Why there is so little hope from COP

For many years the representatives of fossil capital have outnumbered politicians and scientists at the COP talks, but this year fossil capital has openly, brazenly taken control. COP28, starting 30 November, will be chaired by Sultan Al Jabr, CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s state-owned oil company. He recently announced plans to increase output from 2.7 billion barrels to 5 billion barrels a day, and leaked documents reveal ADNOC’s plans to use the summit to broker business deals.

For the past 28 years the capitalist class has demonstrated it will not and very likely cannot halt rising emissions. Instead they have only ever organised a “disturbing acceleration in the number, speed and scale of broken climate records” (2023 UN Emissions Gap report).

Since the 1992 Earth Summit, human activity has added nearly one trillion tonnes of CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere. More emissions have been released since the COP process began than in all previous human history. In the last year, global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.2% to an all-time record 57.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Atmospheric CO2 levels are now at levels not seen on Earth since four million years ago, when the climate was 2-4ºC hotter and sea levels were 10-25 metres higher. Nobody knows how long it will take for temperature and sea level to catch up with CO2 concentrations, but for 86 days this year temperatures were already 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels. September 2023 was the hottest on record with temperatures 1.8ºC above preindustrial levels (UN Emissions Gap Report 2023). A recent polar summit in Paris warned that we may already have passed tipping points for catastrophic melt of the cryosphere (the frozen-water parts of the planet), which would trigger feedback loops that further accelerate heating.

28 years of failure are the predictable result of a ruling class that prioritises profit over reason, the anarchy of the free market over planning and control. The ruling class’s inability to harness science and technology for social and ecological good was well understood by the earliest Marxists: “Every society based on the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control... The product governs the producers... Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with, them... As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these social means of action - and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders - so long as these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us... But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants.

“The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and the electricity under command in the telegraph and voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the service of humanity. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual” (Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific).

As the floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme weather intensify, we look to the workers’ movement as the only social force with the interest and potential power to bring our productive forces under social control.