How revolution is essential for reversing the global climate catastrophe

With dramatic and unprecedented rises in temperature having been observed during the past few decades with the likelihood of the UK reaching temperatures peaking at 40 degrees having risen by times since 1960, and this week in South East England there having been red weather warnings put in place indicating significant danger to people's health and personally safety, one can now truly realise the extent of the major ongoing existential threat of climate change which controls our lives and damages our wellbeing. A threat that has largely been brought about due to human activity in the form of mass consumption, globalisation, westernisation, and the rising demand to expand nations' industries to keep up with the rapid economic growth that has been taking place globally. It is in light of this, that one must question, why are workplaces not taking enough action to support the wellbeing of their workers (as after all, computers overheating and stopping working in these temperatures is the point by which they choose to end the work day, as opposed to when workers would need to leave work due to concerns for their safety especially if they have underlying health issues or work in high risk environments), as well as why the need to produce greater output (despite this ironically being reduced if workers' health still remains the greatest priority. The answer to this is capitalism. It is because of this that revolution of existing systems is essential to bringing about meaningful change to the environment, as well as that these improvements should not appear secondary to other aims.

The sheer economic disparity observed for many within the Global South posed by this supposed economic growth purely facilitated to support the capitalist economic interests of the Western World also acts as a barrier for helping them to respond to the impacts of climate change and continue to support their people's interests due to their inability to fund the development of adequate infrastructure designed to effectively mitigate for the damage posed by these crises, or have access to the resources required for this. It is very clear that these regions face a significantly greater level of vulnerability to these due to them being primarily situated in equatorial, tropical and sub-tropical and coastal regions, in which the frequency and impacts of natural disasters would be the greatest. An example of this is the Multiple Hazard Zone (MHZ) that nations such as Indonesia and the Philippines are situated in. This region, being within close proximity to the Pacific Ring of Fire, and featuring zones of both high and low pressure and warm oceans as well as frequent tectonic activity, regularly experiences many different forms of climate induced environmental hazards often in succession and of high intensity. It is because of this that an even greater strain on the economy of these nations is likely to be observed, thus making rapid economic recovery even more difficult, thus exacerbating the potential long term impacts of the hazards. It is also important to note that these two examples are nations undergoing rapid economic development through globalisation, industrial advancement, and the increased adoption of Western cultural and lifestyle related norms, all of these requiring a huge amount of energy and resources, and accelerating the mass consumption described under capitalism. This, along with the major issues posed by the knock on effects that this has on the acceleration of the Western World's economy in turn increasing their consumption and exploitation of resources, would therefore prove to explain the huge issues with economic growth on the environment.

Furthermore, this disproportionate vulnerability observed for between the Global North and Global South can also be observed with the racialisation of the issue with regard to the treatment of vulnerable individuals seeking asylum for environmental reasons can often be abused and receive considerably poorer treatment than other migrants due to the institutionalised racism common within the western world and concerns as to the legitimacy of their reasons to migrate, as well as whether neighbouring regions can provide for them.

Moreover, the economic growth in question, as well as being facilitated through rapid industrial expansion within the Global South can also be facilitated through other means that are more implicitly unenvironmental and that have also been primarily caused by the acceleration of global capitalism. An example of this is the development of AI, something that is primarily accessible to and of interest to those within the Western world set about to further generate wealth and give large technology companies to develop, in much the same way as green energy has been used for these reasons and for motives other than purely out of environmental interest. This is the epitome of capitalism for these reasons as well as its significant proposed role in replacing the workforce with machinery and computer generation so as to mechanise and improve the efficiency of human skills, so as to allow for greater profit to be gained through this. The creation of major new AI data centres to support the growing global demand for AI has proven to have had significant and wide reaching consequences on the environment due to the land and resources that have been required for them to be developed, as well as ultimately the huge amount of energy and water that goes into frequent generation of AI prompts in the long term. This can be seen when reflecting on the sheer amount of electricity consumed when training a single large model such as Chat GPT 3 being similar to the total amount of energy used by a small town annually, with this being as high as between 1.3 and 1.5 GW/h. It has been projected that by 2028 the total demand for electricity for AI generation could potentially rise by a 3 to 5 fold increase from that of 2022 to 150-300 TWh/y⁻¹. This is aside from the sheer volume of water required for the cooling systems needed for these technology data centres to function also being of major concern, these typically being around 7000-12000 L/MW/h⁻¹ for each data centre, along with the problematically high greenhouse gas emissions released in the processes of extraction and production of the necessary components required for this (Hlabisa, 2025). The water usage also appears to be a particularly significant concern considering the sources by which it is obtained from in that almost 68% of AI data centres are near protected areas of nature or Key Biodiversity areas which are home to important ecosystems featuring a diverse range of wildlife thus being reliant on stable environmental conditions being maintained (Kenny et. al., 2025). This would thus present the need for change to be ever increasing with huge division between the Global North and Global South to be for a large part the result of unethical exploitative practices which few other than those engaging with corporate greed require.