Despair and hope: three young activists give their verdicts on COP26

Whether, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson prophesied, the event itself will prove to have been truly “historic” is a moot point. ­However, it seems undeniable that this COP marked a historic moment for the mass movement against climate change.

The protesters in Glasgow heard the hard-hitting testimony of the delegations from the South Pacific islands, which are already being ­inundated with flood water. There were also the voices from around the global south (whether from the Indian subcontinent or sub-Saharan Africa), sounding the alarm about the devastating impact of climate change upon vital agricultural land.

Then, on Friday November 6, the youth-led Fridays for Future demonstration brought a massive 30,000 people onto the streets of Glasgow. The following day, despite ferocious wind and rain, an estimated 100,000 people joined the climate protest march from Kelvingrove Park to Glasgow Green. Solidarity protests were held that day across the globe.

The marches were stunning in their diversity. Greta Thunberg (above), the dynamic leader of the youth movement, expressed her support for the low paid Glasgow cleansing workers, members of the GMB union, who took strike action during COP and joined the Fridays for Future protest.

On the mammoth Saturday march, the full breadth and diversity of the movement against climate change was on display. There were a huge range of environmental campaigners, socialists of various kinds, trade unionists, community activists, faith groups and a pro-Scottish independence bloc seeking a sustainable future outside of the UK. There was even a very brave drag queen whose daring outfit was not made either for the terrible weather or the long march ahead.

Always and everywhere there were the young people. When, just three years ago, a 15-year-old ­Greta ­Thunberg first sat, on her own, ­outside the Swedish Parliament in ­Stockholm with her famous, hand-painted ­placard reading “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (School strike for ­climate), she could hardly have dreamed that she was beginning a youth-led movement of millions.

There was a sense among the young campaigners in Glasgow ­during COP26 that, even if the conference itself had not turned a corner on ­climate change, their movement had taken an important step forward. That, certainly, is the message from Laura Verdasco, Ethan Brodie and Lola Bhlaire, three activists who are currently students at the ­University of Glasgow.

Verdasco (above) is in the fourth, and final, year of her degree in Psychology and Neuroscience, Bhlaire is a third-year English Literature student, while Brodie is in the third year of his ­degree in History. All three were part of the protests during COP26, which have had such an impact around the world.

When I met the trio on the campus of the University, I started by asking them what, if anything, they thought COP26 had achieved. Verdasco ­confesses herself unimpressed.

SHE expected to hear “a lot of powerful statements” from various world leaders, she says, referring to rhetoric such as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s warning that the planet is now at “one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock”. However, she adds, the headline promises that have come out of COP26 are insufficient to stop catastrophic climate change.

Not only that, she comments, but even the inadequate promises from the conference “are not legally binding”. In fact, says Verdasco, much of the rhetoric coming out of the ­Glasgow gathering has been about “greenwashing all of these companies that have invested all of this money into making themselves look better”.

Bhlaire (above) agrees that COP26 was what Thunberg called a “greenwash festival” – in other words, an event that attempted to give a fake, ecological veneer to governments and big companies that continue to be major contributors to the climate crisis. “We’re really tired of these generic statements about climate change,” she says.

“‘Less plastic in such-and-such year’; ‘less fishing in so-and-so year’. We’re completely aware that these statements don’t lead anywhere. There have been 26 COPs, and there have been these kinds of statements at every single one.”

In fact, says Bhlaire, “world leaders have no skin in the game when it comes to climate change. They don’t suffer the consequences of climate change like normal people do. Their houses don’t flood, for example.”

Brodie (below) points to the dissonance between ­Johnson’s speeches about the urgent need for action on climate change and the fact that his government ­continues to give the green light for the development of the Cambo oilfield in Shetland. That contradiction, he says, “exposes the limitations of trying to create a healthy, sustainable planet within the confines of capitalism.”

This is not to say that many of the politicians at COP didn’t talk a good game, Brodie observes. “What ­really struck me, watching some of the speakers, was how convincing their performances can be.

“They’re very good actors, in that respect. They say what they think they need to say to convince us that we can trust them, we can leave it to them, and we don’t need to flock to the streets.”

However, he adds, people are “beginning to see through that ruse. As Greta Thunberg said at the Fridays for Future march, ‘the emperor has no clothes’.

“Now that people have seen that, it has fanned the flames of the anger. People feel betrayed.”

Verdasco also admires the clarity of Thunberg’s message. Unlike some NGOs and campaign groups that focus on this or that aspect of the climate crisis, “she will say ‘system change, not climate change’, and she means it.”

READ MORE: Scotland has come out of COP26 better than the UK, says Lorna Slater

Young people “have seen how the system has failed us consistently since we were born,” she continues. “We’ve seen that in crisis after crisis. I can hear that in what Greta says, because she always addresses the fact that it’s a systemic issue that won’t be addressed if we just change our diet or stop using single use plastics.

“She is starting to draw the links to show that it’s a collective fight in which we all have a stake. For ­example, I really appreciated how she showed support for the bin ­workers in Glasgow, who were on strike. I think that really shows that she wants to make people aware of how it all links together.”

BHLAIRE objects to the leaders of the major western powers, such as US President Joe Biden, using rhetoric that is “like the chants of the protesters”, while they continue to be the world’s biggest polluters. “Biden says ‘this really isn’t a joke’,” she observes, “but the US military is a huge contributor of carbon emissions.”

She is correct about the US ­military’s massive carbon footprint. The Costs of War project at Brown University, Rhode Island ­calculates that the US military produced around 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon ­emissions between 2001 and 2017 (which is more than Japan’s total CO2 ­emissions in 2017).

Significantly, as reported by the Democracy Now! news organisation in the States: “military carbon emissions have largely been exempted from international climate treaties dating back to the 1997 Kyoto ­Protocol, thanks to lobbying from the United States.”

While the US tries to hide the environmental cost of its military, the government of far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (below) almost seems to be rubbing the world’s face in its shameless destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Negotiators working for the Brazilian government signed up to the COP26 pledge to work “collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030”.

Yet, even before the Glasgow ­conference was over, senators in ­Bolsonaro’s coalition backtracked on that commitment, saying they would only act against illegal deforestation. Little wonder, then, that the young activists think Brazil’s signature on the COP deforestation agreement is all but meaningless.

“If we really had an international community, they would send a UN army [to protect the Amazon] or they’d cut economic ties with Brazil,” says Brodie.

If Verdasco, Bhlaire and Brodie are angry about what they see as the ­failures of COP26, they have also been energised by the protest ­movement that accompanied it. They welcome the fact that the climate movement has moved very strongly in the direction of placing responsibility for the ecological crisis on big business and world governments, rather than on the individual consumer choices of ordinary people.

“The whole system is built on carbon,” says Brodie, “you can’t avoid it.” Consequently, the young activists seek macro-political solutions to the climate crisis, rather than placing the emphasis on, for example, what ­people eat.

While they have no problem with the campaign to convince people to consume less meat, the real problem, they insist, lies in the decisions of multinational agribusiness, whether in the industrial farming of cattle or the destructive use of pesticides.

BRODIE was “really moved”, he says, by the huge demonstrations in Glasgow on November 5 and 6. “Climate change is something that occupies my mind a lot,” he comments, “and I often fall into feelings of despair and hopelessness.”

However, he adds, he came away from the big COP26 protests with “a profound feeling of hope… I didn’t realise how many people actually cared.”

He speaks for all three of the young campaigners when he says: “When we come together, we all lift each other’s spirits, and you feel that we can really do this.

“If we keep up this momentum, this spirit, this energy, we could actually change the world.”