Future COPs: fail again, fail better – Green Jobs Alliance
becoming ever more stark”
By Paul Atkin, Greener Jobs Alliance
COPs are structurally set up to fall short of what is needed. Decision-making by consensus means that any country has a veto. That means that any agreed global position can go no faster than Saudi Arabia and other petro states will permit, even though the US government, the world’s leading petro state, was very audibly absent.
Hence, there was no agreement to even include the words “fossil fuels” in the declaration, let alone planning a road map away from them. However, the tectonic energy plates are shifting. Even Saudi Arabia, while very keen to maintain its oil exports, is investing massively in solar energy for domestic consumption, and over 60% of countries are already beyond their fossil fuel peak.
The commercial, as well as environmental, logic is becoming remorseless. As Clyde Russel, the Asia commodities and energy columnist for Reuters, put it, “If China can maintain, or even lower prices for its clean-energy products it will be hard for the fossil-fuel exporters to compete.” There is an element of panic in the US about this, with Elon Musk noting ‘Just with solar alone, China can, in 18 months, produce enough solar panels to power all the electricity of the United States’ which underlines the contrary desperation of Trump’s baseless bluster at the UN that green energy is ‘scam that will make your country fail’. The rest of the world knows better…and is moving on.
Future COPs will find themselves in a race between that economic and social tipping point and the environmental tipping points being driven by emissions that are now beginning to plateau, when we need them to come down very fast. This COP, partly because of its failings, nevertheless provided a forum to rehearse and establish coalitions of the willing to move faster and further. Although blocs of more than 80 countries, including major fossil fuel producers like Norway and Brazil, had supported a road map to phase out fossil fuels, and 93 had supported a move to “reverse deforestation,” they were unable to get clear commitments into the main text. But, in response, Colombia and the Netherlands, with the support of other countries, have taken the initiative to convene a phase-out road map global conference this April, indicating a virtuous spiral of accelerated ambition beyond global agreements. Jumping well over the low bar set by the global agreements is vital now, and no one should be allowed to try to limbo dance beneath it.
The agreement to triple development finance by 2030 is welcome but undermined by the concerted retreat from Overseas Development Aid to finance arms spending that is now epidemic in the Global North, as Trump tries to stall its wagons into a tight, selfish, tooled-up circle, fighting to the death as the world burns around us. It was as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met last June in Germany to set the stage for COP30, that Trump pushed NATO countries to increase their military spending. This sucked the air out of discussions to increase public climate financing, a key agenda item in Belém.
This contradiction between the drive to war and global cooperation to save ourselves from climate breakdown is becoming ever more stark and should be a central plank of the upcoming year of trade union climate action.
- Paul Atkin is the editor of the GJA, you can follow them on Facebook and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published by the Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA) December 2025 Newsletter – you can read the newsletter in full here.
- If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.
3 December, 2025 -Author: Sam Myerson
In the final moments of the UN COP30 climate-change conference (Brazil, 10-21 Nov) a deal was signed, minimal in commitment but acceptable to the richest nations (other than the USA) and those most reliant on petrochemicals.
The world’s best scientists gave clear warnings on climate change, but might as well have gone to the pub. UN Climate chief Simon Stiell admitted as much: “we are not winning the fight, but we are still in it”. With no agreement at all on a road map for a transition from fossil fuels.
Russia, Saudia Arabia, Argentina and others lined up to block and refuse to support commitments to migration away from fossil fuels. The USA boycotted the event for the first time in 30 years, but Milei’s Argentina, increasingly reliant on US sponsorship was there for it, obstructing agreements. Argentina in is currently developing Patagonian oil and gas shale deposits.
TheGuardian said COP30 made “a faltering, inadequate step, and one that will barely interrupt the climate’s steady march towards catastrophe”. With modern technologies, much potential exists for bourgeois society to act on confront climate change. COP30 showed it incapable of doing so.
Exceed
The Earth is near-certain to exceed the Paris target of 1.5ºC increase in global average temperatures since 1850-1900. We can now expect much talk about the need to limit warming to 2ºC — and it’s true, 2ºC will be much less bad than 2.1 or 2.2 or 2.5 — but with no sense of urgency from the ruling class. This conference, the coalition of the unwilling, has put off addressing cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that are required to limit warming until next year.
In few days since COP30 Canada has signalled that it will create a new oil pipeline to carry one million barrels of oil a day. A cluster of three storms, driven by rising ocean temperatures, has battered south-east Asia. The US Environmental Protection agency, under Trump, is tearing down regulations on clean water and endangered species, and expanding oil and gas drilling in costal areas and a remote Arctic area. Iran is facing its worst drought in generations, with reservoirs at less than 10%.
Johan Rockström, professor of earth systems at the Postdam Climate Institute, wrote years ago that to limit global warming to 1.5ºC we would have to have emissions fall by at least 5% a year. Yet Trump, Milei, and the petrostates say that a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels is against national sovereignty. No national sovereignty can save anyone from global climate change.
There is no one coming to save us. Revolutionary socialists know this. The climate movement knows this. But in the last few years we have let defeats and even despair grind us down. We have to turn that round.
Crisis
The crisis must be paid for by those who caused it and profited from it. Every year the number of billionaires increases. The world is set to acquire its first trillionaire. The billionaires’ insatiable thirst for profit is devouring the planet.
The only countervailing force with even a chance of being adequate is the labour movement. The labour movement must play a central role both in forcing every concession, however small, and in pressing for further and faster action.
Belem COP30 --- The Zero COP!
The COP30 in Belem, Brazil, held in November, had been preceded by a decided lack of momentum in international climate action and in the global negotiations process. Therefore, not much was expected of it, as commented in these columns earlier when the COP was set to begin.
In anticipation of the weak outcomes, COP30 had been billed variously as the “implementation COP,” the “indigenous peoples COP”, given its venue at the entry to the great Amazon rain forest and its many thousand original inhabitants, or even bravely as the “COP of truth,” as proclaimed by President Lula da Silva of Brazil.
In contrast, people’s expectations and demands for urgent climate action remained undiminished, with over 80,000 people in attendance, including around 58,000 registered delegates, making it the largest COP attendance after COP28 in Dubai.
However, when COP30 closed after the nowadays obligatory extra day to enable stitching up some kind of agreement, the two-week conference had delivered literally almost no progress on any of the major fronts, in terms of tackling the dangerously high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or the resultant mounting climate impacts affecting millions of people.
Read Also: Belem COP30: Implement What?
On key issues, there were only a few facesaving promises of future steps and even some retrograde pronouncements after much wrangling, prompting some commentators to call this the most divisive COP ever. For the most part, the cans were kicked down the road on almost all issues. This was truly a zero COP.
Emissions Reduction Ambition
On what should have been the paramount issue at COP30, shockingly little attention was paid. The world is way behind on what needs to be done to combat climate change. A prolonged and rigorous three-year scientific global stocktake (GST) mandated under the Paris Agreement has completed its task and was even reviewed at COP29 in Baku last year. The United Nations Environment Programme or UNEP has also since assessed that emissions gap between the global goal and current emission trends. Even the final COP30 text notes that global carbon dioxide emissions should decline from 2019 levels by 43% and 60% by 2030 and 2025, respectively, to meet the internationally agreed goal of restricting global temperature rise to 1.5C.
The UNEP notes, however, that total global emissions are continuing to rise and will decline by only 12% even if all countries adhere to the emission reduction commitments contained in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
Yet, far from making any concerted effort to address this failure and drive up emission reduction ambitions, virtually no effort was made to discuss or review the current status of NDCs submitted, and catalyse some action by different countries, especially the developed countries, such as the European Union, Japan, Canada, and Australia, to undertake deeper emission cuts.
The final “global mutirao” agreement --- a Brazilian term meaning a multi-stakeholder deliberation --- only promises to “keep 1.5C within reach,” but kicks the can down the road to two poorly defined unofficial and voluntary future processes outside the COP process but led by the COP30 and COP31 presidencies, termed a “Global Implementation Accelerator” (GIA) toward a “Belem Mission 1.5C.”
The GIA would be held during the inter-sessional meeting in Bonn in mid-2026 and a report presented at COP31, while the three presidents of COP29-31 will similarly assess and report on progress on all measures agreed on so far for the Belem Mission. Not many will bet on these ventures proposed by the COP30 president as a desperate last-minute measure to salvage something from the Belem Conference.
Even here, though, the final text highlights the dark clouds hovering overhead. The final text draws attention to the fact that carbon budget left to enable the 1.5C goal is “small and being rapidly depleted,” with 80% having already been exhausted historically.
For the first time, the agreed COP text also tacitly acknowledges the bitter reality that there is likely to be an overshoot of the 1.5C target, meaning that global temperatures may well rise above that level even if temporarily, and calling for limiting “both the magnitude and duration of any [such] overshoot.”
It did not go unnoticed that India, currently the world’s third largest emitter, although with extremely low per capita emissions, shockingly failed to submit its updated NDC even though it has had time since February 2025!
Forests
A new initiative on mitigation came from Brazil, championed by President Lula, focusing on preventing deforestation. The proposal gained particular salience because of the Amazonian setting of COP30. The initiative comes at a time when the world’s forests are now absorbing the historically least amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) due to deforestation under pressure of land clearance for plantation, mining or other economic activity as well as forest fires. Significant parts of the Amazon itself, and perhaps soon the entire Amazon forest tracts, are on the verge of flipping from a net sink or absorber of CO2 to a net emitter, majorly weakening efforts to control global emissions.
Brazil’s proposal for a Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) was to form a trust fund, hosted at the World Bank, which would receive funds from public sources so as to leverage a larger corpus from private entities targeting total of $120 billion.
The funds would be invested, other than in fossil-fuel based activities, to generate returns at par with market rates such that preservation of forests would be as economically valuable as destroying them for other uses. An important provision was that 20% of the funds would be earmarked for indigenous peoples and other forest dwelling communities. Brazil kicked off TFFF with a contribution of $1 billion.
Efforts to make this part of the main body of the COP decisions failed, however, although Norway and Germany pledged similar amounts. German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz paid a customary short visit to the COP and released a statement upon return to Germany that seemed to suggest criticism of the standards of facilities in Belem not matching those available in Germany. This drew much disapproval in Brazil and around the world, and appeared to push Chancellor Mertz into donating $1 billion to TFFF, prompting several commentators to remark on such a costly apology!
The proposal suffered the fate of several other key issues up for decision at COP30, and got kicked down the road to a “roadmap” to be worked out later.
Fossil Fuels
An issue of key concern for emissions reduction which stirred up a major storm in Belem was on measures to reduce the role of fossil fuels, which account for around 70% of all GHG emissions and close to 90% of CO2. Initial draft texts suggested pathways to “transition away” from fossil fuels, and championed by the EU, was vociferously opposed by Saudi Arabia and other “petro-states,” India and the Like-Minded Developing Countries coalition, including the Africa Group and China.
This may sound counter-intuitive, given the reality that decarbonisation of the global economy must necessarily involve moving away from fossil fuels. This is also explicitly recognised in the Global Stocktake. However, how the issue is contextualised and framed is important. India, for instance, despite acerating renewable especially solar energy to 50% of installed capacity, is likely to remain dependent on coal-fired power generation for electricity actually produced for a considerable length of time yet.
The history of earlier recent COPs would throw light on this. COP26 in Glasgow was compelled to change the phraseology of its agreement from “phasing out” to “phasing down” fossil fuels, further toned down in COP29 in Baku. At Belem, there was a concerted revolt at what was perceived as attempts to impose energy transition pathways in isolation from other factors on developing countries.
After much often heated discussion, in what must be seen as a strange outcome, the final text has no mention of fossil fuels at all!
On the other hand, there was important emphasis placed on just transition, a concept embracing sustainability, equity, inclusion and human development along with energy efficiency and decarbonisation.
Once again, though, there was little effort put in within the COP process on fleshing out this idea, and COP30 finally accepted the COP President Andre Correa do Lago’s proposal to initiate a “roadmap” after and outside the formal COP framework to work out how such a transition could be achieved.
Adaptation & Finance
Two issues came to dominate at Belem, which seemed to animate delegates, particularly from developing countries the most: adaptation and finance, both intimately related.
The issue of how much comparative weight should be placed on adaptation and mitigation has been prominent in the international negotiations almost from the outset, with trends favouring first one then the other. With climate impacts growing in severity and magnitude, posing huge costs on nations in terms of lost lives, livelihoods, ecosystems and infrastructure, the urgent need for adaptation and building resilience along with finance for the same has come to dominate thinking in developing countries, which is reflected at successive COPs.
Adaptation actions pose a conceptual difficulty in the COP framework. Whereas mitigation or emissions control calls for national actions contributing towards national outcomes, outcomes of national adaptation actions are also national. Therefore, while funding from developed to developing countries is called for, how is accountability and transparency regarding national adaptation actions to be ensured without trampling on sovereignty?
The previous few COPs and inter-sessional meetings, including COP29, have worked on this issue, partly through trying to define a set of indicators to be addressed in adaptation actions under the Global Goal for Adaptation (GGA). An initial set of thousands of indicators were whittled down to 100 at Belem with an aim to further define 59 voluntary non-intrusive indicators and other measures to be concretized later. It thus appears that the GGA will fructify as a programme soon.
Finally, it all came down to finances, the dominant theme at Belem. Earlier COPs had seen the quantum of finances expected from developed to developing countries rise to $300 billion annually. Although even this amount is not materialising, pressure was mounted to triple the flow of funds and to increase the component of grant-based public funds rather than loans so as to ease the burden on poorer nations.
After much wrangling, the final COP30 text did incorporate the aspirational goal of tripling finance flows including public and private finances, and a goal of raising $300 billion of public finance by 2035, pushing the date forward from 2030. But this is to be discussed under a two-year work programme.
With so much work now pending and half-done, there is much to be done in forthcoming inter-sessionals and the coming COPs. The big question is whether, and how, lost momentum will be recovered. And how much worse will climate changes become meanwhile.
The writer is with the Delhi Science Forum and All India Peoples Science Network. The views are personal.
Where COP Fails, Ecuador Leads: The General Strike in Defence of Nature
As COP30 in Brazil proved impotent in the face of climate catastrophe, Pádraig Mac Niocaill shares vital lessons from Ecuador where mass movements and general strikes have secured real victories for climate justice.
As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) concluded in Brazil, offering the world its 30th helping of hollow promises and business-friendly targets, a small country on the opposite side of the continent delivered a verdict of its own. On 16 November, the people of Ecuador overwhelmingly defeated a referendum that sought to supercharge the president’s aims to create a neoliberal and extractivist “New Ecuador”.
This was not a victory handed from above by a global gathering of well paid “experts”, greenwashing politicians and fossil fuel lobbyists, but from the working classes of Ecuador organising en masse. Against the current brutal and violently oppressive regime, the working classes recognised this attack on their material conditions and refused to sacrifice their livelihoods and environment on the altar of neoliberalism. A victory for real climate justice was won in the streets.
The Rights of Nature concept
Ecuador is one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. It is home to four incredibly distinct biomes, with the most plant and animal species per square kilometre in the world, and with the Galapagos Islands off the coast, an area of rapid evolution. In many ways the same can be said of its politics. The country has gone through drastic changes since my earliest memories, and is now politically unrecognisable from where it was even 10 years ago. But the real power in Ecuador – people power – has only grown and sharpened in the past few decades. In 2008, Ecuador, home to 14 million people at the time, became the first country in the world to recognise the Rights of Nature as part of its newly drafted constitution, shaping discussion for years to come.
Brought about by the result of new political representation of indigenous groups, a timely left-wing government and decades of struggle, Ecuador made history by constitutionally recognising that nature has legally enforceable rights “to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles”. For many, this legal concept resonated with the worldview of ‘Pacha Mama’, Mother Earth, a Kichwa (indigenous peoples of Ecuador) term for a ‘cosmos where humans, animals, plants, and mountains are deeply interconnected, and damage to one component inevitably affects all others’.
After some teething problems, this new precedent was successfully used to help prevent several mining and polluting projects in the courts in following years. Predictably, however, the constitution that enshrined it has come under major threats ever since. The Rights of Nature framework itself has also faced significant challenges, from legal battles, to state reluctance to fully enforce its principles. This all points towards a valuable reminder, that more important than the legislation or legal particulars itself, the means by which it entered the conversation from the ground up speak the loudest. It has proven to be not a conclusion, but a tool in the arsenal of people power, one that turns the ownership of natural resources on its head. Ecuador, with a history of colonisation we here in Ireland can relate to, had taken a first step in a direction to challenge that history, and in doing so, set far-reaching precedents.
The United States and neoliberalism in Ecuador
Like most of Latin America, Ecuador is no stranger to US attempts to destabilise and force regime change. This included coups in the 1960s, as well as decades of economic pressure. Indeed, Ecuador officially replaced its own currency with the US dollar in 2000. Following this, three personality-driven presidents were ousted in the space of ten years.
Then, in 2006, Ecuador had its own expression of the pink tide – a period in which left-wing leaders were voted in across Latin America, promising a rejection of neoliberalism and US influence – with the election of Rafael Correa. An ally of Hugo Chavez, Correa’s term in office saw improvements in healthcare, literacy and infrastructure. Further, the 2008 constitution protected indigenous rights, making Ecuador a plurinational state, and it prohibited foreign military bases, a move which saw the US Military removed from the country. However, despite left aesthetics, Correa’s project lacked critical political foundations, and ultimately turned its back on anti-extactivist promises; an approach that would lead to further contradictions, a fracture in the left and aid its downfall down the line.
In 2017, after Correa’s three terms, his vice-president and successor, Lenín Moreno, lunged their platform sharply to the right, betraying and persecuting Correa, allying with the nation’s economic elites and the IMF, and embracing austerity. The privatisation of healthcare in Ecuador, enabled by Moreno, greatly contributed to the horrific scenes during the COVID pandemic, and Ecuador’s perception as one of the safest countries in Latin America has heartbreakingly been turned upside down since. Subsequent neoliberal governments have deepened their offensive, undoing a lot of the social reforms and whipping up a “narco” crisis to justify a greater US role and a full-scale assault on social and ecological rights.
The October 2019 Rebellion
The extent of the neoliberal embrace by the Lenín government set the scene for the rebellion of October 2019, a defining moment for modern Ecuador. The uprising exploded onto the streets in response to IMF-mandated austerity, starting with Moreno’s elimination of fuel subsidies. Led by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), tens of thousands of Indigenous people, unions, workers, and students across Ecuador mobilised. They rallied, marched and occupied the capital Quito and key infrastructure, eventually bringing the country to a standstill.
One of the most prominent leaders of this uprising was the ecosocialist and Marxist, Leonidas Iza, (now president of CONAIE), someone who has encouraged direct political confrontation with the neoliberal government from the streets to the government Assembly, and who has led major national strikes, paro nacionals, since this 2019 explosion. The state’s response to the 2019 uprising was brutal, deploying military and police who used tear gas and lethal force, resulting in deaths and over a thousand injuries. This ferocious class struggle culminated in a decisive victory for the people, forcing Moreno’s government to fully reinstate the fuel subsidies. The success of the uprising galvanised the power mass mobilisation had in rolling back neoliberal attacks and reinvigorated Indigenous and working-class movements as the central force of resistance in Ecuador.
2022 Strike and the Yasuní Victory
Despite an unprecedented surge for the indigenous political party in the 2021 elections, a Left split over Correa lines led to the election of banker Guillermo Lasso, who was quick to ramp up further neoliberal policies in a country devastated by the pandemic. Once again led by CONAIE, but with wide union backing, huge crowds were mobilised onto the streets in response, and an 18-day national strike ensued. The government crackdown was similarly brutal to 2019, again resulting in several protester deaths and human rights violations, but it was no match to the masses united.
To end the strike and protests, Lasso was forced to accept a reduction in fuel prices and agree to no mining on indigenous land, along with other demands for the working class, like job security. The indigenous-led united front had combined demands for economic justice and environmental justice, and this same unity between anti-austerity and anti-extractivist policies would prove a vital foundation for the fight against extraction going forward.
Ecuador, already devastated from decades of oil exploration by multi-national corporations like Chevron-Texaco, was in danger from Lasso’s rampant capitalist policies. He bet hard on extractivism, aiming to make billions from mining and oil in the Chocó Andino, a key water source for Ecuador, and the biodiverse Yasuní regions. For a decade, campaigning and petitions had taken place to protect these areas, with nearly a million combined signatures collected. A strike in 2022 supercharged these efforts, with rallies and marches leading to a national referendum that decisively won at the ballot box.
Despite the overwhelming attempts to discredit and smear the campaigners from the fossil fuel industry, Ecuador had become one of the first countries in the world to clamp down on resource extraction through democratic vote – a vote first secured then subsequently won through mass mobilisations from below.
The Cuenca Victory and 2025 strike
The referendum, like the Rights of Nature before it, would meet a tough setback with the surprise 2023 election of Daniel Noboa. Noboa, tech-bro son of a billionaire banana magnate, ran on a “tough on crime” platform against a still-disorganised political Left. Parroting Western-style scaremongering, he quickly moved to deepen the Ecuadorian alliance with international capital and the United States, and perhaps nowhere greater was this emphasised than Noboa enlisting paramilitary Blackwater (of Iraq war infamy) to his campaign. Bolstered by the likes of Donald Trump, Noboa began another attempt to eliminate fuel subsidies, and put forth his referendum “La Consulta” in September 2025.
This sweeping neoliberal package sought to open Ecuador to foreign military bases under the guise of fighting drug trafficking, and as well as the 2008 Constitution with a pro-business charter. Crucially, this also threatened to undo the Rights of Nature legislation and in a direct attack on democracy, threatened to stop public funding of political parties too. In response, CONAIE began a national strike, which saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets across Ecuador in what would be the third national strike in six years. Noboa, son of the wealthiest family in Ecuador, used unprecedented military force to clamp down on protest, shooting and killing several unarmed protestors and cementing a dangerous new alliance between the economic elite and the military in the process.
Alongside the strike, one of Ecuador’s largest marches in history took place on 16 September in Cuenca. Noboa’s government was co-operating with Canadian mining company Dundee Precious Metals (DPM), and its planned mine was to be in an area of precious wetland that supplied water to many communities. The “March for the Protection of Water” brought around 100,000 people onto the streets from all over the country, with an ultimatum to the government that if the license was not revoked, an uprising would take place. Off the back of years of persistent on-the-ground organising of the masses, and a clear political enemy and demands, the march was victorious in tipping the scales with the Ecuadorian government revoking the license to DPM several weeks later.
Despite the violent clampdown on the 31-day National strike, struggles like the DPM victory helped ensure political momentum didn’t dissipate. The Ecuadorian public voted a resounding No to all four items on Noboa’s “La Consulta” referendum – with two-thirds of voters against – in a stunning rebuke to Noboa’s perceived influence. This indigenous-led resistance provides potent examples of cultivating community and respect for the land, while organising around the disciplined tactics of workers’ power: general strikes and mass marches. Hope to fully overthrow the neoliberal establishment in Ecuador may be on the horizon if the right lessons are learned and if the momentum is kept up.
Together, class & climate struggle can win
Recent victories protecting Ecuador’s Rights of Nature, just weeks before world leaders assembled at COP30, is of more than just local importance. While indigenous voices and the communities most affected by climate change and harmful policy are ignored at COP, Ecuador contains vital strategic lessons for the global climate movement. Recent years have demonstrated unequivocally that the fight for a livable planet is inextricably linked to the class struggle. Many of the politicians and leaders at COP30 are not part of the solution but key to the problem, and unless directly challenged, may succeed with their sleight of hand in the face of global climate crisis.
In 2021, Derry City & Strabane council became the first government body on these islands to pass a motion recognising the Rights of Nature, brought to council by People Before Profit Councillor Maeve O’Neill, taking inspiration from cases like Ecuador with help and support from environmentalists across the north. The concept has gained momentum, culminating in a Citizen’s Assembly in the South of Ireland recommending the Rights of Nature. To the surprise of no-one, the right-wing Irish Government has not acted upon the recommendation – it is clear that a political people power approach will be necessary here too.
In recent years, the Save Lough Neagh campaign and along with groups like Friends of the Earth and The Gathering have protested and called for ‘rights of nature’ status for Lough Neagh, a demand made by Gerry Carroll MLA in Stormont on behalf of the campaign. Lough Neagh, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Europe, has been plundered via extractivism in the form of sand dredging, legalised by the SDLP in 2020, and subject to long colonial history, with the absentee landlord, the Earl of Shaftesbury, making money for every tonne extracted. From gold-mining threats in multiple counties, to the establishment push for Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in the South, Ireland becoming the first country in Europe to include the Rights of Nature in its constitution could prove a valuable tool in our efforts to protect one of the most over-exploited regions of Europe.
The struggle in Ecuador contains countless examples of how real climate justice is won through organised struggle that directly challenges the power of capital, proving that the power to defend the people and planet lies not in the decision made from above, but in the feet on the street and their ability to engage politically and take on the state head on.
In a disturbing parallel, the Ecuadorian government’s collaboration with Canadian mining company DPM mirrors the threats of mining here in the North from the Canadian company Dalradian. They have been offered licences by the ‘open for business’ Stormont government, with US lawmakers making threats should it not proceed. From the state-sponsored pollution of Lough Neagh via neoliberal policies like Going for Growth fuelling the likes of serial polluter Moy Park (owned by an Amazon-deforester), to the public funding of F-35 engineering factories complicit in genocide, the connections are clear: this system extracts harm, both abroad and at home, while our material conditions are sacrificed. Our liberation depends not on appealing to this system, but on building power from below, forging the kind of mass, organised movements that can take over the streets, challenge our government, and ultimately, force a future where both people and planet can thrive.
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