COP29, 2024: an umpteenth masquerade validating the destruction of the planet and life by ALL capitalist states

COP29, 2024: an umpteenth masquerade validating the destruction of the planet and life

by all capitalist states

Annual CO2 production by the planet's main polluters (officially listed)

1. China: 11.4 billion tonnes of CO2/year
2. United States : 5 billion tonnes of CO2/year
3. India: 2.7 billion tonnes of CO2/year
4. Russia: 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2/year
5. Japan: 1 billion tonnes of CO2/year
6. Iran: 749 million tonnes of CO2/year
7. Germany: 675 million tonnes of CO2/year
8. Saudi Arabia : 672 million tonnes of CO2/year
9. Indonesia: 619 million tonnes of CO2/year
10. South Korea : 616 million tonnes of CO2/year
11. Canada: 546 million tonnes of CO2/year
12. Brazil : 489 million tonnes of CO2/year
13. Turkey : 446 million tonnes of CO2/year
14. South Africa : 436 million tonnes of CO2/year
15. Mexico: 407 million tonnes of CO2/year

On Sunday, November 24, 2024, in Baku (capital of Azerbaijan's oil-rich Far West), on the Caspian Sea, at the end of an extended game, the annual comedy of the COP, in its ^29th version, came to an end. The Caspian, the world's largest inland sea, is the very symbol of the rottenness of all capitalist mahagony[1]. It's a mixture of extreme pollution from oil exploitation, rapid drying-up by Russian capitalism's detour of the great rivers (Ural and Volga), and global warming that has brought water levels to their lowest level in over 40 years. In June 2023, the Kazakh state had just declared a state of emergency due to low water levels, impacting drinking water supplies and fisheries, as well as biodiversity.

The COP (Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) brings together all the (capitalist) member states, as well as companies, NGOs and other interested parties (oil and gas lobbies), with the aim of “negotiating and taking decisions on actions to be taken to address climate change”. The Convention, which came into force in 1994, acknowledges (sic) the existence of climate change and “human responsibility” (sic) for it, but never the overwhelming responsibility of capitalism and its agents. It aims to “stabilize anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere at a level that does not endanger the global climate”. The 198 signatories to the Convention (197 States and the European Union) are called “parties”.

Parties”, then, but ‘parties’ who are aware (because they are well informed) of collective crimes against humanity through wilful inaction. These “parties” are often richly supported by the funds of the nabobs of so-called “fossil” capitalism, paying an army of “climate-skeptic” henchmen in the media, on so-called “social networks”, and even in the field, as in Brazil?

Every year since 1995, a Conference of the Parties (COP) has been organized, without ever calling into question fossil fuel capitalism and its state and private agents. The latter never fail to point out that coal, and today gas and oil, “are a gift from God” (dixit Ilham Aliev, son of the (ex-“communist”) dictator Heydar Aliev, immensely rich since the tender age of 11), by simple capitalist inheritance[2].

The leaders of the capitalist world - after giving thanks to oil and gas at COP28, held in Dubai in November-December 2023[3] - reiterated their allegiance to polluting energies a year later, by travelling to the shores of the Caspian, to Baku, the Azeri capital, from November 11 to 23, 2024.

This COP, chaired by António Guterres, former Portuguese “socialist” Prime Minister from 1995 to 2002, now UN Secretary General, produced a provocative promise of $300 billion a year in handouts to maintain the 1.5 degree “limit” on global warming - when the most credible prediction is an increase of almost 3 degrees Celsius by 2050...

Each of the states and capitalist oil lobbies present at this conference knew full well that what was at stake was the (irreversible) twilight of humanity and living species: a) sea levels could rise by more than a metre by 2100, due to the melting of glaciers and icecaps (Greenland and Antarctica), with irreversible consequences for all the world's coastal regions; b) almost half of the Earth's living species could disappear, victims of a sixth mass extinction[4]; c) temperatures could climb to 55° C (in the shade! ) in France as early as 2070; lethal heat waves of up to 80°C could render vast territories uninhabitable in China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf... as well as in the USA (Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri) by the end of the century; d) the massive thawing of permafrost (permanently frozen ground : Alaska, Canada, Russia) could bring back certain extinct or unknown viruses, worse than covid 19, and release twice as much methane and carbon dioxide as the earth's atmosphere, thus potentiating current warming[5].

To this apocalyptic picture, well known to all ruling capitalist factions - but denied by the “climate sceptic” lobbies - was added the grotesque commedia dell'arte scene played out by 300 NGOs, all sponsored in various capacities by capitalist states, even the most polluting. The latter had called (on the night of November 22 to 23) for developing countries (India and Russia?!?) and China to leave the climate conference in Baku, if the “rich countries” did not increase their financial commitment. China escaped categorization as a “rich country”, monstrously enriched by the exploitation of the proletariat in the Middle Kingdom and throughout Asia, on course to overtake the USA, but as a vulgar “developing” country.

China, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, was awarded the great medal of capitalist virtue, that of moral and... financial irresponsibility[6]. Whether hyper-rich or “proletarian” powers seeking their “place in the sun” - to quote Benito Mussolini's old joke - three major powers (China, USA and India) emit half of all greenhouse gases[7].

The darlings of the farce, staged by private and state capitalists, could only watch helplessly as they were programmed to disappear under the effect of rapidly rising waters: “After COP29 is over, we won't be able to just sail off into the sunset, because we are literally sinking. We are literally sinking “[8].

At a time when a growing number of states (all capitalist by the very nature of trade!) are literally in danger of sinking, climate migration is becoming a mass phenomenon. By 2050, 216 million people could be migrating within their own country. Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to record up to 86 million internal climate migrants; East Asia and the Pacific, 49 million; South Asia, 40 million; North Africa, 19 million; Latin America, 17 million; and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 5 million[9]. These migrants, vilified by all capitalist states, parties and “parties”, from the smallest to the largest, have nothing to look forward to but a “fresh and joyful” hunt for them, their brutal internment in concentration camps (Greece, Rwanda, etc.), their deportation or “better” conversion into bleeding cannon fodder, as in Putin's Russia[10], and finally a slow programmed death[11].

The proletarians who die every day in the capitalist prisons of the “North”, the so-called “global South”, the “East” and the “West”? there could be no question of it: a sepulchral silence has always reigned. Already, at COP28 in Dubai, it transpired that the COP28 facilities had been built under extreme conditions by migrant workers deprived of all rights. They had been working in the shade at over 40°C! And to show that human life counts for little to the oil and gas billionaires, Syrian master butcher Bashar Al-Assad (chiefly responsible for 300,000 civilian deaths) had been cordially invited by the United Arab Emirates[12].

Who is to blame? The curse of the Anthropocene or the barbarity of capitalism, both private and state-owned?

The answer claimed by all those actually responsible for climate catastrophes is disarmingly and perversely simple: “It's a Law of Nature; it's not my fault”[13].

For the media, it's the average person who doesn't sort his or her rubbish (when there is any...), or who throws plastic bottles or chemical containers into water sources. Or, dramatically, the peasant who burns his weeds on his miserable plot of land for lack of basic cleaning and hygiene services, as in India's Delhi (population 30 million), without questioning capitalism's exponential pollution by diesel or chemical factories,

For many geographers and historians, this is the fault of “human geology”, the Anthropocene, a new geological “era” in which human activities are irreversibly inscribed in geological and climatic history. For the authors of a nonetheless excellent book on the “Anthropocene Event” (Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz), it's a case of resigning ourselves, going home and going to bed: “learning to live in it”, “learning to survive it”[14].

Nevertheless, the authors of this essay, more aware than the average “leftist” and overcome with lucid remorse, themselves warn: “ We must be careful with this term, and not leave humanity's collective guilt to bear the burden of this environmental change, when political and economic actors are responsible for it. The Anthropocene is too important a matter to be left to scientists alone “.

On the other hand, other authors, belonging to a Trotskyist-Leninist planet on the verge of extinction, dare to assert that all so-called Stalinist or “anti-imperialist state socialist” regimes, converted today to mixed capitalism (private and state), are part of a “fossil Stalinism” (sic) “non-capitalist”.

The Swedish Trotskyist “radical environmentalist” Andreas Malm, who modestly sees himself as the “new Lenin of planet Earth”[15], but also as the misunderstood prophet of “national liberation struggles”, however mafia-like and terrorist[16], not only ignores capitalist structures in Russia from Lenin to Putin, but also in China, North Korea, Vietnam, etc., but makes state capitalism THE “supreme virtue”. Against the Russian communist left of the time[17], Lenin used the same rhetoric as today's owners of state capitalism, organized in so-called “communist parties”:

“State capitalism would be our salvation (...). Our duty is to learn from the state capitalism of the Germans, to apply ourselves with all our strength to assimilating it, to spare no dictatorial procedures to implant it in Russia even more rapidly than Peter the Great did for Western mores in the old barbaric Russia, without backing down from the use of barbaric methods against barbarism "[18].

Mr. Andreas Malm and his Trotskyite-leftist peers not only declare themselves ready to employ a rich arsenal of barbaric methods to bring about the triumph of the most barbaric state capitalism, they are blatant liars. They pretend that the only cause of the planet's destruction is British and American-style liberal capitalism. The unrestrained destruction of nature in the USSR, the disappearance of the Aral Sea for the benefit of mafia cotton capitalism, are out of the question for these lovers of the most barbaric state capitalism. Yet the balance sheet of state capitalism remains: the destruction of nature and mankind[19]. It's the same as that of so-called “liberal” capitalism.

*

*     *

A verse from the Internationale, sung by whole generations of proletarians, proclaims: “ There are no supreme saviors, Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune, Producers, let us save ourselves! Let us decree common salvation!

This common salvation can only come from the workers themselves, confronting capital itself, in every country, on every continent, whether private or state-owned, whatever its label. Until they take complete power on a global scale, at the end of long and uncertain battles. To establish a true pooling of the wealth of an Earth that must be jealously preserved to avoid the inevitable destruction of the whole of humanity, under the lethal regime of Capital, which has opened up a new era: the Thanatocene for all!

Pantopolis, November 30, 2024.

Version deepL, reviewed and checked

[1] Bertolt Brecht's opera Grandeur and Decadence of the City of Mahagonny, set to music by Kurt Weil, premiered in Leipzig in 1930, is a virulent critique of capitalism, where the absolute crime is not having money. Mahagonny, a town lost in the middle of the Alabama desert, as Baku is lost among the derricks of a desertifying Caspian, is governed by three thugs who rival each other in imagination, debauchery, extortion and violence.

[2] Euronews: https://fr.euronews.com/2024/11/12/ilham-aliyev-critique-loccident-a-louverture-de-la-cop29: “ Oil and gas are a gift from God, just like the sun, the wind and minerals”, before conceding: “But deep down, at the same time, we cannot deny that fossil fuels are harmful” (sic)...

[3] The appointment of Sultan Al-Jaber as President of COP28 shocked only the naive. This “sultan” presides over ADNOC, one of the world's largest oil companies. A few days before the COP, “28th^season ” tycoon Al-Jaber had announced that ADNOC would increase its production of black gold from 3 million barrels per day in 2023 to 5 million in 2027! That's +70% in 4 years!

[4] https://www.futura-sciences.com/planete/definitions/rechauffement-climatique-sixieme-extinction-masse-16134/

[5] https://ecotoxicologie.fr/effets-rechauffement-climatiquel, see also: https://www.goodplanet.org/fr/3-minutes-pour-comprendre-le-permafrost/#:~:text=Le%20permafrost%2C%20perg%C3%A9lisol%20en%20fran%C3%A7ais,en%20Russie%2C%20Canada%20et%20Alaska.

[6] https://news.un.org/fr/story/2024/11/1150846: Onu Info, November 24, 2024.

[7] Matthieu Goar, “Climat : les émissions toujours trop élevées”, Le Monde, October 26, 2024, p. 7.

[8] Onu Info, Nov. 24, 2024, ibid.

[9] World Bank report, Groundswell, Sept. 13, 2021 (https://www.banquemondiale.org/fr/news/press-release/2021/09/13/climate-change-could-force-216-million-people-to-migrate-within-their-own-countries-by-2050).

[10] Slate website: www.slate.fr/monde/russie-armee-invisible-poutine-migrants-prisonniers-asie-centrale-guerre-ukraine-kirghizstan-tadjikistan

[11] The International Office for Migration (IOM) deplores (in 2022) 50,000 migrant deaths: https://www.iom.int/fr/news/loim-deplore-50-000-deces-de-migrants-recenses-travers-le-monde

[12] https://reporterre.net/La-COP28-en-quatre-polemiques

[13] Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1781) : “ On s'ennuie de tout, mon Ange, c'est une Loi de la Nature; ce n'est pas ma faute ” (letter 141).

[14] Bonneuil & Fressoz, L'événement anthropocène, Éditions du seuil, Paris, 2023, p. 268.

[15] https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/04/21/andreas-malm-le-lenine-de-l-ecologie_6170422_3232.html: Le Monde, April 21, 2023.

[16] Pour la Palestine comme pour la Terre : Les ravages de l'impérialisme fossile, La Fabrique, to be published in February 2025.

[17] La revue Kommunist Moscou, 1918 - Les Communistes de gauche contre le capitalisme d'état, Smolny collective, Toulouse, 2011.

[18] Bold underlining is our own. Source: Lenin, “Sur l'infantilisme de gauche et les idées petites-bourgeoises” (sic), May 1918, in Oeuvres, vol. 27, February-July 1918, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1961.

[19] Paul Josephson, Nikolai Dronin, Ruben Mnatsakanian et alii, An Environmental History of Russia, Cambridge University Press, 2013.