Global warming, nuclear energy and environmental issues are constantly on the agenda. A number of "ecologists" - such as Nicolas Hulot - claim that environmental issues transcend class struggle and the opposition between rich and poor. Balivernes! The ecological problems, and the potential environmental disaster that we face, are the products of the capitalist system.
It is true that capitalists live on earth, too, and from this point of view, one could say that the degradation of the environment is not in their interest. But the environmental consequences of capitalism do not depend on the individual will - whether good or bad - of this or that capitalist. They derive from the mode of operation of the capitalist system, whose motive force is the search for profit.
This is how Marxism analyzes the degradation of the environment. As Engels wrote towards the end of his life: "Where individual capitalists produce and exchange for immediate profit, the closest and most immediate results can only be taken into consideration. Provided that the manufacturer or the merchant individually sells the goods produced or purchased with the small profit of use, he is satisfied and does not care about what happens next to the merchandise and its buyer. The same goes for the natural effects of these actions. The Spanish planters in Cuba burned the forests on the slopes and found in the ash enough fertilizer for a generation of extremely profitable coffee trees - what mattered to them that, subsequently, the tropical showers carried the layer of superficial ground now without protection, leaving behind only the bare rocks? With respect to nature as well as society, in the current mode of production we only consider the closest, the most tangible result; and then it is still astonishing that the far-reaching consequences of the actions aimed at this immediate result are quite different, most often quite opposite. " (Engels - The role played by labor in the transition from ape to man.)