"People are always imagining new ways to live, and then figuring out ways to remake the world to suit what they've imagined," wrote journalist Elizabeth Colbert in 2006. "As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest?"
As long as we allow capitalism-imperialism to rule, its relentless pursuit of profits for the few will become increasingly destructive to the masses and our planet.
Once we mobilize the masses for communism, we can and will rescue ourselves from the rubble of capitalist destruction and remake our world. "Carbon levels reach 400 parts per million"
This last happened when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Today, symptoms of global climate change include drought in Syria, raging wildfires in central Asia, wildly destructive storms in North America, and rising seas that threaten to engulf entire island nations and coastal cities everywhere.
Carbon levels have trended steadily up as industrial capitalism emerged in 19th-century Europe, fueled by fossil carbon and living slaves. Now they are skyrocketing (see graph). Capitalist competition demands constantly increasing production and mechanization in its drive for maximum profits. Coal, oil, and natural gas are gobbled up, along with workers' lives. The byproducts include carbon contamination, chemical pollution, and nuclear war.
US capitalist-imperialist rulers see the dangers but cannot avoid them. On one hand, they urge Obama to use fascist "executive power" to impose emissions caps and taxes. These may shift the economic burden of carbon pollution but can't strike at the root of the problem. On the other, they complain loudly about China's increasing energy consumption, beating the drums for eventual world war and encouraging "fracking" in the name of "energy independence."
The problem isn't that humans, like other animals and even plants, change our environments while they evolve and adapt to them. The problem is that our imagination is limited by ruling-class ideology. It's that the ruling class uses its state power to enforce its own narrow and destructive self-interests: short-term profit and long-term domination.
We need to imagine, and then create, a way to live without money or bosses or borders: a global communist way. We must react, not with despair or reform, but with revolution.
Capitalism squanders our labor power, producing whatever commodities can be profitably sold so that capitalists can hoard our labor as their private wealth. Communist society, in contrast, will mobilize our creativity and labor to develop clean sources of energy. We'll produce only what we actually need, and distribute it where it's most needed.
Capitalism-imperialism remakes the world in whatever way maximizes profits, disregarding the inevitably disastrous consequences. Communism will remake the world intentionally, according to mass communist consciousness of present and future needs.
Understandably, many find climate change depressing. Capitalism-imperialism has wrought seemingly irreversible destruction. Worse will come, especially when imperialist conflicts explode into another world war. Large areas may become uninhabitable. Communist power will emerge amidst the rubble.
The masses will dare to save ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism, as Bangladeshi workers fought to rescue their class brothers and sisters from the rubble of the recent factory collapse there.

"Learn from Dazhai"
Until the 1960s, Dazhai was a bare-poor village on barren Shanxi mountain slopes in China. Drought prevailed, except when torrential rains drowned the crops. Everyone except a few landlords toiled ceaselessly to survive. During famine years, whole families died.
The bitter struggle against nature continued after Red-led villagers expropriated the landlords. They soon made tremendous breakthroughs, led by an outstanding communist, the life-long landless laborer Chen Yonggui.
Chen Yonggui recruited himself to the Chinese Communist Party and soon became village Party secretary, based on his bold determination to put communist ideas into practice. For starters, unlike Party leadership elsewhere, Chen Yonggui insisted that he and all village leaders work daily in the fields with the masses.
Chen Yonggui led the village masses to think and act collectively. They transformed their harsh environment, building and irrigating fields on mountainside terraces and reclaiming land by diverting rivers. Toiling through three brutal winters, they conquered the floods in Wolf Den Ravine by building an arched dam designed by the unschooled Chen Yonggui.
Dazhai soon began exporting grain and inspiring millions in China and beyond. Mao called on everyone to "learn from Dazhai." But Chinese Communist Party leaders who praised Dazhai for its technical accomplishments obscured its main achievement: transforming social relations of production and ending the division between mental and manual labor.
One lesson we take from Dazhai is that the masses, mobilized for communism, can overcome capitalist devastation and even global climate change, and remake the world.