Guerrilla History - COP26 Dispatch w/ Vijay Prashad and Chris Saltmarsh

Starting point is 00:00:00 You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and what? Welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian

Starting point is 00:00:35 history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of the co-hosts of Gorilla History, Henry Huck and Mackie, but what you're going to be hearing today is a little bit different than usual. This will be one of our dispatches. For those of you who have listened to the show before, dispatches are shorter, more contemporary accounts of things that are happening in the world that we think that we can bring a little bit of historical analysis on. And because of the timeliness of these dispatches, in many cases, not all of the co-hosts are going to be present. And in this case, despite the fact that we were

Starting point is 00:01:11 all preparing for it, because of the timing of our guests, only Adnan was able to conduct the interview. And so therefore, you'll only be hearing Adnan during this episode. But I will do the introduction in any case. You will be hearing from Professor Adnan Hussein, his historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Our guests today are the excellent Vijay Prashad, who, of course, as many of our listeners know, is executive director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. He's the author of many books, including The Darker Nations, The Porer Nations, Red Star Over the Third World, and, of course, the first episode of guerrilla history,

Starting point is 00:01:54 or the first full episode of guerrilla history, was focused on his newest book, Washington Bullets, the history of the CIA coups and assassinations. Highly recommend you check out that book and check out the episode that we did with VJ just over a year ago at this point. The other guest is one of my friends and comrades, Chris Saltmarsh. Chris is co-founder of Labor for a Green New Deal. He just published his first book, Burnt, Fighting for Climate Justice, which came out about two months ago from Pluto Press,

Starting point is 00:02:26 and he regularly writes for magazines and journals, including Tribune. His two most recent articles for Tribune are 2.4 degrees is a disaster, but COP won't stop it. And COP26 can learn from West Papua's Green Resistance. The topic for the episode today is going to be COP 26. Adnan Brett and I had all been planning on doing a dispatch on COP 26 with these guests, but because of the timing that they were both available after the conference ended, only Adnan was able to conduct the interview. But we have excellent guests for you.

Starting point is 00:03:07 It's a great interview. Chris Salt Marsh is a longtime climate activist and climate journalist, so he brings that perspective to it. And Vijay Prashad, of course, is anti-imperialist extraordinaire who was at COP 26, so we can get that perspective from Vijay as well. So the last thing that I'm going to mention before I turn it over to Adnan is that you can follow guerrilla history on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod.

Starting point is 00:03:36 And you can support the show on Patreon at patreon. At patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And now, without further ado, let me turn it over to my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, to interview Vijay Prashad and Chris Sultmarsh about COP 26. I'm delighted to be joined today by VJ Prashad and Chris Saltmarch for this guerrilla history dispatch on the recent COP 26. Thank you both for being here. Great, thanks.

Starting point is 00:04:23 Yeah, I'm telling us. Well, Viji, I know you were in attendance for at least part of the conference, and so I wanted to start with you to get any sort of grassroots impressions of the proceedings as it was taking place. Well, Adnan, the first thing is there is no single cop. There were at least two cops, and I think that's important. If you've ever been to Glasgow, Glasgow is a beautiful city. It used to be the second most important city on the British Isles during the time of the British Empire. And the docks of Glasgow on the River Clyde were the docks where the great jute bales that came from Bengal used to be offloaded to be taken to Dundee, which was the main city of the jute manufacturing. also where a lot of the goods from the Americas produced, of course, by, you know, the people captured in Africa.

Starting point is 00:05:24 You know, the slave trade furnished the wealth of a place like Glasgow. And when you walk around Glasgow, you can see the beautiful buildings and so on. Very interestingly, the dock area, the Queen's dock, was reclaimed some decades ago. And it was made into the Scotland Enterprise Center, which, housed the official cop where the people of the leaders of countries and a lot of corporations, a lot of corporate leaders and lobbyists gathered. So they gathered essentially on the area where the wealth from the colonies used to come. You know, it could not have been a more perfect image.

Starting point is 00:06:07 That was one cop where they were so-called discussing the future of humankind, you know, as the head of the European Commission said that so few have in their hands our future. And you wonder, she said that without irony, you know, is that a good thing that such a, you know, small number of people, corporate executives and heads of governments are deliberating on these things by themselves on top of the old docklands. That was one cop. The second cop took place in, you know, daycare centers at abandoned churches in, trade union halls and that was the People's Summit. That's where, you know, people who represented environmental movements, NGOs of various kinds, political parties, youth movements and so on came.

Starting point is 00:06:57 And we had our own cop, you know, where we had our own deliberation and discussion. And I was, for instance, on the jury of the People's Tribunal, where we found the UN framework on climate change guilty of basically negligence and violating the UN Charter. In other words, we found the other cop guilty of not doing its job. So when you say, you know, what's going on? Well, there were two cops. There were 150,000 people who marched in a people's march. And we were yelling and screaming, but we were too far from the convention center to actually be heard. So, in fact, the Joe Bidens and the Boris Johnson's and the Emmanuel Macron's and so on,

Starting point is 00:07:36 they didn't even know we existed. But we knew they existed, and that's the fundamental democratic asymmetry. I'm so glad you mentioned both that history, since this is a history podcast, and we will, of course, be talking, however, about the present and the future, but to at least invoke that historic circumstance. But I think even when we're talking about climate, we have to talk about the history of imperialism, of a kind of carbon imperialism, those, you know, emitters historically. So maybe when we analyze that one cop that you found guilty in your people's tribunal, if we turn to Chris, what are the inadequacies of the structure of this conference of the parties and these state-oriented kinds of agreements?

Starting point is 00:08:25 Where do you fit this cop into previous cops to give us a better sense of what was achieved, what needs to be achieved? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess the first thing I'd say, is, you know, obviously, I think for most of us, top 26 has failed on any kind of metric of climate justice, international solidarity, decarbonization. But actually, you know, the UNF Triple C has its own kind of metrics of success. And for me, you know, what I've been telling people is, you know, climate action, if you like, it's a secondary aim for the UNF triple C.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Actually, its primary aim is maintaining the wealth and power of the global north and of its capitalist class. And it's done that effectively. It did it this year. It did it effectively in Paris. And it's done it right throughout its history. And, you know, we can go right the way back to the beginning of this framework in the Rio Earth Summit. And, you know, this was where it all kind of began. And I mean, that was a pivotal moment because, you know, it was up for debate, you know, what this structure of kind of international climate diplomacy would look like. But, you know, George H.W. Bush, the president of the U.S. at the time, made very clear that, that the US would have no part of it if the American way of life, as he put it, was up for debate.

Starting point is 00:09:40 And, you know, as we know, that for him was a euphemism for American capitalism. And so from the very beginning, American capital has been the midwife, I guess, of this process. And since then, you know, we had the Kyoto Protocol, which produced carbon markets, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. We then had Copenhagen cop in 2009, which was a serious failure after the, the wealthiest countries tried to bounce poor countries into an inadequate agreement and that was that was rejected and then we have the Paris agreement which has been widely lauded by our kind of ruling classes particularly here in the west but it's one again that kind of signs a death

Starting point is 00:10:20 warrant for the many millions of people around the world um you know they baked in um a trajectory to to really unsafe levels of warming um and you know and again the the lineage that we see in this couple of weeks at COP 26 is, you know, it was much reported that if you added all of the kind of targets that countries have made together, that takes us to about 2.4 degrees of warming. And I don't like to dwell too much on the kind of abstract, you know, figures and temperature rises of it. But put simply, you know, if you look at the extreme weather we're experiencing today at 1.1 degrees, 2.4 is for many millions of people, seriously catastrophic and deadly. And it's actually, you know, I'm not optimistic that we would even meet that 2.4 degrees target because there's no, so little enforcement mechanisms, so little finance afforded to support countries through the UNF triple C. And so really that kind of quite dire situation would be an optimistic, I think, assessment. So, so yeah, I think that's where we are. And I think it's been tough because, you know, if you look at it from, you know, if you're asking the question of all how, how, like, we're.

Starting point is 00:11:31 are we to achieve anything that looks like climate justice, you know, through this framework, it's looking close to impossible. And, you know, the whole kind of mantra was that's keep 1.5 alive. But really, this idea of achieving 1.5 degrees of warming, you know, has always been pie in the sky through the UNF triple C because, you know, that would require levels of transformation and disempowering of, you know, the global north and its capital that it just could not possibly abide. Yeah, Vijay, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts.

Starting point is 00:12:01 on these outcomes and the limitations of the COP framework? Well, you know, going into the COP, it looked like the fix was already in, which is to say that at the G20 meeting, which preceded the COP, this is the 20, well, self-styled largest economies in the world. I'm not sure exactly how you should measure economies. Remember, the government of Bhutan measures the economy by happiness. So if we measured our economies by happiness, I don't think these 20 necessarily would all make the grade, you know, where are your suicide rates high and so on. But anyway, these G20 countries met in Rome and they had a summit where you could already tell what was coming in the final so-called Glasgow Pact, you know, that emerged.

Starting point is 00:12:54 What was that? Well, it was clear that the Western countries were going to point fingers at coal. They wanted to make this the coal summit. Now, this is a very problematic issue because you immediately come into the great north-south divide with coal. You know, let's take India. When the British arrived in India, India was not a coal-spewing country. The British imposed a coal economy on India. It was the British that, you know, basically decided

Starting point is 00:13:25 that the whole of Jharkand had to be a coal mine. The people who lived in Jharkand didn't know there was coal under their feet. You know, they lived their lives. British basically said, ah, we found coal here and coal it's going to be. And when they left India, that was the principal form of energy. Meanwhile, in many parts of the world, in Europe, in North America and so on, there was a move to oil and natural gas as the principal energy source. These are equally fossil fuels and equally dirty and equally.

Starting point is 00:13:55 creating carbon emissions. You know, the United States is per capita the largest carbon emitter today. Chinese carbon emitter per capita only emits 42% of what a US carbon emitter emits. Indian carbon emitter today only emits 12% of what a US carbon emitter makes. But yet the fix was on because they walked into Glasgow saying the issue is coal and we want coal zero. We're not really interested in net zero emissions. And by the way, this net zero was itself a branding exercise. That doesn't mean zero emissions. It means near zero. You know, it's supposed to be a slope that goes downward. But it's not really zero. You can brand anything these days, but leave that aside. They wanted this summit to be carbon, to coal zero. Now, coal zero is

Starting point is 00:14:47 a problem. How do you take, make coal zero in India overnight? You know, that means that that billions of people around the world, in India, in China, but in most of the global south, will have no access to power. They will lose electricity. Right now, if we decided to shut all coal-fired plants, most of the planet will go dark. Let's just face it. The Western countries have moved to other forms of heating. France has nuclear. They have a big investment in nuclear power. other countries natural gas. India just does not have access to natural gas. You know, the only natural gas it might have had would have come from Iran through Pakistan in the pipeline. You know, you may remember Enron Corporation, my God, that takes us back, built a natural gas plant on the coastline of Maharashtra where they were going to bring liquefied natural gas into such a waste of resources to liquefy natural gas and then bring it on ships.

Starting point is 00:15:49 The carbon footprint on each ton, cubic ton of liquefied natural gas was enormous. So anyway, set that aside. They wanted this to be a coal summit and they in a way got it because they so-called shamed these countries into coal. Now, pay attention to something interesting. A few days before the final Glasgow Pact was announced to great fanfare where, you know, the British representative pretended to cry and so on. It's all crocodile tears. But a few days before, the United States and China signed a bilateral piece of paper.

Starting point is 00:16:24 In that bilateral piece of paper, a phrase was already used called phase down coal. They already used the phrase phase down coal. John Kerry, the climate envoy, said you, this is what he said. You have to phase down before you phase out. He already said that before the final day when the Indian representative environment minister changed the wording of the final text from phase out coal to face down coal and everybody said this is the plot by India and China they are refusing the Swiss the representative from Switzerland was so condescending saying that oh you have sabotaged the whole thing and so on

Starting point is 00:17:03 in plain sight the United States and China had just a few days before said we should face down coal why face down because India China and the United States are the three largest countries that rely on coal per capita It's not the case that the United States per capita relies on coal more than others. But the United States is per capita the largest carbon emitters. So two problems are there. One, that everybody colluded in this business of saying let's allow coal for now. One of the reasons is it's humanitarian.

Starting point is 00:17:34 You can't just shut the lights off in India and say no coal. That it's a real issue here. It should be debated. But the more fundamental question is hiding behind coal, they basically set aside the question of turning the lights out on other carbon gases, you know, for instance, oil and natural gas and they set aside methane. Methane is the second biggest greenhouse gas. On the day of nature, Saturday, the discussion was nature. There was barely any discussion about agriculture and agro business. Because, you know, it's countries in the West that have

Starting point is 00:18:10 massive factory farms that generate enormous amounts of methane. They don't want any conversation about that. So that's why I say the fix was in, you know, it was much easier to blame India and China and walk away, you know, brush your hands and say, hey, listen, Greta, we in the Western countries, we solved everything, you know, but India and China, the scofflaws. I mean, for God's sake, that's exactly the opposite of what happened. And yeah, if I could just, I guess, chip in really briefly on that as well. I think that, you know, what VJ says about really focusing on coal is really interesting. And for me, you know, I've spent a lot of time in, you know, the British climate movement, working with NGOs and the like. And I think what I also really

Starting point is 00:18:54 recognise and what is interesting is that, you know, this, you know, focus on coal, you know, it almost obfuscate from Europe's like reliance on oil and gas, isn't just driven by those governments, but also, you know, there's a kind of complicity with the wider liberal NGO sector or civil society. And again, there's been this really strong, you know, push to single out coal is the dirtiest, the worst fossil fuel, and maybe you can come up with some metrics to prove that, but I think VJ is right to say that, realistically, these fossil fuels were on a level.

Starting point is 00:19:22 And so, yeah, I think it's just, you know, it's important to implicate the civil society, which very often has a revolving door with these governments in this, yeah, in this inequality that's being pushed across. Well, it sounds like from what you're both are describing, particularly VJ, with this point you're making, that your analysis of the COP suggests that it has to be inextricable with really understanding

Starting point is 00:19:51 the inequalities in the global economy between the global north and south. And that's something I know Chris has written recently about in his latest article for the Tribune magazine about how 2.4% looks like this is what could realistically happen as a result. And that this framework is really about achieving, you know, the advantages that the global north already has. So I'm wondering from both of you, if you might want to reflect even more broadly, you know, what it means to have climate justice. Something that we talk about frequently, the climate justice movement. And many people just think of it in these abstract terms of reducing carbon emissions

Starting point is 00:20:39 overall in order to avoid the worst effects of, you know, climate change and global warming. But it seems like your analysis, both of you, seems to suggest a much broader meaning and set of implications and consequences when we talk about climate justice. D.J, I wonder if you had any thoughts on what you are meaning by and envisioning by climate justice. Well, look, Adnan, let's not talk about what I think. Let's talk about what the, what the countries, the member states of the United Nations have agreed to. You know, what I think is not germane, there's 7.9 billion of us, but the countries that belong to the UN actually

Starting point is 00:21:22 signed pieces of paper, they signed a treaty, they signed, they made an obligation. There are at least two things that should be on the table for the discussion. The first is in 1992, before the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was formed, that was set up in 1994, there There was a very important UN conference on environment and development at Rio de Janeiro. That was a 92 meeting. At that meeting, a phrase was agreed upon. You know, even the United States, I mean, agreed to this phrase, which is common and differentiated responsibilities.

Starting point is 00:21:57 The general idea is that, look, climate, environmental destruction, this is a common impact. Everybody is impacted by it. Well, okay, if you're in a low-lying island, you're perhaps you're impacted, you know, know, much faster, but everybody's impacted. That was the common. The differentiated part is important. There was agreement that the West had basically, in terms of climate, absorbed a greater share of the carbon budget. This can be actually forensically accounted for. This is not a guesstimate, as they say. This is actually something you can forensically estimate what is the carbon budget, who has used more of it and so on. It's very clear that the Western countries,

Starting point is 00:22:39 United States in the lead, but not by itself, have exhausted their share of the carbon budget. And therefore, it is the responsibility of these countries to both accelerate their decarbonization. They need to go faster to reduce their reliance on the carbon budget. And secondly, provide some means for poorer countries to leapfrog technologies. That's basically what differentiated means. Then as a consequence of the various cops, and remember, this is a way. was COP-26. That means they've been going at this for 26 years. Let's not forget that. And therefore, as a consequence of that agreement, there was an understanding that the richer

Starting point is 00:23:21 countries had to create a transition fund of some kind. Well, again, they agreed. This is not my opinion. They agreed to create a climate fund, you know, to have a transition fund. They also agreed on a number. It's a tiny number, an insignificant number, but they agreed to put $100 billion a year into the fund. Now, just for comparison during the pandemic, central banks created $16 trillion out of nothing. They created this out of digital numbers. $16 trillion were created during the pandemic

Starting point is 00:23:56 to basically make sure capitalism wasn't flushed down the toilet. But they can't come up with $100 billion a year into this fund. This fund would actually help the transition because then you could go to S-Com in South Africa. Africa, big human cry being made about this. Now we're going to help ESCOM get out of carbon, but you could just go there and say, look, here's a new technology, we're going to, you're going to go to solar, you're going to go to this, we're going to provide the array, we're going to provide everything, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:23 because that's the way we're going to do it. Africa, by the way, as a continent, contributes only 4% of carbon emissions, 54 countries, only 4%. So there's a way in which there's already signed agreement. We agree that there are differential responsibilities. We agree that we have money which we should transfer and also therefore technologies should be transferred. This is not on the table anymore. What I saw at COP, because I also engaged with people in the other COP, that is the official COP,

Starting point is 00:24:53 what I saw was a lot of corporations basically lobbying for public funds to modernize capitalism. They know that their forms of energy are out of date. They are anachronistic. And instead of putting private money, their own money, which is sitting in tax havens and in you know in in equities of various kinds rather than risk their own money to modernize their own ventures they are seeking undercover of oh my god the planet is going to end they are seeking public money to modernize private capitalism this is a scam in my opinion you know rather than use the money for that let's put the money into the climate

Starting point is 00:25:32 fund let's allow greater renewable energies to technologies to be put in place in port countries so that they can leapfrog over reliance on coal but that's not happening i mean i'm i'm telling you something straight what we see is a kind of shell game going on where firms are using the climate debate to basically get public funds for their own private pecuniary interests yeah i absolutely agree with all of that i guess just quickly on the finance point uh before i say a little something about justice i think you know it's really worth saying vj is absolutely right with 100 billion is a tiny amount compared to what's needed. But it's also entirely, you know, in the kind of medium and long term, you know, it's entirely self-defeating for the global

Starting point is 00:26:16 north to not provide this finance because it's undermining, you know, the possibilities of any transition. But what it really kind of demonstrates is for, you know, these powerful countries for the UNF triple C as a process, actually maintaining global inequalities is far more important to it than it than actually decarbonising. And I guess, you know, brings onto, you know, the question of justice. And for me, you know, when, when I think about climate justice, you know, you can kind of summarize it reasonably simply as saying, well, the people who have caused the crisis, you know, Peter talked about differentiated responsibility, the people who continue to profit from it, whether it's the governments of the global north or the corporations

Starting point is 00:26:56 of the global north, they will be insulated, you know, the most from its effects. And actually, it's the people around the world, the ordinary people, working people in any country in the world that you can think of that have themselves done little to nothing to create this crisis and they're certainly not making a profit out of it. They're the ones, all of us, who will be hit first and worse by its impacts. And that's the injustice of it. And I think, you know, when we talk about climate justice, it's about repairing that as much as possible. And some of that will be, you know, through financial reparations, between nations. But as well, I think, you know, we have to understand that the kind of the harm that has already been inflicted for, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:42 a history of colonialism and the imposition of capitalism and the harms that will continue to be inflicted through the climate prices, you know, there kind of isn't enough money in the world to pay for that, you know, the loss of life. You can't part a number of it. And so when we think about justice in that context, I think for me, it has to, we have to think about reparations that are structural as well. So reorganizing how. the global, you know, political economy works, how geopolitics work, so that we're re-empowering those nations and those states that have been disempowered through colonialism and disempowering the likes of the US and the UK. You know, similarly re-empowering

Starting point is 00:28:17 workers' labour and disempowering capital. You know, these are important parts of climate justice because it's only by giving power back to those from whom it's been taken that we can create a society and economy of politics that is fair and equitable. I'm wondering also, Vij, if maybe you also would extend your analysis further to talk a little bit about the geopolitics. You talked about the corporate, you know, exploitation of the climate discourse for public funds for private benefit, but also the geopolitical dimension. and politics of the conference, I've noticed that, of course, this, as you pointed out, this emphasis on coal as the main villain of the piece and a failure to account for history of admissions, that historical analysis is just dispensed with. So it's as if we're just in this one snapshot moment, a per capita understanding is seldom introduced into the discourse to have a sense of the relative responsibilities.

Starting point is 00:29:28 But I've noticed that there is very much a targeting here of China as the most responsible. This is how it's being sold increasingly to audiences of the global north. So I'm wondering if you had any further analysis about the geopolitics of the cop and any assessment of that. I mean, you know, Adna, this is so brazen and it requires so little analysis. You know, that's what's heartbreaking about this. You know, the Chinese have, you know, whatever the, however you understand China, the Chinese are now the world's largest producer of dot, dot, dot. Am I to say of pollution?

Starting point is 00:30:12 No, they are the world's largest producer of basically green technology. And not just manufacturing. They're developing new forms of technology. You know, new kinds of, they're actually experimenting with new forms of energy and so on. It's quite interesting what they are. up to in these Chinese companies. Now, this is an opportunity for collaboration. You would imagine that there would be a handout saying let's collaborate, let's figure out how to do this together and so on, you know. But no, that's not the language. The language is

Starting point is 00:30:45 you are the scofflaw, you are doing something wrong. You are pledging to not build any more coal-fired plants, but you don't actually mean it. I mean, that's what, that's how the financial times writes about it. Xi Jinping says, we are going to not, no long build coal-fired plants outside China and the Western press says, we don't believe you. Well, why not? I mean, they've said that, they've pledged that. You can hold them to it, but why don't you believe them? There is an element of racism in this, I feel, but I don't want to belabor that.

Starting point is 00:31:16 More than anything else, it's become wrapped into this Cold War mentality that is afflicting I think so much of what's happening in the world. You know, I just feel that here. you have a situation where they could collaborate on technology, you could have a collaboration on helping other countries, you know, the West could in fact come up with a formula saying China is the leading producer of green technology. Let's put some of that off patent, you know, and let's see what Chinese government firms do and so on. Second thing that's important here is there's a lot of finger pointing China is emitting is the biggest polluter and so on. Well,

Starting point is 00:31:56 Well, it's the biggest polluter because it's producing the things that the West wants to buy. You know, if the West started to produce its own buckets and its own shovels and pails, and I don't know why I keep talking about buckets, but, you know, its own cars and everything is made in China. You've basically outsourced your carbon emissions. If you were to insource those emissions, your emission numbers will rise. If in the United States, you had to make paper again, for instance, you know, your emission numbers will rise. So you've outsourced your carbon emissions. to China and then you blame China.

Starting point is 00:32:28 I mean, it's extraordinary how facile the debate is. And even in the respectable press, journalists just, you know, don't even think about this. They go to their Walmarts and their targets and they buy goods that's made in China. And they don't think about the fact that the Chinese are basically responsible for carbon emissions so that they can buy all this stuff at a cheap price.

Starting point is 00:32:49 That's not running through the heads of journalists. That's the second thing on this that I would like to put on the table. But linked to that, related to that, I think it's really important for us also to talk about the role of the military. The Brown University released a note which showed that the United States military is the world's largest institutional polluter of greenhouse gases. Some of that is just because the U.S. military has bases all over the world and constantly move ships and planes between them. Half the time, I don't know why they keep moving ships and planes between them, resupplying, moving troops around and so on. It's the largest institutional polluter. It's larger than the oil companies as an institutional polluter. We need to think about what this kind of militarism does.

Starting point is 00:33:37 It's choking the planet. Do you really need bases all over the world? I mean, if I had five minutes with Mr. Biden, I would ask him, Mr. Biden, when are you going to, you're talking about freedom for the people of Hong Kong and you'll protect the people? What about the liberation for the people of Guam and the people of Okinawa and the people of Diego Garcia. I mean, these are all places held as colonies by the United States. The Chagosian people of Diego Garcia, I've been sitting in a courtroom in Britain for years and years and years trying to get their islands back.

Starting point is 00:34:11 These are the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, where the United States is one of the world's largest bases. It's called Diego Garcia. You know, the Chagosians want their land back. The U.S. has a big base there. You know, you're talking about. Hong Kong and how you're bleeding about democracy and so on. What about democracy for the Chagosians, the people of Guam, you know, the people of Wauquinawa, even, well, let's not talk

Starting point is 00:34:35 about this too much, but the people of Hawaii and so on. These are all extended military bases for God's sake. And, you know, where the only political prison is in Cuba, it's on Guantanamo, run by the United States government. So, you know, that should be on the table. more you have this militarized language, the more normal it seems to have military bases all over the world. And the less remarked upon is the fact that the U.S. military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. Well, you've really sketched out how the consumption, production nexus has to be looked at globally. And then also, you know, the military imperialist sort of venture. And what we're really talking about is our modern form of

Starting point is 00:35:24 capitalism is really killing the planet. Chris, in your recent article, you talked about how we need to be more concrete rather than abstract about these numbers, 2.4% versus 1.5 and so on. I'm wondering if maybe you want to underscore that and sketch out a little bit. What you see is the specific consequences for those in the global South in particular who are going to be suffering the worst of the crisis as it advances even after. the so-called achievements of COP 26. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:35:59 You know, I think in some ways it can be quite hard to look into the future and say, well, this is the world we're going to see because often it kind of makes you sound like a crack because, you know, you kind of sketch out this very apocalyptic kind of world. And, you know, I think for a lot of people it's quite hard to believe. And so why I actually find most useful when describing this is pointing to what's already happening and saying, you know, if what we've seen over the past few years, there's a real escalation in the extreme weather of wildfires, you know, that, you know, I think what the last few years have done as well, you know, I'm speaking from the UK, especially for people that I know

Starting point is 00:36:38 in the global north is really underline how this is happening now, not just in a kind of over there in the global south, but, you know, this is increasingly going to affect so many of us. And so you have wildfires kind of ravaging for Australia or California, Athens, wherever. droughts, you know, in Kenya, extreme flooding that will increasingly, you know, render, you know, large, you know, dense populations, very precarious. Storms will, you know, rip through cities, you know, I think a few years ago, Bearer in Mozambique and 90% of infrastructure was destroyed. Flooding in Bangladesh continues yearly and will get worse and worse.

Starting point is 00:37:24 And, you know, all of these things will disrupt food systems. You know, I think we've seen large-scale crops fail. And we'll see that more and more and more. That will obviously have an impact on food prices around the world. And with all of this, we'll see people displaced, you know, within the country they're from, within the region. You know, often we talk about climate refugees. And I think what's often, you know, little understood is that when people are displaced, they won't, you know, be from you know Bangladesh to the UK it will be within the same region and actually places that have

Starting point is 00:38:00 been had resources stolen that have been deprived with the resources to deal with this problem will still you know they'll be vulnerable and lack the resources to to deal with that displacement of people and so you know this is just a kind of very brief outline of the things we're already seeing with the climate crisis you know the world at 1.1 degrees um but you know I think what that really underlines it when, you know, very often when we talk about Paris Agreement, I just say this Paris Agreement is lauded as this kind of gold standard of, you know, climate diplomacy. But, you know, it's strongest ambition is 1.5 degrees, which is, you know, can I consider a considerably worse situation than where we are now. So what we, you know, we want to keep 1.5

Starting point is 00:38:43 alive. Let's be real. 1.5 is serious economic destruction and loss of life for very many people. um two degrees is even worse 2.4 degrees yeah and i think by the time we're going to 2.4 2.7 3 whatever it is that's when you kind of get this idea of tipping points and the more warming you get itself gets more warming um and you kind of get into this runaway situation and so yeah i think i you know i would be i would be reticent to give a whole lot of detail about you know what the level of warming that these accords put us on a path to looks like because because as they've said I think you only need to look at what we're experiencing today to understand that for very many people climate change, the climate crisis, climate breakdown, climate injustice is already a defining factor of their lives.

Starting point is 00:39:33 It's a significant threat to livelihoods and to life itself and that will only get more these impacts, these threats will become more frequent, more severe and more geographically spread. And, you know, not only, I think, as we've shown, not only are we not doing anything close to what's necessary to limit that or to mitigate for that, we're also not doing enough to adapt to it and to think about, well, how will we live in in this new reality? And, you know, I think one of the things I've been thinking about recently is, you know, this idea of this kind of kept net zero targets, you know, the UK net zero by 2050, we kind of stop thinking what it will be like beyond 2050, you know, is this idea of like, well, we

Starting point is 00:40:19 have done it by then. But in three decades time, I'll be in my 50s and technically still have a decade or two left to work. And it's like, well, what is it like for me? What is it like for people who are born today? You will be, you know, in their 30s at 2050. Because I can say, well, we will have a steady, you know, escalating of this crisis until then, and it will carry on after that, whether we achieve net zero, whatever that means or not. Yeah. Well, we know that the official cop is not really equipped to address the real sources of the problem or to achieve the genuine solutions that would reflect real climate justice and end inequality. BJ, perhaps by way of conclusion, you can tell us, you know, what was the people's agenda at the

Starting point is 00:41:11 real cop that was taking place and what do you see as the path forward for people who really want to dedicate themselves to a just world and address this problem? See, I just would like to admit that a lot of our movements are movements of criticism. You know, we are critical of what they are doing on the other side of the fence, but we don't know what we would do if we suddenly were handed everything. You know, suddenly they decide they're going to board Elon Musk's spacecraft and disappear and they throw the keys in our face, what will we do? And I don't think we've actually thought this through.

Starting point is 00:41:50 But there are some things that are obvious and on the table. Let's firstly stop subsidizing fossil fuels, $5.9 billion, roughly $6 billion a year. Let's stop using public money to underwrite fossil fuel companies. immediately transfer money into a climate fund you know scale up renewable energy all over the world let's seriously consider creating car free zones in very many parts of the world you know if you can take a train there should be no road going beside it just have more trains running I'll give you just a simple example I was I went from London to Glasgow by train and the British train system is so

Starting point is 00:42:35 destroyed by privatization you know as you leave London, you see all these fancy trains in Houston Station, and as you go north further and further in England, you see the train stock deteriorate because you are now in areas where they are just forgotten people living. When you enter Scotland, the train stock actually improves. It's so class ridden the whole thing. You know, you need to have a world of public transportation. We need to put money into that.

Starting point is 00:43:05 We need to have a world where we're heating buildings in an effective way. I mean, I would say let's go to dense housing. You know, let's have less standalone houses. The denser housing, the less you're wasting heat. You know, if every family lives in one little house with a garden and so on, the energy burden on that family is enormous. But if you're living in a building, it's compact. You can create heat densities and cool densities as well. So, I mean, there are some common sense things at none. It's It's not rocket science. We have to also learn as a movement not to turn inward and say local is great because local

Starting point is 00:43:44 often doesn't have the solution. We'll still need international trade. We'll have to figure out how best to do it. How do we convert ships, for instance, from being reliant on energies that have produced carbon to different kinds of energies? How do we do that? Let's be creative with things like that. We don't need to turn inward.

Starting point is 00:44:07 So there are some basic policy things that are on the table, you know, but we'd have to go up against a car industry. We'd have to go up against a rubber industry. You'd have to go up against, you know, the privatization kick that public transport has been in and so on and so forth. You know, we'd have to think seriously about what affordable housing means and how to house people, you know, in a way that is energy, you know, utilizes energy in a proper way. might have to even consider whether every family should have their own kitchen, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:38 to cook privately or whether we do more communal kind of eating. It's more efficient use of energy. And you know, people say all these small things make no difference. Of course they make a difference when you're multiplying it by 7.9 billion. If 7.9 billion people are doing X number of things and you can reduce that by a great quantum of number, you'll have an impact. So there are at a big scale, small. scale, there are things we could do in a heartbeat.

Starting point is 00:45:06 I think we could manage it, Adnan. If they threw the keys at us, I don't think we'll be as clueless as we immediately feel when those keys land in our palm. Well, those are the keys that we need to get, indeed. I really appreciate this conversation and the update and analysis you've provided for our listeners on guerrilla history. How can listeners follow you and your work, Vijay? Well, I would like them to come to the Tri-Continental. It's the tricontinental.org and look at our materials and so on. And follow the work of Globetrotter, where most of my reporting comes through the Globetrotter Wire Service.

Starting point is 00:45:51 And Chris, how can listeners follow you? Yeah, get me on Twitter at Chris underscore Saltmarsh. I've been writing for Tribune magazine in the UK. quite often and I've had a book out recently but fighting for climate justice with Pluto Press yeah which yeah you're very welcome to crow copy up fantastic again thank you so much really appreciate this conversation and listeners that's it for this cop update this dispatch look for our you know episodes coming out very soon on a variety of other topics until then solidarity.

Starting point is 00:47:04 Thank you.

Guerrilla History - COP26 Dispatch w/ Vijay Prashad and Chris Saltmarsh

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