COP26 – how much more blah, blah, blah?

This video, on Dave Borlace’s Youtube channel, ‘Just Have a Think’, provides a very good deconstruction of the “blah, blah, blah” reality of the resolutions coming out of COP26 (the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference).

However, Borlace’s exposé stands in stark contrast to his political conclusion.

After outlining in detail how the global powers and their major monopolies are the biggest barrier to overcoming the climate crisis, he then concludes by claiming that not all hope is lost: all that is required is that we make better, greener choices as individuals “in our own lives”, whilst putting “relentless pressure on our political and business leaders” to make the urgent changes.

The same leaders, he explains just moments before, who have shown time after time (including at this conference), they have no intention of doing what is necessary to avert catastrophic ecological collapse. They are the puppets of the multi-national corporations and the upper echelons of the capitalist class who make most of the big decisions which affect our lives in the interests of maximising their profits and capital accumulation.

So now COP27 next year in Egypt will become the new “most important conference in human history” and the new “last chance”. In reality, just like all the COPs that have come before, it too will fall far short of what is required.

Only as masses of people start to wake up to the reality that decisions about production, distribution and exchange must be taken out of private hands as part of an international planned response, resulting from new, more democratic institutions of working-class governance, will humanity have the possibility of averting catastrophic ecological and social collapse.

What is urgently required is the creation of a political movement—a revolutionary party—committed to breaking the resistance of the capitalist rulers and their state apparatus and beginning to implement the urgently necessary social transformation our future depends on.