The major disaster in British Columbia a week ago has been conspicuously under-reported in the UK, whether in the interests of those who want to minimise concerns about climate change, or as part of the British exceptionalism which increasingly dominates our mainline media.
A key feature of the disaster is that much of its devastation has impacted on already impoverished First Nations communities, many of whom are without power, short of food and shelter, and cut off by roads made impassable by huge landslides.
It’s also clear that increased run-off following the forest fire-storms in a uniquely hot summer has contributed to the flooding and landslides.
Large numbers of dairy cows have been swept away, to the extent that there’s a widespread shortage of milk in western Canada.
Most nations submitted new NDCs in advance of COP26.
Around 40 nations did not submit.
Next round of NDCs covers the 2030s so this was effectively the last chance for setting policy on emissions reductions prior to 2030M
Major Policy Outcomes
Glasgow Climate Pact – this was a new development
Requests review by end of 2022. Australia has already announced that it won’t do this.
Requests greater adaptation, climate, and loss and damage finance.
Requests coal phasedown.
Various other features.
Article 6 finally agreed – system of carbon markets and other forms of cooperation (6 years late). Major issues remain on how emissions are counted and attributed.
Similarly, finally agreed transparency rules.
Climate Colonialismcontinues
Refusal to agree a Loss and Damage Facility. Refusal to therefore plan for climate impacts on the Global South.
Failure to even cough up $100bn promised to developing countries. (Serco Test and Trace £37bn ~ $50bn). African group suggest $1.3tr.
Adaptation, similar failure, calls to double finance in Glasgow Pact, but from low base. ($40bn in 2025)Warming Amounts
Warming Amounts
‘Current policies in place today will lead to a best-estimate of around 2.6C to 2.7C warming by 2100 (with an uncertainty range of around 2C-3.6C). If countries meet both conditional and unconditional nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for the near-term target of 2030, projected warming by 2100 falls to 2.4C (1.8C-3.3C).’ Carbon Brief
Key Takeaways
Not enough, money and fossil fuels absent.
Climate colonialism and imperialism continues.
Too much faith in tech and markets.
COP increasingly spectacular, inaccessible, and uneven.
Signs of life
The COP26 Marches centred calls for reparations and involved trade unionists.
I suppose I just thought that campaigning amongst armament workers and on behalf of armament workers would be likely to be difficult in terms of how we might begin to “actually” impact global heating. I know that if we weren’t building all this military shit and jetting it all over the world and destroying humans and other productive forces with it, then we would avoid putting a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. It’s just that I’ve never considered that it was an issue that you might be able to intervene in quite the same way as I think we might be able to when it comes to oil and gas production.
The issue of oil and gas is looming ever larger in the consciousness of the climate movement. It’s way, way higher than it was when I discovered XR in 2019. When I took part in the London Rebellion it was hard to get a sensible conversation about oil and gas and the North Sea was a very nebulous “concept” for many. Look at the movement today with Stop Cambo. If reporting on mainstream media is anything to go by it’s beginning to exercise thoughts in layers way beyond just the activists and the scientists now. Interestingly the only people who dare not mention oil & gas is the COP. I don’t know if any of this is true about the military complex.
But I can see that from the perspective of jobs, and that’s how the discussion was framed, there’s pretty much no difference in making “demands” about just transitioning armaments workers and oil workers into renewables and other sustainable work.
But I can’t see how it would ever be likely to be more than just a “demand” in the case of armaments workers. In the case of oil workers I have, as you know, an idea that a mass intervention amongst oil workers is a crucial first step if we’re ever going to get to the point where we try to choke off oil and gas production – the absolute first and crucial necessity of a movement that has any hope of abating climate change in the face of this system. There has to be a time and it has to come very soon when the licence society gives the industry to produce fossil fuels is withdrawn. Who is going to force that issue?
I don’t know if a part of all this that as oil is is all I’ve ever known/done, oil is all I can ever really see. The opposite was surely very widely the truth for the bulk of the population until very recently. I think that’s changing.
But I’m beginning to realise that what I see as the impossibility of armaments workers turning their weapons into ploughshares, is what others see as impossible when the issue of confronting/challenging the oil and gas workers. I can see why people think it’s a very long shot to imagine that they’ll either participate in the ending of oil and gas production. But I think that least they can be neutralised, picketed at the heliports and stopped from producing the oil. For how long? And anyway! They need to be informed of the science and we can’t rely on the media to do that.
These two issues, fossil fuel and the armaments/military complex, seem to be of different orders (qualitatively and quantitatively) in the context of tackling climate change. Fossil fuel production seems to me to be primary. Once the fossil fuels are out of the ground, they are pollution – they will be burned/processed. Being used to build and deploy military hardware is just (just?) the path the pollution takes to get into the atmosphere. Or do we think that realistically we can take on the military complex and somehow stop it, and therefore stop the demand for fossil fuel?
They (?) take fossil fuels out of the ground and then make fortunes on it. They need to keep taking it out of the ground to keep making fortunes – to keep feeding the beast. So they are endlessly imaginative in finding new and more extravagant and destructive ways of using it. It looks like a real madness. to me. The thing is that they can’t turn this hellish roundabout off themselves. But turned off it will have to be if life is to survive, inasmuch as I understand the science.
Capitalism is the problem. But to a great extent isn’t the oil industry pretty much the same thing as capitalism (?) . . the same thing as climate change? The military complex surely is just (just again?) how they regulate capitalism – keep the imperialistic plunder going and ensure that the trade routes remain open to keep that wealth flowing north, and in the process provide an ever-renewing market for the oil. I never did get my head round the concept of a permanent arms economy – it was an idea touted by a political tendency I was taught was beyond the pale. But I guess I’m stumbling along in the same neck of the woods here.
Obviously, the military complex is a huge issue for humanity, but I just don’t see how you tackle it head on with any hope of affecting climate change. On the other hand, if you end oil you end capitalism (don’t ask me to prove that – I was hoping someone else would though) and then you have at least a fighting chance (is that a pun) of ending the military complex. The other way round it’s even clearer. You don’t stop oil and life on earth is in danger. However, you frame it you need to stop oil.
Over the next few days we are keen to publish posts that reflect on COP 26. We’re particularly interested in articles that look at the challenge of movement building in the wake of COP. To kick things off we republish this article by Brendan Montague the editor of the Ecologist which was first published online under a CC BY 4.0 license in that magazine on 12th November.Send articles or ideas for articles to triple.e.scot@gmail.com
The COP26 conference has failed to usher in a new era where capital is constrained to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown.
The future was supposed to be copitalism: a new global economic paradigm where national governments work together through the United Nations (UN) Conference of the Parties (COP) process to limit emissions and prevent runaway climate breakdown – while leaving capitalism otherwise intact.
The climate conferences have taken place annually for a quarter of a century. The aim is to negotiate global emissions targets that will be translated into national policies. The high-water mark was the Paris Agreement of COP21 when the worlds’ leaders agreed to limit global heating to 1.5C.
The mechanism agreed was “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs). This means national governments are responsible for submitting commitments to cut emissions to the UN. The COP process is also supposed to include a “ratchet mechanism” where those government commitments are made increasingly ambitious.
Credibility
In order to deliver on the NDCs each country would have to use a combination of carrot – investment, incentives, tax cuts – and stick – regulation and taxation – to move capital away from fossil fuels and towards “green” technology and infrastructure. The most obvious and effective means of reducing emissions is a limit or stop on the exploitation of coal, oil and gas.
Thus, “copitalism” is designed to maintain the status quo except where specific economic activity drives us towards climate breakdown. Capital accumulation remains the logic of our economies. Economic growth is maintained, or profit is delivered by the distribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest. Corporations continue to deliver profits for shareholders. Social inequality deepens. Poverty grinds.
The Glasgow conference, COP26, was the first deadline for presidents and prime ministers to hand in their Paris Agreement homework. The problem is, reducing fossil fuel exploitation involves a confrontation with the wealthiest, most entrenched monopoly corporations in human history.
And even on its own terms, the outcomes from the COP process over the last two weeks are catastrophic. As Climate Action Tracker (CAT) reported during the conference: “The projected warming from current policies – not proposals, what countries are actually doing – is…at 2.7 ̊C with only a 0.2 ̊C improvement over the last year and nearly one degree above the net-zero announcements governments have made.”
The distressing truth is Copitalism should be a dystopian nightmare.
Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics, a CAT partner organisation, has said: “It’s all very well for leaders to claim they have a net zero target, but if they have no plans as to how to get there, and their 2030 targets are as low as so many of them are, then frankly, these net zero targets are just lip service to real climate action. Glasgow has a serious credibility gap.”
The new promises emanating from Glasgow would reduce this warming by just 0.1C. As Climate Action Tracker has established, there is a “very big credibility gap” when it comes to net-zero policy. Life under such conditions will not be worth living for millions, if not billions, of people.
Damage
The primary weakness of the COP process is that even the best outcomes are, by design, not action but words. The conferences are focused on national governments setting out new commitments, always framed by deadlines years into the future. The politicians and their parties may not even be in power when those chickens come home to roost.
Those members of civil society paying the most attention – concerned citizens, protesters, charities and NGOs and the thousands of journalists – feel duty bound to celebrate and amplify the smallest successes from the COP process. There is a deep concern that the general public will become disheartened, climate anxiety will intensify and campaigners will switch off.
And so one of the major successes being touted at the conference is an agreement signed by 40 countries to phase out coal power by the 2030s for the coloniser economies and 2040s for the colonised, and to end all investment in new coal power generation. China has not agreed to reduce coal production and burning at home.
There has also been much fanfare about the surprise agreement between the United States – historically the largest contributor to climate breakdown – and China – currently the largest national contributor. But even here the response of many at COP26 has been characterised thus: “This was a stage-managed nothingburger. There was nothing new bar words, nothing on coal, finance or loss and damage.”
The problem is, climate breakdown is a physical reality.
Share price
A total of 88m barrels of oil were produced globally in 2020. The historically unprecedented international shutdown of production as a result of the global pandemic did not come close to reducing our use of oil by the levels necessary to prevent climate breakdown. Indeed, production was at a historic high of 95m barrels in 2019. There is no reason to believe it will not return to these suicidal levels in the coming years.
Further, a total of 159,610,000 tonnes of coal were produced globally in 2020. Again, the pandemic slowdown resulted in a dip in mining. But, even so, coal production globally is higher today than when the gavel was struck to mark the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. And bear in mind that there remains 1,074,108,000,000 tonnes of proven coal reserves around the world.
The actual introduction of a copitalist economy would inevitably result in coal, oil and gas becoming stranded assets. Those companies that hold these assets would not be able to exploit them, turning assets into sales into profits into dividends for shareholders. The share prices might not collapse, but they would certainly move. If capitalism works on any level, then it is that those with capital will only invest in companies that deliver a return on that investment.
CC0
The share prices of the major energy companies tell the same story. ExxonMobil currently has a market capitalisation of $281 billion. A share in the company today is worth $64 – indistinguishable from the price on the opening day of COP26 and well above the $35 price from this time last year. ExxonMobil shareholders do not fear copitalism.
Likewise, the share price of the Peabody Energy Corporation – the world’s largest private coal company – remains steady at $11, almost three times its value last year. Closer to home, shares in BP have risen from £2.36 each to £3.41 in the course of the last year, as the company recovers from the pandemic.
Campaigners
The justification for this political project is that the need to avert climate breakdown is so urgent and critical, and the likelihood of a wider and deeper political transformation of our societies and our economies is so remote, that the capitalists must be appeased while being persuaded that climate mitigation is in their interests as much as anyone else’s.
The problem with the capitalist project is that capitalists are not running the capitalist system, but perversely the capitalist system runs the capitalists. The corporate leadership of any country does not choose what or how it produces but instead is the flotsam of our societies willing to do anything to ride the wave of capitalist wealth-making at any cost.
Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of Shell, is a moral vacuum. But this is not a personal failing of a human being who just happens to have risen through the ranks of his corporation through hard work and diligence.
A capitalist logic has promoted those executives who deliver results, deliver profits, precisely by grinding the most out of the human and natural resources they control. No amount of evidence or hectoring can change van Beurden’s mind. And if it does, he will be out of a job.
The assembled delegates, the surrounding banks of NGO campaigners and exhausted journalists try to understand the daily shocks and disappointments of the COP process. It is assumed that a failure of understanding on the part of a particular leader – usually someone else’s leader – is the cause of failure at the conference. We are wedded to the idea of human agency, of powerful saviours, of national leaders.
Billionaires
The delegates of COP26 negotiating our collective future are hidden away in a cordoned off zone within the Blue Zone. More than 500 of those delegates are either directly within the employ of fossil fuel companies or delegates for government departments working with Big Coal, Oil and Gas. The NGOs and the journalists accredited to the zone are locked out of the real discussions, relying on press conferences for any crumbs of information.
The Blue Zone itself feels like a military encampment on the banks of the River Clyde. The fences tower overhead with delegates rushing through turnstiles guarded by security. The Green Zone along the road is entirely separate, but here the pavilions are dominated by National Grid, Unilever, Sainsbury’s and Microsoft. The message – that corporations are the solution – is not subtle. The Green Zone is open to the public, and school children tour the science museum styled displays.
Civil society is represented in Glasgow. But the COP26 Coalition is both physically and metaphorically cast into the hinterland in venues scattered across the living centre of the city of Glasgow. Here the science of climate change is understood and accepted, and the reality of the actual change needed to prevent calamity is discussed. The attendees are actual people from Glasgow.
The discussions at the venue in Adelaide Place were wide ranging and meaningful, taking in the Green New Deal, degrowth, Indigenous traditions, the threat of green colonialism, food sovereignty, international trade, and more. But the event seemed only to coincide with the COP negotiations happening less than two miles away. There seemed no possibility of these debates influencing the proceedings.
Copitalism should be a dystopian nightmare. The COP26 conferences are a political project aimed at maintaining as much as possible of our current global economic system. The billionaires will continue to make gargantuan profits, fuelling their intergalactic fantasies. At the same time, 15 million people have likely died from coronavirus and billions are denied a cheap vaccine to maintain the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
Monsters
But the experience of COP26 during the last few days suggests that copitalism itself is an unachievable utopian dream, as vacuous as Charles Fourier’s vision of the oceans turning to lemonade. There is, alas, no real need for a neologism. Capitalism cannot allow copitalism to exist, such is its rapacious need for mountains and oceans of coal, oil and gas.
Barack Obama when president of the United States was instrumental in defusing the Paris Agreement and now calls on young people to protest for climate action. During his speech on Monday he made the following confession: “There are times where the future seems somewhat bleak. There are times where I am doubtful that humanity can get its act together before it’s too late, and images of dystopia start creeping into my dreams.”
The reality is that COP26 is failing because capitalism cannot allow copitalism to supersede. We cannot postpone the work of ending capitalism until after we have moved to avert climate breakdown. Because capitalism is climate breakdown. Ta’Kaiya Blaney of the Tla A’min Nation, the Indigenous activist told People’s Plenary meeting before a walkout today: “Cop26 is a performance. It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism. I didn’t come here to fix the agenda – I came here to disrupt it.”
This argument does not have to be simplified for the public. We already know. As Cora, a 15-year-old member of Fridays For Future from Edinburgh said so eloquently this week: “Letting that kind of capitalist theatre run every COP? We are never going to see the change that we need now.”
But if copitalism is now an impossible utopia, is capitalism really the only game in town? Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the billionaire? Or is now the time for the climate movement to merge fully into the environment movement, the social justice movement, the (dare I say it) anti-capitalist movement so that we can aggregate our traumas, our grievances, our hopes, into something with the force and multitude that can begin to challenge the capitalist machine at the core of our misfortunes?
The famous quote from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci also seems apposite right now. “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
This is the slightly expanded text of a contribution that Pete Cannell (speaking for Scot.E3) made to a meeting organised by the global climate jobs network at the COP26 people’s summit.
Scotland is well placed to make a rapid transition to a zero-carbon economy. It is well endowed with natural resources for wind, wave, tidal and hydro power generation. Hydro power was developed in the 1950’s and sixties, more recently there has been some further development of local, small-scale hydro. Offshore and onshore wind power has developed rapidly, wave and tidal has seen very little investment. But Scotland also has a relatively strong representation of engineering skills among its workforces. These workers have skills in electrical, marine engineering, fabrication and so on – skills that are needed for the transition to a zero-carbon economy that needs to begin right now.
Most of these workers are currently employed in either the Oil and Gas sector or ‘Defence’. Sectors which are significantly larger as a proportion of the Scottish economy than they are of the UK as a whole.
The current state of play with climate jobs is disastrous. The policy of leaving transition to the market has resulted in declining numbers of jobs in renewables. We’ve written about the closure of facilities at BiFab and Machrihanish elsewhere on this site. At the same time there have been massive job losses in the North Sea and a long-term decline in engineering jobs in the defence sector. While there has been a massive increase in offshore wind generation the private sector has driven down wages and conditions, used low paid workers from around the world, shifted production to sites thousands of miles away and focused on profit maximisation rather than just transition.
There’s a lot more we could say about oil and gas but in the context of the other talks at this meeting we want to focus now on the arms trade. Britain is one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world and Scotland has a disproportionately large share of this activity. It has been excellent that during this mobilisation around COP26 there has been a lot of discussion of the huge carbon emissions of the military.
In Scot.E3 we’ve argued for the need to go further – the military industrial complex in Scotland (and globally) acts as a barrier to transition. It thrives on public subsidy – far more than that provided for renewables. This is a characteristic it shares with the oil and gas sector. It distorts the economy, it’s secretive and hugely corrupt, dominates research agendas and monopolises skills and resources that should be directed to saving the planet.
We look forward to a day when the commitment and imagination of young people currently in school can be deployed to develop the kind of sustainable and socially just society that we are fighting for. But time is short, and we need to start the transition now with the skills and knowledge that are already available. To achieve climate justice and win the climate jobs we need it’s going to be necessary to force a radical shift of resources away from the defence sector as well as from oil and gas.
Despite wind and heavy rain one hundred thousand people marched in Glasgow yesterday. They were joined by hundreds of thousands more at over 300 locations around the world. Here’s a visual record of the Glasgow march. Thanks to Graham Checkley for the pictures and video.
And here’s an overview of the whole march from our friends at REEL News
This article by Scot.E3 activists Brian Parkin and Pete Cannell was first published in the newsletter of the Scottish United Left. United Left is a self funded organisation for UNITE members, with the principal aim of promoting a socialist agenda within the Union
For the better part of a century Scotland has been energy self-sufficient. Since the end of World War 2 an ‘energy mix’ of coal, hydro, natural gas and nuclear provided an embarrassment of riches as far as power generation was concerned. Not only was Scotland power generation self-sufficient but it was also a net exporter of power to England and Northern Ireland via inter-connecter cables. But over the past decade, the picture has been changing radically.
Firstly, much of Scotland’s ‘thermal’ power plant- coal and nuclear has been retired– and the one gas-fired plant at Peterhead has been down-loaded; and without the fitting of carbon capture plant- it too, will be closed by 2025. Also, by 2030 Scotland’s remaining nuclear station at Torness should have closed. And despite a considerable investment programme in wind turbine construction it is conceivable that Scotland will be unable to meet its peak winter demand at times.
Climate crisis
The November COP 26 Climate summit in Glasgow will present evidence showing a worsening picture of runaway climate change due to the failure to control and reduce CO2 and other greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere. But even before the summit begins, many scientists and environmental activists have expressed doubts about any targets on greenhouse gasses being met. This is bad news which suggest that fundamental political changes are required in order to bring the world economy in line in order to prevent a global catastrophe. But rather than just await a solution from upon high, it is essential that wherever possible, climate crisis abatement strategies are undertaken now.
Scotland’s potential
Relative to much of the rest of Europe, Scotland is endowed with a combination of natural assets- which if harnessed responsibly- could turn the country into a showcase green energy economy. Scotland has one of the longest coastlines of any country in Europe- along with some of the most reliable wind resources- both on and off shore. Another exemplary energy resource is the Pentland Firth- the tidal stream straits between Northern Caithness and the Orkney Islands. It has been calculated that if a mere 20% of the straits energy could be captured then the power needs of Scotland could be met.
The social dimensions
Any radical shift in the economy is not possible without the jobs to achieve it and the democratic consensus to make it possible. But no such programme is possible unless there is a clear understanding that the status quo can no longer prevail. It is a status quo that is driven by a profit motive that denies both environmental responsibility and social justice. So while the planet overheats, the elderly and poor shiver. Therefore, we will need a Just Transition that will transfer and retrain workers from old sectors into building and maintaining the various component sectors of the green economy. There will be houses to upgrade to new thermal standards and new houses to build that incorporate those standards. New smart power distribution and supply systems will have to be built and maintained. Also the design and manufacture of new wind, tidal, wave technologies and supply systems will require a new generation of workers.
And beyond……
A truly green economy must also take into account the wider built environment- issues like clean free public transport and the redesign of energy efficient public amenities and enhanced cultural facilities. And Scotland which beyond its central belt has a dispersed population dependent on road transport- which raises the prospect of non-fossil fuel powered vehicles.
These and many other issues will present themselves as the transition towards a green energy economy nears. But it is essential that every stage of these transitions are the subject of truly democratic discussion that will at each stage raise the question of whether Scotland will remain part of a dire global problem- or a leading part of its solution.
As the climate talks were starting in Glasgow, the Edinburgh COP26 Coalition and Edinburgh XR held a march of around 400 people from the Meadows to the Scottish Parliament – ending with a rally at the parliament. Speakers included a young activist from Kenya, Friends of the Earth, the Edinburgh Muslim Women’s Association and many more. Ex oil worker Neil Rothnie spoke for Scot.E3.
The first covers 60 years of unbroken rank and file struggle by construction workers, including the National Building Workers Strike of 1972, the fights for safety, including from asbestos, and against the blacklisting of activist workers, up to the Shut-the-sites campaign last year in the pandemic, and this year’s campaign against deskilling of electricians at Hinkley Point C (‘No 2 ESO’) all threaded together by construction activist JT Murphy’s 100 year-old chant: “With the bosses never, With the trade union officers sometimes, With the rank and file always”.
The second film, in contrast, is about the collective aspirations of young people and people of colour for land and food justice. All very well you may be thinking, but where’s the power for change to come from? At which point the film deftly switches to the fierce and persistent militancy of Indian farmers in the face of three laws designed to commodify land and food for private profit. The Indian Farmers are even bringing their protest to Glasgow this weekend.
Scot.E3 is collaborating with other climate jobs campaigns to organise this event at 415pm on November 9th at COP26
There are currently over a dozen national climate jobs campaigns around the world, as well as further green new deal proposals. The articulation between the climate justice movement and the labour movement is, at this moment, still in its early steps and the pandemic has not promoted any sort of coalescence. The Corona Crisis is not an external event, but part of capitalist over-consumption of nature. Climate jobs are therefore one of the key components of any programatic and political alliance between climate and workers movements. Capitalism has no plan but collapse, so we need a plan from below. To overcome the climate crisis we need a political program for society, and workers in all sectors need to be involved in shaping a livable future for humanity, which will take a lot of work!
November 9
4:15 pm UTC+0
Albany Centre. 44 Ashley Street, Glasgow, G3 6DS United Kingdom
Contributors:
Emma Cockburn (Scot3E – Scotland),
Nuria Blázquez (Ecologistas en Acción – Spain),
Jonathan Neale (One Million Climate Jobs – UK),
João Camargo (Global Climate Jobs / Empregos para o Clima – Portugal)
Online:
Josua Mata (Sentro – Philippines)
Julia Kaiser (Students for Future, TV N 2020 – Germany)
Jean-Claude Simon (Transform Europe! – Denmark)
Ditthi Bhattacharya (New Trade Union Initiative – India)
Employment, Energy and Environment 
