 Yn mynd i'n fawr, mae'n meddiw i'ch gweithio'r crisis wylau. Mae'r cyffredin iawn ac yn ystyried i'r gweithio'r hwn. Yn ymwneud hynny, mae'n meddwl yn fawr o'r llwythau. Ac mae'r meddwl yn angen i'n bwysigio'n meddwl yn dweud yn ymgyrch. A yna, Boris Johnson yn ymddweud yr aelod yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, I'm assuming most people here know what that is. It's the latest United Nations climate change conference. Boris Johnson commenced the opening ceremony. That will commence two weeks of negotiations. Business leaders will be there engaged in private negotiations. There will be press conferences and panel discussions. As well as business leaders proposing their ideas on how to solve the climate crisis. So it shows you the class nature of the event. Like I was saying, in the last five, six, it's hard to put an exact number on it, but since I started off as a climate activist, I was very much kind of a weirdo on the side as a student. Nowadays everyone on a university campus is deeply concerned about this question. It's a fundamental acceleration in events and with that consciousness. Under pressure from these events, the ruling class themselves are starting to wake up to the problem, but it has its limitations. They've been putting the issue further and further forward on their agenda. I think one of the main reasons is the pace of events, even in the most developed parts of the world now, places like Germany and we saw in New York as well, extreme flooding that would in the past have been considered a one in a hundred year event or something. These are now becoming regular occurrences with the dramatic acceleration of the rate of change that affects weather systems and all the old patterns are being thrown out. This has extreme economic and political consequences that the ruling class can't afford to ignore anymore. The rural population of Bangladesh, for example, or North India have been getting devastated by floods every monsoon season due to a lack of infrastructure. Obviously nothing is done about that. That's only set to get worse, but when it starts hitting places like New York, they really can't afford to ignore it anymore. For this reason, there is a lot of hype around this COP26 conference. We've seen this hype before, so we shouldn't be drawn into any illusions. That's the first conclusion. In the mainstream media, COP21 had a similar amount of hype that was in 2015, and that was celebrated as a bit of a turning point in the struggle against climate change. The general scientific consensus of the time and still today is that in order to avoid irreversible damage and unlivable circumstances, the global temperature has to be limited to 1.5 degrees higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution. They were the targets adopted by the Paris Agreement at the COP21 summit in 2015. Some people are therefore placing all of their desperate hopes on these kinds of targets. I've heard that it's a code red for humanity. People are desperate to believe that something can be done about it. Other people see it as too little, too late, and I think that is a bit closer to the truth. Not in general, but I mean by the capitalist system itself, the representatives of capital. They're only switched on now when this problem has been evident for a long time. It's now that it's hitting their pockets and their political careers that they're switching onto it. The COP21 summit, although it was celebrated as a turning point, very little has actually been done. Things are actually getting worse, I would say. Emissions have not gone down apart from due to the pandemic, which created a collapse in demand temporarily. Geopolitical tensions are one of the biggest barriers here. The main reason that the Paris Agreement targets were revered as such a breakthrough at the time was this claim in the media that Barack Obama and Xi Jinping and China and Putin in Russia, they'd all, for the good of people on the planet, put aside the competition, the rivalry between the three greatest imperialist powers in the world. But this was obviously an illusion, an illusion which was completely shattered exactly one year later when Donald Trump won the election, campaigning on a promise to withdraw from the climate agreement, a promise on which he delivered, unfortunately, I suppose. But the point is that it completely exposed how fragile these kinds of promises or agreements between the world leaders are. Geopolitical tensions are increasing and this wasn't just the result of the volatile personality of Donald Trump as an individual. There was that, but all he did was lay bare the existing tensions between America and China, for example. This kind of protectionist policy is becoming generalized. It actually existed under Obama, the beginnings of a trade war with China. Trump spoke very openly about it and that increased the tension massively. The same trade war and the same protectionist approach still exists under Biden even though he signed the United States back up to the Paris Agreement. This really exposed the bitterness of the trade war going on between China and the US. The European Union and the US are also engaged in a bit of a trade war. Within the EU you can see extreme tension as well with Britain breaking out. That's going to completely disrupt the already broken policies of things like carbon permits, which I won't go into too much detail on this because it's a rubbish policy anyway. But it was basically the idea that you could get permits to emit carbon. These ended up getting exchanged and speculated like stocks and now with Britain crashing out of the EU they can just dump loads of permits on, which will increase supply and completely disrupt the pricing of them and stuff. It's a rubbish policy. Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that even the most dedicated defenders of globalism and liberalism, mouthpieces like Emmanuel Macron for example, since the crisis in 2008, the stagnation of the world market, that's basically what's been the driving force for this economic nationalism, this protectionism. And it's sucking people even like Macron in. If you look at the kind of exchanges between him and Britain at the moment, it's pretty clear how strong the tensions are. They're acting like they're about to go to war. So yeah, all of this just goes to show how fragile these promises and targets really are. It was hard enough for them to come up with agreements. Any talk of an actual practical plan, a united plan of action is absolutely meaningless in this context. Two key features of the capitalist epoch are private property of the means of production and the nation state. And I'd say these are the two biggest barriers to us having any kind of global plan with regards to climate change or anything else for that matter. The United Nations, they launched a document in 2020 called Race to Zero. And I think in their own words it expresses quite succinctly exactly what I'm trying to explain. They say breakthroughs cannot happen if individual entities work in isolation from one another. The challenges of competition and inertia often deter ambition where individual actors cannot make the first move without putting themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the near term. That's not my words, that's the United Nations basically explaining that private property and the nation state and the competition of the market is the main barrier to any kind of progress on this question. Obviously the United Nations is a tool of capitalism of the biggest imperialist powers and for that reason it owes its very existence to those imperialist powers. And so without wanting to completely throw in the towel and say there's nothing we can do about this, it doesn't want to do that but it also can't look beyond capitalism to which it depends on for its existence. It can't imagine another way of doing things so it just has to resort to delusional false optimism. This is the same document, I'll quote again. The transition to net zero will occur through exponential change. We know this because it has happened before in every major industrial disruption. It will happen again with decarbonisation. Technologies in new markets often grow on exponential curves rather than in straight lines. Different actors across different sectors in different geographies and economies start to support the transition and the positive feedback between them will raise confidence and increase demand and investment along every stage of the value chain will make it systemic. Is it just me or does that sound absolutely delusional? It's the blind faith in those kinds of market forces which has led us to the precipice we find ourselves on now. But they have no other option. There's nothing else that the United Nations or capitalism can offer. All they can do is hope. They're praying for a new long period of economic growth even though none of the symptoms point in that direction. I'm hoping that a regulation here and a tariff there will inspire the whole of the economy to revolutionise itself into a zero carbon transition. It's complete blind faith basically. And we don't really have time to just wait for a period of growth in the economy. This is a time, a very time sensitive question. It's an existential question. Nothing short of a complete transformation of the whole global economy is what's required here. Probably the biggest change that we've ever seen in the shortest time we've ever seen. Nothing short of that will do. As it stands, 84% of the world's primary energy consumption still comes from fossil fuels. Only around 20% of final energy consumption is produced by electricity at this point. Obviously the most pressing task, that means so much of the rest of it is still combustion engines essentially. One of the most important things then is to electrify every aspect of the economy we can and provide it by renewable energy. Where there is still need for combustion engines, there are alternatives as well. Things like green ammonia, green hydrogen. If 20% of final energy consumption is provided by electricity, you'd need five times that roughly to meet, if you could electrify everything, to meet the total energy demand. Can we provide that by renewable energy? Of course we can, technologically, it's 100% possible. In 2019, the International Energy Agency, the IEA, put together a report called Offshore Wind Outlook 2019. This is just the potential of wind power alone. The report concluded that with high quality resources available in most major markets, offshore wind has the potential to generate more than 420,000 terawatt hours per year worldwide. This is more than 18 times global electricity demand today. 18 times just by wind that discounts any areas where average wind speeds are below 10 miles per hour or something. It discounts geological fault lines where it would be risky to build them. It discounts shipping routes that it might disrupt. The technological potential is absolutely there. But on the basis of capitalism, such a transformation within the required timeframe is impossible, I would say, unfortunately. The current economic climate is distinguished by chronic under-investment. Obviously, a transformation like that requires a huge amount of investment. We don't have time to sit around and wait for an upswing, hope that the investment comes. There has been some increase in investment, people will tell you this. We need to arm ourselves to explain the truth. There has been some increase in investment, but the current level still does fall far too short. Don't take my word for it. The International Energy Agency again said that in 2020, clean energy investments by the oil and gas industry accounted for only 1% of total capital expenditure. The biggest energy companies, 1% of their investment is going into renewables. In 2020, that did increase to 4%. But again, the same document says that the $750 billion that is expected to be spent on clean energy technologies in 2020 remains far below what is required in climate-driven scenarios. They've also stated that to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Clean energy investment worldwide would need to more than triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion per year. $4 trillion per year. It's a huge amount of money and we're falling far too short. At this rate, it wouldn't even reach half that by 2030. 2020, last year, was also supposed to be the first year of climate financing. Climate financing refers to a pledge made in 2009, I think, where the world's wealthiest countries agreed to donate 100 billion every year to the world's poorer countries for the sake of investment. A tackle climate change agreement was 2009. I think it was supposed to be from the year 2020 to 2025, 100 billion per year. They fell 20 billion short in the first year. A whole fifth of that they didn't manage. Again, shows the chronic lack of investment and also the incapacity in terms of international relations to actually act in a united manner. The same problem of investment exists in the key industrial sectors too. Like I said, some things aren't or they're more difficult to electrify. Some pioneering projects here and there, they give us a glimpse of the technological potential that exists. But there is again no sign of a genuine transition. In steelworks, for example, which contributes to 8% of global CO2 emissions every year. There are zero-carbon alternatives using green ammonia in new modern DRI furnaces instead of the carbon-intensive coke that is used in blast furnaces traditionally. This summer, I think it was, the first full-scale zero-carbon steel plant is underway at the cost of 1 billion euros for one steel plant. So you can see the amount of investment that would actually be required. This needs to be rolled out globally with a huge urgency. But there's two reasons that this will not happen. The first is that a huge amount of capital is already invested in existing infrastructure, in existing blast furnaces. No capitalist is going to just give up on that and leave that factory idle or just put that blast furnace to one side and invest in a new one until they've extracted every single penny of profit that they can from the capital they've already invested. That would be bad business. Secondly, there is already a huge excess capacity in steel production for the level of demand for steel. We can already produce too much steel. So there's no real new market for new investors to bother venturing into with this new technology. Again, don't take my word for it. I've explained in an OECD report in 2019 and I quote, it takes years to plan to get permits for to finance and to build a steel plant. Once built, they can last for 25 to 50 years with proper maintenance. The current oversupply of steel plants will also naturally serve to slow the development of newer, more innovative facilities. Potentially on the basis of a profit driven economy. This will not happen is what the OECD is saying. Even in the case of this new zero carbon steel work, the question of profit could mean that it is for nothing after all. The company in the small print of its press release said that should green hydrogen not be available at affordable rates by the end of 2025, they'll just use natural gas in the furnaces anyway. So we can see that the question of prices and the question of market forces is the biggest barrier. Profit is the raison d'etre of capital. It's the only reason it exists and functions. And if faced with the choice of protecting the planet or polluting, well not if faced with the choice, they are faced with this choice on a regular basis, losing profits on the one hand or polluting the planet on the other, the capitalist must always choose the latter. It would be bad business not to. So I think that deals with the question of investment. And in particular the market and the volatile fluctuations of prices are throwing up huge barriers to tackling climate change. That don't seem like they can be circumvented. The capitalist class is at the moment, it is pulling out of fossil fuel investment to some degree. It's spooked basically by regulations and public opinion and now come in quite quickly and heating up. And they're fearing for their profits with all these new tariffs and regulations around carbon emissions. And so they are withdrawing from fossil fuel investments, but that doesn't really necessarily mean a corresponding increase in investment in renewable energy. And that's the problem we're seeing. In short they're withdrawing from the fossil fuel sector faster than they can provide clean energy. And so there's supply shocks in the energy market which is causing the price of energy to skyrocket. And the rise in the price of fuel affects the prices of commodities across the whole market because it is fundamental to the production and distribution of all commodities in the economy at the moment. And this threatens generalised inflation. And so instead of incentivising a move to green investment it can have the opposite effect. You might think that withdrawing from fossil fuel is good. But with a generalised increase in prices materials like steel and copper and aluminium and lithium for batteries they're all absolutely essential to proper green investment in that kind of technology. But they're currently very carbon intensive to produce. That's pushing the price up further. And so this last minute frenzy of regulations and tariffs on carbon emissions is actually raising prices and disincentivising investment in the green sector. Thank you. This is being referred to as greenflation. An article in the Financial Times explained that trying to shut down the old economy too fast threatens to push the price of building a cleaner one out of reach. So for bourgeois policy makers basically tying themselves in knots every single way they turn they find contradictions in the market that just blow up in their faces. An article in The Economist has also highlighted this saying that there are grave problems with the transition to clean energy power. Legal threats, investor pressure and fear of regulations have led investment in fossil fuels to slump by 40% since 2015. And so the result is economic turmoil. It's actually a step backwards for decarbonising and a further increase in those geopolitical tensions. Since May the price of a basket of oil, coal and gas has soared by 95%. Britain has turned the old coal-fired stations on that have been shut down for a long time. This is what I mean by a step backwards in some places. American petrol prices have tripled. Blackouts have engulfed China and India. And according to The Financial Times, Vladimir Putin has just reminded Europe that supply of fuel relies on Russian goodwill which terrifies them given the tension in geopolitical relations. So it's not simply a matter of the scale of the investment, which is all too low anyway. It's a question of the manner of the transition. And under capitalism the transition cannot be a managed one. As a result of this and the inability of a coherent plan, nonetheless the biggest world leaders are putting forward their own disjointed investment plans. And this is all interwoven with a bit of rhetoric around climate change. So a very interesting phenomenon in some cases is the return of Keynesian economics, where the state is offering huge amounts of money that it plans to invest to desperately try and stimulate this period of growth. The Chinese government, let's look at some of these investment plans. The Chinese government has declared it will reach peak emissions in 2030 to then reach net zero by 2060. This is actually not in accordance with the Paris Accord. But even if they managed it, that would still be progress. They've also pledged to withdraw overseas investment in coal power plants. The Chinese economy, Chinese industry paints a very contradictory picture. On the one hand it is the largest producer of solar panels, for example, but it's also the world's largest emitter. It burns more coal than any other. It burns 50% of the world's coal that is burnt. But some people, nonetheless, they have a bit more faith in China's ability to decarbonise than the other large economies. And this is due to the heavy involvement of the state. I think this is part of the reason where the faith in Keynesianism is coming from again. The Chinese state for the last decade or so has undergone the largest programme of Keynesian spending that the world has ever seen. And the state is an enormous state, and it dictates to business in a way that, for a time, resembled some sort of state planning of the economy. But this illusion is being shattered now. The Chinese economy is running into extremely deep contradictions. There's a whole talk on this at some point this weekend. Debt has skyrocketed, both public and private debt. Firms are beginning to declare bankruptcy this year. And this has shattered the illusion of any kind of planning in the chaos. It's failing. It is a capitalist market economy. And it reveals that China is no better equipped to meet its targets than somewhere like the United States. So how does progress look in the United States? Not very good, I'm afraid. The White House has reasserted its goal to decarbonise by 2050. So it's talking the talk. But in the face of fuel shortages and rising prices, in the same week it asked OPEC to increase oil production. OPEC is like an international cartel of oil producing countries. And the White House is pleading for them to step up production to bring prices down. So again a very contradictory picture. The US is also set to burn more coal this year than it did last year. Biden's $2.6 trillion investment plan, which sounds very big. There's nowhere near enough to carry out the level of infrastructure transformation needed anyway. But even this figure of $2.6 trillion has been absolutely slashed less than a quarter in order to get it through Congress. There was another bill called the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the CEPP bill. This is also being met by extremely fierce resistance in the Senate by the most staunch defenders of oil and gas interests there. So it shows you even someone like Biden who, to some extent, he's on board. I think he actually does. These people don't want chaos, they want stability. But their hands are tight. There's nothing they can do in the current economic climate. And due to the contradictions of capitalism itself. So in China and in the US, and to some extent in the European Union, you've got these Keynesian-based spending programmes. You've got financial schemes to try and incentivise investment on the one hand, disincentivise investment in the fossil fuel sector on the other hand. But as I've said before, there is absolutely no balance to this policy. What's the word? Pulling investment in one sector doesn't necessarily mean increasing it in the other. Because capital will only invest if it is certain of a profit. And the whole economic situation is one of stagnating profits and a chronic lack of investment. If you think about it, during the pandemic, this is one of the clearest examples, you had a complete slump in the economy. And the various states of the world printed money and lobbed it at the cap at this class, so-called stimulus. There was absolutely no stimulus, it was lack of support. Investment in the private sector remains completely low. So I think that deals, I spent too much time talking about the rubbish policies of the bourgeoisie. What is there on the left? On the left, the dominant slogan these days is the Green New Deal. So what does that boil down to? I would say it's still based on Keynesian economics. It has some extremely progressive, well, it's actually a very enigmatic thing. People from Biden, clear representatives of the capitalist class, all the way over to the Corbyn movement are using this slogan and obviously they have very different meanings by it. In the UK, Labour for a Green New Deal, they base themselves on the class to some extent, which is very good. They want to work within the massive organisations of the working class to get this to be the adopted programme in the Labour movement. But what is the programme? The demands are largely progressive, things we would absolutely support, things like expanding public ownership, nationalisation of energy, nationalisation of water, railways, a big emphasis on well-paid and unionised jobs, so far so good, this is all very good stuff, green housing standards. We'll support any reforms that increase the living standards of the working class, but we're also interested in raising class consciousness and exposing the limits of certain programmes. This is an existential crisis and we do not have time to go down blind alleys that we've already explored in the past. And there is actually nothing new about the Green New Deal. It's talking about nationalisation, which of course we support. But these nationalisations, it's limited to certain sectors to kind of be run as an appendage to the market economy as a whole. And that, as can be seen, even somewhere like China where the state is so big and for a while it did seem it dictated to capital, we now see it's actually the other way around. The state does not dictate to capital. Capital dictates to the state when the state is an appendage to the market economy and that unfortunately is the limit of the Green New Deal. It fails to resolve the same old problems. Firstly, the capital will still dominate the global economy. And secondly, that the global economy is in a period of slump and government spending can't create a period of capitalist growth. The market dictates to the state and not the other way around. That's the most important point that we should hammer home. And not only do we need to reduce emissions to limit the damage, but we also need to be able to adapt to the changes that are going to happen. There's a certain delay between what we pollute and the way it affects the climate and the weather changes that come with that. We already see in those changes happening now and it's going to continue to happen even if you rent carbon zero tomorrow, which we won't. And so, from a human perspective, there's human implications. It's not just the question of the climate changing and the rock we live on. It has social repercussions. So from a human perspective, it's a human problem. From a working class perspective, it is a class question, the question of climate change and how we're going to deal with it. Climatic changes are already wreaking havoc on the working class and the poor across the world. The rich will continue to be able to afford air conditioning. They'll be the first to get fresh water and food. They'll be able to move house to places that are well defended from flooding or rising sea levels and so forth. They'll even pay private firefighting companies and this sort of thing. Thank you. Whereas the poor will have their homes destroyed, there will be absolutely no security. They'll be forced to move from where they're from. There'll be shortages in food. There'll be droughts. There'll be crop failures. This will affect the poor and the working class. And so just as the capitalist class, it can't plan a transition to zero carbon. It's also patently clear that they're not going to provide a world worth living in for the working class when they can't already. I've solved the problems of today. How are they ever going to solve the problems of tomorrow? I gave the example of the flooding that happens every year in Bangladesh. Do we really believe that the state is going to actually do anything about that? That the capitalist class is actually going to come to their aid just because the problems they've been experiencing for years and years and years are getting worse and worse and worse? Clearly that is utopian. So the point is these are not new issues. The results that come from climate change, they're things like hunger, they're things like displacement, where obviously migration is not an issue, but it becomes a social issue because the working class are pitted against each other to fight over crumbs. Where you get droughts, for example, in one area, you might get a crop shortage. For example, in the 21st century, I think we should take the question of food security, for example. It's a particularly poignant one with relation to climate change. It's a fundamental human need on the one hand, but also it's extremely directly susceptible to changes in the climate, the production of food. When we look at that question, it's disgraceful. In the 21st century, there are millions of people facing starvation and this number is increasing. This year, 1 million people face starvation in Madagascar as a result of climate-related crop failure. Earlier in the summer in Kenya, as well, due to a drought, there was a famine. On a local level, people's access to food is becoming less reliable due to climate change. Despite the fact that there is enough food produced on a global scale to feed 10 billion people, which is obviously the world population is 7.0. It's a huge surplus that we're able to produce. None of this starvation is due to shortage on a global scale. The problem is not one of production. It's not profitable to feed the poor when they can't afford to pay the market price. On a global scale, there is surplus. The task at hand is to redistribute where we find unevenness. This is a question of climate change. The problems facing the working class as a result of climate change are basically the same social problems that they face under capitalism anyway, but exacerbated. We need to redistribute where we find unevenness. In order to do that, we need a democratic plan of production and distribution. That's quite clear. This has to be based on collective ownership of the means of production. If you want democracy in production and distribution, you need democracy in the workplace. That's where it has to start. Worker's democracy and workers' control so much. In order to do this, the largest agricultural companies in the world need to be brought under public ownership and workers' control. Cargill, for example, you might not have heard of it, but Cargill is the largest agricultural company in the world. It's responsible for 25% of all US grain exports. It's not just operating in the US. It operates in almost 70 countries and it employs 166,000 workers. This enormous monster of a company is 90% owned by one individual. Companies like this are absolutely ripe for expropriation by the working class. The sacred property of one man is the destruction of millions of lives around the world. That is a morality we absolutely reject. Today's global network of agricultural companies, taken into workers' control, would allow for agriculture's abundance, which does exist, to be used for all of humanity's needs, to be distributed to every corner of the world, while also restoring the world's forests. A lot of these agricultural companies are the main culprits for the decimation of rainforests like the Amazon. It would also allow for this to be done while protecting the insect population. A lot of these companies make a huge amount of profits through selling extremely toxic pesticides that there would be absolutely no need for a worker's run international agricultural system to actually use. They just don't want to give up on that commodity. This obviously would need to be combined with a centrally planned international intermodal network of shipping routes for effective distribution. This is entirely possible as well. The monopolisation that you see in the shipping sector makes it completely ripe for expropriation too. Between the years 2000 and 2018, the 10 largest container companies increased their market share from 12% to 82% of all container companies. 10 companies, in other words, would need to be taken into public ownership, and you would have almost the entirety of the world's shipping containers under a centralised democratic plan. Obviously, a programme like this cannot just be carried out. It can't fall from the sky. It can't just be implemented by any politician who fancies it. Obviously, only a mass movement, and the mass movement led by the working class, only that can carry out this transformation. That is what we base ourselves on. They are the methods we base ourselves on and they are the traditions we base ourselves on. There are these movements. This isn't a fantasy. It's based on history, and it's based on the present day. There are these movements all over the world. Let's take the example of India, which is in the face of a complete crisis over the last year or so on many fronts. The situation in India absolutely demands a situation like this. There was a movement to match it, comrades. That's the most important point. Look at what's happened in India over the last year. Cargill, that same company, is actually the largest buyer. Sorry, it's the largest private buyer. The state is the largest buyer. Cargill is the largest private buyer of grain from the farmers in India, and it is a huge threat to their livelihoods. It's trying to squeeze them from the market, basically, by becoming the dominant buyer, getting rid of any price regulations, squeezing them out so they can take over Indian agriculture. Over the last year, as a result of this, millions of Indian farmers have been mobilising in a historic uprising. I mean millions. They got in their tractors from all different villages, and they drove on Delhi and surrounded the capital. This was compounded by the largest general strike ever seen in history. 250 million Indian workers came out on strike. Despite the hesitancy of the trade union leaders, they did this despite the leadership, not thanks to the lack of leadership of the workers' organisations. In the face of such a movement, a movement like that, it would have been entirely possible for the leadership of the working class to have taken decisive action to unite these movements, give them a political spearhead, and transform Indian society forever. This could have also led the way to tackling climate change for the world's working class. India is actually the second-highest burner of coal after China. Obviously, with a sixth of the world's population in India, it's an economy of huge importance if we're going to tackle climate change. India will have to play a huge part in that. On the question of food security, 40% of all food produced in India is wasted. The government has silos that are owned by the Indian government that are sat full of grain reserves and yet you still have millions of people starving in India this year. There was a hunger crisis. In the face of that movement we saw last year, if the Communist Party of India, for example, was even remotely communist, or if the leaders of the trade unions had a shred of militancy to them, in the face of a movement like that with proper leadership, who is to say that the mass movement couldn't have swept away the Modi government, brought down the government? Who is to say it couldn't have formed a worker and farmers government? This is entirely possible, and that's why the role of leadership is so important. That's the task we face, comrades. In those circumstances, the country's coal plants and the rest of its industrial sectors could have been taken under worker's control. Cargill's food processing plants could have been taken under public control. Their huge command over the purchasing and distributing and exporting of Indian grain could have been taken into public ownership. And the farmers, on this basis, could have formed committees and negotiated with this centralised workers controlled plan of production. And they could have sold their grain to the industrial centres for a far better price for themselves and for the workers by cutting out the middleman, like Cargill and these other private companies, which are ripping them both off. Cool. And on this basis, those industrial centres could have geared their production to providing equipment to the farmers, improving the level of productivity, improving sustainability practices in their farming, connecting them to the rail network, providing an electrified network that reaches every village in India, providing an electricity grid that does so, transferring the production of that electricity from coal to renewables. It was an Indian company that is behind this zero carbon steel plant, so the technology exists, the potential exists. On this basis, the surplus food that is produced in India could have been shipped across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, to Kenya to feed these people where the starvation is happening, reach out an arm and ask them to join a new federation with the Indian state. This is the type of perspective comrades that matches up to the situation that we live in, both in terms of the climate crisis and the political turbulence, the potential is there. This kind of perspective, though, unfortunately, is lacking from policies like the Green New Deal, and that is what we are fighting for. It's not a utopian dream. It's a very real and very necessary possibility. The India's farmers movement and general strike is probably the largest movement in history. The climate crisis and the coronavirus pandemic have laid bare more than anything else I can ever think of, and have laid bare the need for an international plan of production. It was so clear that that was needed and so clear that that was impossible on the basis of capitalism. The demand for the expropriation of the biggest monopolies and industries should be on the order of the day, and yet it's not. There's a complete lack of leadership on the left of the labour movement. You could not ask for more clear opportunities for these, but left reformism, and this is the problem, it cannot help but squander these opportunities, despite the best intentions, because it cannot see past capitalism any more than the ruling class itself can. It doesn't believe another way of organising society as possible. That is the idea we have to put forward. Raise the class consciousness, raise the consciousness of the working class in their own power, in their own history, and in their own future. In other words, the main barrier to tackling the climate crisis is not a technological one, but a political one. The only social force that can strip away that barrier is the organised working class, and time is running out. The movement of the working class needs to be armed with the correct ideas, a sense of its history, a sense of its future, a sense of its power. And the reformist illusions, even those of the left reformists, unfortunately, don't really lead down those blind alleys that I was talking about. In 1938, Leon Trotsky wrote the following words. Without a socialist revolution in the next historical period, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of humankind. The turn is now to the proletariat. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership. It was true back then in the face of World War II, which was a brutal industrial slaughter, and that did follow due to the failure of the revolutionary leadership. And it's true now in the face of the climate catastrophe. So to manage our resources for the needs of the people and the planet alike, we need a democratic plan of production and distribution. The task at hand is to prepare for the revolutionary events that are already coming and will continue to come in the next period because we can't afford to squander these ones. The task is the preparation for the seizure of power by the working class. This and this alone, the only thing I can see that can throw the doors wide open for the next great task facing us, which is the harmonisation of humanity with the rest of the natural world. It is possible. Let's get to work. Thank you, comrades.