide broke from a section of the Langtang Lirung Glacier near the border of Nepal and Tibet. It plummeted about three-quarters of a mile down the Himalayan mountains, the tallest mountain chain on the planet.

The collapse was strong enough to cause a 5.2-magnitude seismic shock and send a massive wall of mud and rocks down the Bhotekoshi River system, a major trade route between Nepal and China along which tens of thousands of people live. Mud, ice, rocks and water traveled more than 60 miles at speeds reaching 112 miles per hour, washing away roads, power plants, and entire villages. One survivor said, “It exploded like a bomb.”

A 68-year-old survivor said from his hospital bed, “It was a huge gush of mud coming straight towards us. As it got closer, it kept rising higher and higher. When I saw it enter our home, I tried to grab my wife’s hand and take her to the terrace. But she was swept away by the mud.” 

A tourism operator said, “There are no human-made things, no human settlement left. Everything is just flat.”

The death toll in Nepal is likely to rise significantly as workers dig through mud and debris and travel to communities that are difficult to reach. Many of those missing are workers in hydroelectric plants. There is a serious threat of more flooding. Hospitals are overflowing and people are being buried in mass graves.

Scientists say decades of warming had weakened the glacier and the mountain underneath it, creating the conditions for the disaster. Dr. Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist, told the Science Media Centre, “These high temperatures would have weakened the snowpack, filled crevasses with water and thawed the bonds between ice and rock that hold these glaciers in place.”

Speaking about the impact that climate change had on the disaster, Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria said, “What happened yesterday is unfortunately the new normal. It’s going to get worse from here onwards.” 

The Climate Catastrophe and Imperialism’s Global Inequalities

Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries, is paying a heavy price for a problem it did not create. Nepal contributes almost nothing to the greenhouse gases driving climate change. The United States leads the world in oil and gas production and produces 260 times as much carbon dioxide (the main gas causing climate change) as Nepal. This fact alone screams out the urgent need for profound transformation of the entire world order.

The villages buried beneath mud in Nepal were not destroyed by an unavoidable act of nature, but fundamentally by a global system which cannot stop producing fossil fuel, burning fossil fuel, and fighting wars involving control of fossil fuel. That system, and that “world order,” have a name: capitalism-imperialism, a system which dominates and exploits the planet, and in which a handful of rich countries suck the blood of the humans in Asia, Africa and Latin America. People see the floods, the fires, the disasters. Yet the level of protest and popular understanding are far behind the enormity and pace of the climate crisis. Urgently needed right now: people who are on a mission to wake up those who are sleepwalking as one disaster follows on the heels of another. It is urgent for people to break out of such extremely lowered sights, looking for non-solutions that leave the real source of the problem, the capitalist-imperialist system, untouched. This is all the more unacceptable when the reality is, by breaking outside this system, there is a whole different way the world can be.

“The rooftops of the world are caving in”

One important expression of the climate crisis is that glaciers all over the world are disappearing. An article in the journal Nature found that they lost 273 billion tons of ice each year between 2000 and 2023. More than half of the world’s glaciers will disappear by the end of the century. 

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, during a 2023 trip to Nepal, said the country’s huge mountains have lost one-third of their ice in just over 30 years due to global warming. He explained “the rooftops of the world are caving in.” 

Glaciers are the world's natural water towers and reservoirs, helping sustain rivers that supply drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower for more than two billion people. The threat from glaciers melting is not just that masses of ice and mountains will break off as happened in Nepal or that dams will burst on lakes formed by melting glaciers. Disappearing glaciers also means that communities are forced to adapt to a world where water no longer arrives when and where it once did. Places that people have lived and worked for hundreds or thousands of years will become unlivable. This is the world that capitalism-imperialism is barreling toward. 

A System Lurching Toward Unspeakable Horrors

One disaster after another, and decades of scientific warnings are repeatedly ignored, denied, or given lip service by those in power. Every year capitalist imperialist powers burn more fossil fuels, pollute the atmosphere with more climate-heating greenhouse gases, and drive the world’s temperature to new records.

In the face of the unrelenting assault, huge numbers of young people feel that there is no hope. It is morally and politically abhorrent to do nothing— but most people have no idea what to do about a problem this big.

The system is leading humanity and the natural world off a cliff. The problem is not greed, ignorance, or the fossil fuel companies but the system itself. This system, driven by its inner nature and dynamics, will continue to burn fossil fuels despite the horrific consequences.

And now, Trump/MAGA fascism has taken this to a whole new level. While glaciers disappear and people are buried beneath mountains of mud, Trump was calling climate change, “the greatest con-job ever perpetrated on the world.” He is dismantling the scientific bodies that make it possible to understand what is happening with the climate as part of a society-wide assault on science. Trump is openly seizing Venezuela’s large oil reserves, a blatant act of piracy and plunder that will only contribute to even more spewing of fossil fuels. 

There are key things that have to be confronted: as we have argued, the climate catastrophe comes from deep within the operation of this system (for in-depth, scientific analysis of how capitalism cannot stop destroying the planet, go here, here and here). In a situation this dire, everyone should be urgently searching for what the answer is to this crisis and should refuse to be confined within the framework of what is “acceptable” and “legitimate” by the standards of capitalist America. Everyone should critically reject political solutions that call for tepid reforms within the existing system, like carbon credits, limiting climate footprints, and waiting for capitalism to choose “renewables.” There should be no tolerance for focusing on elections as the quintessential way to change things—this is a trap and a snare for anyone seeking real change. (One basic fact: in the U.S. emissions have continued to rise without stopping under BOTH political parties.)

And those who seek deeply and with intellectual courage will find not only that working to reform this system cannot solve the environmental crisis; but even more important, they will find that an answer exists, in the radical and revolutionary new communism developed by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, and in the concrete framework for an emancipatory socialist society. Here is how Raymond Lotta describes how this new society will deal with the environment: 

The new socialist society will put the interests of the preservation and repair of the planet's ecosystems above its own national development. It will encourage and give scientific, technical, and organizational backing to bold international initiatives to prevent widespread collapse of coral reefs, tropical forests, and other ecosystems—and to make it possible both for scientists and non-scientists to cooperate and collaborate internationally on an unprecedented scale.

Everyone should be digging into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America which in addition to addressing the environmental crisis in a pathbreaking way, provides a blueprint for a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture.

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Mountains are collapsing, rivers are disappearing, and entire societies are being pushed toward catastrophe while those in power accelerate the destruction.

“We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.”
—Bob Avakian