Climate change

December’s COP15 summit on biodiversity, delayed for two years by the pandemic, brought together every nation on Earth (except the US and the Vatican) to agree a target of “30 by 30”: 30% of the Earth to be “protected for nature” by 2030. COP15 president and China’s ecology minister Huang Runqiu claimed this year’s (non-binding) agreement as an “historic moment” comparable to the Paris climate accord of 2015. This boosterism should fool no-one. The Paris deal is yet to have any effect in halting year on year increases in CO2 emissions, let alone reducing emissions or reducing atmospheric...

After four years of a strategy of forcing change by filling the world’s jails with climate activists, Extinction Rebellion have “quit” that scheme. In a New Year’s message they declare a temporary “shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic... to prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.” They hope that the shift to non-confrontational tactics will help them put 100,000 people on the streets for their next demonstration on 21 April. XR’s strategy of seeking mass arrests never really made much sense. If XR activists are now rethinking then this is a...

Even by its own standards, it is difficult to see why the government has given permission for a new coal mine near Whitehaven in West Cumbria. The mine is set to extract 2.8 million tonnes of coking coal a year and has been promoted under the silly slogan: “great coal, great steel, Great Britain”. But British steel-makers say it’s got high sulphur content and they cannot use it. Over 90% will be exported. Even here there is a shrinking market, as Europe shifts to electric arc furnaces and renewable energy. Michael Gove justified his decision with the brazenly denialist claim that the mine will...

“When temperature rise exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius (which could occur by 2026), some three billion will be living in places that regularly experience conditions beyond the human habitable range...[and] we are extremely unlikely to keep below 1.5 degrees C.” Gaia Vince in her book Nomad Century lays out the science in stark terms: we “face a very hostile world, characterised by a belt of uninhabitability swathed across most of today’s most populated regions... This is a completely new situation for our species, one in which our expanding population must deal with an ever-shrinking zone of...

Zack Muddle ( Solidarity 653 ) is of course right that the problem is capitalist work, rather than work per se, is driving the ecological crises. But capitalist work is what three billion wage workers do at the moment, and it needs to stop. The capitalist mode of production involves a constant pressure to do more work in less time. We sense this at work through our boss’s efforts to squeeze more work out of our working day. It also manifests as the replacement of human workers with ever more powerful machines. Work is always a physical movement of matter, the creation and distribution of use...

Protesters during Joe Biden's speech at COP27. The activists, two of them from indigenous peoples, held up a banner saying "People vs Fossil Fuels". They were thrown out of and banned from the conference Set against the backdrop of the Pakistan floods and famine in the Horn of Africa, COP27 was supposed to be the “implementation COP”. But this was a meeting that could not even agree to a non-binding statement that we should “phase down” (not even “phase out”!) fossil fuels. They implemented nothing: acceleration on the highway to climate hell continues. There was so much to discuss that the...

“We became a victim of something with which we had nothing to do, and of course it was a man-made disaster. Imagine, on one hand we have to cater for food security for the common man by spending billions of dollars and on the other we have to spend billions of dollars to protect flood-affected people from further miseries and difficulties. “How on earth can one expect from us that we will undertake this gigantic task on our own?” With these words Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, appealed to the assembled world leaders at COP27 in a key intervention in the loss and damages debate. The...

Download a PDF of a bulletin based on this article here “We’re on the highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”. These measured words from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres opened COP27. He called on humanity to "cooperate or perish." But moral appeals to world leaders will not work. Cooperation is antithetical to the capitalist world order. Businesses and nation states are locked in competitive rivalry. So where could this cooperation come from? Where is the brake and reverse gear? Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre explains that we now "very, very...

Get ready for more “Blah, Blah, Blah” : from 6-18 November the world’s capitalist class meets in Egypt for their 27th attempt to slow the acceleration of the climate crisis. In the 27 years since they first started meeting, human activity has added over 811 Gt of CO2 to the atmosphere or about as much as has been emitted by all of human activity in the previous 250 years. Given this record there is little hope that COP27 will organise effective change, but still Rishi Sunak’s decision to stay away is denialist swagger from a man who just handed Big Oil a multi-billion pound tax break to expand...

An oak sapling was planted in Parliament Square. Orange paint was daubed on a luxury car show room. Tomato soup was chucked at Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting (not damaging it, nor likely to). Two people closed the Dartford Crossing. A fossil fuel company got its windows smashed. Milk was spilt over the cheese counter at Fortnum and Mason. Those were some of the stunts that peppered Extinction Rebellion’s weekend of action (14 October). The weekend attracted fewer people than previous mobilisations. Since April, the Just Stop Oil splinter group has been blockading fossil fuel...