This is the text of a talk I gave at the October 3rd Friends of Socialist China Conference marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People Republic in 1949.

I’m speaking in a personal capacity, because both the organisations I help to lead have a range of views – these are mine – but others are available.

There’s a tendency to put climate change in a separate box – in a way that downplays the enormity of its threat – largely because the consequences of dealing with it have to be transformative and mobilise society at all levels.

Becoming one item amongst others on a list allows it to drop off the radar in response to immediate pressures.

But an understanding that the climactic conditions for the survival of any kind of viable human civilisation are being actively destroyed by the way that civilisation functions at the moment should the framework into which everything else is put.

And the struggle for socialism in the 21st Century is best understood as the attempt by the global working class to salvage human society from the death wish, wars and ecological self destruction now openly on display – and being mobilised for – in the imperialist countries.

States that are already attempting to construct socialism – China above all – are crucial in this struggle.

I’d like to deal with three things in this talk

1. The scale of the crisis
2. The imperial path to self destruction
3. What China is doing

The UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects different futures depending on how much greenhouse gas emissions we generate from here on.

All projections have us over, at or close to a 2C increase above pre industrial averages by 2050.

The most optimistic projection gets us back down to 1.5C by 2100 – but that depends on a reduction in atmospheric GHGs for which, at the moment, there is no viable mechanism.

They also project a world in which the population has risen to 10 billion by 2070 and in which people will be – on average – 10 – 25% poorer.

The UK Met Office projects the chances of exceeding 1.5C by 2030 at 70%.

A report by the Faculty and Institute of Actuaries – the thinking wing of the insurance industry – and Exeter University, based on notions of “climate solvency”, adds in the social and economic costs of these projections.

At 2C up by 2050 that means a drop in global GDP of 10 -25% and 2 billion people dead. At 3C up by 2070, a 50% drop in global GDP and 4 billion dead.

That’s in under 50 years from now.

That this is even possible should concentrate minds of the urgency of doing everything we can to avoid it.

Climate impacts are already costly. The cost of climate related “natural disasters” in the US last year was $1 trillion. And we are already seeing increased deaths from heat, wildfires, floods. There are 100,000 glacial melt lakes forming in the Himalayas like the one that flooded in Nepal last month.

The tipping point in all this is when the costs of the accumulating and intensifying climate disasters overwhelms our capacity to cope with an recover from them.

The response of the dominant fraction of the ruling class to this – given political expression by the Trump administration (and its domestic mini-mes here) is to pretend that its not happening, or to brass it out.

“The world is getting cooler”. That was Trump at the UN. We’ve all noticed that this summer, haven’t we?

“We’re not afraid of climate change”. That was Marco Rubio beating his hairy little chest recently.

This may be because they believe their own nonsense

Many of them are, after all, “End of Times” evangelicals who interpret everything as a manifestation of the Book of Revelations.

Or they have a strategy of dealing with it by impoverishing the Global South, China included, so that its carbon footprint is pushed down far enough to let them, carry on as they are.

Or, as in a recent article in The Tablet, they interpret everything through the lens of a zero sum competition with China, in which China’s investment in electrification is a dastardly plot to over come the USA’s natural – possibly God given – advantages in having huge hydrocarbon reserves – which allows them to pose the domestic ” net zero movement” as a pro Chinese fifth column. We will be facing this sort of framing a lot more I suspect.

Or, they have just given up. As revealed by a tell all talk given at Davos by a high end sex worker – I read about this, I wasn’t there – who said that most of her clients were “resigned” to climate collapse and just “want to enjoy the here and now”. A sort of last days of Nazi Berlin approach.

Whatever they think, the bottom line on this is that the pursuit of US global energy dominance, with everything that flows from it – the intervention in Venezuela, siege of Cuba, turning Greenland into a military Protectorate, driving the Gaza genocide, NATO adventurism in Ukraine, the attack on Iran – is suicidal, especially if they succeed.

If the world were to burn “every last drop” of known fossil fuel reserves, overall planetary temperatures would rise by 16C – but society would have collapsed long before that.

So, was China right to say about the recent Xi-Trump summit that the world needs China and the US to cooperate to solve global issues like climate change. Well, yes, because the world would benefit enormously if the US were cooperate instead of sabotaging the transition. Its equally obvious that it won’t do it, and China doesn’t expect it to – as it wasn’t discussed at the summit.

There’s been a number of articles in the Chinese Press recently hinting at a more proactive role in shaping global climate governance, including a bid to host COP33 in 2028. that would be a huge step forward – probably send the global Right into a frenzy – and help push US unipolarity into a smaller sphere of dominance.

Until relatively recently – and still sometimes – arguments for more serious action on climate here were met with ” Yeah, but what about China?”

So, what about China?

China’s greenhouse gas emissions are now peaking. The only question is how fast they will come down.

Solar power now generates more electricity than coal.

In 2024 China was responsible for a third of global investment in renewables and more for the last two years twice as many wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China as in the rest of the world put together.

As this is state led investment in both physical kit and R&D this has led to denunciations from the G20 opposing “non market mechanisms”, possibly because they are working so well.

A result of that investment is that the costs of solar, wind, batteries have dropped so far that they are now the cheapest option for new power generation in 86% of cases globally and renewable energy is now attracting twice as much investment globally than fossil fuels, even though the latter are more profitable.

As a result of that, a majority of countries have passed peak fossil fuel use.

China’s exports of green tech last year displaced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the UKs entire output.

In many areas, like EVs and batteries, China’s technology is now world leading.

All this is leading to surreal accusations from the US and EU that China is “overproducing” EVs, Solar Panels, Batteries..as if we need fewer of them. A more apposite question than “why is China producing so much? might be “why are the imperialist countries producing so little?”

The effect of electrification is to reduce fossil fuel import bills – a paradox of Trump’s war on Iran is that this is increasing the demand for EVs, solar panels and batteries globally – including in places where they are clamping down on Universities teaching about climate change, like Texas.

All this adds up to a crucial global tipping point, which gives us what hope we have.

China’s domestic approach in the 15th Five Year Plan is an instructive bit of joined up government.

75% of the 72 5YP documents produced this year have targets/policies with a climate dimension.

Overarching commitments by 2030 are:

• peaking GHG emissions and a 7-10% reduction by 2035
• cut the carbon intensity of every product by 17%
• non fossil fuel energy to be 25% of the total and 50% of electricity
• Forest cover up to 25.8%
• green travel in central cities to be 75% of all journeys.

I could have spent the entire 10 minutes of this talk with a blizzard of statistics like this. Carbon Brief has a very useful breakdown of all the climate targets and policies in the 15th 5YP if you want to dig into it.

Its important to note that headline targets tend to be understated – sometimes hugely.

• The last wind and solar targets for 2030 were met by 2024
• The target for New Energy trucks is 20% of the total by 2030. Current projections are that they will be 50% by 2028.
• The overall target for EVs for 3030 is 70% of the total. they are already at 65%.

Just to finish on how comprehensive this is – sectors with plans and policies include, not only the obvious Renewable Energy, Fossil Fuels, power system and Transport, but also Monitoring, including for extreme weather (a contrast with the US, where Trump is cutting all the world leading work being done by scientists there – presumably on the principle that what you don’t know can’t hurt you) energy conservation in public buildings, construction, farming and forestry, ports, traditional Chinese medicine, recycling, consumption, tourism and crucially promotion to “thoroughly and vigorously” publicise these laws, codes and regulations.

This implies the kind of education campaign that is essential for the social mobilisation needed for these massive shifts – an implementation of Article 12 of the Paris Agreement that could be a model for other countries to follow.