Current data from the bourgeois scientific record for 2024- 2025 confirms what workers worldwide have been experiencing for decades. The climate crisis is accelerating, driven above all by capitalist industry and militarism. The warming planet is already reshaping everyday life. In 2024, the global average surface temperature was +1.55 °C above the 1850 - 1900 baseline, the highest in at least 175 years. The World Meteorological Organization warns that there is now an 80% chance at least one of the next five years will breach +1.5 °C. At that threshold, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will increase sharply.

Heatwaves like those in southern Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in 2024, where temperatures exceeded 50 °C, are deadly to outdoor workers, the elderly, and those without cooling. Floods such as those in Libya and Pakistan in recent years displace millions and destroy homes, schools, and hospitals. Rising seas, currently advancing at 4.62 mm per year, the fastest rate in over two millennia threaten to inundate low-lying cities from Jakarta to Miami, with hundreds of millions facing displacement by 2100. Wildfire smoke in North America in 2023 - 2024 caused an estimated hundreds of thousands of excess respiratory-related ER visits. Droughts in East Africa and Central America have driven spikes in hunger, with the FAO estimating 735 million people were chronically undernourished in 2022, a figure worsened by climate shocks.

Fossil fuel combustion accounts for roughly 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Global Carbon Budget 2024 reports fossil CO₂ emissions at 37.4 gigatonnes, a record driven by the permanent capitalist imperialist powers. The largest national emitters are China (30%), the United States (14%), the EU (~7%), and India (7%), together responsible for nearly 60% of global CO₂ output.

Heavy industry, steel, cement, petrochemicals, remains among the most carbon-intensive sectors, collectively responsible for around 25% of CO₂ emissions. These sectors are deeply embedded in capitalist growth cycles, construction booms, consumer goods turnover, and planned obsolescence keep production and emissions high. The top 100 fossil fuel producers, according to the Carbon Majors Database, are linked to over 70% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

Beyond the greenwashed naivety of a potential ecological capitalism, renewable energy rollouts are often coupled with expanded fossil infrastructure, ensuring that global coal, oil, and gas use remains near historic peaks. The military sector is a massive, often hidden emitter. If the U.S. military were a country, it would rank among the world’s top 50 emitters, burning over 100 million barrels of oil annually. Military aviation and naval fleets are among the most fuel-intensive operations on the planet.

Imperialist wars conflict compounds the crisis. The Iraq War alone generated emissions comparable to adding 25 million extra cars to the road for a year. Destruction of infrastructure, oil wells, power plants, industrial sites during war causes spills, fires, and long-term contamination, while reconstruction demands vast energy and material inputs. Yet, military emissions are typically excluded from international climate reporting, a loophole established during the 1997 Kyoto Protocol negotiations.

Militarism and industrial capitalism are symbiotic. Military power safeguards global supply chains, resource extraction, and markets; industry supplies the materials and technologies that sustain permanent war-readiness. Both rely on fossil-fuel-heavy logistics, manufacturing, and infrastructure.

The IPCC AR6 warns that without rapid, deep cuts, the world is on track for +2.7 °C warming by 2100 under current policies. This level would trigger irreversible loss of major ice sheets, multi-meter sea-level rise over coming centuries, and collapse of key ecosystems such as tropical coral reefs (already suffering more than 50% decline in cover).

At +2 °C, the proportion of the global population exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years jumps to 37%, compared to 14% today. Crop yields for staple grains like maize and wheat could decline by 5-10% per degree of warming, exacerbating food insecurity. Freshwater scarcity would affect an additional 350 million people, and climate-related economic damages could reach trillions annually, disproportionately in the Global South.

The numbers are clear, capitalist industry and militarism are the primary engines of climate change. Their emissions are concentrated among a few States, corporations, and sectors, yet their impacts are global. Climate breakdown is not the by-product of “humanity as a whole,” but the outcome of a capitalist system that treats perpetual growth, fossil fuel dependence, and armed dominance as non-negotiable. Only the global revolution of the proletariat and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat with its International Communist Party at the lead can put an end to the irrational laws of capitalist economy that work every day to engulf the entire world in absolute destruction, rendering the planet uninhabitable be it due to nuclear winter or irreversible climate change.