The repeated editorial structure of local news over the last week started with the long-standing and terribly tedious weatherman (he presents as a traditional suit-and-tie’d sis male) showing the map of extreme heat that enveloped us. He offered two smiling sentences to explain it, summing-up with it’s unusually hot for this time of year.

The next seven minutes would be offered by a young journalist on the beach celebrating the heatwave and vox-popping towards her climactic sprint with a board into the 4-inch surf. Her interviews were all of joyous sunbathers and ice-cream sellers, with one seller crest-fallen at the lack of surf for the seeking of surf-boards, delivering journalistic balance to reassure that there’s always a downside to the very best that life has to offer. A sunny summer is all we need.

Were this a one-time aberration I wouldn’t be writing, but this is the mainstream and downstream normal narrative about the record-breaking weather. Nothing to worry about. Yet this is likely to be the coldest summer any of us will experience.

No doubt the coming floods and storms this winter will herald a cacophony of joyous fun-lovers seeking to surf the waves pouring down high streets and enjoying a mince pie supplied by the charitable soup kitchen for the suddenly homeless shivering in the hastily transitioned and mattressed local church hall.

The endless denial of the accelerating and deepening global climate catastrophe is only surpassed by the refusal to identify, let alone discuss, the record profits being made by fossil fuel companies and supermarkets at the expense of crisis-levels of inflation and poverty.

Now, those of us who have long campaigned for “system change not climate change” are being almost imperceptibly silenced by those arguing for “system change not poverty”. Yet the two are intrinsically linked.

It is the fossil-fuelled economy that has brought us into the tipping point for climate Armageddon, and the fossil-fuelled economy that has created boundless profits accumulated by an absurdly wealthy and powerful few at the expense of the rest of us – peoples and societies. 

The welcome return of strike action, accompanied by pressure groups clamouring for more “targeted help” for those in fuel poverty (a well used concept now encompassing most of us, to the disconcertion of those charities created to give alms to the poor) is drowning-out the issue of runaway global heating and the extreme weather it is causing.

The only answer to fuel poverty is system change, the only answer to climate catastrophe is precisely the same. Let’s look: when the utilities – petrol, coal, gas, electricity generation, water & sewage, public transport and health services – were run by government bodies under democratic control we could all afford them. Indeed, in my youth many regions didn’t pay at all for water or sewage, it was that cheap and funded through general taxation. 

Even the world-destroying oil giant BP was originally 51% owned by the British Government by way of its imperialist conquest in Iran, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Of course, government ownership didn’t stop the imperialist rape and pillage that continues transnationally today (nationalisation is no panacea), but even the modicum of democracy allowed for the potential for price controls use of profits. In today’s terms, renationalised oil and gas could ensure fast transition.

Shell oil was originally “Royal Dutch Petroleum” owned by the government of today’s Netherlands…but I digress. The point is we used to have some – not nearly enough – voice over our utilities.

The call for renationalisation is just that. We, the People, used to own all these resources, managed, albeit by government bodies directed by politicians supposedly democratically elected by we, the People. When this is explained to the young they cannot conceive of it. Yet it is in my close memory, and I’m yet to enter the age of infirmity.

The Capitalist Class did everything to gain total control of production. Deregulation. Pro-profit, anti union and anti-environment laws. The small State. Truss’s inheritance.

The neoliberal project, directed by Ridley in the 1970’s (you may wish to look-up the Ridley Report) and puppet-headed by the megalomaniacal Margaret Thatcher in the ‘80’s, forced system-change using the UK as a test-tube laboratory for a version of free-market economics. Because of our trade-union movement’s proud history and capacity at that time, the UK experiment was slower to mature than its counterpart (a similar-but-not-the-same experiment) in the United States, headed by semi-literate charlatan actor, President Ronald Reagan. 

The previous post-war system of economics favoured a “mixed-economy” approach whilst thoroughly embracing the continued accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of the very few.  Sometimes, and somewhat loosely, referred to as Keynsianism, this model placed some limits on how much profit a company could make, using a government-produced legal system that placed caps on proportions of surplus value extracted from wages and prices by the owners of Capital.

Caps on Capital. No excessive profits, ensured by taxing the rich and the corporations. The 95p in the £ tax on the super-rich (sadly the subject of the misguided Beatles song, Taxman) showed that a degree of socialism could live alongside and inside Capitalism to ensure social housing, comprehensive education of quality, a National Health Service immediately available to all regardless of income, cheap and abundant public transport, and very cheap utilities. No fuel poverty.

Marxist revolutionaries always said this couldn’t last, although we always defended every last piece of that social infrastructure to the very end, in the interests of the working class. The general Marxist analysis of how capitalism works – the economic priorities of accumulation of private wealth and maintenance of cheap labour through  global competition – ensures the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In short, Capitalism can only last for so long as the working class allow it to by more of us working harder for longer for less income and diminishing quality of life.

In the end, the Bosses won. The working class fight was dulled and deceived by the reformism as well as full-blown collaboration at times, of the Labour Party and trade union leadership. True, the neoliberal experiment in Britain was slowed, at times to a full stop, by nothing other than the power of the working class invoking direct action of the most fierce kind. Every branch of utilities took strike action in the 1980’s to stop neoliberal privatisation, and fought hard, much of the fights being illegal occupations and wildcat walkouts.

The Great Miners Strike cost Thatcher’s Government more than all previous strike action put together. The local council workers struck, even in a few cases alongside their elected councillors, to defend municipal socialism that ensured libraries and swimming pools and street cleansing and parks and recreation and adult education and youth clubs and, well, social infrastructure. The DHSS workers took strike action to defend the comparatively decent system of Welfare Benefits, and Ambulance Workers took strike action to defend the national and very well co-ordinated health service.

I will not have it that we didn’t fight for the future generations to come. We fought like lions! True, our history is peppered with false dawns, with shoddy compromises, with careerist turncoats, false leaderships, undercover Tory infiltrators and Police rapists, but at the base, within the rank-and-file of organised labour, in Truth we fought. And lost. 

The Capitalists took all our common wealth, taxing us high and then taking the taxes for themselves in the form of subsidies and incentives and “breaks” – especially the banks, fossil fuel and military industries – a kind of socialism for the rich whilst the 99% pay dear.

The neoliberals, conceived in greed and born in the “50’s” to rage against any common ownership of their potential cash-piles, are now free to be seen as the billionaires they are, brandishing their unaccountable global power plunging billions of human souls into misery. Accumulation of private wealth is their creed, and they appear to be stockpiling record amounts in some misguided idea that they and their kin can survive all climate breakdown or nuclear fallout.

Today’s cry for renationalisation takes on a new but not impossible element. Not only has it happened before (and so can again), but now the demand for levels of emission-reduction and lower energy use if we are to preserve any vestige of decent human society means it has to happen again, and very quickly.~

The strikes by rail workers, train drivers and salaried staff include a political demand for renationalisation of rail transport under democratic control. Climate activists know the same demand for system change is essential. Renationalise under democratic control (for example, a National Climate Service) to :

• Put an end the private car conceptually and materially, and that means an effective, integrated and affordable public transport system funded by taxation (the more you have, the greater proportion you pay into the common weal);
• Ensure an integrated Public Health Service to manage the increasing demands, not so much an ageing population being blamed for everything, but the growing ill-health caused by climate changes encouraging viruses, heat-stroke, food shortages and, not least, emotional distress.
• Fast-track home insulation and the emergency transition from fossil-fuelled heating, lighting and cooking. A new programme of council housing as a template, including enforced compulsory-purchase of private tenancies from bad landlords;
• Compulsory renationalisation (without compensation) of all fossil-fuel companies with structural links to the UK government (identified primarily by the £10,500,000,000 tax donations they currently receive), with immediate lowering of energy prices and the emergency investment of their resources into renewable energy production;
• Redistribution of off-shore and on-shore corporate and banking profits for liveable welfare benefits and social services;
• Workers control of the industries to ensure the people who do and know the work are the ones making the policy and decisions about production and distribution.
• Oh, and make food, water, housing, education and fuel not-for-profit essential life-provisions for all at all times.

More needs to be done. And we should be on strike for both decent wages and system change to stop global climate catastrophe. The Capitalist bosses are tied to the current system of competitive wealth accumulation for doing things and cannot adapt even if they wanted to, which obviously they don’t.

When I say it is up to us to use our power to change the system, I get the immediate response that we are powerless. Well, the currency as well as the history of strikes disprove that. Then I’m told the great powers are so high-up the pyramid that they’re unreachable. Yet most emperors in human history have been overthrown, and all economic systems perish and are replaced. 

When I say System Change not Climate Change, I mean revolution. Turn the pyramid upside down. Let the producers, the workers, be at the top. The Capitalists own everything yet produce nothing but pain and destruction. They must be overthrown.

We are in an historic period of profound distress. It conjures-up images of the 1930’s for me, and we know how that ended. 

Everywhere, people are anxious amongst images and portents of great suffering. 

I’m taking nothing away from the so far more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees suffering severe trauma when I identify the wider global level of angst and nervous depression. Those being bombed in Yemen, tortured in Sudan, corralled in Syria and evicted in Palestine or the at-least 20 million starving to death right now in Afghanistan and southern Madagascar all suffer from fear and pain. Indeed, add to that the two-thirds of humanity going to bed hungry, two-billion without access to clean drinking water, and 3.5 billion experiencing environmental changes requiring migration, and we can recognise reality for what it is.

Added together the world’s human population is descending, as long-predicted, into a barbarous and genocidal maelstrom. 

Such cataclysm is only tempered by comparison with the destruction occurring to the rest of animal and plant life. The 6th Great Extinction, as scientists from all denominations call it. If stared at, with eyes wide open, the 21st Century as denoted by the Western human calendar is making the 20th look relatively benign.

Outside my window at the centre of this parochial military English city, people go about their business much in the same way as those in Kyiv did on the 23rd February. Change doesn’t hit until it hits. I’m sipping strong coffee (soon to be in short supply and triple the price), whilst tapping on my tablet (the wifi soon to be intermittent from supply outages) and musing in a warmish room (soon to be made unaffordable by fuel price hikes).

A few days ago the accursed International Monetary Fund, those who destroyed the economies of most of Africa (and Greece amongst many others) with their debt-economy demands and Structural Adjustment neoliberal privatisations, reflected upon the the economic impact of the war and western sanctions against Russia, saying,

“Price shocks will have an impact worldwide, especially on poor households for whom food and fuel are a higher proportion of expenses. Should the conflict escalate, the economic damage would be all the more devastating. The sanctions on Russia will also have a substantial impact on the global economy and financial markets, with significant spillovers to other countries.”

This is already beginning to take place. Oil prices have reached $130 per barrel, and in the United Kingdom, petrol prices at the pumps have surged past £7 a gallon to their highest levels ever. In France, the price of diesel has gone from €1.65 per litre at the end of last year to €2.20 per litre.

This doesn’t mean people will use less fuel – transport and heating are not luxuries to be discarded during lean times, but essential necessities. Inflation simply means we have to pay more for what we need to maintain employment and sustenance.

Those gambling on the Stock Exchange casinos of the super-rich have ensured the “Wheat futures” rise of 70% this year – Russia and Ukraine together account for one-quarter of all grain exports. In Europe, industrial production is beginning to shut down due to soaring energy prices whilst military emissions are rising exponentially. Oil price rises doesn’t reduce oil use, it just costs more.

In the month of February, UK inflation at the more honest RPI is at 7.9 percent and rising, and in the Eurozone it reached 5.8 percent, the highest level on record since the creation of the single currency in 1997. Inflation is expected to rise sharply in March as the consequences of sanctions reverberate throughout the world economy.

As a UK pensioner I will need to cut the food order and wear two jumpers by April (unless global warming shoots local temperatures to worrying new records), enough to validate my continuous moaning about this inhuman and corrupt class system, but not representing any real hardship compared with the challenges facing young working class families.

The worst hit will be developing countries in Africa and the so-called Middle East. Starvation and famine in this region of the world is already happening. Eighty percent of grain in Egypt is purchased from Russia. Other major importers of Russian grain include Turkey, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Yemen. There will be food riots alongside mass famine.

Altogether, the impact of war on the global working class will be enormous. We are already reeling from more than two years of the COVID pandemic in which some 15 millions have died and living standards have been eroded to the breaking point by inflation caused by pandemic-induced chaos in global supply chains. 

This social trauma is the product of deliberate rejection of necessary public health measures by the world’s governments in the name of “herd immunity,” or the sacrificing of life to profit. And there’s a new variant spreading out of Japan with unknown consequences in this, now war obsessed and pandemic denying world.

Governments are using Ukraine to deflect attention from the pandemic, which is not over and is already beginning to surge again. The war is being used to explain an inflation rate which was already at its highest level in decades before, now rebranded as a “Putin price hike” entirely the fault of Russia, in an attempt to deflect attention from the corruption, greed and incompetence of Prime Minister Johnson and, indeed, most of the western political class. 

There is every danger of a new war hysteria whipped-up by the media moguls on behalf of their peers in the armaments and fossil-fuel industries to obscure the record profits. The stock prices of armaments manufacturers and suppliers such as Babcock, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon have risen sharply in recent weeks. Western oil companies and agribusiness are predicting superprofits from worldwide shortages derived from the removal of their Russian rivals.

Yet, probably their single most focussed drive of this imperialist war propaganda (that’s what it is) is to push back the climate movement and our demand for the end of the fossil-fuelled economy. We were making headway, lets be clear, before and even during the Pandemic. Because of our global protests – Thunberg’s Fridays for Future and the international Extinction Rebellion direct actions – there are few who are unworried by the deepening and visible climate catastrophe, the extreme weather events quite universal, with shocking peaks such as fires-then-floods in Sydney – Sydney! Australia! Who would have thought?

The clamour from the organised far-Right, growing fast throughout the West, is to renew their denial of Climate Change in order to “save” the economy. White-supremacist nationalists such as Nigel Farage are promoting the UK version of a Trumpite “Make Britain Great Again” by ending green energy subsidies and closing the borders, not only from Ukrainians but all the perils of the world “outside”. Having warned of war with Russia (as did the Left, but from the opposite perspective of caring for humanity) he now turns our economic anxiety towards hatred of a foreign enemy, and against “the enemy within”: We, the climate and anti-war protesters. 

Throughout the world, the war in Ukraine is being used as cover to redirect hundreds-of-billions in resources away from health and welfare towards war. The latest spending bill making its way through the United States Congress includes nearly $800 billion for the military, including $15 billion in spending for Ukraine, while omitting $15 billion in pandemic-related funding. The corporate media in Britain is calling for the gutting of the postwar welfare state for the sake of increasing military spending. Most ominously, Germany has rammed through a tripling of their military budget for this year, the largest increase since Adolf Hitler.

Johnson’s Government, claiming to be “defending freedom” in Ukraine, is busy planning greater use of state repression, including injunctions, anti-strike legislation, executive orders and other measures to suppress working class opposition at home. 

It is difficult to judge, at this relatively early stage, the mood and sense of working class people here and abroad. With a situation more analogous with the First World War rather than the Second, it is worth reading-up on the many strikes and protests throughout those 4 ghastly years, despite the capitulation of the trade unions and their political representatives to the “war effort”. 

The immediate challenge is to expose the lie of any supposed “national unity” backing for war. We’ve heard it all before. The working class never benefits from war. We pay for it, always, as an international class, in poverty and death. Amidst economic and climate collapse, I can’t see ordinary working people going gently into that dark night. Protests will continue, essentially.

For climate activists there are traps to be avoided. This is no time to attack workers for daring to drive to work or be employed in fossil fuel industries – target the anger on where the power lies – for example, the corporate executives of Shell and BP enjoying disgusting levels of profit dividends from destruction. And don’t utilise the war sanctions as a method for cutting the use of fossil fuels – war increases global heating emissions far more than any reduction in their use due to price-hikes. And sanctions always hurt the ordinary people more than the oligarchs. Get real! 

It’s time to join the Movements together – No to War, No to Climate Chaos, People Before Profit! The main enemy is at home – Capitalism. 

Whatever strategies climate activists have organised to date, the War exposes much which is often left hidden or unsaid. It is also likely, if not stopped immediately, to elongate towards a constant and expand towards a global conflagration. It should clarify our perspective.

I have had the privilege over the past couple of years of addressing meetings discussing the deepening catastrophe facing humanity and the ecology. At each and every talk I have stressed and repeatedly concluded that global warfare will, necessarily, predate any climate collapse. 

War will also exacerbate and accelerate climate chaos. One feeds the other.

I’m grateful to those who agree with this very obvious and in no way clever assessment. The most casual consideration of human history cannot fail to link the impact of environmental change to human conflict and vice versa. When systems collapse, people move or die, producing either nihilistic competition for the remaining basic resources or system change to adapt and accommodate in a spirit of cooperation.

We are not living in a world of international cooperation. Indeed, the global economic and political system of capitalism requires competition. Locally, one provider competes with another to win our custom and their profits, globally rival imperialisms compete for regional resources and the cheap labour from which to produce private wealth. 

Capitalist competition is killing the Planet. 

The domination of one grouping or “Class” of humans over another is the real struggle constant at the base of human society. Which, in turn, means that not all humans are equally culpable for the destruction of the ecology. We know, for example, that the regions referred to as the Global South have caused little or no emissions responsible for the heating of the ecosphere. 

Within human societies there is a profound inequality of responsibility for either the climate emergency or warfare. The current whipping-up of Russophobia is as misplaced and manipulated as the narratives intent upon blaming all of humanity for climate change.

I am full to overflowing (I cry) with compassion for those experiencing war right now, in Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, Congo, Somalia, Mozambique, Tigray, Rohingya, Myanmar, Colombia, Maghreb, Iraq, Libya…so many regions. The degradation of life and human potential is sickening. The degradation of the environment – from the 100% wasteful production of military hardware through to the explosive destruction of thermobaric bombs and nuclear missiles – is dramatically increased in periods of war compared with peacetime.

Right now I cannot side with the territorial ambitions of the Russian ruling class any more than those of the US-controlled NATO. I can only conclude that everywhere, everyone has to assert their right to life and self-determination. Only cooperation and mutuality can assure the right to life.

Survival requires the struggle for emancipation, suffrage and equality. Global Justice. Which in turn requires challenging those who, as individuals or groups, seek to restrict and repress the rights of others for their own gain. And  challenge to those who seek to destroy and exploit Nature for their own gain. 

I am therefore no pacifist. I oppose Imperialist wars and support collective struggles against oppression and exploitation. My comrades in Russia today are being arrested and tortured for daring to challenge Putin’s war. My comrades in Africa, the Americas, India and China are being incarcerated, tortured and killed for daring to challenge oil pipelines and Monsanto pesticides. They have the right to fight back.

The struggle to prevent climate collapse has elements of warfare as a requirement for success. If the oil companies, their billionaire executives and millionaire shareholders, won’t stop extracting this planet-killer, and continue to hire private armies to kill any who protest, then we have to use force to shut them down. 

If the political elites continue to seek power over Planet, such as the Bidens, Kerrys, Putins, Bolsanaros, Xis, Morrisons and Johnsons of this world, then we have to forcefully change the system to stop the destruction they are happy to reek in their own interests.

Protest to Survive.

The IPPC published its second scientific conclusions as part of their 6th Report cycle last week. The frenzy of war ensured it received no attention. It is an amalgam of more than 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers all detailing the very immediate collapse of ecosystems and immediate threat to the very lives of 3,500,000,000 human beings. The destruction of insect life, birds and animals, fish and kelp presents a picture of horror deeper even than war. 

We have passed the Tipping Point and can only mitigate to prevent complete extinction, adapting fast to live systemically differently, limiting all impacts, from now on. 

Little wonder our ruling classes are choosing war, now. The System-changes required to save people and planet require the removal of those who seek to destroy people and planet. Capitalism is a failed system and those who continue to perpetrate it are choosing mutually assured destruction over life itself. 

There are those in the climate movement who perversely welcome the war. They argued this weekend that shutting down the gas pipeline through Ukraine to Germany means less emissions and requires new ways of fuelling society. Europe will have to ration fossil fuels. The “collateral damage” of lives lost is nothing compared with the coming climate cataclysm so “bring it on”, the war can be an opportunity to shut down emissions now, they argue.

To me there is something deeply barbaric as well as impractical about their position. The politics of environment-over-humanity is, and always has been, embedded within environmental movements and is an ideological formation to be challenged and exposed. Indeed, many who espouse being “Beyond Politics” exert a deeply political activism that is anti-human. 

I uphold the ancient political continuum that broadly equates the Left of the spectrum with humanism and mutuality, and the Right with individualism and survival of the fittest. This is not the time or place to examine the deeper philosophical tensions within it.

Fight for Humanity!

There has always been an organised and powerful section within environmental and climate activists sitting on the Right. Those proclaiming Gaia would be better of without humanity, that humans are a destructive virus contaminating an otherwise harmonious Nature, or even that the sooner humanity becomes extinct the better (Nature will return to equilibrium without us), soon disclose a vehement hatred for humanity when pressed. 

Malthusians amongst them, these anti-humans effectively welcome the pain, suffering and death of billions of humans in the name of the Ecology. There is even discussion of the need to save Nature by allowing climate change to destroy all but a few hundred-million humans – “let the humans die!”. The apparent racism of where the billions condemned to death will inevitably be situated is one element of such reactionary if not fascist politics. But the very obvious hypocrisy and contorted thinking they have to go through to maintain this state is eye-watering. 

“Save the Whales” in the name of the sanctity of all life, yet care less for the billions of Krill, octopus, anchovies they eat, all of which have a sentience to one degree or another. Damn humans for eating fish. Feel and express deep love for dolphins at play, but neglect the wars their pods enact one on another. Don’t mention the ferocious attacks seals and Orcas plan against the beleaguered penguins. Territorial wars between lion packs or chimpanzee clans are “natural” for survival, whilst human conflict damns us to being deserving of extinction. The contradictions are absurd.

Humans have always been and should remain part of the Ecology. We are animals, indeed mammals, with the ancestral instincts embedded in the amygdala vying alongside the emotional senses stimulated from our brains’ frontal cortex. We fight and flee, expose and conceal, procreate and share alongside the rest of Nature, and shouldn’t be damned for doing so.

There is a difference between those who look at the war and despair at the human condition, and those who actively condemn humanity for being less than perfect. And, naturally, the vast majority of climate activists care deeply for people as well as planet. Comparatively few if any billionaires give a damn for either, trapped as they are in the system of accumulation for accumulation’s sake.

It is the military industry worldwide that is the highest emitter of global heating gases. For that reason alone the environment movement must target and challenge these profiteers. The pursuance of war is financed and furthered by these industries and their lackey politicians, currently seeking the same weapons to all sides in the wars cited above. And war itself creates more emissions, not less, gas pipeline shutdowns not withstanding. 

Human beings are sentient animals with extraordinarily developed mental and emotional abilities panning a wide spectrum of behaviours and abilities that offer us the opportunity to temper our survival instincts with rational thought and historic perception. I love humanity. We’re amazing. Life is amazing. The World is mesmerising.

Human beings have all the sentience and technology required to Stop the War and rebalance the Ecology in harmony with Nature. Indeed, the two issues go hand-in-hand. We have to fight for humanity to stop imperialist conflicts in order to obtain the necessary global cooperation across our species that is pre-requisite to saving the environment. 

The fact that it will take a revolution to stop war offers us the synthesis of all these contradictions. Fight for People and Planet. Join the Revolution!

As if the latest war isn’t enough, today’s news has deepened an already anxious global sense of uncertainty for the future.

Russian shelling caused fires in the complex of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in the early hours of this morning. Ukrainian authorities reported the fire at a training building to be under control and the reactors not at risk, with normal background radiation recorded. The city in which it sits, Enerhodar, has a population of 53,000.

Russia says the explosion was caused by Ukrainian forces, Ukraine blames the Russian military. In the fog of war it’s never easy to know who or what to believe. But every war breaks all rules, always.

There were 15 nuclear reactor sites operating in Ukraine at the start of Putin’s invasion in February 2022. Russian troops took over the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant early in the invasion, with serious concerns expressed about the management of the fourth reactor there which is still in melt-down following the explosion in 1988. 

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear site has 6 reactors and is the largest in Europe, brought on-line in the 1980’s and possibly highly vulnerable as past it’s sell-by date. Thankfully, sensibly, at the point of Russian military take-over, operators had shut down five of its six reactors. Yesterday there was heavy shelling of the nuclear power plant, finally resulting in fire inside the complex. 

This is the closest humanity has approached, at least in the twenty-first century, to nuclear power becoming integral to warfare and a weapon of mass destruction. If a nuclear core is damaged, the explosion will contaminate millions of people with long term health and environmental impacts as experienced in the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. 

It is not that a reactor has to suffer a direct hit or even be targetted. Damage to the infrastructure for operating a nuclear reactor can cause follow-on catastrophe. Nuclear reactors require electricity to run the pumps that supply coolant to stop the plant over-heating. At Fukushima, the diesel-electric generators were housed beneath the ground in an act of engineering idiocy, and were flooded during the tsunami, stopping the pumps and causing the reactors to overheat and explode. They continue to melt down and emit deadly levels of radiation into the air and across the Pacific Ocean, measurable on the West Coast of of the USA. 

The scale of nuclear catastrophe, often talked-down, is wholly overwhelming when faced.

Ukraine’s power stations are being prepared for war. That means shut downs, where the temperature inside the reactor can lower to a point where a meltdown cannot take place. The reactors still require careful management, and a engineers have to remain in place during and after military bombardment. Soldiers certainly are ill-equipped to run a nuclear site. 

Shut down ends the production of electricity. Shutting down the reactors at Zaporizhzhia has been the single safe action to be taken. The consequence for a country reliant upon nuclear power means millions without electricity and often without water and supplies, the loss of electricity making other utilities unable to function, such as water supplies which require pumping. When fully operational, Zaporizhzhia supplies one-fifth of Ukrainian homes, four million households, with electricity. Well, it used to.

The Ukrainian government has accused Russia of “nuclear terrorism”, a concept central to the analysis by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that nuclear power should be ended, replaced with renewables. Ukraine has called for a 30km no-war zone around each of the countries nuclear plants – an exclusion zone to stop any military actions or infrastructure. 

The question is asked – what can be done to prevent an almost inevitable nuclear catastrophe in this war? Unpalatable to some politicians in the USA and Europe, the reality is that China holds the greatest influence, as a critic but not outright opponent of Russia, and as the largest trading partner of Ukraine after the European Union. 

We may well be reliant upon China to ensure President Putin restrains his forces from attacking nuclear plants. The creation of large parts of the Ukraine as a dead-zone, its wheat inedible and environment unfit for human habitation, would cause long-term suffering to peoples far away from the country itself. Nuclear fallout and radiation does not recognise humanity’s politically constructed national borders. Wheat scarcity of itself would cause basic food prices to soar worldwide.

But the first and foremost criticism by we, the anti-nuke brigade, long chastised and derided, holds true. War is never surgical nor does it run to plan – ask any general of any side.

The human suffering of so-called “collateral damage”, in other words, civilian casualties – in Afghanistan, Libya or Bosnia & Serbia, each of which a war with NATO involvement, or, for balance, in Georgia at the hands of Russian forces – proved to the world that “precision bombing” and “surgical strikes” are false propaganda to appease the conscience of the outside world. Civil society dies in large numbers.

There can be no suggestion, it follows, that nuclear power plants can be rendered safe during war. Not only can guided missiles fly off-target, but the sites themselves can become targets for territorial control. The aggressor may use a contaminated or demilitarised zone to control a region, or a defender may consider the same option rather than lose – war is war. Indeed, the losing-side may well resort to mutual destruction, or blame their explosions on the other side. 

And that’s where nuclear weapons enter the discussion. Both sides – have no illusions, both East and West – have stated there readiness to use “tactical nuclear weapons”. Both Russia and NATO have, independent of each other, the ability to extinguish all life on earth many times over by use of their nuclear arsenals. Amongst these illegal weapons of mass destruction sit nuclear bombs for use on the battlefield, their explosions limited to a smaller circumference than the inter-continental ballistic missiles (about the size of the Hiroshima bomb).

The great immediate danger is the fallacy, believed by most politicians, that current technology offers the ability to use these battlefield “low-yield” nuclear bombs without initiating outright nuclear war. Should there be a rise in radiation levels, through explosions at nuclear power plants (or extensive use of uranium tipped missiles as in Iraq), the use of a nuclear field-weapon or two may be able to be disguised (at least for a while, until any independent scientist can identify the origin of the unique isotopes). 

Nuclear weapons become a tactical consideration for beleaguered generals.

Of course, as documented by the military themselves, the modern technology that is used to ensure inter-continental nuclear weapons are on constant alert is reliant on the algorithms and automatic triggers similar to those that trigger adverts on your mobile phone applications. One sniff of nuclear use by one side ensures immediate and automated counter by the other – the dynamic of nuclear Armageddon. There is no time to think before action if you want to save “your side”. 

So we are now at the most dangerous point in human and indeed environmental history. 

What is to be done? There is substantial evidence that the core reason politicians have not used nuclear weapons against populations since Nagasaki in 1945 is public opinion. In more than 75 years, the countless wars having seen more bombs dropped than in the first and second world wars combined, with an average of one million humans being killed each year in warfare, nuclear weapons have stayed siloed. Warmongers fear mass opposition and potential uprisings against them should they “go too far” (a moveable scale of acceptable atrocities in itself).

We are all, the vast majority of us, sickened and opposed in mind and heart by the potential of nuclear war. That moral as well as physical horror lies mostly dormant but rumbling inside each of us. But now it is time for the passive objections to end. It is time to shout out loud against nuclear war. The brave activists in Russia are protesting to Stop the War despite painful incarceration and threats to life. They deserve everyone’s support. 

But more, they need to see us, all of us, everywhere, on the streets where we are, shouting-out against this and all imperialist war, and especially, no more nuclear weapons be they nuclear bombs or nuclear power plants. Here at home, the current push by UK government for a new generation of nuclear power plants, including Small Modular Reactors to be housed in and around towns and communities, must be stopped.

Join the protests. 

The COP26, with it’s 515 carbon fuel lobbyists and government lackeys, has published its first draft agreement. It is wet and watered down, weakening commitments to funding first made in 2015.

We all knew the COP26 wouldn’t make the grade, but this level of failure is truly shocking. COP is dead.

And as a result, hundreds of millions will be dead, too. The girth of the Earth between the tropics is experiencing catastrophe. There are at least 50 million people in famine, and hundreds of millions more in precarious conditions of heat, flood, landslides, and water and food shortages. None have been properly represented at the COP Out.

In the industrial North, climate is a concern ”for the future”. Yet we are seeing deepening and accelerating extreme weather events alongside a continued decline in the social infrastructure required for safety and protection.

We are heading, within the next five years, to living a crisis each day caused by climate change.

Last weekend I helped run a march and rally of over a thousand people in my small and poor city of Plymouth. Many attended our people’s Assembly focussed upon discussing ”the Future”. The conclusions were stark, the scale of the changes needed so immense.

But the event added numbers to those now committed to making the change.

It occurred to me that such discussions, about the day-to-day reality of accelerating climate collapse, needed to be understood by everyone. So I wrote to my local tabloid rag:

It is no good pretending. The international climate conference in Glasgow, shorthanded to COP26, is not going to do what’s needed.

Despite the politicians from poorer countries imploring the rich and powerful West to help them, despite Sir David Attenborough and the Princes Charles and William taking a stand, and despite the Big Celebrities of Hollywood and Bollywood sharing their statements, for the Capitalist Class its Business as usual.

And still, when 99% of scientists say we are experiencing (not predicted but happening) climate catastrophe on land and in the oceans, press and politicians join forces to fuel the sceptics and poo poo the science.

Many polls show that the majority of people are very worried about Climate Change. 

The “Greenwash” of lies, misinformation and false-assurances is designed to placate us, but, however powerful they think they are, we’re not fooled.

The day-to-day experience of Climate Change for the working classes of the so-called wealthy West are set for endless crisis. The empty supermarket shelves, transport disruption and fuel-price hikes of the last couple of months are nothing compared with the damage set to be experienced because of global heating. 

The impact of global heating is going to raise sea levels, disrupt the seasons and therefore all food production, and induce extreme weather events from flash floods to wrecking winds and high tides.

Transport disruption will force sudden lay-offs, without pay, of millions of workers at a time as the last-minute production and storage strategies of our industries collapse. Energy outages – meaning power cuts – are predicted by the power companies for the very near future. The addition of fuel poverty will make winter heating too expensive for 10-15 million of us within the next 5-years, increasing the already outrageous numbers dying of hypothermia each winter in our country. 

The floods to our houses, where one-in-five of us live on flood plains, will cause continuous suffering and financial ruin. The rest of us live in some of the worst housing in Europe, with poor insulation and unhealthy damp requiring costly repair and renovation.  

But don’t worry, the insurance companies, mortgage companies and financial institutions have already protected themselves against all liabilities – just look at the cladding scandal after the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire.

The Great and the Good implore us to make the changes needed, but what power have we? The scientists focus upon emissions reductions – 8% each year globally from now on if we are to avoid climate collapse. 

However much recycling an individual can achieve has little or no impact given the amount of global heating emissions spewing from factories and offices. The oil and gas companies aren’t going to vote themselves out-of-business.

Just 100 Corporations are responsible for over 80% of all emissions. Many of those are military – arms manufacturing being the most climate damaging single industry of them all. Whatever we do in our personal and family lives, it is Big Business that has to be changed if we are to slow down and stop the catastrophe.

We need a national as well as international governmental body to lay down laws upon the Big Polluters. We need to regulate the emissions towards Zero, not the Greenwashed “Net-Zero”, by 2035 not 2050/60/70/sometime never. 

And for there to be any chance of any of that happening, we have to seize back control. Workers must demand an equal voice over what is produced, why, and how its produced to protect and rebuild the environment and climate. Communities have to take back control from the petit-corruption of ego-centric politicians. The People (we’re overwhelmingly wage-slaves) have to claim back democracy, real democracy, from the Political Class and their fat cat financiers.

The starting point for all this is Protest. We marched through Plymouth City Centre on Saturday.

We have to join together and protest. We have call-out and call upon the business and political leaders to make the changes needed for us all to survive, or get out of our way! We may all have our preferred solution but together we know, we have to protest to survive. 

For me, its System Change not Climate Change. For that we’ll need a revolution!

Tony Staunton

President, Plymouth Trade Union Council

www.plymouthhub4climate.org

“You’d better think, (think, think) let you’re mind go, let yourself be free”, to paraphrase Aretha Franklin.

A very few of us handed-out over 1,000 leaflets yesterday, and another thousand the day before that. We were advertising the climate conference COP26 protests next weekend, Here, in Glasgow and Everywhere. We have thousands more yet to distribute using a handful of hands. 

To me its an imperative, simply because, if the protests are small, the passivity will breed further hopelessness. If they’re larger we will have won the argument that things can happen and things can be done to collectively reduce the extremes of the climate catastrophe. 

Handing out leaflets to those who will grab them voluntarily is not a challenging or exhausting job. Some say no or no thanks, and we say thank you in reply. Others are glad we’re here, and many apologise that they won’t be able to attend the protest due to family, work, physical or mental restraints or they simply “don’t do protests”.

But then there are those who oppose. Yesterday whilst half-a-dozen of us gave out fliers, a group of around 40 adults marched around the City Centre with placards declaring both COVID and Climate Change as hoaxes manufactured by a conspiratorial media and political class intent upon limiting our freedoms and declaring a global totalitarian government. 

This is not the Blog with which to unpick the matrix of conceptual, historical, political and philosophical contradictions underlying these libertarian conspiracists. 

They had their own free newspaper with adverts for the next meeting to be addressed by David Ike, a lead article from a health worker declaring she refuses to wear a mask, and other warnings about the NHS as a form of social control. 

I was ready to sell my own party’s paper for a quid, identifying collective protests against oppression and exploitation globally, with pictures from this week’s mass protests against the military coup in Sudan, and build-up to international protests at the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow.

In Plymouth’s City Centre, I brandished a banner demanding “Strike for Climate”. Across the square, another man, dressed, were anyone to be fooled by crass caricatures, like an environmentalist at a peace camp, held his hand-made placard declaring the coming “End of Days and ensuing Rapture, standing arm-in-arm with climate deniers. The apparent contradictions were tied tentatively together by the common threads of opposition to Big Government and demand for individual, I would suggest individualistic, freedoms.

So the experience felt to me like Left versus Right, performed on the stage of a public amphitheatre experienced by an unsuspecting public out on the first Saturday after pay-day to “do shopping”. 

Most people wanted to go about their business unhindered by any of us.

Those of the general public who wanted to stop and talk wanted to stop to tell us what they believed, rather than listen to anything we had to say (which is fair enough apart from blocking our ability to hand out leaflets to anyone else). And most of those proselytisers were clear, with evidence, that 1. “They” (meaning governments) have known about climate change for decades and done nothing; 2. The big carbon corporations are beyond our reach and won’t change; and 3. Global heating has gone too far and there’s nothing we can do. One man actually walked off in all seriousness shouting, “we’re doomed”. 

A number of old people said they were old so it didn’t matter to them. One self-professed grandmother said it won’t be an issue until their grandchildren are old so why should she worry… I pointed to the morning floods in Glasgow caused by extreme weather, where a month’s rain fell in Cumbria and the North overnight. It’s now.

I am surprised at the general thinking amongst those who declare themselves in one way or another, “left-leaning”, once confronted with the scientific facts, conclude that “its too late to do anything”. It is difficulty to discern whether this is pessimism or passivity, or how to calculate the proportion of each. 

The threat of climate collapse is so big it makes the individual feel powerless. The demand to “Act Now” to force change is confronting to the point of causing offence. And, as likely, its all very frightening. 

In the Zoom talks I’ve offered around the country, I start by quoting the gay Black civil rights writer and activist, James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I read his book, “The Fire Next Time” in 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. He developed the theme: “People find it difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

In a polarised society where confused ideas are being paraded and screamed-out in city centres, its hard to know what to think. The continuous political “line” from mainstream media and politicians adds to the conundrum. It is the “They” who expect us to rely upon them to solve it all. What to do?

To me, Baldwin’s struggle against racist apartheid at the heart of imperial empire, and to demand the legality of homosexuality by the Ultra-Orthodox Christian State, make today’s struggle appear relatively mild and easy. No-one chases us away, attacks us physically, or organises lynch mobs. So why so little activity?

One possibility is a temporary social and political pacification caused by the COVID pandemic and lockdowns over the past 18 months. We have become afraid to congregate and even afraid of each other. Thinking about it, this has been built upon the years of a childhood schooling that demands deference to authority, and the development of micro-management in the workplace that ensures you behave precisely according to your supervisor’s direction and the timed-deadlines of the electronic conveyor belt. 

We are not encouraged to think for ourselves. And actively discouraged from taking action. Lobbying the Climate Emergency Conference being held at the Plymouth Guildhall yesterday, teenage delegates asked we leafleteers outside whether they were “allowed” to go inside – inside a public building, paid for and owned collectively by the tax-payer! They even had written invitations. Have we become wholly acquiescent to authority? Are the conspiracy theorists correct after all?

In every big lie there is a kernel of truth. Otherwise the lie would be easily exposed. The complaints of the conspiracy theorists are gathering strength because of the sensations, the feelings and emotions attached to contemporary life. We’re being done-to, lied-to, coerced and produced and feel a continuous anomie, as an Object for others to manipulate rather than a Subject with a voice and power in a democratic society.

I would conclude that the individualist far-Right will succeed in picking-up on this mix of passivity, alienation and ennui to develop a mass movement for the survival-of-the-fittest – the petit-nationalist white-supremacist closed minds that have led us towards this suicidal path. 

At the moment there appears little to stop them, given the silence of the Left. It is imperative that the collective, human-loving socialist Left get onto the streets and into the workplaces in numbers and start to offer solutions that empower and activate all.

We’ve all had plenty of time to think. It’s now time to act.

System Change not Climate Change.

For those who believe in Capitalism, “the poor will always be with us”. For socialists, collective society organised for need not profit can eradicate poverty within a single generation. Globally. Even the World Bank makes clear, the wealth is there: if global annual Net Domestic Product was shared equally, every child, woman, and man would have an income of over £35,000 a year. 

I was reminded of this during the obnoxiously self-aggrandising speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequor, Richi Sunak. He offered nothing for those across the UK out-of-work whilst cutting the tax on “fizzy wine” – Champagne. He increased taxes on the poor whilst cutting those for the rich – who already employ accountants to ensure they pay little or nothing. 

More crucially, Sunak announced tax cuts on internal short-haul flights, encouraging more aircraft emissions ahead of the COP26 Conference next week. This, alongside continued plans for a new coal mine in Cumbria and oil field in the North Sea, proves the real approach of this Tory Government towards the Climate Emergency. 

Their cynicism shouldn’t surprise us. The System they manage and benefit from relies upon exploitation of people and planet. The entire and all-encompassing approach of the global capitalist class towards climate change is one of strategising how to accumulate more personal wealth. What can be done, they ask, to utilise the chaos in order to increase profits?

I have been leafleting every day in our City Centre, organising for the local climate protest on 6th November, co-ordinated alongside 50 others in Britain and thousands across the World to call-out the ill-fated and counter-productive COP26 Conference next week.

Despite the crescendo of “Climate” announcements and programmes across all media, overwhelming in their Greenwash of “don’t worry, we, the great and the good, have the solutions and will sort-it-all on your behalf”, there is little evidence heightened consciousness and public concern.

This is “half-term” week when harassed parents are inclined to bring their children into the shopping precinct to buy the essentials, manage the budget by finding early Xmas present bargains, or maybe just get out of the house. The general mood emits collective fatigue.

There are few signs of joy. Groups look harassed and full shopping bags are few and far between. Despite the Chancellor’s exclamations on how well the economy has bounced-back from the COVID pandemic, the whiff of austerity and poverty is everywhere, not least in the eyes of the passers-by.

So asking people to not only care about the Climate and Ecology but act now to protect the planet does not meet with much enthusiasm. This response can be easily misunderstood. Many polls and research papers identify that the great majority of people, home and abroad, are concerned about climate chaos. The extreme weather events, not least the sudden flash-floods killing people across Europe and the United States, offer material evidence of climate change. The climate deniers are now a tiny minority.

Climate politics is nevertheless polarised and entrenched. The nationalists, of which there are many, argue against our leaflets, saying that China and Russia don’t give a damn and, until they do, there’s no point in the UK sacrificing anything towards emissions reductions. Let me be clear, they have a clear ideological argument with an internal logic that offers ardent and dogmatic assertion. 

Our leaflet, formally constructed by the international COP26 Coalition, calls for Global Justice. The racists, of which there are few, immediately and ferociously vocalise the ancient Malthusian tract that there are too many humans and its time for a cull. Rule Britannia and protect our own shores, with all the genocidal white-supremacy at their disposal. 

I would calculate that one-in-ten take the leaflet. Such a straw poll offers a “straw man” to be shied at. At this point I have no indication of how large or small the November protest will be. But the experience of leafleting does offer some observations.

Firstly, there’s no real hostility – the conspiracy theorists from QAnon to David Ike and Piers Corbyn do not own the Zeitgeist. But they’re there. Were the internationalist humanists and environmentalists not organising and seeking to mobilise, the nihilist ideas of conspiracy and Armageddon could take hold.

Then there’s the Establishment, calculating that they should steer clear of feeding the rabble and showing no support for protest or rallying for climate action. The well-heeled amongst the shoppers (yes, you can see by dress, completion and deportment just what level of income they enjoy) frown and offer their well-rehearsed micro-body language of disapproval. Their benefits and status from the current status quo react against any suggestion that societal change is essential for survival. We should keep calm and carry on.

And, as a third observation, wholly unscientific in it’s presumptions, suggests it’s largely younger people who take the leaflets. Not a majority, although most glance sideways in response to the word “climate”, indicative of recognition and worry. Young people on half-term holiday are in the city centre to enjoy the sheer experience of being young, giggling together and laughing, sharing, playing. 

It feels almost abusive to offer them a leaflet suggesting societal breakdown and climate catastrophe, the extinction of most life on earth, including humans. Many, from the most caring (although probably paternalistic) approach to child care, would say we are scaremongering and should shut-up. 

I’m reminded of the many, ghastly, movies and documentaries I’ve watched where children are playing together and families laughing moments before the atomic bomb explodes above them and all turns to light and ash. Of course, climate chaos is not the same apart from heading towards the deadly outcome in comparative slow motion. Indeed, thousands are dying daily right now from the impact of global heating.

My mantra these days is as simple as this: I’m acting on scientific fact. The emotions of the deepening catastrophe, now apparent and fast moving, feel to be dissolving the importance of personal preferences and sensibilities. The facts are even demoting beliefs, although having a preferred goal does make “the doing” easier. We may come to act to stop climate chaos from a huge range of motivations but the point is to act.

The scientists can prove by simple observation the slowing of the Atlantic meridional Overturning Circulation is already affecting seasons and weather North and South. The Arctic melt has altered the northern Jet Stream to bizarre and unpredictable “behaviours” that is causing the flash floods, amongst many other extreme events. The IPCC 6th Report omits reference to the historically unique levels of methane release from permafrost and, more recently, oceans. 

It doesn’t matter what we all choose to believe, the fact is the climate is passing the Tipping Points that will see current conditions pass. 

How we respond to this is, however, down to personal choice. I’m afraid that the self-reassurance if not satisfaction that comes from recycling, turning the thermostat down, seeking the car and walking more will have no discernible impact given the scale of the challenge.

And the facts offered through the contra-activity of the Capitalists and their Chancellors in government gives evidence that the current powers controlling human society and behaviours cannot and will not protect humanity or Nature.

We can only protest to survive, force fundamental change to human systems or face early and soon-to-come extinction. 

https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/climate-change-activists-protest-plymouth-6088318

The COP26 represents the latest in a 25-year failure in the official approach to dealing with Climate Change. We are now in the midst of accelerating and self-promoting climate catastrophe.

Today you can look around the world and signal dozens of disasters that shouldn’t have happened. Extreme weather events, floods, fires and failed harvests leading to famine. Extreme changes to natural systems are also visible, dead-seas and increasing acidification, ice-melt at the poles and glacial melt on the mountains, record temperatures in inhabited areas stretching above 50 degrees celsius (C).

The COP26 Summit has been delayed by a year because of the COVID Pandemic. It will take place under the shadow of the 6th Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which the United General Secretary called “Code Red” for human societies. This is not opinion, it is peer-reviewed, double-and-triple-checked compilation of thousands of scientific papers detailing proven research from across 5 continents over periods of years and decades which, together, prove the terrible danger we face, as does most life on earth – the 6th Great Extinction.

At over 4,000 pages with appendices, I doubt many delegates to the COP26 Conference will bother to read the IPCC 6th Report, let alone digest the very real implications. But the whole world has access to the science, and the whole world will be watching them.

The UN Conference of Parties (COP) came out of the Earth Summit in 1992 held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The COP was supposed to discuss a collective response to the climate emergency. Those attending could be self-appointed and the process became dominated by the Non-Government Organisations, Corporations and politicians from the richest countries of the global North, quashing the voice of the less developed or powerful nations of the Global South. 

The COP process has been a complete failure, and in fact made the situation by creating an illusion of action whilst emissions increase. Even when the so-called “Paris Agreement” offered a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted by 196 Parties at COP21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016, Governments di little or nothing. 

The Paris Agreement is much quoted in 2021, its stated goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels (1850). 

COP26 in November will become a major issue far wider than the trade unions and environment movements. Extreme events are becoming worse day-by-day, but also the richest countries that organise as the G7 see COP as a political issue through which they can push a set of ideological, political and economic agendas. 

UK Prime Minister Johnson will be hosting COP26, calling for a Summit of deeds not words, but actually pushing his flagship neoliberal offensive as recovery from COVID through new industry and maximising profits of major corporations.

Is COP26 the “last chance”? That was said for each COP in the last decade, with agreements leading to little or nothing. There have been key moments – Kyoto COP3 in 1997 as an agreement that became a battle ground; Copenhagen 2009 which was destroyed by Presdident Obama’s protectionism of the USA’s global interests; and the COP21 Paris 2015 had large demos which were heavily repressed by the French State…I was there.

All Agreements were based-upon the argument that free-market Capitalism can solve the threats from Climate Change. For example, Carbon trading will allow corporations to cap their emissions and lead to overall decline.

But COP has never been a meeting of informed scientists and politicians. 38,000 delegates to COP21 were either delegates of individual governments or lobbyists from “interested parties” including fuel companies, industrialists, and NGOs, all seeking to bargain there interests. A battle ground for economic and political interests, dominated by the most powerful interests.

The US were able to produce a large number of delegates driving forward their agendas, influencing through economic aid and outfits threats. For example, US delegates to the 2017 COP in Durban offered South Africa funding in return for collaboration. In Poland in COP24 was sponsored by the Polish coal company, and COP22 the main sponsors were the Spanish coal and gas corporations.

COP is also a battle-ground for internal national politics and between sections of their ruling classes. It may see complicated but in the end the tussles, in-fighting, self-interest and corporate greed produce compromises that achieve less than nothing. On current proposals to COP26, not current actions, global emissions will reduce by just 1% by 2030 and we will reach average temperature rise of 4C by 2080. More than half the world’s population will be forced from their sea-edge towns and cities (including London and New York) and the more internal areas will be uninhabitable.

It’s not all hopeless. The Paris Agreement in 2015 limited emissions to a target 1.5C, because the smaller countries formed a large alliance based-upon links with the huge protests outside and globally. Where there are hundreds of thousands of people demanding radical change, they do influence the debates inside Conference. That’s why there is so much concern that so many smaller countries may not be able to attend COP26 due to either the extreme costs or the pandemic threat of travel to Glasgow. Our protests are vital to ensure their voice.

The key focus is that currently the global emissions continue to rise. Naomi Klein’s book, “This Changes Everything” says if at the start of the COP process, all countries had agreed to reduce their emissions by 2% a year the crisis would be now have been averted. Instead, the politics of delay, rivalry, and off-setting has has won horrific pollution levels and models of climate collapse in the near future. 

The IPCC 6th Report most certainly identifies that it will be impossible to halt climate heating to below a 2C average global increase over pre-industrial levels (1850) even if the 8% global reductions in global heating emissions happen every year from now. And there’s no evidence that the COP26 will agree to anything like those levels of reductions.

2C average means some areas experience periods of 0.5C increase whilst others – the Tropics and in-between, experience 4-5C. Afghanistan, for example, is predicted to be 5C hotter by the end of the Century. The 2C could be brought-down again by the century’s end, but at the expense of possibly more than a billion lives lost, and mass forced migration. 

There is a recognition that these COP agreements don’t work, but the large countries don’t want legally-binding requirements forcing governments to act. The UN fails to enforce agreements in any case, just look at the way their declarations for Palestine or against nuclear weapons are completely ignored.

Nevertheless, we must recognise that international agreement does matter. COP26 offers an opportunity to raise the issues and demand better solutions. Especially our calls for just transition of industrial production (including industrial agriculture) away from reliance of carbon-fuels and plastics, and 1-4 Million Green Jobs Now!  The call for Global Climate Justice is also identifies radical but plausible solutions. Even if the Corporate bosses and their tame politicians won’t listen or budge, our voices and protests will win greater public consciousness and increase the calls for system change.

In the trades unions, Unite, the UCU, NEU and PCS unions are already members of the COP26 Coalition, and we need to build anti-racist organisations, Palestine Solidarity, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi, etc. The organised working class has a key and leading role to play.

The demand for reparations for the Global South is an essential ingredient of our campaigning. The wealth of the global North has been created by the exploitation of the South and the overwhelming majority of the global heating emissions that are destroying whole swathes of the poorer regions of the world. We are going to experience a dramatic reduction in living standards and we should prepare ourselves for that rather than cling to the delusion that the western, middle-class lifestyle can be made sustainable. But, for the Global South, the catastrophe will be far worse. 

There is a solution – a vision of the world where we organise the economy in the interests of the Ecology and the interests of the People. We recognise the power of ordinary people to change the world, and the power of workers as the producers at the point of production. These reforms must challenge the structures of fossil fuel capitalism, by taking on its exploitation and racism – and the fossil fuel interests at its heart. 

We cannot plan for an ambitious, long-term program of energy conversion without challenging the power of the big oil companies or the nuclear industry, or without confronting the private lobbies of weapons manufacturers or the communications industry, which are more and more closely aligned into the transnational military-industrial-complex.

Politically, the Corporate class know they’re in the spotlight, and are funding a huge publicity and propaganda exercise to pretend that fossil-fuels can solve the climate emergency. 

Just look into the greenwash of carbon-capture-and-storage, biofuels, carbon-trading, nuclear energy, blue-hydrogen and climate-engeneering and you quickly find they’re either unproven, in their infancy, comparatively expensive compared existing wind, wave and solar technologies, or too distant as projects that could possibly stop the catastrophe. 

There is more than one “Green New Deal”, and many are promoted by the fossil-companies who want to preserve their profits first and foremost, whatever the cost to the Earth. 

It’s equally important to note that the climate and environment movement is not intrinsically left-wing, socialist or autonomist. It is not necessarily on the side of workers. The working class has to ensure it has a strong voice inside the climate demands, and argues for collective organisation and mutual support. 

There are far-right forces at work: a climate nationalism that argues for militarised borders against climate refugees; a return-to-the-land idealism that blames people not the methods of production for the crisis, and condemns technology. A Malthusian hatred of humanity that looks forward to seeing billions dead through the heat, the starvation and the floods, watching billions die on the news channels because humans are bad. And then there are the xenophobic imperialists who argue for invasion and climate colonialism in order to import resources and food from across the globe and leave “the indigenous” their local famines. White supremacy is being stoked-up for a reason.

The final, although not far away result of the right-wing agenda will be global war. War for Water, war for food, war against the desperate refugees, and potentially a range of civil wars. Such modelling of “possible scenarios” is well advanced in the military Capitals of the powerful nations. Society is carefully being militarised, and democracy – in structure and notion – debased.

But such a dystopian and totalitarian future can only happen if the mass of the people are won to such ideology, embrace nationalism and racism or are pacified and disempowered from protesting for people before profit. The collective power of the working classes of the world, united to defend our lives and our futures, is far greater than the power of Corporate executives.

I’ve been asked why I have a blog page when I write so rarely. It’s a good question. First and foremost I’m busy, secondly I’m not a very confident writer, and thirdly, I write to be able to clarify my own thoughts, nothing more.

So why publish personal thoughts? Usually, I only publish thoughts that have arisen from discussions with others who are interested in my take on conditions in this turbulent and complex period of human history. It aids further debate.

I’ve spent the past four months supporting the building of a time-limited coalition to protest at the policies of the G7 group of Capitalist countries. President Biden and other “elected representatives” met in Carbis Bay, Cornwall last week, close to where I live. What else could I do but organise?

The G7, plus invited guest Prime Ministers, we’re continuing the imperialist “Great Reset” carve-up of markets and natural resources on a global scale. The Greenwash “NET” messages for continuing to seek profit from climate catastrophe were highly advertised.

Less publicised was the extension of the Western imperialist alliance against China and Russia, with the launch of the US/UK fleet headed by the new Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier towards the South China Seas. Then, the further of lowering standards of Corporate accountability with a perverse dictat for taxation that will actually cut State income from the profits of exploitation. And behind closed doors, the limiting of Aid, including COVID-vaccines, to the Global South, ensuring continuing death and social dislocation directly against the scientific evidence from the World Health Organisation.

I can only rage against these smiling political figureheads as anti-human scum.

We did what we could. Amidst the sudden and infected invasion by 6,500 additional police and military, armed and extremely dangerous into the holiday resorts of sunny Cornwall, we marched upon gated media centres and sought to get as close to the militarised conference centre as possible.

The question of why elected politicians had to have £70 million of security to protect their three-day jamboree hung in the air. Cornwall has seen a four-fold increase in family poverty over the past 15 months, food banks being extended from the local churches to schools, struggling to meet the ever-growing demand in this, one of the poorest regions of Europe.

How can anyone be anything other than incandescent with rage against both the organisation of the G7 and their decisions. This is the elite acting on behalf of the elite, leading humanity into deeper barbarism and all-but inevitable climate collapse.

Talking with justice-seeking representatives from Tigray, Kashmir and Palestine I acquainted myself emotionally with the personal horrors of orchestrated genocide, sponsored communal violence and proxy wars all perpetrated by the continued imperialist quest for power over land and markets at the expense of humanity and Nature.

We are already living in a condition of barbarism, deepening and accelerating.

On our side, the protests were way too small, hampered by the three-C’s of COVID-restrictions and realistic fears, Cornwall’s comparative inaccessibility, and the post-Corbyn pessimism and pacification of trade unions and the Left across the UK and Europe. But at least we were there.

Against all the odds, we built and held together the most improbable Coalition of anarchists, autonomists (nope, they’re not the same), Trotskyists, Corbynistas (yes, they’re still around), Liberals and Stalinists. Bottom-up and Top-down socialists, reformers and State-smashers, individualists and communalists. As a political project it was unique, even if extremely small and vulnerable.

You see, the future of humanity depends upon grassroots activism drawing together sufficient numbers of social activists into the size of critical mass commensurate to the sheer scale of the challenge facing us. Ecological collapse, global heating, climate change, economic crisis, Pandemic and forced mass migration are not predictions f one possible future, they are all with us.

Fighting for a future for humanity has never been more urgent or all-encompassing. We have to find a way of acknowledging each other’s political points of difference, making spaces for disagreement and at times fierce argument about the specificities, yet essentially linking arms in direct action against common enemy – the global Capitalist class.

To be honest, our “Resist G7 Coalition” held together by purposefully not discussing politics, just organising for protest actions. And that led to a lack of cogency, a failure to clearly elucidate our purpose and focus, and continuous underlying distrust that failed to inspire and garner wider forces. But we did produce and broadcast some level of protest that otherwise would not have happened.

It was a brave experiment, and all those who participated proved their bravery. Hopefully we can learn the lessons and do it better next time. But there is one element that remains under-and-ill-considered. The “environmental movement” separated themselves out and largely acted from inside their specific organisations, linking together not at all. This is a terrible mistake.

Whether it was the climate activists from CAFOD or the Extinction Rebellion artists, their protests were purposefully small, singular and symbolic. They showed no desire to raise the organised opposition towards the size of critical mass required for real change, or to link issues other than “environmental” together. Far from it.

This is no use at all. The climate crisis encompasses all issues. Or, from the other perspective, all issues include the need to address global heating emissions. Future planning of the global economy will determine global heating emissions. The international response to COVID exposes the fault lines of the international cooperation needed to prevent climate chaos. The continued and accelerating militarisation of borders and nation states discloses the primary impact of the industrial/military complex upon environmental destruction.

Extinction Rebellion has to extend itself as an anti-imperialist movement for Peace, a force against racism and oppression. The Christians in CAFOD and other activist church groups have to challenge Capitalism as a perverse anti-human system. The Greens and Corbynistas have to recognise the falsehood, fraud and powerlessness of our system of parliamentary democracy, dwarfed and made impotent by corporate power and political corruption.

And, ultimately and most crucially, the organised working class, through trade unionism and beyond, have to unite with this Movement of Movements and take power at the point of production.

There is only one solution, System Change. And that is, surely, what we can all coalesce around, debating and formulating the replacement along the way. At a global scale, it will take the united, organised action of hundreds of millions of human beings to produce the united force capable of stopping climate catastrophe.

And so I write this for my friend and neighbour who suggested it was a good thing that the G7 meets and brings together different nations in common cause. Wrong. The cause is their own aggrandisement and avarice. The solution is their overthrow, disbandment, and the construction in short-time of a new system based upon need not profit. For the many not the few. For the Ecology, not profit from plunder. And most of all, for the survival of humanity. Revolution!

Through the final reign

The dividing line:

Polarisation.

Amid contiguous storms,

Arid conflicts,

The drought of expectations.

The Centre cannot hold,

Gutters flooded,

Rotted beams,

Shattered ceilings, 

Stachybotrys chartarum.

Equilibrium tenses

Breathing deep

Fern-shaped patterning

Denying deep-lung

And, oh, the fatigue!

Paisley fractals

Betray chaos

As a future

Ne’re to emerge

And already here.

Through endless rain

The obvious sign:

Alienation.

Imposed inhuman norms,

War contradicts

Individualised emancipation.

The Centre cannot hold,

Children blooded

Toxic dreams

Frosted feelings

Phosphoric Idiom.

Sea Level rises

C Dioxide seep

Surf-caped drowning

Border cities rung-

Out, oh, the intrigue!

Torn-up track tales

Portray chaos

As a suture

Between our urge

And flying fear.

This is new terrain

The sharp incline:

Extermination.

As Nature transforms

Ice pole predicts 

The death of civilisation –

The Centre cannot hold!

Ideology muddied:

Despotic regime-

Forcing mos maiorum

Characterises

Dictatorship creep.

Yet revolt is happening

Powered by the Young

Marching, oh, in league,

Dodging projectiles,

A survival ethos

For a future,

Profit in purge,

Collectively clear.

Recently, the social networks across Britain have been full to the brim with derogatory comments about the stupidity, ignorance and apathy of “the electorate”, a term focussed upon the working classes who voted Tory in last week’s elections. Indeed, the spokespeople for the Party of Labour appear to speak of the working class as if we’re an alien species, with many activists repeating this bile.

The emotional bile of these supposedly left-wing supporters of some semblance of socialism in the Labour Party has erupted in a splaying of projectile hatred against working class Tories.

Yet even the most part-time amateur psephologist would be quick to point-out that 70%-ish of the electorate didn’t vote at all, and that only a minority of those who did vote, voted for the Tory Party of the Boss Class.

Whilst much is made of the 52% vote for Tory MP in the one by-election, the focus of the bosses media and the walking dead of New Labour, the proportion Tory votes across the electorate is a minority. And yes, the Tories have a 70-seat majority in Parliament from the 2019 election yet more people voted against them and a third of the electorate didn’t vote at all.

Call this a democracy? No? Then why are you playing the game?

The unspoken and ill-addressed issue for those on “The Left” who choose to engage in the fraud and illusion of Parliamentary Democracy is that the majority of the population consider themselves less-than-enfranchised: “whoever you vote for the self-seeking capitalist supporters win, and they do-for-themselves and their like, not us”.

My experience of a lot of the social democratic left is of higher-educated, largely middle-class, absurdly self-opinionated (rather than fact-based and enquiring) moral-highground self-promoters seeking a place in the current scheme-of-things – plaudits and formal recognition – rather than any real change to the System that is Capitalism.

Occasionally as now, I’m moved by their own arrogance to turn the tables on them. They exhibit all the emotional intelligence of a peasant, seeking to defend their tiny allotment of political life against all challenges. The opposite way of seeing and emotional interpretation of reality stems from the proletarian recognition of strength through the collective, the power for change being based at the point of production. The reformists are forced by position to deny this, promoting instead pessimism and passivity.

As a life-long socialist, the day I lose my faith in the working classes of the world is the day I give-up on life itself. I was born and raised working-class, and maybe that makes a difference. As an under-educated and angry teenager living by my wits I instinctively understood and sought-out collective identity and power rather than the self-promotion and status that I had been assured since birth was beyond my level of entitlement. Being part of Us versus Them was, and remains, not some over-intellectualised ideological position but a question of survival.

My faith in the working class is not an intellectual blind spot for me. Nor is it a metaphysical question of faith over fact.

Everyone is quick to point out the iniquities of the 1% versus the 99%, that’s easy and obvious. Billionaires exist and flaunt their power. Most of us can point to Bezos exploiting the Amazon workforce and the Pandemic, or Gates’ false green washing over NET-Zero. But follow that trail and you quickly end-up recognising the courtiers of the Ruling Class – including those who wish for reforms that maintain their current class position and entitlements – include many activists restraining themselves in spite of any acknowledgement of the science of climate catastrophe.

Contemporary courtiers, every bit as sycophantic as those sucking-up to Henry the Eighth or the Russian Tsars, include the elected politicians of all tiers of government, alongside the small-and-medium-sized business owners, each and all sharing secret aspirations of becoming multi-millionaire partners of the corporate Transnationals. Entitled and positioned supporters of Capitalism, furthering the System, not challenging it.

Social Democrats, including many socialists and Greens, court the courtiers. The idea being that winning the confidence and votes of the middle-classes will build a sufficient vote to get them into Parliament and then do justice for-and-on-behalf-of the masses. Maybe they could even file-off the sharpest edges off Capitalism itself. In all this, their fundamental misunderstanding of how Capitalism works together with a complete lack of faith in the working class is as palpable as it is hypocritical.

Indeed the all-but full-on disparaging damnation of working people on less-than sufficiency-incomes – the bottom 70% of society – in today’s stream of holier-than-thou text outrage at the election outcomes is nothing short of anti-working class.

To those I shout, until there is democracy in the workplace – those who produce having a collective say over how and what we produce, for what good purpose we work and at what life-affirming payment rate we are valued – we cannot say we live in any real semblance of democracy.

Stop playing your silly games! It’s perfectly reasonable to not take part in a sham election where what you actually need, not to mention what you’d actually like, is never on offer. And the pragmatism associated with a vote for the devil-you-know rather than the devil-you-don’t know is, at the very least, recognisable across time.

When life requires all your energy just to get through, pay the bills, raise your kids and get sufficient food and sleep to keep going, the falsehood of a cross on a piece of paper is not worthy of much effort.

I have faith in the working masses because human history offers an unchallengeable pattern of revolts by the producers over those who seek to rule them.

The constant heartbeat of history proves the point. Periods of stasis followed by the severe jolt of a fresh pumping of life blood through the body of society. “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”, wrote Marx and Engels as the very starting point of the Communist manifesto.

Any analysis of the actions of the world’s ruling classes today suggests they’ve read that phrase and understand it’s truth very well indeed. Those born and raised to rule in our rotten class societies are taught such history from an early age – the despotism of Kings and Queens as a blueprint for how to keep the masses in their place.

Of the 12,000 years of large-scale static societies, the struggle for rights, life and liberty has been a constant. Yet only in the last 300 or so years have we experienced any real semblance of democracy – the rule of the people, slaves as well as citizens – and then as a pale shadow, a mere flickering of the light that would shine in a society of full human suffrage, equality and self-determination.

Today, we wage-slaves have no voice, and the self-anointed “citizens” above them don’t care to look at the truth of what it would take to ensure actual universal suffrage. System Change. Revolution.

Indeed, in today’s deepening and accelerating plunge into climate catastrophe, revolution is the only solution.

There have been short sparks that show such potential flame is possible. The most obvious is the short period after the overthrow of the Tzar and his Court in the Russian Revolution, 1917, before it was corralled and, in today’s terms, kettled by 14 invading armies and a counter-revolutionary civil war funded by the international Capitalist Class.

But human history is peppered with such revolts, happening with a constancy somewhere on earth at all times.

This is the real story of today. Right now 250 million small-holding farmers in India are defying the total might of the Indian State machine. Prime Minister Modi operating on behalf of the world’s richest billionaires is facing the largest collective strike in human history, despite his murderous and torturing Police force.

The indigenous Peoples of Canada have stopped, through self-sacrifice and sheer collective power, not one but two gas and oil pipelines. The working class organised into trade unions have come to their call and stood alongside, shutting transport hubs and blocking commerce to a point where today’s Caesars and Pharoes in the earth-destroying carbon industries have had to retreat.

Every continent has its news stories of collective challenge to the exploitation, oppression and repression of its rulers. Even in the UK we have large protests for the Climate – Thunberg’s Fridays for Future and our own Extinction Rebellion; against racism – Black Lives Matter; and against additional police powers intending to further clamp down on the working class – Kill the Bill!.

Yet the social democrats are out-on-the-streets applauding their own efforts to canvass for Labour candidates who have shown in word and action that they will do nothing for the poor, nothing to challenge institutional racism, nothing to put the climate emergency into action, nothing to force through the sexist glass ceiling or challenge all aspects of male-dominance.

And then, when these charlatans lose their seats, those proclaiming themselves as socialists blame the working class for not voting “Labour”. It’s beyond parody.

There is a proletarian consciousness. It does not contain the individualism of the middle classes. We are less judgemental because we see the frailty of others in ourselves. We understand each other’s contradictions between action and intent, all born out of getting-through-the-day, laughing-off our shared rough edges and intermittent bad behaviours. We don’t tolerate high-minded proselytisers promising pie-in-the-sky. We are, above all, forgiving of each other because we share the harshness of insufficiency.

Yes, we are distorted by property-relations that deepen our alienation from Nature, each other and ourselves. But we struggle every day to find solace, to join together in fun and laughter, to shrug off the assaults and find our way through. We are interdependent in our communities and workplaces. We have to rely on our workmates. We don’t suffer fools gladly or put-up with being lied to. And when the baton is wielded too harshly, whether at school, on the streets or in the workplace, we fight back. Together. As a global human base behaviour.

Real socialism does not and cannot come through Parliament. It comes through struggle. Put your limited energy where it counts. Stop putting false hope and faith in representation from above. Build collective fightback from below and the political organisation to organise, agitate and initiate. Time is short.

The G7 is a meeting of the world’s most powerful political leaders, scheduled for 11th-13th June 2021 in the UK.

These leaders govern the richest countries in the world in their own interests, and the G7 exists to keep it that way. These government ministers will sit behind military security to meet at a luxury hotel complex in one the most picturesque but poorest regions of Europe – Cornwall. Resetting the global economy after the Pandemic will be the key discussion throughout, with the Climate Emergency centre-fold and used to dominate the media with messages of new economic growth through questionable “Green Technologies”, promoted by billionaire Bill Gates and his ilk. Global capitalism – the neoliberal free-market domination of the transnational corporations for agrochemicals, industrial agriculture, biofuels, together with the so-called Negative Emissions Technology (NET) of Carbon-Capture-and-Storage, mini-nuclear power plants and carbon trading – is the default setting. The G7 wealthiest nations, hosted by UK Prime Minister Johnson, has invited India’s Prime Minister Modi, currently assaulting millions of small farmers to enforce corporate dominance of food markets, and Australia’s Morrison, the coal and uranium enthusiast. The headlines from the G7 will be a prelude to what can be expected from the COP26 deliberations in November, once again led by the UK. The Campaign against Climate Change is supporting the Resist G7 Coalition established soon after the venue was announced. Based in Cornwall, England, the Coalition has issued the call for action in every community, town and city with a day of action for Climate on Friday 11th June and an international manifestation of opposition to G7 neoliberalism on Saturday12th. Local protests will take place in Cornwall, with convergence centres and counter-conferences in Penzance and Falmouth. The continuing risk from COVID variants makes the long journey to Cornwall by coach unsafe, and any physical protests called by the Coalition will seek to ensure ensure social distancing and personal protection. The G7+ cannot pass unchallenged. Our planet is on fire. While world leaders dine in a restaurant where the most expensive wine costs £850 a bottle, the climate and ecological crisis rages on. Yet those world leaders won’t even mention climate justice. Countries in the Global South are already paying the highest price in the climate crisis despite being the least responsible for causing it. And these countries, facing climate devastation, won’t even get a seat at the G7 table. The Resist G7 Coalition of grassroots groups is supported by a range of established campaigns for direct action to challenge the political and economic status quo. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Stop the War Coalition nationally are leading the call for exposure of the warmongering still being waged between rival imperialisms represented at the G7 conference. We are clear that barbarous levels of global military expenditure should be converted into investment in the Just Transition to fossil-free energy production by 2030 and the reduction to zero-carbon emissions soon after that. Laying waste to millions of lives and the environment, the current global heating emissions from the global military industry dwarfs all others. The Campaign against Climate Change will be leading the exposure of the inherent racism of current policies towards the Climate Emergency, and demanding Global Justice. Prime Minister Morrison’s institutional racism against refugees in Australia have become a blueprint for Britain’s own border controls against inward migration by people of colour. The implications of Fortress UK, Fortress Europe and Fortress USA for the hundreds of millions of climate refugees predicted in the next 20 years are horrific and require immediate challenge from the entire Movement of Movements. Currently the G7 is busy reaching out to very select representatives of civic society in the UK and internationally to build a Court and a moat of tacit support for neoliberalism around the fortress of their Conference at Carbis Bay. The “G7 engagement groups” of business, charities, NGO’s and trade unions are invited to consult upon economic, environmental, health, trade and “labour” policies, technology, development and foreign policy issues. Supporters of the neoliberal doctrine, the economics of consumerism and privatisation will flock to join, and we must counter their cheers and flag-waving. As well as welcoming G7 leaders to Cornwall in June, the UK will host a number of meetings throughout the year between a variety of Government Ministers from the G7, both virtually and in different locations across the nations, “…ensuring many areas of the country experience the benefits of the UK’s G7 Presidency”. The likely outcomes of the G7+ Conference are already enshrined in the quest for economic growth and exploitation of global markets, raw materials and ordinary working people. We should ensure that no meeting or statement from the G7 goes without challenge. The Coalition is calling for protest wherever the G7 emerges. The Campaign against Climate Change will be taking these arguments to the UK and international trade union movement and climate movements in the coming weeks and months to build as strong and powerful a voice of exposure and opposition the G7 as possible. We recommend your organisation signs-up to the Resist G7 Coalition and takes action wherever and however you can in June. And then on, to COP26 in Glasgow in November! You can download the RG7 Statement of Intent and Code of Conduct here, along with a model motion for organisations to debate and ratify, with a request for sponsorship and donations to help fund accommodation, publicity and convergence. Support the RG7 social media call on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. Or you can email at ResistG7@protonmail.com

Every few years, the planets get into a position where spacecraft launched from planet Earth can get to Mars with a minimum of time and energy. One such time was in 2020 and now, three robotic craft are arriving to probe Mars. Together they represent investment of billions of pounds and millions of hours of human graft and invention. They’re investing off-world whilst our world is burning. It’s mad.

I feel extremely guilty about being entirely enthralled by these probes. I grew up in the period of the moon landings. I sang along with Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” whilst being transfixed by the fuzzy monochrome videos of moonwalks. I shouted out on protests against the genocide of 3 million people through the Vietnam War, and at the same time wept at the immolation of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee inside the command module of Apollo 1.

Space Men were my idols. Male supremacy was a given then and, outrageously, is still culturally endemic today despite generations of struggle for women’s rights and liberation. Through my childhood of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s it went largely unquestioned. Flash Gordon’s fizzing rocket displayed each Saturday morning Children’s Matinee at the local Odeon Cinema competed with serial cowboy shorties to instil machismo and white supremacy. And we were taught that technology would soon provide us all with a life of leisure and exploration. Space was not so much the final frontier as the symbol of all human progress. I was raised to it.

That’s my way of explaining away why, over the last few years, I’ve kept track of Elon Musk’s SpaceX technology, claiming to start the process of enabling people to live on other planets. Through each day I take efforts to campaign for investment in sustainable life on earth, and in the process damn the billionaires who have exploited all to the point of extinction for their own avaricious pleasure. But every so often I take a sneaky private peek at whether the recyclable Starship rocket has landed successfully or exploded in a fireball worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

I console myself by recognising that human beings carry contradictions in both mind and body. Our mood swings between hope and hopelessness span a vast spectrum of emotional states and heavenly questions, with many periods of life demanding nothing less than sheer perseverance. We are constantly excited and aroused by carefully contrived imagery manipulating our emotions and coercing our affiliations.

Unless wholly in charge of ourselves despite all external influences we live in a state of tension between conflicting thoughts and desires. In isolation, such as the self-imposed house arrest against the threat from viral infection, we can begin to think we’re mentally unwell, forgetting that all humans live the dance of internal conflict. As a saving grace, usually, the practical demands of self-maintenance prevent constant introspection.

Without constant self-assessment, a condition in itself that ensures mental distress, we are most likely to hold on to contradictory thoughts and beliefs. We can readily understand that all film and TV is contrived in script-driven studios, yet become emotionally attached to the characters represented. They’re much easier to manage than the people we live alongside in reality.

When we find ourselves losing sleep over what will happen to Jon Snow, or fantasise over the avatar of an online celebrity, we have to disinfect our minds by shouting at the mirror – “they’re not real people!”

Such personal debriefings are far more difficult when dealing with the constant propaganda churned-out on behalf of a ruling class wishing to normalise human traits of competition and avarice to the point of denial of mutuality and compassion.

Our consciousness is split asunder, nurtured to acknowledge the barbaric inequalities of Capitalist society yet still buy-in to its’ cosmetic comforts. The ability to pretend, to substitute our dreams for reality, perpetuates the status quo rather than disrupts. When considering the plight of others we can “thank God its them instead of me”. When considering planetary ecology we can choose to believe that our tiny acts of recycling or reducing plastic use can turn around the destruction. We’re delusional. We might as well believe we can live on Mars.

The internal struggle for fact versus fiction, justice versus tyranny, inclusion versus competition, is today’s common human condition. It’s distressing. Social history suggests it hasn’t always been so nor is it inevitable. There can be a material reality based upon mutual cooperation, self-determination and equality of status and provision. There have been significant periods of peaceful human society. Humanity can rejoin Earth’s natural metabolism and enjoy the synthesis of creativity and sustainability. We have the handed-down know-how.

Another world is possible, here on Earth. In fact, its our only hope. We will have to concentrate our activities as well as our hopes, here. Whilst I appreciate science fiction as a vehicle for conceptual exploration, we have to keep a grip on reality. Break the illusions.

Yet, just as my parents and school teachers encouraged my star-gazing and moon dreams, today’s Tim Peakes’, Helen Shermans’ and Tim Dodds’ continue the same school and silver screen fantasising about the joys of living off-planet. I see little difference between astronauts and soldiers offering whole-school “learning programmes”. It is pure propaganda.

The reality of terraforming Mars is pure myth. The timescale of natural evolution together with the sheer size of a planet makes having humanity create a new home in space quite impossible. Impossible, that is, in the time we have left to rebalance the Earth’s climate sufficiently to ensure we can still live here, rather than drive ourselves to species extinction. It is going to take every effort, much pain and sacrifice to turn the world economy from ecological destruction to carbon-zero repair in the time left to us.

Perhaps that’s the real draw of Elon Musk’s egomaniacal mythologising. Even if we destroy life on Earth he will have been responsible for ensuring humanity migrates and survives somewhere else. A fresh start. The next Adam and Eve. It doesn’t matter that it can’t possibly work, only that it distracts us from the very pressing existential realities of the present day.

Maybe, just maybe, this is the point at which the vastness of the human imagination can win through. Our children are experiencing a consciousness split between one eye on the stars, the other on the environment. One moment of compassion and concern for the dying White Rhino, the next an intellectual flow of facts and figures about the travel distance from here to Mars, and how to successfully land on a dead planet.

The amazing but absurd technology, wasteful and pointless, of Starships, proves nonetheless that we have the ability to transform production away from fossil fuels within a few years. In the mere flash of an eye.

Much of the space programme’s computer technology and gas combustion is of little use in our survival programme. We could turn our gaze away and begin to express wonder and excitement in the more simple but life-affirming technologies of solar and wind power generation. And glory in the reduction of energy use, the absence of explosions! Peace.

Instead, the world is accelerating to the Dark Side. Tuesday’s orbiting of the “Hope” probe launched by the Arab Emirates, Thursday’s success of China’s Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) vehicle, and next week’s landing of NASA’s rover, “Perseverance” on Mars via “Sky Crane” is as much evidence of imperialist competition as technological magnificence.

Whilst SpaceX is routinely launching spy-satellites for the USA, NASA is busy testing the massive SLS system designed to take astronauts back to the moon, to “settle” in hermetically sealed anti-viral bubbles. Here in the UK, huge sums of tax-payers hard-earned cash is being ploughed, not into sustainable agricultural food production but Space Ports, allied with the USA, from which to launch social control platforms into space. Tourists will flood to Newquay, Cornwall not so much for the sun, sea and surf as the rocket launch. The real stuff of fantasy.

I’m trying to disinfect myself from this Sci-fi awe. The money, and more, should be spent on Earth without hesitation to stop the Climate Catastrophe. Indeed, why isn’t it? Because the “Space Race” first announced by Kennedy – a man so throughly mythologised into a progressive Peacenik – is well and truly back-on. Space 2039 will be full of laser battles and mineral wars. Earth 2039 will be burning-up.

I am reminded that President Kennedy’s real motive for demanding the US land “men” on the moon by 1970 was solely to compete with and break not only the economy but the hope of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This time it’s China.

I had no illusions in, nor allegiance to, the Russian government or the political system of China back in the 1960’s, nor now. The need to challenge western imperialism remains a practical priority in a world where the military expenditure of the USA is greater each year than the rest of the world combined. It is the Empire of the USA that is driving the militarisation of space, satellites, moons and indeed, whole planets. To pretend that the new drive to Space is in any way peaceful or progressive is to live in the clawing clutches of self-deceit.

For SpaceX read Star Wars.

The buzz-word of 2021 will be, if it isn’t already, Net.

With both the G7 and COP26 being hosted by the UK this year – the Climate Emergency breaking through the COVID-mist to headline at both – the World’s Establishment are rallying behind Net gains from Net promotion: Net-Zero and NET production.

Arguing that they’re “only following the science”, corporate bosses and their political lackeys are hiring media and communications specialists to build their “Green Credentials”. Pricey advertising and glossy brochures proclaim their shift to lowering emissions as a collective capitalist commitment to “Net-Zero by 2050”.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charged by the United Nations with the responsibility for collating current science reports of global heating, has declared 2050 as the deadline by which human society should emit no more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the amount that can be removed – Net-Zero.

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, at 0.04% and increasing at an unprecedented rate when compared to most of Earth’s history, largely determines the extent of global warming. The IPCC’s 2018 Report concluded that we are careering towards the very “worst case scenario”, meaning global heating that will see the collapse of human societies and extinction of the majority of life. For a notably over-cautious and conservative body of the Establishment, that’s hard talk.

Talk that has made the super-rich corporate executives shudder. Not from fear of loss of life so much as fear of loss of profits. It doesn’t require much research to recognise that modern global Capitalism is wholly and inextricably reliant upon a carbon-economy. Coal, coke, oil and gas for energy, transport, plastics and steel production. To be told to move away from the carbon-based economy, even over 30 years, is not only a threat to the future of Transnational oil giants but to the profitable infrastructure of every business.

For decades, oil companies had been the biggest investors in the ideology and propaganda of “Climate Denial”, funding and even constructing entire university campuses based-upon concocting quasi-scientific reports to “prove” that the heating was caused by sun-spots, or just natural fluctuations and nothing to worry about, or actually not happening at all.

Worsening extreme weather events and a succession of record-breaking hottest years in history, together with overwhelming numbers of detailed scientific reports and analysis from across the globe finally broke the contrived impasse. The break-through was helped, to the greatest extent, by a growing clamour from below from school students taking strike action to lead a wave of protest that caught the public imagination and won public sign-up. Everywhere. The World is On Fire!

Oil Executives had already assessed the rising tide of opposition, changing their logos from yellow to green or green-lettering to yellow sunshine, projecting the absurd and openly contradictory notion of “clean carbon”. It worked to some extent, but the scientific facts kept exposing their pretty lures as decoys. Public consciousness was getting away, the bait refused, the holes in the arguments exposed.

It was time, once again, for damage limitation, not so much of the Planet but of the projected rate of corporate profits. The arguments were concentrated into two camps, Zero-carbon or Net-Zero.

Global heating emissions were increasing and accelerating, the impacts on sea, ice, land and air each feeding each to ensure heating would continue for decades if not centuries even if we hit the zero-emissions button immediately.

There is no time to lose!” “Keep the Carbon in the Ground, Keep the Oil in the Soil” sang the protesters as they were arrested. Carbon-Zero by 2025 or face Rebellion ahead of Extinction.

Any worthwhile study of the scientific readings and models would expose the need to stop emissions now, but the facts should not get in the way of money-making. It escaped nobody’s attention that the demands would mean, if accepted, the end of the carbon-based economy and, indeed, complete system change. Heavens forbid, the very end of Capitalism -the system of exploitation of Nature and Humanity for accumulation of wealth by a rich few.

The rich few met as the World Economic Forum in 2021 to defend themselves. Under the guise of promoting a “cohesive and sustainable world” they announced The Great Reset Initiative. In a characteristically perverse charade, they blamed COVID-19 not Climate Catastrophe for the need for urgent economic change. But it was carbon emissions rather than viral aerosols that had their attention.

NET – Negative Emissions Technologies – is their collective proclamation. To achieve Net-Zero by 2050, the oil-guzzling, coal-crunching, gas-spewing companies will come clean. Converted as if by magic, they’re offering the latest sleight-of-hand to ensure business as usual as a much as possible.

Carbon-capture-and-storage, the panacea that will allow coal and gas generators to continue to spit, their emissions to be captured and stored instead of emitted, is no more than a distraction from the coming calamity. At present the capture is in its infancy and the storage is unproven. The very few companies investing in the technology are, to a unit, recycling the stored carbon into new fuel that yes, when used, sends emissions back into the atmosphere. And the scale of capture needed, when currently over 43 billion tonnes of CO2 are spewed into the atmosphere each year (imagine a 20 mile wide and high cube) makes the technology a dream rather than a hope. Capture that!

Other pronouncements, from shift from gas and oil to biofuels (Europe declaring the burning of wood as carbon-neutral) are even easier to discount. And while some environmentalists cling-on from understandable desperation to nuclear power, the cost and length of construction prior to energy production is ridiculously high, in terms of both carbon emissions and the storage of highly toxic and widely-polluting waste.

Carbon-taxes and off-setting are similarly promoted with huge enthusiasm by transnational corporations, their fingers in most pies, to allow continued emissions so long as you fund someone, somewhere else, not to emit. The formula is finite of course. Once everywhere not emitting is “bought” in order to allow everywhere else to continue emitting, the truth will be out – they’re still emitting!

NET and Net-Zero will not work. Even the IPCC is clear that we’ve little chance of stopping 2 degrees temperature rise above the base – not seen in half-a-million years or more. And most projections acknowledge we’re well on our way to 3 degrees, with current emissions if not reduced at all ensuring 10 degrees in a couple of hundred years time. That’s the end of life on earth. Mars.

I repeat, these new technologies – the NET – won’t work, at least not in time. Even the economics suggests that the amount of investment needed for these new technologies, in contrast to the low cost of solar and wind power together with large reductions in energy use, is problematic. Already, the US tax-payer subsidises the oil, gas and coal industries to a tune of $15billion annually, the UK $13billion and some $60billion tax-aid is paid to prop-up the profits of the carbon-based economy worldwide. Now they’re asking for even more government hand-outs for their cosmetic “green initiatives”.

The Great Reset is a Great Lie. Yet most climate and environment non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as government departments, national and local, are adopting the Great Reset, netted hook, line and sinker. It is embedded into the core of most versions of a Green New Deal or Building Back Better. Most adoptees, at least privately, admit they’re banking on some change being better than no change and hoping that their own tenacity in continually asking for “more” will net some progress.

The pessimism of the NGOs combined with desire to protect the status quo in which they’ve prospered is entirely short-sighted. Only carbon-zero in 10 years offers any chance of any form of social stability. And anyway, to be honest, the only thing to do with a big lie is to expose it before it becomes “common sense” and impossible to budge.

Born in the Age of COVID, the Great Reset promotes the ideological principle of adaptation and adoption – supply a shot in the arm (hopefully at a handsome profit) to protect the infrastructure as it is, after which we should simply learn to live with it. We may well have to live with various mutations of Corona virus, but all the science says that the Climate will not be so accommodating.

Net-Zero will, more likely than not, Net-Nothing.

I’m always elated when symbols of the far-Right get broken. The demise of predatory misogynists such as Weinstein, the end of South African Apartheid, the bankruptcy of the British National Party, the defeat of racist Trump – all moments in history offering me renewed faith in humanity and hope for the future.

Actually, they’re not moments at all but events in a continuous process. It took millions of women’s voices to shout out “Me Too” on the streets to have just one serial rapist jailed. The suffering through torture and murder of tens of thousands lead to the scale of global outrage and protest that finally dismantled the Boer’s white supremacist government. The thousands clashing with Police from Cable Street, through Lewisham and Welling to the mass campaign to defeat “Tommy Robinson”, many an Anti-Fa losing their livelihoods and opportunities for life through unjust arrests, altogether ensured that British fascism has never, to date, taken hold.

And Trumpism? There can be no doubt that the tens of millions actively involved in the Black Lives Matter Movement in the USA and beyond, the neighbourhood and community organising to expose and counter his cuts to Welfare and Health services, the teachers strikes for better funding for working class communities, and, not least, the millions on the streets challenging Trump’s Climate Denial, all built the foundation to Trump’s demise.

It is, therefore, simply not true that Biden has won the US Presidential Election, despite all the World’s media shouting the message out this morning. It is a victory, absurdly narrow and momentary, for the people who care so much as to put themselves out enough to build the vote, to campaign tirelessly and to hold their noses in support of another Billionaire figure of the very Establishment they are in constant struggle with. It was only a vote in a ballot, and a moment in time.

All these struggles continue, hopefully unabated, essential to be escalated. The process of seeking social justice for all appears still in it’s infancy given the scale and span of human history, and is certainly far from concluded: organised and institutional racism is still endemic; the scale of abuse against women is pervasive across all societies; and neo-fascism is rebuilding and growing fast on all continents.

This accurately labelled “descent into barbarism” is the product of the crisis of the system capitalism. Capitalism’s reliance upon Debt, corruption and more-than-all-that, exploitation of people and planet, ensures that we are subject to the most amplified and accelerating tensions on all fronts.

Trump’s defeat may offer us momentary pleasure but we can be excused for wondering why we still feel a tension and despondency in our hearts.

It is at this point, all issues, all paths, all fights must be informed by and focussed through the prism of global heating and the urgency of emissions reduction if we are to survive, let alone win the ultimate prize of Peace with social justice, self-determination and agency.

Biden will deliver absolutely nothing of this. My friends, family and co-activists are shouting with joy today that Biden has promised to have the USA sign up to the Paris Accord again, “on the first day of his Presidency”. We’ll see, but in any case the Paris Accord was woefully inadequate to address the threat of climate collapse projected in 2016 let alone in the light of the escalating emissions crisis since that time. It is a weak backstop brought to the fore in aid of Greenwash – the appearance of doing something whilst doing nothing. We should have no illusions.

Biden is a tried and tested protector of the status quo in an era when staying the same is a universal death warrant. For decades he has represented the Washington consensus crossing Party boundaries to protect the interests of Business. He was a backroom architect and ultimately vice-President through a period of the Democrats’ right wing “third way” policies: neoliberal free-trade agreements, huge tax-payers gifts to banks, “tough-on-crime” anti-working class legislation and militarisation of the Police, not to mention cuts to welfare spending and services. His President Obama waged more war with imperialist intentions than has Trump. The Black Lives Matter movement was forced into existence during the reign of a Black President!

His alternative Party of the Ruling Class, boastfully emulating moral and intellectual (as well as financial) superiority, appears to represent the middle class liberals, technocrats and professionals whilst really continuing the project of the financiers and Big Business Capitalists. If that sounds like an allegation from Trump’s populist base its’ because it is. Every Great Lie has to have a kernel of Truth for it to work.

Trump’s speeches this week maintained the Great Lie that his is the true voice of the working class. Biden’s persona of dignity and fair play only fed on the feelings of indignation and anger by a population largely without opportunity, effective healthcare or education. That’s why the vote was larger than ever before, and so many Black and working class people voted for Trump as to make “Biden’s victory” so thin.

Far-right populism isn’t going away, and neither will Trump’s army whether he continues as leader or not. And this climate-denying movement will offer Biden every opportunity to limit and water-down any measures against global heating emissions that could make a real difference. In other words, the two men symbolise the two-sides of the same coin – the continuation of the System that is destroying the world.

Just for this moment, we progressives deserve a well-earned sigh of relief that Trump has lost a second term as President of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. But, if we remain honest to ourselves we cannot feel joy or satisfaction. We can only gear ourselves up for the inevitable fights against the next President and everything he stands for. The demand has to be System Change, not symbolic change! Our existence depends upon it.

2020 horror? There are an enormous proportion of tweets and online posts offering the same antidote to this year’s challenges: “why can’t we just talk about positive things and stop all this negativity?”

My instant inner response each time is “Grow Up!”, although I’d never put that in print(!). I have often been left incandescent at the prissy call-outs to “be happy”, alongside what appears to be an all-but anti-human approach of “I know best”.

As far as I can surmise, such arrogance reflects a deeply reactionary self-consumed approach to life and society, a response to the current and ongoing global crisis that ultimately reflects far-Right “survival of the fittest” notions.

Of course, having my own blog allows me to vent and rant away without requiring anyone to listen, and publish my own observations upon the human condition for my own satisfaction. I need this outlet, and I guess that’s the same for others who similarly vent frustration and angst at anomie online.

Yet I can only observe the “Lovely, Lovely” approach to life as, not only deeply entitled, but twee. I perfectly well understand the mental health dangers of constant pessimism and hopelessness, but there is plenty to be pessimistic about, and, as a human emotion depression exists as an alert mechanism – a warning. To present otherwise is surely a descent into a different area of mental illness – asserting an emotional blindness to current challenges and the travails of others.

There’s a lot of such self-centredness around.

Just the responses to the outrageous levels of child poverty in the UK offers sufficient evidence of that. This week Parliament voted not to pay a paltry amount to feed children of poor families with a light lunch during school holidays. To a person, the self-centred spoke out to argue that State handouts create dependency and parents should struggle to stand on their own two feet, taking individual responsibility for their children’s diet.

The fact that more than 1 in 3 children in England and Wales live in poor households where one or more of the human necessities of life cannot be afforded is not to be acknowledged or dealt with. Ask why poverty is widespread, deepening, systemic, institutionalised? Instead, “why can’t they do what I do?”

There are similar reactions in responses to the Climate crisis, often by people who consider themselves progressive and even “Left-wing”.

Firstly, let’s be clear, there is no scientific argument. It is a matter of fact that the 16 clinically observed aspects of environmental and ecological degradation are at or past their respective Tipping Points.

To deny the scale of the challenge is to deny fact, yet the “Big Picture”, or rather, the holistic approach to campaigning to stop runaway climate change is most often neglected or denied.

The facts are too many to document in a single article, but just observe a few visions from the year 2020:

• the release of methane from ocean floors and Siberian permafrost;

• The loss of sea-life as the oceans acidify;

• the record-breaking high temperatures from the USA’s Death Valley to India’s Northern Phalodi;

• the equally never-seen-before scale of fires in California, Australasia, The Amazon and Syria’s Al-Suwayda Governorate; and

• the equally devastating floods in Rwanda, Bangladesh, Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia, Guyana, Italy, Indonesia, and the Adjara region of the country of Georgia;

not to mention the extraordinary pace of extinction of animal and insect life, and the evidence of never-before-seen in the last 3 million years environmental change, at a pace that dumfounds both the scientists and their computer models. This requires alarm, not comfort.

Yet, as an activist, I spend most of my time in online-meetings and reading tracts by well-meaning and equally well informed colleagues and comrades who seek to remain within the cosmetic spaces of day-to-day campaigning.

Each to their own, anyone doing anything is to be valued. I am not arguing that they should stop, only that the numbers who are actively challenging the System are far too few to be effective.

Neither am I arguing an either-or approach, demanding only revolutionary activity and damning all day-to-day reforms. I do both. I simply note that many of my friends and associates remain single-issue and defiant against calls for System Change, “doing” only the “cycling”, “rewilding”, “reuse” or “reduce use” single focus activities.

I don’t mind that it makes them feel better (I only wish they would do for me), but do mind when they pose their chosen hobby as “the answer”: “If only people would refuse to use plastic”, “People [the Others?] should be Vegan”, “oh, personally, I only ever use charity shops – consumerism is an addiction which I don’t have” (think about it).

Of course we need fewer cars, to walk and cycle more, to use less plastic and eat less meat, just as we need to buck the trends towards social intolerance and Fear of Others. But we have very little time in which to act before conditions ensure complete social collapse.

Historically, a deep social, political and economic crisis precedes revolution. This multi-faceted crisis, comprised of pandemic, economic and political corruption, extreme inequality of power and opportunity, war and climate collapse, is not going away.

This is our life from here on in. More of the same, and far worse, is on the way. But, as in all things, what we do matters and can shape the trajectory and outcome of the crisis.

It’s no good pretending. It’s the System! If politicians deny the climate emergency, either by word or inaction, they have to be challenged forthrightly, not politely requested to produce more cycle lanes or sow wild seeds, but to establish laws against global heating emissions, starting with the oil producers, arms manufacturers (the military are biggest polluters) and fossil fuel burners (car users being way down the list of targets).

To bang-on about re-wilding parks and pavements, rave about walking rather than driving, exude moral superiority for riding a bicycle, or pontificate about how nasty some politicians can be, may well be personally reassuring. I know I have my own pet passions. But none of these produce any real change, and certainly not the level of change needed.

As others document well, not least George Monbiot, the honest approach is to own the sheer scale and sonics of the challenge. Effective re-wilding is about ending industrial farming and transforming the management of areas the size of Dartmoor, the Lake District and the East Midlands. Planting tens of millions of trees.

By contrast, letting the football pitch at my local Victoria Park return to Dandelions, Lousewort and Yellow Rattle won’t make a heap of difference (except for the group of young asylum seekers whose use of the well-mown grass football pitch is a rare escape from the fear and tedium of imposed poverty).

Equally, ensuring homes are refitted to zero-carbon emissions will not be aided if the weeds (sorry, wild flowers) are protected and allowed to grow in the curtilages, walls and roofs with the ensuing destructive root damage and water intrusion to buildings. Flowers seed themselves everywhere. Fungus eats wood. We have to protect our homes, de-weed our vegetable patches, kill Russian Vines (the mile-a-minute Fallopia Baldschuanica) before they overwhelm us!

It is argued that these small-scale approaches offer education and patterns of change that add-up to large-scale changes. An oft-offered example is is recycling, now “normal” across the industrialised world. But look deeper and the majority of municipalities still burn or send to land-fill much of that which we have painstakingly recycled at home. Deeper still, smog-inducing tankers ferry our plastics to poor countries with no option but to dump our waste somewhere else. Recycling isn’t profitable enough as a money-making concern for the System to truly adopt it (but lets not talk about that).

Sometimes the twee moralism becomes anti-humanity in its holier-than-thou approach. “The World would be fine if only everyone else lived as I do”. Or worse still, “I hate humanity, the world would be better off without us!” Ugh, I can’t abide it! Humans may well be analogous to a bacteria, but there would be no life on Earth without such a marvellous mix of interactive lifeforms – especially bacteria! We are of vital importance to the Ecology!

Sharing the Planet with Nature requires that we offer management – of ourselves yes, but of other life forms that can be just as intrusive, rampant, predatory and destructive. There’s nothing benign about Nature, and whilst I’d want humanity to be as one with the metabolism of all Life, the notion of a “Return to Nature” is actually an argument for human extinction. We should not be apart from the Ecology, but as part of Life we should act upon it for our own survival.

So we need to be factual and scientific about what works and must be done to prevent runaway climate change. And seize the time. Stop playing around. It is the Capitalist System of production that exploits and destroys the ecology, and exploits and oppresses the majority of humanity in much the same way and towards the same extinction. Either it is ended or we end as a species.

These are Epic times. Why think small?

Practically, ending the domination of the internal combustion engine will not occur because we individually choose to give-up our cars but by laws that ensure oil and gas will, from henceforth, be left in the ground! And the biggest demand right now must be for the restructuring of the economy to produce millions of Green Jobs in this period of recession into economic (as well as emotional) Depression, which requires targeting Government and politicians, Corporations and businesses.

Why would we find happiness in living an illusion?

I’m sure I’m now seen as nothing other than an intolerant old man at these meetings, repeating the above endlessly and showing angst if not overt anger at the paucity of the debate and shallowness of aspiration. But so be it. The issues are of the future of human survival, not personal politeness.

Nevertheless I will now, once again, curb my ire and return to an online politeness in text and Zoom meet-ups. Only because alienating those around me is unlikely to encourage or build a movement of the scale needed for real societal change. Inside I am squirming and seething at the lack of proportionate response to existential threat: “shuffering and shmiling” as Fela Kuti would sing.

The human world is not a nice place in 2020 and isn’t about to get any nicer. Most of us (apart from the top 5% of the world’s wealthy few) are facing deepening discomfort. Rather than seek the soporific comforts of “feeling like we’re doing something”, we may as well make ourselves uncomfortable now and do things that really make a difference. That will require fighting for a different society, not just better cycle routes.

https://youtu.be/Y–5IlljO78

The current discussion is focussed upon mental ill-health caused by COVID-19. The focus is always upon the individual narrative. Radio and TV programs and newsreels constantly offer Vox-Pops of personal statements expressing feelings, focussing upon emotionality.

There’s much that is political propaganda in this. Immediately, I’m cursed for “reducing” or “denying” the serious impacts of pandemic related disease, sickness, bereavement, Lockdown claustrophobia, financial stress and debt, homelessness, domestic violence, social rage and deepening alienation.

Nope, mine is not a reductionist rant. It’s been months since I’ve felt able to write, the Summer offering some solace from gardening and cautious meet-ups post-Lockdown, but my stress and anxiety levels have been high, and I know I’m far from being alone in feeling alone and powerless. I am not one to minimise mental distress.

The problem with the focus upon the rise in mental ill-health is the dominant quasi-scientific approach of “biomedical psychology”. As my compatriot, Iain Ferguson identifies, there’s nothing wrong or abnormal with a response of anxiety to pandemic conditions – such emotions must be usual and collective human reactions to such stressful circumstances.

Yet the Capitalist propaganda machine identifies “Health”, mental and physical, as our personal and individual responsibility, even though viruses clearly require societal collective responses for mutual safety – masks, hygiene, sanitation, public refuse collection and decontamination, hospitals, ventilators, vaccines – little of which can be reduced to the level of individual production.

The response has to be societal. The current dominant cultural demands of neoliberal individualism and consumerism force us to believe we are at fault if we live in damp rented accommodation, its our fault if we can’t afford a low-fat low-sugar diet, its up to us to beat obesity by running each day, checking our steps and heartbeat on our Apple Watches.

The most scant and blurred check of personal and household income in Britain quickly proves that a huge proportion of us lack any choice in our living conditions, living in various degrees of poverty. Indeed, with the economic crisis stemming not only from COVID-19 but from the long oil-slick of the 2008 banking crash, around 4 million of our children live in poverty and over 1 million households rely upon charitable food banks.

That’s the stuff of stress and anxiety. Its not you. Levels of mental distress were high in this country well before COVID hit. Isolation, inequality, poverty, women’s oppression and racism are all structurally endemic in Capitalist society and each ensures fluctuating degrees of distress response.

The System, based upon judging people on their workability, condemns millions to lack of access, lack of choice, and resulting mental ill health, mostly encapsulating self-blame and self-hatred. It’s such ideology, and the corresponding media propaganda, that condones the cuts to mental health services to minimal levels.

One aspect of the current focus on mental health is now labelled “moral distress”, suddenly exposed and espoused by media from BBC 4’s Women’s Hour to “long-reads” in Guardian. I find it a fascinating revision of any consideration of political dissonance from the ruling ideas of the Capitalist Class.

Without seeking to clearly define this category of mental ill-health, it’s worth referring the outline concept to my friends, colleagues and comrades in the Climate Movement. The more we read the Science, we witness the extreme weather events and their aftermath for swathes of humanity (not to mention the mental anguish generated every time we project forward a few years in our imagination), the more “moral distress” appears to overwhelm us.

The moral distress of ecological and climate destruction leads us to the same self-blame and self-hatred borne of the powerlessness felt in other contexts. Such individualisation of the challenge, promoted by adverts from British Petroleum, The Sun “newspaper”, Prime Minister Johnson and those cleverly distorted journalists précis’ of Attenborough programmes, drives many activists into ever more alienated and pointless, self-denying activities.

It is claimed, falsely, that it is your plastic-use, your method of home heating, cooking, diet, attire, even breathing, that is the root of the problem. All this, despite the fact that you have little control over any of them (air pollution being a case in point).

In short, unless you’re an oil business billionaire (massive land-owner, corporate farmer or arms manufacturer), it’s not your fault! You didn’t create Capitalism. COVID-19 is a collective challenge and requires a collective, societal, pro-humanity response. So is Global Heating. Focus upon the methods of production that create deadly pandemics and emissions. Turn your pent-up emotions outwards, join together, and tear-down the System!

Yesterday, the latest Domestic Abuse Bill finally passed through the UK Parliament. We’ve campaigned for it for at least the last 5 years and should celebrate despite it having been mauled by misogynist MPs and neutered by the destruction of the Legal Aid system. Clearly Law-making is only ever incremental.

At last, the emotional coercion as well as physical and economic abuse and coercion of adults who are or recently have been living together has been addressed in Law. Children in households where there is abuse between adult family members are, for the first time, recognised as suffering from the same abuse.

The formal recognition of emotional harm caused by abusive behaviours, for example slandering the victim as “crazy” or abusive (known as “gaslighting”), is a valuable addition to the long list of how individual humans can control another and render them powerless. This comes at a time when reports of domestic abuse have more than quadrupled during the COVID-19 Lockdown.

During the same period, the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder by Police of George Floyd in the USA has raised the level of debate about Power-and-Control behaviours, both personal and institutionalised. The knee pressed on the neck until dead is a graphic symbol of illegitimate power, and allows us now to extend our exploration of the more subtle behaviours that restrict or deny our ability to breathe.

At a tangent, the debate about a “Woman’s Right to Choose” and abortion rights continues unabated, with the notion that an individual has the right to be in charge of their own body (and nobody else’s) still ludicrously contentious. Add to that the very loud arguments about whether Transgender people have the right to be recognised as women if they so choose, dividing feminists and misogynists alike, and all issues of individual liberty and human rights remain far from resolved.

We live in ideologically-febrile times, but probably always have. The divisions in the vast array of potential “ways of seeing” across all of humanity have constantly led to camps, ideological groupings, sects, parties and conflict. The human imagination that has empowered us to conceive of ideas, constructions and actions that raise us to the top of the food chain comes at a high cost.

We are able to love and hate, build and destroy, care and ignore. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, we can hear without listening, see without understanding. We are all able to abuse. We therefore have to control and manage ourselves. We simply cannot be free to do what we want, any old time.

This raises questions, not only about the limits to potential freedoms and self-determination, but of human entitlement. In the context of person-to-person abuse, domestic abusers (the vast majority being men) consider themselves entitled to control and manipulate their intimate partner, if not their entire cohort of family and friends, by virtue of their maleness.

Having spent much of my lifetime employed as a statutory social worker intervening in cases of domestic abuse, I have some understanding of the dynamics of power-and-control relationships.

I have explored, through personal experience as well as academic study, the societal mechanisms by which the behaviours of the controller and the controlled develop, accelerate, become enmeshed, maintained and amplified. Belief systems are developed and embedded in order to explain away and normalise the abuse. Crucially, the abuser learns to feel entitled to behave in that way.

I’m in no doubt that all notions of entitlement stem from societal norms and cultural requirements, not innate “human nature”. We are socialised into basic expectations of “acceptable” behaviour, and any scan of different societies can identify the rainbow coloured span of legitimate ways of living. There is no one normal.

So people appear to choose to live under threat and in fear rather than defy the prescribed social norms. At societal level, millions can live under brutal dictatorships for decades, surviving in the shadows enjoying secret symbolic acts of defiance or illegitimacy. Drinking during Prohibition, reading banned books, daring to seek prohibited sexual encounters. Small acts that assuage the death-defying demand to challenge the entire system.

Unequal personal relationships often include similar token defiance. The oppressed and abused mouth-off behind the abusers back, but know to don the false-smile when together. And the pay-offs, usually summed-up by “better the devil you know…”, keep the relationship going. Such co-dependency is a prominent form of dysfunctional relationships, a dynamic that answers the throw away question of “why does s/he stay with him?” The more thoughtful question should be, “what are the barriers that prevent the victim from leaving?

We become locked into habits, familiarities and dependencies however destructive, for fear of the unknown. In this example, in a male-dominated society, a woman leaving her abuser runs the gauntlet of economic hardship as well as isolation and social stigma. The stereotype of the passive, caring and emotional woman is proven by the converse societal damnation of her assertive and challenging alter-ego.

Humans are so fabulously expansive in our potential conceptions and behaviours that we have to learn how to behave in any given society, and adapt to do so. Racism is learnt. Sexism is learnt. Homophobia is learnt. Religiosity is learnt. Good and Bad are social constructs. A deeply unequal and stratified society has to necessarily teach inequality and the righteousness of superior over inferior human beings.

Our base drives, complex in their minute-by-minute execution, come down to the comparatively simple inter-relationship of identity and survival. What I have to do to feel valid and what I have to do to be safe enough. Perception is key. And the “pay-off” – the value of holding on to what is rather than escape into the unknown – keeps us placed in the most extreme and absurd of situations.

If society teaches me that, as a man I have rights over women, or my lighter skin offers me power over people of colour, then I can feel comparatively valued and secure. At least I’m better off than them. “Tuppence ha’penny looking down at tuppence” as my Dad used to say. By this adage we all learn our place in the scheme of things. The abused may well believe that its right that s/he’s abused, because society says so, even if it seriously limits the ability to breathe.

It is Society that invokes our preferred attributes, including any and all human rights and entitlements. There is nothing essential or inalienable about any of them. I am given the “right” to control my partner only if those around me allow it. I can get away with enslaving others for my own benefit, on whatever contrived and spurious grounds, until I’m prevented from doing so. My judgements of “others’ as better or worse than me can only be validated by a society that condones hierarchy and competition.

Which brings us to the horrid quandary of the degree of societal change essential to prevent climate-driven human extinction. It is the class-laden layers of entitlements, seemingly bestowed upon the people of those societies most hectic in promoting global heating emissions, that ensure we maintain abusive behaviours towards the Environment as well as each other.

At a societal level, the most CO2-emitting North Western countries bestow the “Right” to fresh clean drinking water, electricity, housing and health care upon its citizens in return to gross exploitation and oppression. The least polluting peoples, seemingly because they’re the least economically developed, are not entitled to these comforts, even tho’ it is the natural resources within their national boundaries that overwhelmingly provide the entitlements for the better off. Western societies abuse the Global South for our own benefit and at their victims’ abject expense.

On a personal level, the size of diamond displays the validity of his love for me, whatever shackles it also portrays or exploitation it requires before display. My car bestows my status, never mind its CO2 rating and lung-damaging pollution; my employment secures my place in the scheme of things, even if being a qualified aircraft engineer (after 5 years of hard graft for which I deserve recompense and acknowledgement) contributes massively to environmental destruction; the home temperature from my central heating system ensures my comfort, whether the use of fossil fuels is sustainable or not.

It’s difficult to argue that we benefit from carbon-based economies when they are destroying the environment upon which we depend for survival. But how do we end the current individual and collective buy-in to ecological abuse? Society says and structures life to proclaim that I need a car (despite its cost) and makes life harder without one. How can I be strong enough to walk away?

To lower emissions by the mind-boggling scale required to prevent societal breakdown and ecological Armageddon, we have to address and change all current notions of Human Entitlement. If we can challenge entitlements in relation to domestic abuse or white supremacy, why can’t we do the same to prevent environmental abuse?

We don’t need to exert power in order to feel safe and warm in an intimate relationship. Negotiation, empathy and sensitivity offer a far deeper, more enjoyable and rewarding partnership. Children who grow-up appreciating the value, including the true cost, of things tend to have a broader and more cooperative relationship towards everything and everyone around them. Perhaps we don’t need central heating after all.

Environmental destruction is the most powerful of all abuse because it impacts negatively upon all Life. Can an abuser change perception and behaviour? I can authoritatively say “yes” because I’ve seen it happen so many times. Individuals can and do learn, adapt and change. We can learn not to abuse.

By the same token, “survivors” are, by definition, the people who have stood up and walked away from the abuse. The most over-stated cry of the support worker is, “if he’s hit you, he’ll do it again and next time it’ll be worse still. You can’t change him, its time to leave.” The walk into the unknown may be frightening but generally not nearly as fearful as the day-to-day tremble of the abusive home environment.

Yet, through the past five decades the proportion of domestic abuse households hasn’t changed, no matter how many individuals have passed through therapeutic intervention to learn better behaviours. Hence yet another Law. It is clear from history that outlawing domestic abuse will not work unless male dominance as a norm is systemically challenged and unlearnt.

Whilst stemming from different root causes, the same goes for constructs of white supremacy, and indeed for acceptance of global heating emissions. Such abuse should not just be frowned upon, but decried, exposed and constantly challenged, as well as prohibited. But right now, those refusing to comply with the abuse, facing-up to the abusers, challenging and changing behaviours, are still derided and stigmatised by a society defending its’ entitlements.

Can humanity stop abusing the environment? The analogy with domestic abuse suggests not fast enough if left to the slow-burn of one-by-one learning. While one person has unlearnt the abusive behaviours another has just started to enact what society has taught. The bright red Emergency Stop button controlling the conveyor belt has to be pressed, hard.

Ending environmental abuse requires societal change. It probably does mean a period of discomfort whilst building a new normal. It will require strong laws against the abusers – in this case the Corporations who are currently protected in their psychopathy. And, as with the misogynist abusers, they’re likely to fight back against any and all personal liability or accountability.

Progress depends upon the joined-up force of all movements against abuse. At base, the societal conventions that legitimise exploitation and oppression sit alongside the tenets that allow ecological destruction. At all levels of society we must pursue demands for equality not supremacy, cooperation not competition, the prioritisation of sustenance over accumulation, sharing not owning, sufficiency over avarice. But mostly, the end of any provision of entitlement without responsibility.

My recent discussions around Climate, through this period of mass protest that “Black Lives Matter”, have been tense. Meetings and online forums appear to be spinning in repetitive circles much like the swirling weather fronts rumbling across the Atlantic. The impasse created by, on the one side, COVID-19 Lockdown and on the other, spontaneous and death-defying outrage at State murder of people based upon their skin colour, appears to have rendered the Climate Movement almost paralysed.

As a microcosm of all that I have become abrupt and over-assertive (I hope not abusive) during online meetings where the same-old-same-old is being proposed, completely disregarding the febrile and era-announcing social upheavals taking place. The political tensions are enormous and raise the spectre that the status quo cannot hold. We have to push.

Our side must put actions before words, and yet, little is happening other than cleaning plastic from beaches and scrawling names of wild flowers on pavements, the best to save them from Roundup’s toxic glyphosphates. The analogy works out – if we don’t push forward with mass revolt to save the Planet and ourselves, we’ll succumb to being gassed, too.

So below is my response to a well-meaning and honest reformist seeking to build political alliances with local politicians in order to win change: cuts to emissions and the move away from the carbon economy. we share the sense of urgency but my impatience got the better of me and caused upset. For that, I’m sorry.

“Oh dear. I am in a state of almost constant heightened awareness/alert about “things climate”. I’ve read too much, and keep on doing so. My ancient optimism and long-lived positive outlook has been so deeply dented that I have developed an impatience not seen in earlier life. Perhaps I’m simply experiencing the inevitable “Victor Meldrew” grumpy-old-man syndrome. Every reflective experience is one of “Groundhog Day” – how many times must we go round the same discussions and arguments that have failed so dismally for decades? Rather than patiently explain myself, I’ve become snappy, and I sincerely apologise for that. My time with the local Extinction Rebellion Group allowed a completely fresh approach, consciously recognising that “the old ways hadn’t worked” and demanding direct action in order to challenge “The Power”. Along with the school student strikes enticed by Greta Thunberg, they worked. So much so that the conspiracy theorist would argue that the COVID-19 Lockdown was made-up in order to quash the revolt. I don’t think that for one moment, and in any case, as we see with Black Lives Matter worldwide, (or the Hong Kong revolts, or strikes in China) it hasn’t worked completely. Rather, there is a distinct confusion of direction. The protests had their time, so what’s next. And, as someone informed by the Climate Justice group, a radical international organisation engaging India and Africa, and the World Social Forum, an all-embracing global Movement of Movements, I see the debate as testing the most hardened campaigners worldwide. No-one has the answers. As I said at our Zoom meeting, the unquestionable science is of an acceleration of the indicators of climate collapse far beyond the computer models. 12 of the 16 measurements of environmental stability have now passed their tipping points. We’re on the brink. At the same time, there is a worldwide crisis of democracy, rendering the People’s voice and wishes redundant. It is not irrelevant to the discussions in small UK town like ours that there is a huge rise in the number of far-Right governments, oppressive in many ways but united in their Climate Denial. Local municipal political bodies, such as UK elected Councils, are also steeped in corruption and political dogma…and ours is no exception.So I’m over sensitive to reinventing the wheel, repeating the mantra, revisiting lost ground, rehearsing ancient plays (when there is contemporary art full of new forms available), or rolling that boulder back up the mountain side even one more time. The issue for me is the powerlessness of the people, and I get most cross whenever The People are blamed for not utilising the Power they don’t have. The argument of consumer power is the most pernicious. Only those with sufficient independent resources can afford to choose what and where to buy or boycott. The vast majority of us have limited means, our essential requirements owned and controlled in a wholly dictatorial mode (rented accommodation, price of foodstuffs, rate of pay for the job or level of Universal Credit, access to education, even access to healthcare despite the NHS – long ago stripped of any democratic control). The lack of resource is astounding, rendering half the population unable to live outside the very “Now” of life – looking back at our own history is too painful, and looking forward equally distressing – the poorest amongst us just have to get on with coping today, living for today in tiny bubbles of close-horizons and scrimped diet. Best not to think at all about reality, history or generations hence – best live in a dream of TV and drugs. The bottom 50% of UK society shares less than 20% of GDP, the poorest 20% have a disposable income as a household (not person) of less than £13k per year whilst the top 20% average £70k. One in three of our children live in poverty with precarious access to diet, housing, education and health. In the Western end of our poor City, the unskilled working class man has a life expectancy 15 years lower than his contemporary as a skilled male 2 miles to the East .And then there’s the media lies and propaganda concoctions that dull and divert public consciousness away from the things that matter. For example, were we to put a Press Release out today about methane release, our words would evaporate in front of the heat generated by the death of Dame Vera Lynn at 103 years old. More than 80% of all our media (on-and-offline) is owned by 5 individual billionaires who control the messages, to their own advantage, of course. The resulting broadcasts, so dull and banal that most don’t even listen, meaning the small nuggets of fact and reason that we manage to get through the censor’s net often falls on stony ground. So your proposal for mapping where the power lies is, for me, very straight forward but very little to do with seeking-out individual councillors in a rotten borough where Councillors have no freedom of thought or action from their Political Party’s contrived message for short-term electoral gain. We’ve done it to death, tested it to destruction, and by all that is sacred, its a tattered corpse. I’m personally averse to trying again, although I recognise that each generation has to test out afresh and learn the lessons for themselves. I simply wish we could better learn from history. What’ll it take? A critical mass of bodies heaped into death-defying action in the face of overwhelming odds, in a reckless and selfless bid for the survival of humanity in some form? Well, I’m not quite so pessimistic, nor a nihilist. There are uprisings, there is a developing consciousness in a proportion of the young, worldwide, that offers huge hope. And they are tearing down the statues. No more status quo. Not going through the same old rigmarole. Right now the Establishment are trying to incorporate as many of them as they can before they send in the politically-driven Police to round-up the doggedly non-compliant, but there is a huge Movement afoot. I refuse to become oppositionist against anyone trying to do anything towards human progress. But we each have only so much energy and mine is waning. Let a million flowers bloom. I simply cannot have faith in turning or replacing at least 26 local Councillors into hardened environmentalists who recognise that we must cut emissions drastically enough to ensure global cuts to production that result by 2030 in all oil being left in the ground and zero-emissions soon after. With our little town in poll position? Really? I think we need to shout the facts of science and offer symbols of the terrible impact of global heating now, in every way possible wherever we can, in public and with drama. We need to link with an international Movement of Movements to a point where workers collectively take strike action and close down the polluting and carbon-emitting workplaces and transform society root-and-branch. That’s why I like XR’s “speak Truth to Power” although my experience of that organisation (as with most) is the difficulty in determining whose “Truth” predominates. I prefer Facts. Let’s push the facts. Let’s bombard public discourse with climate facts. There’s tons. And tear down the symbols of fossil fuels. The final analysis, tho’, is that Oil and Capitalism are intrinsically linked and inseparable, just as is the System wholly reliant upon the institutional racism currently fomenting protest. I have to observe that you cannot end the one without ending the other. The challenge on all fronts is Capitalism as a System that can and must be replaced, and that means linking all the issues and movements in common cause, not deferring at all to the old structures.

Thanks for your tolerance. Lovely to talk. Love and Struggle, Tony

And in other news…the CEO of the oil company seeking to build a pipeline between Edmonton and Vancouver says COVID-19 offers the very best time to start the building work, because protests of more than 15 people are outlawed! I admit to a growing sense of pent-up anger. Must be Lockdown fatigue.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that profiteers and gangsters use any and every crisis in order to plunder profit out of human misery. Indeed, since the time of Kissinger and the USA’s war in Vietnam, imperialists as the most dominant Capitalists have recognised the profits that can be made from actively creating crises for which they have already manufactured the most convenient, immediate and lucrative solution.

War makes big money for big business. So can ill health. Make it so.

As an example, the entire class of owners of industries and natural resources are in a frenzy looking at how to use the global pandemic to make more money. Of course, the primary focus may be on the creation of a cure, a vaccine that can be sold to hundreds of millions at a profit. Big money returns require that the Big Pharma provider can set its own price, as opposed to State regulated health services that can set a ceiling enforced by Law.

Little wonder that Bill Gates is investing big-style to capture the private health market worldwide, or that the Chief Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, Dominic Cumming’s visit to Barnard Castle appears suspect when the site is best known as the headquarters of the Big-Fraud-Big-Pharma company, GlaxoSmithKline. The self-aggrandising Corporate State came of age some time ago.

But the crisis caused by COVID-19 is also allowing for a great deal of corruption elsewhere, as well as the obfuscation of “most other news” including wars and plane crashes, but especially in relation to global heating.

A number of records for the Earth’s climate were set in 2019: It was the warmest year without a major El Niño event ever recorded at surface temperature, and the warmest year on record for ocean heat content, which increased markedly between 2018 and 2019. Last year also saw record lows in sea ice extent and volume in the Arctic and Antarctic for much of the period between April and August, while global sea levels and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations reached new record highs in 2019 and the world’s glaciers continued to melt at accelerating rates.

I’m writing this in a continuing heatwave across Britain, our local reservoirs extremely low although we’re not even at the end of May. Yet there have been snow storms in Eastern Turkey and record temperature rises in the Arctic. Cyclone Amphan destroyed the ecologically fragile region of the India-Bangladesh border, the record sea temperatures of the Bay of Bengal sweeping the super-typhoon inland through the mangrove forest last preserves of the Bengal tigers and destroying towns and homes, displacing at least 3 million people.

So when Alberta’s energy minister, appropriately called Sonya Savage, tells oil-drilling contractors to celebrate, I can’t help my anger. The recommencement of pipeline construction is the hallmark of Business as Usual. The Old Normal.

COVID Lockdown has not reduced C02 levels increasing in the atmosphere because there’s a significant time lag between close-downs of emissions and reduction in global warming gases. The pandemic has shown us, however, that human societies can change behaviours overnight; massively reducing oil use from Internal Combustion Engines, planes and cruise liners; finding thousands of billions of pounds to invest in infrastructure and people. That’s worth reading twice.

Here we are at the centre of the most gross contradictions. One global crisis proving we can change and adapt, the other even more perilous crisis being neglected and denied by Governments and Businesses. All the time the poorer peoples of the less developed economies and the Global South face mounting immiserisation, displacement into crowded and vast refugee camps, trapping them in discomfort and disease and a life shortened and degraded to a greater extent than any virus can do on its own.

It is the Capitalist mode of production that has caused the Pandemic, as predicted, and the Capitalist System’s deep and obsessive reliance upon fossil fuels that has caused this climate catastrophe. It is still the case that we face human extinction within two or three generations because temperatures are rising towards 6 degrees above pre-industrial norms. And it is the case that we will soon see more viruses to live and die by.

As the lockdown evaporates before its time in order for the Capitalists to resume their quest for profit growth rather than human survival, those of us who care about climate and people are re-emerging from our caves. My experience of countless Zoom meetings and web-based social messages is currently all consuming. With the manifestos for Green New Deals across the world identifying how a New Normal, a low-emission, Just and inclusive global economy is now possible, we should enjoy a surge hope and excitement.

The growing Climate Movement, briefly stalled but still with the millions who protested through 2019, is ready once more. Yet I am pessimistic. I’ve probably been indoors too long. All the discussions and debates I’m reading and engaging with state the solutions large and small, on a grand scale and in minutiae. But precious few activists are even beginning to state what needs to be done for it to be achieved, and no-one, apart from the Savages of this world, are recognising that protest is now illegal.

I find it frustrating. How do we achieve the New Normal? Governments worldwide are pushing back human protections and returning to an even deeper and more offensive exploitation of people and Planet as I write. New and draconian laws have been put in place under the excuse of Pandemic but to be maintained to prevent a return to mass mobilisation. And the buzz of oil-guzzling traffic is once again drowning out the new-found songs of wild birds.

I’m tired of talking about what could be. I’m disillusioned with the individual actions to limit plastics, recycle cardboard, collect litter and rewild the verges of paths and roadways. The destruction of life, both the day-to-day enjoyability of living and the extinction of entire species, is escalating exponentially. My conscience cannot be salved through symbolic actions.

What will it take to raise the level of political, economic and social revolution required to beat back the savages and achieve the New Normal? Nothing less than revolutionary leadership, coordinated and general strike actions against the centres of production, and a renewed mass class consciousness and realisation that we are experiencing escalating barbarity that will only consume humanity unless we achieve global system change. This is the fight for life.