“SYSTEM change, not climate change” runs a slogan carried on banners and chanted on climate demos.
Fossil fuel giant BP’s announcement today it will slash funding for renewables while increasing investment in oil and gas extraction illustrates its truth.
BP is a highly profitable company. Its net income (meaning its profit after all expenses, including taxes and interest, are deducted) for last year was $8.9 billion (£7.2bn).
This was lower than profits in 2023 and 2022. But it is not annual comparisons that have raised shareholder pressure to switch back to maximal oil and gas extraction — BP has just announced a $25bn deal with Iraq’s government to work its oil and gas fields — at the expense of the climate.
It is envy of even greater profits at industry rivals. Shareholder returns on investment have averaged 36 per cent since 2020, compared to 82 per cent at Shell and 160 per cent at Exxon.
BP shareholders want a race to the top when it comes to profit — which means a race to the bottom for the planet. Inter-capitalist competition impels companies to behave in this way.
Marx once observed that the capitalist system tends to destroy its two sources of wealth, nature and human beings. Few sectors showcase this as dramatically as the highly polluting and ecologically devastating fossil fuel industry.
BP’s logic makes another thing clear: investment in renewables is not, currently, as profitable as in fossil fuels.
Which is why allowing for-profit corporations to dictate the terms of a green transition is madness. They will not try to help us meet targets for reducing fossil fuel use. It is not in their interests.
Were BP still a publicly owned company, its colossal profits of recent years could have stayed in ordinary people’s pockets through lower bills, or funded insulation schemes to reduce future energy usage, or indeed been invested in renewable energy. Decisions on how to allocate its huge resources could be made in the longer-term interest of the public, not in that of investors interested only in the value of their portfolios.
The case for energy nationalisation has been made — in some cases in costed detail, as in plans drawn up by the Unite union — and won, as far as the public are concerned. Surveys consistently show majority support for it.
The challenge is to turn that consensus into political action given the traditional party of the trade union movement, Labour, has set its face against it.
The blunt prioritisation of profit over planet should be an opportunity for the left.
In itself it is negative, part of the “drill, baby drill” mantra of the new leader of the so-called Free World, Donald Trump. Business feels no political pressure to “greenwash” its activities any longer.
But that makes the “system change, not climate change” argument starker. The pretence that governments and corporations care about the planet is increasingly threadbare. Not just climate denialists like Trump, but supposed centrists like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are, in practice, ditching all commitments to act.
This should bring together socialist and environmentalist movements, already mutually sympathetic, into a common movement for radical change.
Protests and direct actions are important, but isolated from the organised working-class movement are unlikely to force a ruling-class retreat.
For their part, unions represent a minority of workers and have a real opportunity to grow by joining hands with locally rooted campaigns for social and economic justice. Socialist militants active in each movement can consider how best to deepen ties, on what issues joint campaigns can be mounted.
There are divisions over the strategies for different sectors and industries. Divisions that can only be overcome by a common strategy to secure the interests of the whole working class — through the abolition of the capitalist system that dictates ecological vandalism of the sort just announced by BP.
