Profiteering from Plunder of Nature

Despite UN Secretary General António Guterres’ COP27 eve warning that “our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible”, and that humanity is on a “highway to climate hell”, and as island states are in the threat of being washed off the map, no political decision on this crucial question confronting humanity was taken in this year’s UNFCCC meeting held during November 6-18 at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt. That’s, at this critical juncture when country leaders and world community are duty-bound to make a giant leap in the realm of climate action, leaders of 196 countries in the presence of more than 35000 participants representing climate activists and various CSOs/NGOs that assembled at COP27 could not rise to the occasion, though the Summit got an apparently progressive posture under corporate media blitz.

In essence, the COP27 failed to move an inch beyond last year’s Glasgow Summit. In spite of high sounding deliberations by country heads, the 27th global Climate Conference was a failure in respect of taking any concrete steps regarding the most pressing needs connected with the mounting climate crisis today. Among them the most important was to implement the commitment taken in the Paris Agreement seven years ago to limit– the limit regarded by climate experts as the “point of no return” –global warming to less than 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and, in relation to this, to end the use of fossil fuels and stop the emission of greenhouse gases which requires a phase out of coal power in particular in a time-bound manner.

However, taking advantage of the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine between US-led NATO on the one side and Russia on the other, and the consequent obstructions linked with Nord Stream 1 and 2, and in the guise of spiralling energy prices and the escalating cost of living, many countries of EU, especially Germany, have reversed their earlier commitments on reducing fossil fuel consumption. Now COP27 has resorted only to a limited reduction in coal power and the so called ‘phase out’ is applicable only to ‘inefficient fossil fuel subsidies’. Finally, the Summit could issue only a request for new country pledges, or nationally determined contributions for the forthcoming COP28 in UAE during November-December 2023. Revealingly, amidst the Indian representatives’ rhetoric at COP27 that all fossil fuels should be phased out, at home, Modi regime has been busy with the decision to auction out 141 coal mines to corporates during the Summit period itself.

Though funding is not a solution to overcome the impending climate catastrophe, the biggest green-house gas emitters, including the number 1 and 2 imperialist economic powers such as US and China, were reluctant to part with any substantial amount even to smoothen the burden borne by the poor Afro-Asian-Latin American countries and island nations. Even the much trumpeted $100 billion per year promise by US is a paltry sum (the required Loss and Damages Fund–L&D Fund– is estimated at a minimum of $ 500 billion). Compare it with $220 billion that Qatar, a small country which is reported to have spent to host the 2022 World Cup. And there has been no commitment on spending on ‘climate change adaptation’, nor any concrete proposals regarding the allocation and distribution of even this small amount among needy nations. The imperialist powers’ attempt was to push the onus of de-carbonisation efforts on to the shoulders of oppressed nations who are at the receiving end of bearing the brunt of climate catastrophe.

In brief, the COP27 sponsored by the notorious global pollutant Cocoa Cola and managed by world’s corporate MNCs could nothing to reverse the unabated climate crisis. On account of its basic corporate orientation, it could not accept the climate crisis as one of the central political questions confronting humanity. Today the horrific levels of wealth appropriation by global corporate capital is accomplished not only through super-exploitation of labour but also through plunder of nature. It is based on this concrete understanding that CPI (ML) Red Star has adopted the contradiction between capital and nature as one of the major contradictions in its Party Program.

Today, the core issue behind climate crisis is systemic; it is inseparably linked up with the mainstream development paradigm that is being pushed through neoliberal-corporatisation the world over. Climate crisis today can be reversed only through a people-oriented and pro-nature development model. It is up to the working class and oppressed the world over to come forward challenging the hegemony of corporate capital based on a political alternative which alone can overcome the impending climate catastrophe. In that sense we are constrained to call COP27 as a mere window dressing.