THE planet is burning. Everybody knows it. Everyone can see it.

If the planet goes on burning at anywhere near the same rate as it is now, the result will be the end of life as we know it.

Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? Maybe — but that doesn’t alter the fact that what I have just said is true.

So forgive me if I don’t agree with the daily disappointing Labour Party shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who apparently finds protests by supporters of Just Stop Oil to be “pathetic and tedious.”

Sweltering heat is blanketing much of the planet, and there appears to be no credible commitment to reverse it.

That much of the last few weeks have seen the hottest average temperatures ever recorded on the planet should be the spark for more protest actions — not less — even at the expense of the occasional “inconvenient” pause in a sporting fixture.

One measure last week showed that Earth’s average temperature on Wednesday remained at the record high, 17.18° Celsius, set the day before.

And for the seven-day period ending Wednesday of last week, the daily average temperature was .04° Celsius higher than any week in 44 years of record-keeping.

Last week the Chinese government reported that Beijing had recorded an astonishing 10 days of temperatures above 35°C.

Also last week, Egypt experienced days of temperatures soaring above 37.7°C.

In April, global ocean temperatures soared to 21.1°C and newly published data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service showed “exceptionally warm” ocean temperatures in the north Atlantic with “extreme” marine heatwaves near Britain and in the Baltic Sea.

Other research shows the Antarctic is between 10-20°C warmer than averages from 1979 to 2000.

This has led to the ice in the Antarctic shrinking to record lows.

The 4.5 million square miles covered by the sheet on June 27 was, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, almost 1 million square miles less than average for that date for the period from 1981-2010.

Several rounds of wildfire smoke originating from northern Canada have brought dangerous air quality levels to eastern North America.

The poorest communities in North America, already often living in heavily polluted areas and suffering the health consequences that go with it, suffered disproportionately from the wildfires.

Scientists say the climate emergency will make wildfires and smoke more likely and intense and that places such as the east coast of the US will see more of it.

One of the answers to this crisis by the world’s leaders is to put a fossil fuel executive, Sultan al-Jaber, at the head of the UN climate change conference, Cop28, in Dubai in November.

World leaders did this knowing full well that the oil and gas industry accounts for around 15 per cent of energy-related global greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week, in a speech to oil-producing states, Jaber urged the oil and gas industry to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by or before 2050.

Although Jaber is the head of the United Arab Emirates’ renewables firm Masdar, he also leads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, one of the world’s largest oil producers.

It’s hard to take his words seriously. His blatant conflict of interests brings out into the open the control that the oil and gas industry lobby has held over the climate change conference process from the beginning.

The Earth’s soaring temperatures are life-threatening and have caused the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres to say this proves “that climate change is out of control,” and that without urgent measures to tackle the crisis “we are moving into a catastrophic situation.”

While the climate emergency is global, there is little disagreement that the most disproportionate impact is and will continue to be felt by the global South who have, on the whole, the most limited capabilities to be able to respond.

The global North, which bears most responsibility for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, preaches, through hypocritical environmental campaigns, that the world needs to change but, seemingly, only as long as these changes don’t hit the profits of the fossil fuel companies that buy and sell politicians to protect their interests.

These companies and their client governments are content to export their climate footprints by setting up factories abroad — for cheap labour — and by contributing to deforestation or unsustainable agriculture.

This can best be described as climate colonialism.

Rich nations are content to exploit the natural resources and people of the global South as long as the profits flow northwards.

Rich nations view the global South as expendable as long as the transnational companies can still get access to the raw materials needed to satisfy consumers in the global North.

While some nations that were former colonial powers with overseas empires can take steps against natural disasters, countries in the global South, such as Pakistan, have been unable to do so.  

Pakistan has faced torrential floods in the past year that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people and as I write look set for more possible flooding.

Any attempt to tackle the climate crisis must take into account the inequality generated by systemic colonialism.

One way to counter past climate colonialism is through “loss and damages.”

Loss and damages refers to “reparations” by rich nations for the damage they have caused by pillaging the resources of the global South.

This seems perfectly reasonable given that the so-called natural disasters in the global South are the result of the global North’s industrialisation with fossil fuels, as well as their current neo-capitalist practices.

But, instead, the global North continues to attempt to patronisingly dictate the world’s response to the climate emergency in yet another example of neocolonialism.

The response to the climate emergency must be weighted in favour of the global South — but for this to happen there needs to be a paradigm shift in international global political relations.

In the past, rich nations have promised financial support to the global South but these funds have never materialised.

These rich nations point their fingers at the rest of the world while seeing no contradiction in subsidising the fossil fuel industry. Neither do they see a problem in pumping billions in military hardware to fight their endless wars — another massive contributor to the climate emergency.

Saving the planet is currently a very poor runner-up to war — and runners-up have still lost.

These are all reasons why the shift in priorities that the global South is pursuing through the Brics coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation or the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States is so urgently needed.

They represent that necessary paradigm shift away from the dominance of powerful transnational corporations and the politicians they own, to an approach that prioritises the interests of the billions of people in the global South who are routinely exploited and then ignored.

Tackling the climate emergency requires a political shift in favour of the working class and peasant communities across the globe and away from the worship of profit. This means more protest — not less.

Follow Roger on Twitter at @RogerAMck.