THEY did their best — the climate activists, NGOs, environmental scientists, most of the delegates and civil servants — but it wasn’t enough. Big Oil won the day.

From the Azerbaijani hosts to the flock of corporate lobbyists, the determination to live in denial of today’s climate roller coaster again swept aside all objections from the world outside.

The need for trillions of dollars going into a “repair and damage” fund was replaced by the promise of millions. And even then, the track record of delivering climate finance has always fallen well short of the promises.

Rich countries never met the 2020 target of £79 billion originally set for the fund, and the current commitment of £567bn has yet to see money flowing into it. Even this falls a long way short of the £1 trillion that developing nations were calling for.
 
Behind this sits even bigger backsliding. Missing was an affirmation of the current commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.” The oiligarchs — states and lobbyists — would rather we skipped past such planet-saving obligations.

It was as though the whole year since Cop28 had skipped past the litany of droughts, forest fires, hurricanes and deluges; events that can deliver a year’s rainfall in less than eight hours. None of this was allowed to undermine our addiction to oil.

Time for a different plan.

It pains me to say it but the world is past the point of remaining within a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures. This is what climate scientists have been screaming about for decades but which political leaders ignored.

Now we are on a wild-weather roller coaster and the signs are that it could all become dramatically worse.

AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Thermohaline_circulation.svg used to be a term only understood by nerds. Now many more grasp that it refers what Europeans probably know as the Gulf Stream.

This is a force of nature that moderates the climate we enjoy and regulates the seasons Western Europe has taken for granted.

As CO2 emissions increased, we fooled ourselves that warming wasn’t happening. The oceans were absorbing most of the heat.  Only now we are grasping the consequences.

Warmer seas allow greater evaporation, leading to denser cloud formation and more intense downpours once they hit land.

Fiercer wind patterns come as part of this, generating an increase in hurricanes, tornados and thunderstorms that all run amok wherever they hit town. Welcome to the world we’ve been messing up.

Delusionary economics

Part of the tragedy of Cop29 was that it was obsessed with the wrong questions. The “loss and damage” debate should have revolved around “capital,” not on the contributions from nation states.

Across the industrial world, neoliberalism has widened the gaps between rich and poor, undermining internationalism as it goes. Parties of the Right have capitalised on the impoverishment of the poor, suggesting it is all the fault of progressive politics.

In the US, Germany and a dozen other countries the dial has already swung in the direction of destructive introspection and populism.

America’s poor (including immigrant communities) voted for Trump, believing their impoverishment was down to illegal immigration. Much of Europe is following suit. Britain only dodged the same bullet because the far right took enough votes from a discredited Tory Party to deliver the illusion of a landslide shift to Labour.

Internationally, the richest nations are reducing their aid budgets and raising immigration barriers. Yet no-one is saying: “If nations aren’t paying, then let’s tax capital.”

Globalisation and deregulation turned financial markets into a casino. By the mili-second, speculators gamble against countries, commodities and communities. Those that don’t, simply demand that we privatise the public realm.

Tobin time?

It is over 50 years since Professor James Tobin came up with the notion of a fractional tax (of 0.1 per cent) on speculative financial transactions. This is now how we should be arguing for the World Bank, the IMF and the Loss and Damage budget to be financed.

Capital markets rather than countries must do the heavy lifting of climate finance. But Cop29 couldn’t even find anyone to run the argument.

In the same terms, back home, Britain’s landslide Labour majority has been unwilling to challenge the landslide shift of wealth in favour of the wealthy.

The universality of Winter Fuel Allowance payments could easily have been contained by lowering the upper tax threshold by the same amount.

The wealth of Britain’s richest has skyrocketed over the last 15 years. Labour’s Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, could have focused on the colossal growth in tax evasion by the rich rather than on shortcomings of the poor within the benefits system.

Blackpool, Blackheath or Blackrock?

Much of the controversy surrounding the Labour government has been trivia. I don’t care where Keir Starmer gets his suits from. I don’t care whether the chancellor even claims to have been a bus driver in a previous life. What matters is whether they are shifting the political dial in favour of the poor and the planet.

In his farewell column as economics editor for the Guardian newspaper, Larry Elliot delivered the message Labour avoids: “The free market has failed. Wealth did not trickle down, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened.”

When the casino collapsed in 2008 governments threw vast amounts of cheap money into its rescue. Zombie capitalism staggered on. But the left failed to come up with an alternative. This is why we’ve seen the current lurch to populism. But it’s actually much, much worse.

Labour is chasing a centre ground that no longer exists. It’s political reconfiguration is being driven by the interests of corporate feudalism. All talk about new partnerships with the private sector shows we have learned nothing from the rip-offs that PPPs and privatisations inflicted on the UK.

Giving Palantir Technologies (a US company that specialises in software platforms) access to NHS records will extend their surveillance of us. It will not improve the NHS.

A government partnership with BlackRock Inc (a US investment multinational) would pave the way for the wholesale privatisation of public services. And the whole panoply of Freeports offers a protected space for this pillaging of the public domain.

These are vultures, not partners.

Labour ought to be building partnerships with its own localities — Blackpool, Blackheath, Blackburn et al … anyone but BlackRock. The start should be Labour’s 1945 model of civic bonds, matched with legislation to block price-gouging interest charges by the private sector.

A different model of partnerships isn’t difficult to find.

When Germany launched its Energiewende (energy transition) programme, promoting the growth of community-based solar and wind projects, it used the German Development Bank — KfW — to de-risk much of the process.

The effect wasn’t just to speed up the programme but also to keep interest rate charges low. Tell that to Thames Water, currently bound into exorbitant interest charges from its owners, Macquarie Bank.

It’s a simple process. KfW underwrote half of the risk, but only on the basis of low interest rates. Money poured in. Projects took off. And communities took ownership. Labour could do the same … if only it hadn’t sold its soul to BlackRock.

You have to ask what on Earth possessed them to go down this path? I don’t think Starmer and Reeves are corrupt. Others around them may be, but “blinkered” and “stupid” don’t fall into the category of visionary leadership. And that’s what we need now.

If Labour fails to see this it will become locked into its own struggle with the disenfranchised poor. Trump, Musk, Farage and fascism will then have won. Collapse and climate chaos will follow.

If ever there was a moment for Labour to reopen its doors to the young, the inspired, the ethical and transformational, this surely has to be it.