Last week a COP26 march made its way through Glasgow’s Govan to protest militarisation and its profiteering from climate change.
The locals spilled out of shops, bookies and pubs to look on, detached from the spectacle headed towards the military giant BAE systems on the Clyde.
Protests have been the most inclusive part of COP26 but in reality, most ordinary people are too busy pushing the boulder of their lives uphill, to meaningfully engage.
The majority of people who live in or have travelled to Glasgow, have felt like outsiders excluded from the fortified space of COP26.
I live minutes from the COP26 conference and I can see how white and how privileged it is, with delegates, PR teams and government entourages from all over the world pouring in with their fat expense accounts and dubious agendas.
It is a networking conference, consisting of mainly politicians, businesses, charities and aid agencies attempting to either greenwash or secure a dollop of the pot of cash promised for “initiatives” and renewables.
Climate change is a disaster for the poor but for the rich, big business, the aid agencies and third sector, COP26 is a golden opportunity to expand markets and secure grants.
Public money promised will disappear into the crevices of organisations who in reality will not improve the lives of the 120million additional people climate change will push into poverty by 2030.
Small grassroots charities – and there are many in the likes of Govan – lose out to large “non-profit” machines with overpaid management and whole teams devoted to fundraising and grant applications.
And just like businesses, charities and aid agencies are masters of spin.
I have witnessed a charity’s irrigation projects in Cambodia, great on a grant application but in reality a 10 pence plastic pipe in a garden, or the “agricultural projects” in Ethiopia, which amount to cheap packets of seeds distributed to farmers.
This week COP devoted barely an hour to a discussion on “loss and damage” – the harm that man-made climate change is causing to the world’s poor, predominantly in the global south.
The world’s richest 10 per cent of people cause 50 per cent of emissions, but it is not their homes being swallowed by oceans or turned to dust by drought.
If they are impacted they can afford to move without traversing a desert or risking their lives on a trafficker’s dinghy, yet it is these climate change refugees who are demonised.
This week, protesters from Extinction Rebellion staged a demo where they smashed up a car, begging the question: if something of yours was destroyed by a stranger, wouldn’t you expect to be compensated?
It’s a fair point, barely even reported.
The conference began with developed countries admitting they had failed to meet a pledge made in 2009 to provide £86billion a year in climate finance to vulnerable countries by 2020, pushing back the deadline to 2023.
Three times that amount is actually needed.
In a global economy, where the world’s biggest banks have put £2trillion into fossil fuels since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the amount which could transform the lives of the worst hit, is pennies.
The most moving part of COP26 has been listening to the speakers at the culmination of marches in Glasgow’s George Square.
Men and women from the Amazon whose land is being grabbed and raised for industry, activists from Colombia who risk being shot in climate change protests and our own union activists demanding city council workers like bin collectors get a fair wage for wading in our filth.
But in George Square, they were preaching to the converted and though the solidarity was warming, they were out in the cold, without a seat at the table of COP26.
It is easy to dismiss as “loony left” the activists demanding “system change not climate change” but revolutionising disaster capitalism is the only answer.
Greta Thunberg spoke for us all when she said “you can shove COP26 up your a**e”.
It has done nothing but make ordinary people feel powerless.
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