Politicians have had their chance. Now it’s our turn.

Just after Armistice Day this year, we reached our generation’s own eleventh hour. An eleventh hour that dwarfed both world wars in scale and importance. At that conference in Glasgow, a treaty could have been signed that would have saved millions — if not billions — of lives. A treaty that could have prevented famines and droughts and floods. The right treaty would have kept fossil fuels in the ground, committed the world to a rapid phase out of oil, gas and coal, and transferred vast wealth from the developed world to poorer regions to aid adaptation and mitigation.

Alas, what transpired was total, abject failure. Collectively, the most powerful governments in the world agreed that the financial interests of the fossil fuel industry took precedence of the lives of future generations. They determined that economic growth should take priority over the natural world. They decided that it is better to pray for non-existent technology that to sacrifice one penny of billionaire wealth.

The goal of COP26 was not to minimise and mitigate climate change. It was to ensure the primacy of free market capitalism in a changing climate. They sought to bring climate action under the umbrella of capitalism and to make it a tool to increase wealth and economic activity. This is an oxymoron of epic proportions. Economic growth and capitalism are what caused the environmental crisis. It should not take much intelligence to realise that more economic growth will not fix it. As is oft said, infinite growth on a finite planet is the definition of insanity.

To return to the wartime analogy, our governments have engaged in the grotesque appeasement of corporate and fossil fuel interests. Appeasement did not work well for Chamberlain. It will work out far worse this time.

In one small way however, COP26 has helped us. It has shown us definitively and conclusively that they are not on our side. Our leaders, governments, civil servants, media and businesses have abandoned us and our children to our fate. We know with certainty that it is pointless to press for government action. They are on the payroll of oil and gas giants. They take their orders from the billionaires, not the electorate — billionaires that are plundering the planet. BP and Exxon set the agenda at COP26, not climate scientists.

Environmental movements can now safely stop lobbying governments, and cease protesting to political leaders. We know they’ll never listen. They are as blind to a world outside capitalism as a trout is to deep space. They are constrained by a system and ideology that holds them captive. We should instead shift our attention to where it always belonged — changing the system.

It’s the rich people that did it

As was shown by a timely study from Oxfam, climate change is a rich person problem. The 1% produce twice the emissions of the poorest 50% combined. They produce 15% of the world’s carbon emissions — an average of 70 tons each per year. They are planetary destroyers.

It is the richest 1% that must sacrifice the most — nearly all of their wealth and consumption — to save the planet. The global 10% (those earning over $55,000) are responsible for nearly all of the world’s emissions. Their actions are enough to push us over the prescribed carbon budget for 1.5 degrees, even if the remaining 90% produced no carbon at all.

As Stephen Barlow has insightfully described, all of our decision makers, leaders and powerful journalists fall well inside the global 10% — and most into the global 1%. They will not willingly sacrifice their own privilege. For the rich and powerful, meaningful climate action is like turkeys voting for Christmas. They would need to give up what they hold dearest. As a result, we see little or no discussion of policies that restrict the consumption of the rich. Of course, by acting in this way they are taking a perniciously myopic view. Preserving their consumption now dooms them to a future of disaster, taking us all down with them. As George Monbiot writes, we must make extreme wealth extinct before it kills us all.

Failure of the press

I hold the media to be most responsible. Through their control of the airwaves they have insidiously forced denial and delay into the minds of the population. They continue to brainwash the people with the lie that COP26 has been in a success. They have failed entirely to hold politicians to account, to question the incredible role of fossil fuel lobbyists and to press for real change.

In ‘Media Control’, Noam Chomsky explains how the media provide propaganda for corporations and politicians. He describes how people are used as a ‘bewildered herd’, whose only political purpose is to validate the rule of the elite every 4 or 5 years. Today, propaganda ensures that the majority do not understand the scale of the climate and ecological crisis —or question the orthodoxy of ‘Net Zero by 2050’. The media could easily tell the scientific truth. The truth of the corruption. The truth of the disaster that is coming. They could incite political engagement — but instead they maintain bewilderment.

Advertising, the other arm of media propaganda, has turned many of us into nothing but vacuous consumers — ignorant to the environmental consequences of our actions. Even as we learnt that we are to be condemned to an uninhabitable planet, friends told me that London’s Oxford Street was packed to the rafters with shoppers. This ignorance of the populace is entirely the fault of the media.

Time to disobey

The elites that rule over us — and who have determined, without our consent, that economic growth and wealth are more important than life itself — view the people as having 3 roles:

• The ‘bewildered herd’ — unengaged voters who licence their activities
• Consumers — buying their products
• Workers — producing their products

For us to successfully overthrow the existing power structures we must step outside all three of these roles. We must stop being what the elite want us to be, and stop participating in their destruction of our world:

1. We must cease to be the bewildered herd, and free others from it. We must stop people in the street, talk constantly about the issues to strangers and friends alike. We must create deep societal engagement with reality. We must all become devoted grassroots political activists.
2. We must cease to be consumers. We must boycott the wealthy corporate interests that have set us on this path. We must stop buying anything but essential goods. No new clothes, no electronics, no petrol. We must deprive them of their revenue streams. If enough people opt-out, we will begin to crash their fragile economic model.
3. We must cease to be their workers. We must go on strike. A general strike, either nationally or globally, would be of immense power. It would entirely disable their system.

Remember, physics doesn’t care what is politically realistic or convenient. Physics doesn’t care about the economy. Physics doesn’t care what wins votes or keeps donors on side. Physics is inexorably taking us towards an uninhabitable planet. This is existential. Life or death.

We can now stop caring what politicians say and do. They have become irrelevant. They have made themselves irrelevant. 2022 is the year we stop doing what we’re supposed to do, and start doing what we need to. 2022 is the year we take our planet back.