LHC statement in support of the Global Student Strike Action
For most of humankind’s previous existence on earth, its population was less than 1 billion. In 2017 Roser and Ortiz-Ospina reported that “Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us. Recent estimates suggest that today’s population size is roughly equivalent to 6.5% of the total number of people ever born. This is the most conspicuous fact about world population growth: for thousands of years, the population grew only slowly but in recent centuries, it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity — an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.”
And “6.5 million people are dying annually from air pollution . . .and 92 per cent of the world’s population are living in places where levels exceed recommended limits. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.”
According to Ocean Scientists for Informed Policy (OSIP), “One of the most under-appreciated facts in climate change is the fate of the energy trapped by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Human activities are releasing nearly 10 Gegatons of Carbon (about 36 Billion tons of CO2) into the atmosphere every year, driving atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 400 parts per million (ppm) from their original pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. This increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases concentrations traps additional energy in the earth’s climate system. What happens to this “extra” energy (0.5-1 watt/m2) remains a mystery to many outside the field of climate and ocean sciences.” This “mystery” must be demystified as a matter of humankind’s survival because — even if all human carbon-releasing activities ceased immediately — the overheated oceans will continue to heat the rest of earth’s already overheated overcrowded ecosystem for decades and possibly centuries.
As Engels explained in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, institutionalised exploitation, injustice, racism, sexism and wars persist because self-serving male-dominated national minorities of protégés of the world’s oldest universities continue to justify patriarchy and poverty ‘in the national interest’, and the pretentious right of ‘liberal democracies’ to wage increasingly industrialised ‘might is right’ wars over the resources necessary to wage increasingly irrational wars. These self-perpetuating self-serving medieval institutions continue their self-righteous practice of rewarding their most favoured alumni with certificates marked “doctor of philosophy” and “master of philosophy” without feeling obliged to teach them right from wrong.
Since its formation over 30 years, London Hazards Centre has worked with concerned trade unionists to end all work-related illnesses, injuries and premature deaths throughout London without prejudice. Together with other publicly funded self-help organisations with similar holistic motives and inclusive methods, the funds at our disposal have been savagely cut.
Fortunately, new holistic inclusive organisations are springing to life all over the world, as a new generation of adolescents feel compelled to use their collective common sense of natural justice and their real fear of humankind’s catastrophic self-destruction to demand coordinated government action to prevent it — the long-overdue scientifically-enlightened compassionate change in the course of human history which Kant first deduced was natural and necessary for the enjoyable recreation of intelligent life on earth until its unpreventable end, and which Marx and Engels consciously and conscientiously worked for with concerned trade unionists all their adult lives.
