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Editorial: Cop27 promises will be empty without radical shifts in economic and foreign policy

EX-PM Boris Johnson boasts in Egypt of being the “spirit of Glasgow” — last year’s Cop26 summit.

He’s right in the sense that that climate conference, like Johnson himself, was big on making promises and weak on keeping them.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon acknowledges that states have not lived up to the commitments of last November: but her claim that there is more “nervousness and scepticism” this year is misleading. The mass mobilisations by environmentalists, socialists and trade unions that hit the streets of Scotland’s biggest city already understood then that politicians cannot be trusted to act.

Propaganda continues to trump accuracy as Western leaders use the conference to greenwash their records. Johnson bangs the drum for continued US global domination with a ludicrous claim that it is “leading the world in helping countries to adopt clean technology.” 

The same US that has exploited fallout from the Ukraine war to boost liquefied natural gas exports to Europe by more than 60 per cent this year? Whose military alone emits more carbon dioxide than most countries? 

That has actively disrupted other countries’ access to green technology by slapping sanctions on Chinese solar component exports when China actually is a world leader in climate tech, accounting for 43 per cent of the entire global investment in renewables and 84 per cent of solar panel manufacturing worldwide?

The attempt to present US leadership as key to addressing climate change reflects a wider delusion about these summits: that everything can change while everything remains the same.

We see it in the blinkered belief that technological advances alone can tackle the crisis while the structure of our economy stays the same.

It’s absurd to claim we can meet emissions reduction targets without serious investment in a cheap, comprehensive and reliable public transport network — yet politicians seem content with rising fares, reduced investment and collapsing services.

The country’s carbon footprint and soaring energy bills could be shrunk by a national home insulation programme — the government even planned such a project, but soon cut its funding. 

Hints of further spending cuts to plug the gap in public finances can only make the outlook worse. 

On becoming Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would not leave future generations “with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves.” 

But a refusal to invest in the transition to a sustainable economy will leave future generations with much worse: collapsing crop yields, shrinking water supplies, the more frequent catastrophic floods and droughts we are already beginning to witness.

British governments will continue to flunk climate targets as long as global warming is seen as a discrete field considered in isolation from wider policy.

As the very existence of the annual Cop summits implies, this is a global crisis which requires global co-operation. 

A cold war mentality that treats sharing scientific research with the existing leader in green technology, China, as a security risk is incompatible with an international emissions reduction strategy. The US’s increasingly aggressive efforts to stifle Chinese scientific advances through trade barriers hurt us all.

Nor can we plausibly claim to be acting to slow rising temperatures while ramping up arms production and pursuing a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine instead of peace negotiations. Nothing is more ecologically destructive than war.

Besides the great power clashes resulting from US determination to remain top dog, US hegemony rests on the Washington Consensus — a set of economic policy prescriptions, policed by institutions like the World Bank, which enshrine corporate profit over the sovereignty of nation states. 

The US-led world order, propped up by Washington’s patsies on both sides of the green benches here, keeps the rapacious transnationals whose insatiable appetite for resource extraction has driven the climate crisis firmly in the driving seat. 

It is, as Extinction Rebellion has declared, only system change which can stave off climate change.

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