NUT: Only a mass movement can fight climate change!

The outcome of the contemptible farce of the Conference of the Parties, or the climate change talks in Copenhagen, will shape politics globally for years to come. No one can be left in any doubt that capitalism’s solutions will involve death, drought, starvation and displacement for millions of people.

Senator Jim Inhofe is the leading Republican on the United States Senate  Environment and Public Works Committee. He’s a climate change denier but he’s not wrong about everything. His assessment of what happened in Copenhagen is that there are no mandatory reductions of emissions of gases for either developed or developing nations; no verification of claimed reductions and the deadline has been shifted from 2010. “It’s a nothing agreement” was his summary.  If it were an agreement then the parties would be committed to doing something, no matter how feeble, instead what has been delivered after a fortnight of shabby dealing and years of political preparation is a political declaration which says only that the world’s rulers have decided to ignore the science and allow the planet to carry on warming.

One of Sudan’s representatives, Lumumba Stanislas Dia-ping, hit the nail on the head when he said that Africa was being asked “to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries". From a Sudanese point of view his vision of the prolonged mass deaths through climate change is already a reality and the Copenhagen deal was a guarantee that it will get worse.
The real leadership for sustained meaningful action came from Latin America. The Bolivians face a future in which their major cities lose their water as the glaciers melt. They had called for the creation of an International Environmental Court with the power to impose penalties on states which do not meet their obligations. The big flaw in that idea is that international courts and treaties are not really meant to punish the rich and powerful, otherwise Tony Blair would be serving a whole life term somewhere. Hugo Chavez articulated superbly the anti-democratic imperial nature of the rotten deal that Obama stitched up.
Obama’s role in the whole process was abysmal. It amounted to little
more than making the Chinese the scapegoat for the capitalist system. The obvious point to make is that a vast chunk of what China produces is shipped to the rich world and if these emissions were to be entered into anyone’s ledger it should be into the rich world’s column.

One of the few positives to emerge from Copenhagen has been the complete collapse of the world’s rulers’ attempt to impose their solution. Their chimera of carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture while the rich produce and consume in the same old way are unsustainable.  Obama stitched up a deal with South Africa, India, Brazil and the US momentarily forgetting his special relationship with Britain and explicitly rejecting the demands of poorer countries to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees and not allowing them to take part in the discussion. It is not hyperbole to say that Copenhagen’s outcome is a death sentence for tens of millions of people in the coming years, overwhelmingly among the planet’s poor. Resistance to it has to take the form of mass activity, winning the arguments in the trade unions, insisting that radical political organisations make it a centrepiece of their activity and listening.

NUT: Oppose amendment 46.1 Support Motion 46 Tackling Climate Change
The Executive amendment 46.1 seriously weakens the motion in two aspects. It deletes the call to affiliate to the Campaign against Climate Change and Stop Climate Chaos coalition and replaces it with "Work with...". The deletion of the fourth paragraph deletes opposition to "renewed investment in nuclear power and carbon trading."

The main motion is a good summary of recent campaigns and proposals for the way forward. Support resolution 46.2 from Bristol/Birmingham which notes the failure of the UN talks in Copenhagen and supports the call of the Bolivian President Evo Morales for a People's World Conference on Climate Change in April 2010.
This editorial appeared in the Socialist Resistance bulletin distributed at the National Union of Teachers' conference, which is taking a major debate on climate change.