Worldwide, millions took to the streets on September 20, the first of the two planned climate general strikes.

Green taxes and individual lifestyle changes shift the burden onto consumers, making workers and the poor pay for climate change, while subsidising big business which creates it. Foodbanks and poundshops do not provide green options. Make the polluters pay, not their involuntary consumers.

The climate disaster is already here for the millions across the world fleeing floods, fires and desertification. But now we have been given a deadline: in October 2018, UN scientists warned we have less than 12 years to keep global warming below 1.5C, the Paris Agreement’s goal, or face catastrophic, runaway climate change

The march was led by school students, followed by young and older people. At its biggest march was around 8-10,000 people. We filled the whole of Briggate whilst waiting to set off on to the Headrow.

Surrounded by lollipop placards brandishing “system change not climate change!” slogans, we joined the forefront of the march lapping the city centre retail quarters, passing out leaflets along the way. Quotes such as “it’s my future” stood out to me in the fervor of the marching protesters, taking action simultaneously with other cities across the world in a stand against climate change, capitalism and corporate ecocide.

With the onset of the dry season in the Amazon region, an inferno of forest fires has hit the Brazilian states of Rondônia, Pará, Mato Grosso and Amazonas. Satellite images show rainforest the size of one and a half football pitches being consumed every minute.This is a disaster not only for the inhabitants of the Amazon region itself but for everyone on the planet.

Our perspectives on the current global situation, League for the Fifth International Congress in Berlin, June 2019

Extinction Rebellion (XR) captured the headlines of the mainstream media and the imagination of millions this Easter, as its activists occupied key tourist locations and major traffic arteries in London for a week or more.

In February tens of thousands of young people showed the way forward in the fight against climate change by walking out of their schools and protesting.

School students lead the way in the fight for system change not climate change

By Chris Close “WE WILL not be led quietly to annihilation by the elites and government… it is not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself.” So reads the opening proclamation of Extinction Rebellion, the new environmental movement launched […]

WHEN PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump selects one of the most notorious climate sceptics, Scott Pruit, to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) you know the planet is in trouble. Pruitt, is part of the team waging a legal action by 28 states against the EPA to halt Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, an attempt to […]

THIS year has seen some of the worst floods, with areas from Aberdeenshire down to Lancashire under water. Large swathes of Northern cities like York, Leeds and Manchester were filled with muddy brown water. Families caught up in the deluge of Storms Desmond and Eva not only had their Christmas ruined, but face months of […]

  By James Copley As we go to press, the death toll from the super typhoon Haiyan is rapidly mounting in the Philippines as it smashed through the Pacific nation. Deaths are reported to have topped 10,000, yet the true count is still far from complete.   The typhoon has wrought destruction across the islands. […]

By James Copley Militant protesters in the mid-Sussex town of Balcombe have temporarily disrupted energy firm Cuadrilla’s exploratory drilling for oil. Perhaps more importantly, they have brought to public attention the controversy around hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking”. Through persistent acts of civil disobedience and camping out on the site of the drilling, courageous activists […]

A recent US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report shows CO2 emissions rising for the second highest time on record in 2012. While largely caused by the expansion of coal-fuelled power plants in the developing world, it won’t have been helped much by US and UK plans to expand shale gas extraction. Another factor […]

THE CAPITALISTS’ LUST for oil and gas knows no boundaries. From wars to extortion, economic sanctions and environmental disasters, these are all just unfortunate blips in the profit figures for those who control the globe’s ever-dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. In recent years rising oil prices, in part due to the instability caused by imperialist war […]

IN PREVIOUS editorials we have argued for a strategy to beat the cuts, centring on the need to win the unions to an all out general strike to smash the austerity programme and kick out Cameron and Clegg. This month I want to use this editorial to discuss something not covered in the rest of […]

World leaders failed the planet yet again in Cancún, Mexico when the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP16) could not reach a legally binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out in 2012. Less than half as many delegates and observers attended, compared to the 45,000 at the previous COP15 […]

The systemic causes of the climate crisis and the role of the working class in solving it.