While the global temperature heats up and our television screens are filled with the natural disasters that come with it, world capitalist leaders have jetted off to Brazil, host of this year’s COP climate change conference. With the backdrop of the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, attendees will rub shoulders with fossil fuel executives as the topic shifts from how to prevent climate catastrophe to how to live with it. To facilitate these discussions, a new swathe of the Amazon has been cut through to build a four-lane motorway so tens of thousands of lobbyists can descend on the city of Belém.
Those representing the interests of advanced capitalist countries are desperate to make sure they get out of paying the price for the damage that the capitalist system has done to the environment. Hardest hit will be the working class and poor of the world’s poorest countries. As has been the case at countless COP conferences, the news will be filled with politicians articulating the need for something to be done about the climate, as long as the bill doesn’t land on them.
In a world torn by capitalist competition and division between competing blocs, British Labour government’s environment minister Ed Miliband has jumped to the defence of COP. According to him, “the COP climate summit is one of the best examples of successful multilateralism the world has ever known”. Away from cloud COP land, the world is heading towards 1.5oC of warming and beyond. So much for ‘capitalist multilateralism’!
British prime minister, Keir Starmer, initially didn’t want to go to COP; his attendance is one of his many U-turns, joining the dropping of the pledge to invest £28 billion a year in green development!
The farce of the COP conference, politicians and CEOs fighting to defend profits while the majority of us face the consequences of climate catastrophe, is a clear crime of the capitalist system. Environmental destruction is a global problem, unable to be solved by a system based on competing nation states. The only way it can be fought is through cooperation across the globe.
This is impossible while the capitalist system stays in place. But the working classes across the world have a common interest and a common enemy – the bosses. A socialist system, based on collective ownership of the wealth of the planet, could democratically plan the transition we need away from polluting fossil fuels without making working-class people pay the price. But to do this we need to get organised, here in Britain and across the world, to take on the bosses, their political representatives and the system of capitalism itself. To direct the wealth and knowledge to improving the lives of all and protecting the environment we need the fundamental socialist transformation of society.