Quite apart from all other aspects of today’s planetary ecological crisis, anthropogenic climate change threatens the future, even the very survival, of humanity. The time in which to make the necessary massive transformations in global production, consumption, and distribution, along with technology, is frightfully short, at most, a matter of a couple decades. The world scientific consensus is that if global carbon emissions do not reach zero by mid-century, it will most likely lead to a catastrophic tipping point, a metaphor referring to pushing a stone at the edge of a cliff so far that it is no longer possible to prevent it from falling. The ultimate danger of such a tipping point is that the climate will morph out of control, leading to an oppressive increase in temperature. With a 4°C increase in global average temperature—a real prospect this century if present emissions trends continue—the very existence of industrial civilization will be threatened. Meanwhile, the lives of hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will be put in peril. Climate change naturally endangers younger generations the most, who can be expected to live well into the latter part of the twenty-first century.
Given the serious global threat represented by climate change and the need to find real solutions, a question that constantly comes to mind is: “Why is climate change not being taught in U.S. public schools?” To be sure, a national survey of 1,500 middle- and high-school teachers in the United States found that 70 percent of middle-school teachers and 72 percent of high-school science teachers in the United States indicated that they spent as much as one to two hours per year on average in the classroom discussing climate change. But only slightly more than half of these teachers actually taught the science, that is, acknowledging that today’s climate change is due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Thirty percent of the teachers taught that climate change is due to natural causes, and another 15 percent avoided the origins of climate change altogether. Not surprisingly, a survey of 15 to 17 year olds in the United States released in 2021 found that a quarter rejected the idea of a climate change crisis, higher than any other country in North America or Europe (Zahra Hirji, “Majority of Science Teachers Are Teaching Climate Change, but Not Always Correctly,” Inside Climate News, February 11, 2016; Eric Plutzer et al., “Climate Confusion Among U.S. Teachers,” Science 351, no. 6274 [February 2016]; Jill Anderson, “How Climate Change Is Taught in America,” Harvard Graduate School of Education, November 12, 2021; Iris Crawford and Liz Potter-Nelson, “Why Isn’t My Kid Learning about Climate Change in Their High School Classroom?,” Ask MIT Climate, July 6, 2022).
A review of thirty-two science textbooks used in California, Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas demonstrated that the materials were drastically deficient. Half of the textbooks had statements on climate change that were either entirely superficial or in error—or they did not discuss the topic at all. Others found ways simply to downplay the scientific consensus on the very reality of anthropogenic climate change. One McGraw-Hill textbook used in Texas placed a statement by the oil industry-financed Heartland Institute, devoted to denying climate change, side by side with a United Nations-based climate change analysis, as if they were of equal validity. A Houghton Mifflin sixth-grade science textbook utilized in Florida classrooms falsely called climate change “one of the most debated issues in modern science.” Fossil fuel industry-funded education programs, meant to substitute for or supplement textbooks, are utilized in secondary education in at least eighteen states. At the level of higher education, a recent study of fifty-seven college biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019 discovered that the treatment of climate change had decreased from a high of fifty-two sentences on average in the first decade of this century to forty-five sentences in the 2010s, with discussion of solutions dropping from a high of 15 percent to 3 percent in the same period (Rebecca Klein and Caroline Preston, “Are We Ready?: How We Are Teaching—and Not Teaching—Kids about Climate Change,” Hechinger Report, May 23, 2020; Katie Worth, Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America [New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2021], 45–56; Renée Cho, “Climate Education in the U.S.,” State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School, February 9, 2023).
It will be obvious to Monthly Review readers that the failure to teach about climate change in schools is a direct manifestation of a capitalist society that is more concerned with its short-run profits than the survival of civilization and humanity as a whole while rejecting the needs of youth altogether. Even science itself is to be sacrificed on the altar of capital.
On July 29, 2024, Nature Communications published a pathbreaking article by Monthly Review author Jason Hickel and his coauthors, Morena Hanbury Lemos and Felix Barbour, on “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy,” providing perhaps the strongest evidence yet for unequal exchange in global commodity chains. What makes this new study particularly remarkable is that in order to account for the transfer of embodied labor from the Global South to the Global North, it is necessary to find a satisfactory way of addressing at the aggregate level not only the differences in wages, but also the differences in productivities. (As Samir Amin explained in the July–August 1977 issue of Monthly Review, unequal exchange reflects a situation where “the difference between the returns to labor is greater than the difference between the productivities.”) In their article, Hickel and his coauthors dealt with this problem in an elegant way by using data on comparative skill level, complemented by a mathematical model and input-output data. They found that between 1995 and 2021, the Global North was able to extract from the Global South 826 billion hours in net appropriated labor. This represents a value capture of $18.4 trillion in Northern prices. Behind this lies the fact that workers in the Global South receive 87–95 percent lower wages for equivalent work at the same skill level.
The underlying conditions of inequality between the Global North and the Global South, themselves the result of a history of colonialism and imperialism, led to the global labor arbitrage, or the outsourcing of production to the Global South in order to exploit low unit labor costs, a shift that was made possible by technological revolutions in communications and transportation. Today, around 90 percent of all labor contribution to production takes place in the Global South, which, however, receives only 21 percent of the income generated. Multinational corporations, mainly located in the North, are the means through which the surplus labor embodied in goods exported from the South is transmitted to the Global North, mainly benefiting monopoly-financial capital at the apex of the system, from New York to London to Berlin to Tokyo. Although it is often claimed that the South is “catching up,” Hickel points out that the wage gap between North and South is actually widening, with wages increasing eleven times more in the Global North than the Global South between 1995 and 2021, exacerbating the conditions underlying economic imperialism. To redress these conditions, Hickel and his coauthors conclude, “will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century” (Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour, “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy,” Nature Communications 15, no. 6298 [July 29, 2024]; Phie Jacobs, “Rich Countries Drain ‘Shocking’ Amount of Labor from the Global South,” ScienceInsider, August 6, 2024).
The Knowledge Economy and Socialism: Science and Society in Cuba by Agustín Lage Dávila (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024; translated by Mauricio Betancourt) was listed as one of the five “best science picks” in Nature in June 2024. See Andrew Robinson, “Sparrow Massacres and Cuban Vaccines: Books in Brief,” Nature, June 7, 2024.
We would like to draw the attention of MR readers to a new quarterly peer-reviewed journal, World Marxist Review, that began publication in April. Two of the three editors-in-chief, Cheng Enfu of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Gabriel Rockhill of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, are MR authors. MR editor John Bellamy Foster is a director of the editorial board. MR and Monthly Review Press authors on the editorial board include: Tony Andreani, Alejandro Valle Baeza, Ding Xiaoqui, David M. Kotz, Rémy Herrera, Thomas E. Lambert, Vijay Prashad, and Victor Wallis. The first two issues of the journal include articles by Cheng, Rockhill, Foster, Kotz, MR authors Gisela Cernadas and Mikaela Erskog, and Monthly Review Press author Deborah Veneziale. For more information, see worldmarxistreview.org.
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