Introduction

Our environment, the natural world and our towns and cities face an unprecedented crisis. The United Nations now predicts that temperatures will rise by 3C if drastic action is not taken to reverse the burning of fossil fuels. If this happens, thousands of cities and hundreds of millions of homes in coastal areas would be submerged. The planet is also in the midst of the sixth great extinction event in its history with thousands of species facing wipe-out due to capitalism and the burning of fossil fuels. Other earth systems essential for life are at, or approaching, unsustainable depletion. The ability of the planet to continue to provide a habitable home for future generations and the animal kingdom is now in question.

People Before Profit seeks to address the root causes of all these different forms of environmental destruction and despoliation. We reject the thesis that the environmental crisis is caused by any innate human instinct, overpopulation or simple consumerism. The crisis comes from the economic system of capitalism and its drive toward profit and competition.

Looking to capitalism to provide solutions for any environmental crisis will not work because it is the operation of free market capitalism that is the root cause of each of these crises.

In every issue examined from climate change to biodiversity and conservation, attempts at binding international treaties based on commodifying nature or incentivising markets have and will continue to fail to protect our environment. Only a radical challenge to the priorities of capitalism can save our natural world and preserve the earth’s biodiversity for future generations.

While the environmental crisis threatens all of humanity, we believe that the world’s poorest and ordinary working class people will suffer the greatest from the chaos that capitalism is creating in our climate and environment. We reject the idea that there is a conflict between safeguarding the environment and the earth’s species and the right to a decent living for ordinary people. The conflict lies between the priorities of capitalism and markets on one hand and our environment, biodiversity and most of humanity on the other.

We believe that a new, radical environmental and social movement is needed that identifies the root causes of the current mass extinction of species and threats to humanity and the natural world.

We stand with those communities and groups that are campaigning against all forms of environmental destruction or trying to protect and conserve endangered species and habitats. But we want to unite these struggles, in our countryside and cities to take on the real cause of this crisis.

Levels of Co2 in the earth’s atmosphere are currently at over 400ppm, well beyond the levels that most scientists believe can be accommodated if we are to avoid the risk of dangerous climate change.

People Before Profit pledges to work with others in the international community to secure far more ambitious targets for fossil fuel reduction globally. This is in stark contrast the government’s current ambition to seek derogations from existing treaties and to substantially increase the Irish herd.