COP26 – What Next?

In the largest armed deployment in Scottish history, 10,000 police officers were drafted in to swamp Glasgow’s streets. Police chiefs said their presence was for the ‘safety of the public’, but it was noticeable that they were almost exclusively deployed against peaceful protestors and that not one oil company CEO (undoubtedly the biggest threat ever to humanity) was arrested. In fact, fossil fuel executives made up the largest delegation of delegates within the ‘blue zone’, the most fortified zone guarded by phalanxes of police. The Glasgow climate summit represents a microcosm of today’s politics of security, in which states resort to militarised and security responses rather than tackling the underlying causes of social and environmental crises. Notably, this single event police operation named Urram (Gaelic for respect) cost £200 million. This is almost three times the amount of climate finance that all the rich countries together promised back in 2009 to deliver each year to the poorest countries but have still failed to do. TNI’s research in a report prior to the summit, Global Climate Wall, tells a similar story. It revealed that the richest countries are spending more than twice as much on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance. Militarisation has become the rich world’s climate adaptation policy. The reason for this is that recent decades have seen the combination of two dominant paradigms that impede climate justice. The first is the ideology of neoliberalism that unshackled corporate power and impeded any effective state action to radically reduce climate emissions. The second is the rise of security policies and infrastructure, particularly in the wake of 9/11, that has made ‘security’ the overriding raison d’etre of the state. There is not a problem in the world that doesn’t have a security ‘solution’, even climate change, where the term ‘climate security’ is increasingly bandied about by military generals and politicians. Indeed NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg attended the Glasgow summit for the first time, arguing that ‘security and climate [are] two sides of the same coin’.