IN CASE you missed it, Tuesday of this week was Earth Day 2025.

The very first Earth Day was held in the US in 1970. An estimated 20 million Americans took to streets, parks and venues to demonstrate against the impacts of industrial development, which had left a growing legacy of serious human health impacts.

According to Earthday.org, which now promotes the annual event globally, “Groups that had been fighting individually against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife united on Earth Day around these shared common values.”

The declared 2025 theme is “Our power, our planet,” calling for people to educate, advocate and mobilise in communities around renewable energy “so we can triple clean electricity by 2030.”

It’s a laudable aim, but it falls way short of the action required now to avert the climate crisis — and it ignores the class realities at play.

The World Meteorological Association’s State of the Global Climate Report 2024 shows that our climate is shifting faster than ever, mainly due to the ongoing rise in greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, from consumption of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

2024 was the first year to have global average temperatures more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era. Greenhouse gas concentrations have reached their highest level in 800,000 years. In 2024, ocean temperatures were hotter than in any year on record. Glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate, and the pace of sea level rise has doubled since the year 2000.

Extreme weather events displaced over 800,000 people in 2024, the highest number since 2008. We are very close to a tipping point from which there will be no turning back.

However, in the US, things are going in the opposite direction, with the big oil and gas corporations calling the tune. Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted, and he has also called coal essential. 

At the same time, generation of solar energy in the US will remain retarded and expensive, through tariffs on imported solar panels, 77 per cent of which came from Chinese-owned companies in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia last year. The US commerce department has just announced new tariffs of up to 40 per cent, 375 per cent, 400 per cent and 3,521 per cent respectively on those companies.

China itself accounts for nearly 85 per cent of global solar panel production, and 40 per cent of British solar panel imports. However, their installation here is likely to be retarded too, by the government’s decision to table a spurious amendment to the Great British Energy Bill. 

Responding to entirely bogus claims of modern slavery imposed on the Uighur people in Xinjiang — the source of 50 per cent of the world’s supply of polysilicon, a key component in solar panels — the government’s amendment would ban the state-owned GB Energy from using any products where there is “evidence” of modern slavery in the supply chains. Such slavery does not exist.

All this will suit the big oil and gas companies in Britain, who want to continue production of fossil fuels in order to maximise their profits. BP has even given up the pretence of being interested in renewable energy, while Shell last year spent seven times as much on its oil and gas businesses as on “renewables and energy solutions.”

While 50 per cent of Britain’s electricity in 2024 came from renewable sources, there is still a long way to go in cutting the consumption of fossil fuels in transport — including aviation — and commercial and domestic heating. But, as long as the production and distribution of energy is in private hands, there will continue to be reliance on fossil fuels.

It’s the monopoly capitalist system that stands in the way. Socialism is the only solution — but as a first step, we need nationalisation of the energy industry.