Don't turn your back on COP21

On Monday, 25,000 official delegates from 150 countries descended on Paris for the COP21 Climate Talks. Of all the talks we have seen to date, they are the best organised international talks, with the most potential. The biggest progress is that they are focussed around the climate action targets that countries have agreed meet by 2020, called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs. They are also set to acknowledge at least some of the great potential of local and grassroots action on climate change by emphasising the role of individual cities, like London, in setting their own targets and actions.

It would be a lie, however, to herald them as a solution, even a temporary one, to our climate change woes. The INDCs mentioned will allow for more coherent discussion and will hopefully push countries to be more ambitious, but taken as they are, they still steer us on a course for at least 3°C of warming. This means catastrophic sea level rise of at least half a metre by 2100, massive weather disasters, floods, droughts, and mass homelessness. This will largely affect those in the global south who haven’t contributed to climate change in the first place.

We need a massive international people’s movement

Look a little closer and it’s clear that even this is optimistic. Huge business groups like Business Europe have taken the stance that climate action is directly opposed to economic growth and governments are nodding along with them.

Reluctant to set real regulation, and scared that they’ll lose out on industry, they have promised huge tax funded pay-outs to companies, should they set any. Business Europe are right: economic growth and true sustainability are fundamentally incompatible and until governments can prioritise people before profits, economic growth will always take precedence and climate action will not make headway.

So, do the talks in Paris have any relevance to the climate struggle? They do, because they bring climate change into the global media spotlight, providing a stage for the real issues to be aired among the lies and lobbying. Globally, climate marches of well over half a million over the weekend highlighted the real strength of this. These people provide hope for real action beyond the Paris talks, outside of the isolated world of politicians and corporations.

Many marchers in Britain emphasised the link between climate apathy and active hostility, on the part of our government, and their vicious and selective austerity. Cuts to solar subsidies have cost 2000 jobs and the prospect of viable solar energy on the grid for many years to come, and the scrapping of a home insulation scheme for new houses is a huge blow to sustainable living as heating will remain our biggest domestic fuel use by far.

It has been estimated that a national home insulation scheme would create 100 thousand jobs. Meanwhile we are the only G7 country to increase fossil fuel subsidies – a move condemned by the UN.

What can we do? The thing about climate change is that it is acutely time sensitive. As long as we emit greenhouse gases they keep piling up in the atmosphere and will guarantee some degree of climate cooking even if we halt all emissions immediately. We need a massive international people’s movement that doesn’t rely on our economic and political system to change things, and we need it now. In fact, we need to change them. But, time is short and we must take every opportunity to force the powers that be to listen now, whether that be rallying in huge numbers in every country on the 12th of December to mark the end of the climate talks, taking part in mass civil disobedience through the climate games, or playing a part in any of countless climate change actions organised by ordinary people like us in the months following the talks.

So don’t be disheartened by the failure, on the surface, of the Paris talks to deliver a safe future, instead add your voice and your hand to the growing number demanding action on climate change for our own sake and that of our fellow humans.