Scotland's Climate Emergency

Nicola Sturgeon has said she believes the world is facing a climate emergency and pledged to speed up efforts to achieve zero carbon emissions.

However, has she heeded Greta Thunberg's warning about North Sea oil who lambasted the expansion of the North Sea fossil fuel industry or does as SNP police has decreed, continue the drilling and shaping legislation to foster oil businesses.

How many fake promises and how much false hope are we going to be fed before we realise the truth? Climate change is changing the world we know and love. Our land, homes and food are at risk. The docility of the world population has contributed greatly to keeping intact the increasingly unequal, barbaric and rapacious society that is global capitalism. Because people believe there is no alternative to capitalism, it keeps on existing. The climate school Friday strikers and Extinction Rebellion have drawn attention to this issue. The fatal flaw means the continuation of the capitalist system which is the cause of the problems of global warming in the first place. Climate campaigners are firmly wedded to a form of capitalism, holding a belief that capitalism can be reformed so as to be compatible with achieving an environmentally sustainable society. The Socialist Party place ourselves unambiguously in the camp of those who argue that capitalism and a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature are not compatible. The excessive consumption of both renewal and non-renewable resources and the release of carbon emissions and waste that nature can’t absorb which currently goes on are not just accidental but an inevitable result of capitalism’s very essence. If the environmental crisis is to be solved, this system must go. What is required is political action - political action aimed at replacing this system by a new and different one.

The Socialist Party believe that if you share our concern for the well-being of people in our society for the welfare of Earth itself then we appeal to you as members of a long-established independent democratic movement which seeks by persuasion and worlds-wide peaceful political organisation to transform our present society into one fit for humankind. The problems of our planet cannot be solved within the existing structures of production and government. Our world is divided into national areas dominated by class minorities in each country, which, either by private or corporate ownership or by state bureaucratic parties monopolise the means of production. The class interests, values and drive for profit of the world-system have been the underlying reasons for the unprecedented destruction of life and resources throughout this century. This appalling process, made worse by new forms of pollution, including the cutting-down of the rain forests. This uncontrolled madness will continue unless we take the necessary democratic action to transform our way of life throughout the planet. Today many aware of past political errors, propose different approaches to the problems of humankind. They put forward schemes which though rightly concerned with holistic, ecologically benign, locally democratic, “human scale” production are still seen as being within the framework of money, wages, prices and profit. These proposals are attractive to a new political generation, which, failing to identify correctly the process responsible for our major problems, are likely to become a new wave of reformists.