By Joseph Healy

The conference, organised by Anti-Capitalist Resistance (ACR) on Saturday 7^th December, was a full day event.

The first plenary had two speakers. The first was Jess Spear from the Irish Republic who represented People Before Profit and who is also a climate scientist. She referred to the recent decimation of the Irish Green Party who went from 12 seats and being in government, to 1 seat. She stated that this, and the decimation of Green parties across Europe, was not due to a “climate backlash” as the press claimed, but due to the fact that Green parties continued to call on the poor to do more to stop climate change – much of it expensive and demanding – while doing nothing to challenge the 1% who continue to devastate the planet.

She gave the example of the Irish Greens who proudly held up the climate pledge that they had gained from entering the right wing coalition government, despite the fact that Ireland has not achieved its climate targets. The Greens should have called for a ban on private jets, instead they had told people in rural areas to go on bicycles, while no rural transport system existed. The Greens had failed to challenge the economic status quo and were paying the price but this doesn’t mean that people have given up on climate.

The second speaker was Asad Rehman from War On Want who had just returned from the COP climate conference. War On Want is often described as the most radical NGO in the UK. Rehman said that the COP had been a farce and that the rich countries promised the global south funds, but only on the basis that they opened up their economies to more privatisation and deregulation, and everyone in the south knew what this meant. The south was paying the price for 200 years of climate destruction by the north, but nothing had fundamentally changed. He said that the 1.5 degrees target had already failed and that we were well on our way to 2 or 3 degrees by the end of the century. He criticised the climate movement and said that they always offered a hair shirt and talk about carbon reduction. He argued that they needed to challenge the obscene wealth of the 1% and present a positive argument that having renewable energy etc would actually improve life for the poor. He was also optimistic that the next COP in Belem in Brazil would be a very different one where the voices of the global south would demand radical change and would call out the hypocrisy of the global north and demand real change.  He argued that challenging poverty and challenging climate catastrophe must go hand in hand, and it was more and more obvious that this could not happen under capitalism.

I attended the session on fighting the Far Right where there were two speakers. The first was Richard Hames, according to whom Far Right strategy today involves a combination of Denialism, Securitisation and Conspiracism. Denialism is what Trump and Farage offered – drill baby drill, there is no crisis. Securitisation is cheaper than mitigation – an example was Trump’s wall with Mexico. They know that Latin American will become unliveable and are erecting a wall to prevent climate migrants. Conspiracism was led by QAnon, and typical of this was the quote from MAGA supporter Marjorie Taylor Green that climate change was the new Covid. Another aspect of all of this was geoengineering which was trumpeted by the geeks and particularly tech bros like Musk. This was satirised in Don’t Look Up in which the Musk character built a rocket to carry the elite to a distant planet, while the rest of humanity was left to die on a burning planet!

The second speaker was doing a PhD on Farming and Fascism and had been to the recent farmers demo in London where Farage was cheered by the crowd. The fascists were using rhetoric with the farmers about ethnic cleansing, and there had been farmers protests across Europe against climate measures, which had resulted in rolling back Green measures in a number of countries. The Far Right rhetoric was anti-bureaucratic a la Brexit and blamed a combination of vegans, Leftists and migrants for the decline in farming and its incomes. The response of the Left should be to “Make farming fun and profitable”. Ecosocialism could make farming fun by clawing back profits from producers and support farm workers (many of whom are migrants) and fight the supermarkets. Land reform is vital, this should include nationalisation. 95% of farmers and farm managers are white and there’s a vital need for the Left to reclaim farming for ethnic minority communities. Increasing domestic food production is also crucial. Farmers are only a small minority of the population but play a central role in food production.

That’s all my reports from the conference. I didn’t attend the final plenary, but at the end everyone was invited to sign up to an embryonic ecosocialist network and 50 people signed up. ACR regards the conference as a big success. For me it presented a lot of ideas and information that I was not aware of but also demonstrated the scale of the challenge for the global Left.