Callum Joyce, Oxford Socialist Party
COP29 – the annual United Nations climate conference of over 200 countries – held this year in Azerbaijan, ended on 23 November after 12 days of discussion aimed at agreeing new targets to help tackle the growing threat of climate change.
After the recent devastating floods in Valencia, you would expect a particular sense of urgency to the talks this year, with the consequences of further stalling on serious measures to combat global warming plain for all to see. Not plain enough for the major capitalist powers though apparently!
The final days of the conference have been mired in controversy, as negotiations over where the money for a new climate fund will come from have dragged past their deadline, with numerous capitalist countries refusing to pledge the amount of money needed. The aim was to raise at least $1.3 trillion, which it is estimated will be needed by 2030 to help poorer countries mitigate the effects of climate change and speed up their transition away from fossil fuels.
However many of the more developed countries are unwilling to stump up the cash. The UK, EU, and US originally pledged only $250 billion between them, later raising this to $300 billion after backlash from the governments of poorer countries. The rest of the money is set to come from vague ‘innovative sources of finance’, relying on more private investment and funding from the poorer countries themselves – neither of which are guaranteed.
That leaves just a meagre $1 trillion to be cobbled together from unspecified sources then – good luck! No doubt the leaders of these capitalist governments will claim they cannot afford to pledge funding of that level themselves. But the money is there. From 2023-24, Shell and BP – neither exactly known for being environmentally friendly either – made over £20 billion in profits and have combined assets worth over half a trillion pounds. In the last year, just the three biggest companies in the US made profits between them of over $1 trillion.
The need to take this colossal wealth off the super-rich is obvious. But the capitalist governments of the world won’t let the fate of the planet get in the way of their own corporations making a tidy profit. The struggle against climate change and all the other issues in society demands the developing of mass workers’ organisations and parties – in Britain and internationally – as vehicles for working-class action to bring about socialist change, taking the wealth out of the hands of the polluters and exploiters and to employ it for the benefit of all instead.
