In the wake of the Stern Review (published 30 Oct 2006) the threat posed by climate change has risen rapidly up the agenda of all the establishment political parties. Or so it appears from the rhetoric!

The problem is that whilst more and more mainstream politicians are talking the talk, they are not walking the walk. They cannot imagine solutions outside the context of an expanding global economy, based entirely on the proposition that the accumulation and concentration of wealth by the tiny minority who control the world's powerful multinational corporations is somehow good for the whole of humanity.

So when these apparent converts to the cause of environmental responsibility, speak of the dire consequences of uncontrolled and devastating climate change they do so with blinkers and earplugs firmly in place. How else can they welcome the latest airport expansion or new motorway on a Tuesday and talk about climate change on a Thursday ?

Environmentalism has traditionally been the territory of Green parties but with the political mainstream now turning its attention in their direction, and the Greens themselves wholly taken in by talk of the a free market and commercialisation as the way forward for renewable energy, the Greens are no longer the radical platform they once appeared to some to be. The Stern Review, to which links are provided, highlights the economic consequences of doing,so far, much too little to combat global warming.

In the meantime we have an expanding world economy, reliant on oil for trade and transport. We have a military wing of a ruling elite, waging war for oil, and what's more a war machine dependant on oil for military superiority. We have real concerns about energy supplies with the legacy of nuclear waste and attendant safety issues unresolved.

We are confronted with massive problems in relation to the waste products of our consumer lifestyle which cannot be buried indefinitely. We have a society where pensioners shiver in fuel poverty whilst others exhibit their status by driving their gas gobbling Chelsea tractors, enjoy an air-conditioned tropical environment and light their lawns with more watts than others need to keep them warm on a frosty night.

The key word here is "waste". The key phrase is carbon emission free energy. The proposition is not that the comfortable middle class should shiver like the impoverished pensioner. The proposition is that nobody needs to be impoverished, materially or environmentally. Solidarity believes that only democratic public ownership of our energy, housing and transport industries, allied to a strategic plan for wholesale renewable electricity generation within a generation, subsidies for energy efficient housing, and a huge reduction in transport carbon pollution can deliver the environmental changes this and future generations need and save us from the tipping point where global warming will cause ecological and climate catastrophe.

Their are two accusations levelled against socialism. Socialism is said to be inefficient because it fails to acknowledge the motivation inspired by greed. Socialism is said to be undemocratic because of the eastern European example.

However the inefficiencies of capitalism are manifest in the lemming-esque approach to climate change. Imagine if an extra-terrestrial tracked the movement of goods in world trade and distinguished between those movements which actually enhanced collective enjoyment, from those that merely added a profit margin and most readers would appreciate that the exploitation of our planetary resources is currently out of balance. The recent debacle where 200 jobs were lost in Annan as locally caught prawns were shipped to China to be shelled and then back again is but one small example of this madness.

The old style communist or Stalinist regimes were undoubtedly a failed experiment but the odds against success were heavily weighted when socialist ideas failed to gain a dominant position in the west. Socialism is necessarily an International movement. Whilst ascendant the worker's state aspires towards a huge extension of democracy but, whilst under siege, paranoia and a nostalgia for the comfort of hierarchical structure resurfaces.

The essential difference in the modern era is the understanding that democracy and education are the oxygenated lifeblood of the genuine socialism Solidarity stands for. We are helped in this by the revolution in communication technology. In this context, socialism starts from a position which, in comparison the eastern experiment, is probably weaker than it was 100 years ago. However socialism can re-emerge on the world stage with greater speed than before with a much more powerful statement of its original purpose. And part of that much more powerful statement is that socialism is not now just charged with its historic task of the liberation of humankind from the social power of capitalism and the reactionary remnants of feudal society - it is charged with the physical saving of humanity and the ecosphere from the potential apocalypse of climate change.

The crisis of overproduction which was described by Marx 150 years ago may well have been moderated by the free market economic technocrats and the new imperialism of the globalised economy, but it has not disappeared. It finds its expression in other ways. The current "cure" has the unsavoury side effects of environmental catastrophe at home and abroad, war after war, the agony of Africa, mass extinctions and the prospect of a very bleak future.

That is why Solidarity commits itself to thinking globally and acting locally, to an internationalist green socialism.

Review references from Stern