My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (19.11.24) seeking to highlight the criminal hypocrisy of the COP29 Climate Conference. Climate is the overarching issue of this human era, bringing together all other issues and campaigns into a Big Picture far too overwhelming for the emotional intelligence of many. The resulting “it’s too late”, “grow your own” or hair-shirts responses are understandable but hopeless. And maybe that’s what is wanted. Just do nothing.

The projections of climate collapse in the very near future are illustrated by this year’s weather events as well climate movements. At least they published the mention of the of Saturday’s events, but the Press Release was never published.

Full text below:

Let’s have a look.

In the United States, super-hurricane Milton battered Florida followed by Helen, the strongest tropical storm ever recorded, which poured more than a year’s average rainfall onto North Carolina in less than eight-hours, destroying whole towns, houses and cars swept away. Seven weeks later local people have no fresh water to drink and the regional food production has been devastated. More than 200 people died.

In Spain, more than a month’s rain fell in less than one hour last week, flooding the the cities of Malaga and Valencia for second time in a month. Thousands were evacuated, more than 200 killed, many still missing, homes, shopping malls and bridges wrecked and 100,000 cars destroyed.

The farmlands that supply not only Spain but supermarkets here in the uk were decimated. Greenhouses, machinery and packaging plants were smashed, with crops destroyed and significant damage to fruit and vegetable production into the future. The floods destroyed more than 60% of Spain’s production of oranges, alongside thousands of hectares of tomatoes, peppers, salad and vines.

Emergency and relief authorities took days to appear and could offer little, the people left to fend for themselves and protest at the lack of care. Timely warnings were not broadcast and cash-relief only offered long after the immediate devastation. And in the USA, the most wealthy nation in the history of humanity, only the wealthy who could pay received help.

Such calamity is nothing compared with the Global South. Record rainfall is happening across the world, in regions with far less economic resilience and social infrastructure than Europe and the USA. And at the same time, fires and droughts across Africa.

Extreme weather is leaving tens of millions millions displaced, millions starving and thousands dead in Nepal and Vietnam, Tibet, Peru, India, China, and Indonesia. It snowed in the Sahara desert, an event never before recorded. Glaciers are melting in the Himalayas causing uncontrollable floods in Pakistan.

Parts of the Arctic are enduring exceptionally high temperatures — up 30 to 40 degrees above normal — because of multiple intense heat domes. 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the past decade recording the hottest global temperatures too.

Everywhere there is profound changes in the weather, swinging between extremes of wet and dry, hot and cold. In Britain one-in-six people live at risk of flooding.

But the United Nations Climate Conference held last week in the oil-dependent-economy of Azerbaijan has ensured no funding for concerted action on the climate emergency, and protected the fossil industries.

The emissions of global heating gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the cause. Emissions have to be reduced, as an emergency action by all nations across the world. And many countries will need help with that, or face complete disaster. That’s why we call for climate justice.

The poor and working classes of every country should not be left to pay the severe price of climate change, caused undoubtedly from the impact burning of fossil fuels since before 1850. Yet we are targeted by climate deniers telling us to keep quiet and carry on – a strategy that hasn’t worked anywhere else.

For every climate sceptic, there are hundreds of climate scientists who studied to get to university, then specialised in aspects of natural science and finally produced report after report of the extraordinary and unprecedented changes that are destabilising our land, oceans, atmosphere and wildlife. Tens of thousands of peer-reviewed and triple-tested scientific reports on all aspects of the climate collapse and sixth Great Extinction of life on Earth – happening now.

Yet those with power are denying these facts and encouraging baseless opinions formed from mythology, superstition and dogmatism. To say these are “conspiracy theories” is not sufficient. This is far-Right wing ideological claptrap, linking climate denial alongside anti-vaccines, anti-woke ultra-nationalism, supporting climate colonialism and racist denigration of the people of colour across the global south – lives that are less valuable than white humans of the industrialised North.

Whilst the super-rich buy-up land in New Zealand, projected to be the least and last to be affected by climate collapse, they tell us there is nothing to worry about. The climate deniers are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

It is as if the far-Right ideologues want to see mass environmental destruction and human carnage in order to feed off the hopelessness, despair and conditions of dog-eat-dog survival, best suited for their political ambitions. President Trump demands “drill, drill’ drill” for oil during his second term, appointing climate denier Chris Wright as energy secretary.

Prime Minster Starmer is more covert, booting tax handouts for carbon capture and storage, biofuels and nuclear power, none of which represent carbon-zero energy suppliers and altogether taking tens of billions of pounds away from investment in renewables of solar, wind and wave power.

The COP29 United Nations Climate Conference proved that the fossil-fuel companies are in control, selling more oil and gas rights in the face of disaster, chasing short-term profits at the expense of human carnage and societal collapse.

The science of climate change is not based upon opinion. It is fact. The climate deniers, funded by the oil corporations, are leading humanity into a deep and accelerating mass disaster.

We protest! Plymouth’s trades unions are supporting the Climate Summit in Plymouth this Saturday, and marching to demand action now: cut emissions by 50% by 2030, and plan for the fastest possible transition away from fossil fuels! Join us!