The effects of global warming, with just a 0.8?C temperature rise, are severe — the oceans are acidifying, fish stocks are dying on a massive scale, agriculture is failing in Central America and parts of Africa, we’re being hit by devastating storms and floods and sea levels are rising.

The global scientific community has far more severe predictions of what will happen if we don’t control the emissions that are causing the warming.

To keep the temperature rise below two degrees, the UN climate talks that began last week in Lima aim to reach a global agreement on reducing emissions.

Some people are calling this the most important meeting in the history of the world.

As the UN talks, called COP20, go on, the Morning Star speaks to Peruvian revolutionary and environmentalist Hugo Blanco.

“The COP20 includes all of the world’s big polluters, including the United States and China. These two countries have just signed an unambitious bilateral agreement on emissions, which seems to mean that they don’t want to commit themselves along with everyone else in the multilateral meeting of all the world’s countries.

And if the two biggest polluters aren’t going to commit to work with everyone else, what can the others do? Here in Lima a common project has to be approved, by the whole world, to be signed off next year in Paris. But that project is in danger.

Before now the proletariat was the vanguard because it fought for a part of capital gains, and it was the only sector that fought against big capital.

Now it is fighting for survival —people are fighting in defence of their lives because they don’t want to die — and that’s more important than capital gains isn’t it?

Times have changed. Now we can’t say that there’s a vanguard. At the moment the most attacked people are the indigenous groups.

These are precisely the people who have benefited least from the advances of civilisation.

They are the people who consume the least and for this reason they are populations that serve no purpose for big capital. They protest against the destruction of the environment we all need to survive, and so they are being massacred.

Indigenous cultures, not only in Peru but all over the world, have the same principles of living.

If humanity is to have a future, we need to restore these values to everyone.

Indigenous people maintain that the collective is in charge, not the individual. They all have a deep love for mother Earth. Earth is the mother of all of us.

And they all hold that solidarity is more important than money. Money doesn’t bring happiness — it’s an impediment to happiness.

If we don’t recover these principles, humanity will stop existing, humanity will be exterminated by neoliberalism.

The capitalists will die too, but the only thing they care about is making as much money as they can as quickly as they can.

In Celendin (in northern Peru) there is a fight for the defence of water. A mining company says it will destroy four lagoons — they’ll remove gold from where one is,

use the water from another and turn the other two into waste dumps.

But it isn’t only four lagoons that they are going to kill — it’s 40 lagoons. By poisoning the water with waste, they’ll destroy all the lagoons in the area, and the lagoons are linked to five rivers, and all these water sources provide water for producing nutritious food and work for tens of thousands of rural families.

If they lose the water they need for agriculture and the grass they need for cattle, what will happen to them?

Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, industrial processes, mining, logging and petrol is a threat to humanity, all of humanity. All of humanity has to unite, and is uniting.

We can see this in the demonstrations in New York, and we’ll see it on December 10 in the big march here in Lima.

Left-wing movements across the world are growing and becoming more conscious about climate change and what we have to do about it.”