The
International League of Peoples’ Struggle sends our deepest condolences
while standing in solidarity with the people of Nepal affected by the
glacier lake outburst flood across a 72km stretch of the Trishuli River
on August 26th. After a week, the situation is more devastating with
each revelation:
Infrastructure:
around $1.3b USD in damages, 8,317 houses destroyed, 41 bridges and 42
km of road damaged, four flood monitoring stations and 20 schools
destroyed, 13 hydropowered projects damaged, 200 loaded shipping
containers missing, destroyed over 26,000 livestock, wiping out paddy
fields in 20 districts , etc.
Causalities: 1,200 people displaced, over 5,000 injured, at least 1,280 killed, and 5,624 people still missing.
These
flash floods were caused by a glacier collapse linked to the current
climate crisis and exacerbated by US imperialism’s rising parasitism
under Trump, cutting USAID funds for natural hazards monitoring that
Nepal was made dependent on for years.
Across
the Global South, the threat of climate change is no longer a distant
reality, but an existential crisis for the peoples of these colonies and
semi-colonies through a multitude of catastrophes: record-breaking
heatwaves, drought, floods, tropical cyclones, wildfires, and many more
natural disasters have been destroying lives and livelihoods of the
basic masses, especially peasants. It is clear that imperialism’s
incessant need for profit is the cause of this crisis through the
increasing emissions from the imperialist countries with the people in
the neocolonies bearing the burden of the havoc caused by global
warming. For instance, Nepal’s share of the world’s greenhouse gas
emissions is ~0.1%, around 41.5 million tons – the US military alone
emits almost five times as much with 205 million tons. Based on per
capita emissions the responsibility of climate disasters still sits with
the western imperialism as their per capita emissions are sky high as
compared to emissions from countries such as China and India.
Climate
imperialism in South Asia will no doubt bring more horrific disasters
as the glaciers in the Himalayan range cuts across from Nepal to
Pakistan, with Pakistan alone being home to more than 7,000 glaciers
while the entire ecosystem is being impacted by high temperatures in the
region.
A
fresh debacle is the hundreds of data centres that are being built in
the western countries but now rapidly expanding in the South. The high
energy cost, further heating and plundering of water resources is
another threat and cannot be separated from the climate and
environmental crisis.
The
issue will only worsen with the end of the “rules-based order”, which
never intended to solve the climate crisis, but was rather concerned
about potential loss of super-profits from climate change. However, the
junking of even the empty multi-lateral treaties such as the Paris
Agreements, large-scale environmental deregulation, and semi-colonies
hung to dry after cuts to ‘aid’ programs designed to make them
dependent, the turn towards to fascism for unfettered profit has
intensified the crisis. And as seen with Venezuela, they with their
usual gang of financial crooks such as the IMF and WB alongside the
ever-present Zionist entity are eager to seize control amidst disaster.
As
the government of Nepal is now filled with royalist and pro-Western
forces that intend to worsen imperialist plunder, the US and other
imperialist countries turning towards fascism, and the climate crisis
only deepening, the people must rise in droves to fight for not only a
better future, but a future itself. The struggle against climate change
is part-and-parcel with the struggle against imperialism and all
reaction.
Signed,
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
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