 With rapidly rising average global temperatures, species extinction, and ever more extreme weather events, it feels a lot like the climate apocalypse is almost upon us. Despite decades of negotiations such as those taking place here in Bonn next week, we've totally screwed it and we're all going to die. So I guess, get in your bunkers, hold your loved ones close and prepare for end times. So what's gone wrong in the fight against climate change? Many commentators, particularly in the global north, point to obstacles that they see as internal to the negotiations themselves. They suggest that if carbon reduction commitments were binding or if certain demagogues hadn't withdrawn their nations from the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations would send a good chance of working together to keep average global temperatures low enough to avoid the worst and most catastrophic effects of climate change. But climate change isn't a one-dimensional, technical problem that all nations have an equal stake in addressing. Rather, it's a problem fundamentally bound up with dynamics of global power. First off, the history of climate change is intimately interwoven with the history of capitalism. The fossil economy established in the early 19th century is, as Andreas Mahlen puts it, an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels and therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide. In other words, capitalist economies view nature as something which can and must be harnessed and commodified for the sake of producing capital, pumping out ever more greenhouse gases into the air in the process. The history of fossil capitalism is also bound up with the history of empire. Not only is the global north historically far more responsible than the global south for emissions productions and yet most distant and insulated from the effects of climate change, but during the Industrial Revolution, western empires stole resources from the global south in order to enrich themselves. As Leon Sealy-Huggins points out, these histories have very real material consequences today. Small island states such as those here by Irma suffered disproportionately from climate change not just because their geophysical dimensions make them vulnerable to flooding, but because their histories of mass wealth expropriation have left them without the resources to defend themselves against and recover from extreme weather events. In the words of Black Lives Matter UK, the climate crisis is a racist crisis. When we look at the root causes of climate change, COP's prospects for success look pretty bleak. COP processes not only often sidestep addressing the underlying issues of capitalism and imperialism, but they actually often reinforce these power dynamics and the impact disparities they involve. For a start, the commitment made to limiting average global warming to two degrees could in fact mean 3.5 degrees of warming in some parts of Africa, a death sentence for many of the world's most vulnerable communities. At COP 19 in 2009, student news negotiator Lamamudha Apeng broke down in tears stating we've been asked to sign a suicide pact. Even once these targets have been set, the methods of their achievement amount to false solutions that reinforce neocolonial power dynamics. Since the foundation of the COP process, big corporations have been lobbying hard to shift climate action away from ending the fossil fuel industry and towards market-based solutions such as carbon capture and storage, essentially allowing the fossil economy to carry on as normal. Likewise, the Kyoto Protocol's flexibility mechanisms allow rich western nations to export their responsibilities for emissions production to the global south, which has led to routine land grabs and the murder of land rights activists. At every level of COP negotiations, rich western nations throw poorer global south nations under the bus. In the words of Goldie Azuri, these negotiations are forums through which climate imperialism operates. Once we view climate change as a problem of global power, the apocalypse doesn't look quite the same. This is no longer a single event that will kill us all indiscriminately. It is part of a complex crisis of capitalism and imperialism, impacting communities with varying levels of violence and imminency. As Indigenous communities have been telling us for decades, we can't rely on single-issue environmental groups and state-led processes to save us. Rather, we should shift our attention to supporting bottom-up extra-governmental struggles, struggles to end the fossil economy, for their payment of reparations for the crimes of imperialism, to abolish borders and to empower women. In short, it's climate justice not saving the world. That should be our starting point for action. So what does this look like? We can start by showing solidarity with communities on the front lines of climate change, such as with the Indigenous communities resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. This involves fighting climate change at sites of fossil fuel production in the UK, but it also involves integrating pre-existing grassroots movements in the UK within the fight. Struggles for renewables, struggles against fuel poverty, struggles for energy democracy and struggles against the disproportionate impact of climate change on communities of colour. Fighting for climate justice doesn't just mean averting the harms that will be reliably inflicted on those already most persecuted and exploited by capitalism and imperialism. It heralds our chance to transform the ways our societies and economies work because, quite frankly, we must. In the face of popular apocalypse mongering, climate justice might just offer us a vision of a new world.