COP27: no pause in capitalist ecocide

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 talks overran by 39 hours. But in over two weeks of detailed technical discussions, representatives of nearly 200 countries achieved nothing. The 636 fossil fuel lobbyists, alongside representatives of various petrostates (including the UAE, which is hosting next year’s meeting) return home to continue their work of growing their businesses unimpeded.

The only mechanism that COP27 governments have to reduce CO2 emissions are carbon trading schemes. Carbon trading is an attempt to correct the so-called “market failure” where prices do not reflect environmental costs.

These schemes have never worked. They provide opportunities for financial swindling but have no impact on real world emissions. COP27 was presented with options such as increased transparency, methods to prevent “double counting” and tighter policing of bogus drawdown schemes. Those might to fix some of the problems with carbon trading. But rich countries argued successfully against these moves. The capitalist class’s only idea to reduce levels of atmospheric carbon remains completely ineffective.

The talks also had space to discuss “non-market approaches” to draw down carbon and decarbonise the economy, but with no result.

In fact, governments could present plans for systematically decommissioning fossil fuel infrastructure, halting new exploration, electrifying everything, building smartgrids, massively expanding nuclear and renewable power sources, creating viable carbon drawdown schemes, and investing in energy efficiency measures like home insulation and integrated public transport. Governments could have spent the week comparing how they achieve these goals, whether they can be achieved through regulation alone or whether it is necessary to take such firms and the financial institutions that back them into common ownership.

The absence of effective initiatives on any of these fronts shows the depth of the crisis.

Conference attendees and some NGOs hailed the historic creation of a loss and damage fund. But no money has been commited to this proposed fund and there is no agreement about who should pay into it or benefit from it. The US-EU bloc’s last minute support for a loss and damage fund was an attempt to get China to contribute and speed up its emissions reductions.

Throughout the conference, the US-EU bloc attempted to position themselves as the people who are “keeping the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius alive” against the poorer nations and China (the G77 bloc), who focussed more on loss and damages. In fact, both sides are lost in climate change denialism.

US-EU governments claim emissions reductions in recent years but hazve largely offshored their emissions to China along with their manufacturing base. And the talk about courses for limiting heating to 1.5 degrees only obscures the fact current policies have us careering blindly towards 3-4 degrees Celsius and beyond.

Poorer nations, with far less control over this trajectory, are right to focus on who pays for the loss and damage. 3-4 degrees Celsius will mean many of these nations will cease to exist. But when they line up behind the world’s biggest polluter and support domestic fossil capital expansion, that is not a strategy for limiting loss and damage.

With each passing COP meeting, it is increasingly obvious that capitalism has no answers. Worse, capitalism is rooted in denialism that can only lead to escalating ecocide.

As the crises deepen and capitalists’ faith in their system falters, this may create opportunities for renewing workers’ organisation and struggle. Herein lies the hope and the much sought after alternative.