We will never settle for a few reforms or a few crumbs.

“Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.” –Murray Bookchin

Climate change poses a major threat to the future of humanity. Today, climate change threatens life itself. Extreme weather, rising seas, ocean acidification and biodiversity collapse will undermine many of the eco-systems on which we depend. Climate change poses a significant threat to future social and economic activities. Today the single biggest threat to our climate is the group of billionaires who profit most from its pollution and, in turn, push government policies that promote more fossil fuels. Our planet is being held hostage by a handful of profiteers who wield decisive power over our governments. They seek economic boom even if it means ecological doom. Climate change compounded by the concentration of wealth and distribution of poverty is pushing natural and humans systems to a perfect storm of tipping points. There is little doubt that the docility of the world population has contributed greatly to keeping intact the increasingly unequal, barbaric and rapacious society that is global capitalism. In our struggle, the Socialist Party depend for the success of our message on people who are prepared to think.

Under the capitalist system, “production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production” (Marx, Capital). The nature of the monopoly capitalist class is to seek profits. In exploiting energy resources, the capitalists do not consider the rational use of natural resources but only seek maximum profits. Capitalism means waste. Armament expansion, war and wars are bottomless pits in consuming and squandering resources. The world, however, could be experiencing the dawn of a revolutionary transformation to becoming an ecologically literate and socially just civilisation. Imagine technology integrated with the ecosystem.

"In London," Karl Marx wrote "they can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense".  Marx was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas, and soil can be treated as a "free gift of nature" to business.

The Socialist Party’s analysis of the environment under capitalism shows how saving the planet is inextricably linked to transforming our society. Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty are not problems that can be solved by the market system. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by corporations devoted to profit above all else. According to the Socialist Party, capitalism is an economic system profoundly at odds with a sustainable planet. The exploitation of nature is as fundamental to the profit system as the exploitation of working people. Capitalist farming is unsustainable because it inevitably starves the soil of nutrients. It is nothing less than "an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil" as Marx pointed out.  As Engels later put it, “The present poisoning of the air, water, and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country” under “one single vast plan.” Despite its potential cost to society in terms of increased labour time, he viewed this fusion as “no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalist and wage-workers.”

The Socialist Party is seeking ultimately to establish a “steady-state economy” or “zero-growth” society which corresponds to what Marx called “simple reproduction” – a situation where human needs were in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilized at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods. The point about such a situation is that there will no longer be any imperative need to develop productivity, i.e. to cut costs in the sense of using fewer resources; nor will there be the blind pressure to do so that is exerted under capitalism through the market.

In socialism, we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular, the vital need to protect the environment. What it means is that we should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be reduced. This will be the opposite of to-day's capitalist system’s cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

The case for socialism starts from a concern for the suffering of humans and look for a solution to this. This makes socialists “anthropocentric” as opposed to the “ecocentrism” – Nature first – of many environmentalist activists. The plunder, looting and rape of Nature is rejected as not being in the interests of the human species, not because the interests of Nature come first. Nor do socialists say humans, as such, are a pollutant or a parasite on Nature. The materialist conception of history makes the way humans are organised to meet their material needs the basis of any society. Humans meet their material needs by transforming parts of the rest of nature into things that are useful to them; this, in fact, is what production is. So the basis of any society is its mode of production which, again, is the same thing as its relationship to the rest of nature. Humans survive by interfering in the rest of nature to change it for their own benefit. Environmentalists are wrong to see this interference as inherently destructive of nature. It might do this, but there is no reason, nothing inherent, why it has to. That humans have to interfere in nature is a fact of human existence. How humans interfere in nature, on the other hand, depends on the kind of society they live in. Capitalism differs from previous class societies in that under it production is not for direct use, not even of the ruling class, but for sale on a market. The competitive pressures to minimise costs and maximise sales, profit-seeking and blind economic growth, with all their destructive effects on the rest of nature, are built-in to capitalism. These make capitalism inherently environmentally unfriendly.

Human beings are both a part and a product of nature and humans have a unique significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force, since humans are precisely that part of nature which has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. True, that at the present time, the form human intervention in the rest of Nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour. In this sense the human species is the brain and voice of Nature i.e. Nature become self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system, change from capitalism to a community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs.

Naomi Klein is also dismissive of capitalist solutions. Geo-engineering – deflecting the sun's rays with space-based mirrors, for example – is "magical thinking". Emission-trading schemes are a shell game, easily exploited by profiteers and frauds. Then there are the "philanthro-capitalists" – Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett – all of whom have, at various times, promised to use their billions to help save the planet but thus far delivered little. The only alternative, then, is to throw the whole system out and begin again. Replace the profit motive with the justice motive. It sounds radical, she says, and it is. But we have our backs up against the climate wall. There is no time for tinkering, no room for compromise. "People are angry," she says. "The system is failing them on multiple levels. If ever there was a moment for transformative change, it's now."

On this point, the Socialist Party and she can agree.