Hurricane Beryl: a deadly beast of capitalist climate crisis

Over the course of several days, Storm Beryl has wreaked havoc across the Caribbean, before landing in the USA. Island communities were flattened in a matter of a few hours and coastal areas were overwhelmed by flood waters. The lives of hundreds of thousands of people have been turned upside down.

Union Island is now uninhabitable and thousands have been forced to relocate to where they can access shelter, food and water. In Jamaica, people were left in a state of shock. Everywhere, homes were in ruins, trees were strewn across impassable roads, and water supplies were damaged. People asked themselves how on earth they could rebuild in already hard times?

Beryl’s trail of destruction cannot be dismissed as merely a natural disaster. Its unseasonal severity is linked to the climate crisis, ultimately a product of capitalism: an anarchic and destructive system that now threatens civilisation as we know it. Unless it is overthrown, violent weather events will become ever more prevalent.

Storm Beryl’s impact

On 29 June, it was confirmed that a new storm named Beryl had formed in the Atlantic Ocean and was moving towards the Caribbean Sea. What was most notable from the outset was its scale, intensity, and the speed of its development. This is the beginning of the hurricane season, which coincides with the temperature of tropical oceans warming up. Throughout the season, hurricanes and storms usually become larger, fiercer and more frequent.

However, Beryl quickly became a Category 4 storm – a type of hurricane typically seen mid-season. Already, we have seen two. By 1 July, it became a Category 5 storm (the highest rating) as it reached the shores of Carriacou, Grenada and other Windward Islands. Over several days, it caused widespread destruction in Carriacou, with one resident claiming the island is “finished for the next couple of years”, after it destroyed homes, businesses, agriculture, and livestock.

Beryl inflicted heavy rainfall, strong winds, dangerous storm surges, battering waves, and widespread flooding within a few hundred miles of its epicentre. In Petit Martinique, there are scenes of trees stripped of their leaves, roofs peeled off homes, and boats and debris strewn across the beaches.

The storm reached Jamaica on 3 July and the island suffered a national electricity blackout. Flash floods damaged roads and other infrastructure, and thousands were left isolated, without essential goods.

Eventually Beryl weakened to a Category 3 and Category 2 storm as it breached the Yucatan coastline in Mexico still causing widespread destruction. At the time of writing, it is responsible for the death of dozens of people and has left a million without power in Texas. Beryl’s immediate impact has been devastating, and is expected to cause a staggering $28-32 billion worth of damage.

Capitalism on the brink

The average global temperature between July 2023 and June 2024 was 1.6C higher than before the fossil fuel era, past the 1.5C tipping point that scientists have long warned about. The likes of Storm Beryl are a glimpse into the new climactic period we are entering.

The melting polar ice caps are raising sea levels, leading to a greater amount of warm water, which is providing the conditions for more frequent and intense extreme weather events. These effects are the result of capitalism, but they are reciprocally impacting the market. Extreme weather is disrupting global trade. For example, the drought in Panama last year disrupted trade passing through the Panama Canal. The loss of revenue for Panama itself is estimated to be between $500-$700 million.

The greater frequency of violent weather events has compelled people to leave their homes for refuge in more stable climates. The number of climate migrants is already estimated to be tens of millions of people and it’s only expected to rise as the climate crisis worsens.

Climate change is therefore both a symptom and a compounding factor of the profound crisis of capitalism, from which it cannot escape. More people are drawing the link between rapacious capitalist exploitation of the Earth, and catastrophic changes in the climate. The youth are especially impatient with the ‘international community’ for their inaction towards the crisis. The rise of groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is an expression of this desperate desire for something to be done, although their ‘direct action’ methods offer no answers.

COP and CARICOM

Whilst rich countries are responsible for the overwhelming majority of emissions – the top 20 polluters including the US, EU, China and Russia were responsible for 83 percent of emissions in 2022 – as the climate crisis deepens, it will be the poor and oppressed countries that most keenly feel its initial harsh effects in the form of displacement, hunger and unlivable conditions.

And yet the former is unwilling to loosen its purse strings to pay for the effects faced by the latter. The UN has given a miserly $4 million to countries impacted by Storm Beryl – a mere drop in the ocean. 

The capitalists’ own institutions are a dead end. COP, the annual UN climate summit, is a toothless and hypocritical sham. The majority of countries that are vulnerable to extreme climate have not received promised support from COP, leading Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines to castigate the summit as “largely a talk shop”.

The imperialists are absolutely to blame for underinvestment in climate defences, lack of decent and affordable housing, and providing little financial assistance to those thrust into poverty / Image: public domain

Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, has been particularly vocal in criticising the big polluters and highlighting their hypocrisy, as governments of the so-called ‘international community’ (i.e., the rich imperialist nations) increasingly outsource the provision of climate aid to private charitable organisations.

The imperialists are absolutely to blame for underinvestment in climate defences, lack of decent and affordable housing, and providing little financial assistance to those thrust into poverty. But what do the likes of Mottley – who co-chaired a meeting of world leaders to discuss climate financing last year – propose? Reforming the likes of the IMF and World Bank to favour climate lending to poor countries, instead of giving the best interest rates to rich countries, as they do at present. But the idea that these institutions formed to defend the interests of western imperialism can be convinced not to favour the profits of the western imperialists is like appealing to Beelzebub against Satan.

The fact is the problem of climate change cannot be solved in the Caribbean, or anywhere else, without breaking capitalism on a world scale. We need a global revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, and to seize the means of production, including the banks, insurance companies, energy industries, transport and the giant corporations responsible for the majority of emissions. On this basis, with the working class in control of the real levers of production, we could establish a worldwide emergency plan to avert and mitigate the climate catastrophe as far as possible.

Ultimately, nowhere on Earth will poor and working-class people be spared the effects of climate change, which will wreak havoc on housing, infrastructure and supply chains for basic necessities. 

To all those who wish to fight against climate catastrophe, we say: now is the time to get organised in the Revolutionary Communist International, and help us build a world party of communist revolution capable of leading the working class to victory over a system that puts the very survival of human society in the balance.