George Kerevan: We must ensure COP26 really is start of something new for the planet

Put another way, Tesla is worth roughly half the entire German stock exchange. The company’s shares are rising just as fast as a SpaceX Starship – up 45% this year. Some reputable analysts are predicting Tesla shares will likely triple in the aftermath of COP26.

There’s a wee problem lurking inside this seeming financial miracle. Yes, Tesla has a stunning product available at a time when the global market for electric vehicles is growing exponentially as a result of climate change. Yes, Tesla is one of the few carmakers who have avoided the collapse of world supply chains in the wake of Covid, particularly the global shortage of microchips that has afflicted car makers everywhere. Elon Musk may be a loudmouth, but he is a management genius who has kept Tesla production lines roaring.

What’s the dilemma? Currently, a Tesla share will cost you the equivalent of 130 times expected earnings. In other words, for every dollar of profit returned, a shareholder has to fork out $130. That is a pathetic financial return even by the standards of your local bank savings account. To own a chunk of Tesla you have to pay way over the odds. There’s a caveat, of course. The diminutive yearly dividends (relative to share price) are compensated for by the rise in the capital value of the Tesla shares. If the analysts are correct, your overall Tesla holdings will treble in value in the next few years.

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What has this got to do with COP26? The answer is dangerously simple. The world’s stock markets are betting that the outcome of COP26 will trigger a gigantic boom in share prices for stocks associated with climate change mitigation – the so-called New Green Deal. If the West’s political elite, starting with Joe Biden, instigate a shift towards massive public spending in a Green New Deal, it will open up vast new markets for private investment to supply the necessary technology.

That includes electric vehicles and renewable energy equipment, but also a whole future generation of nuclear power plants. Each nuclear plant will necessitate literally tens of billions of pounds spent on cement, steel, pumps and computers, sufficient to keep existing suppliers in ageing industries profitable into the 22nd century. The Green New Deal could very well turn out to be the saviour of the historic legacy manufacturing infrastructure that caused global warming in the first case. No wonder world stock exchanges are hitting record highs despite the impact of the pandemic.

My point: the razzmatazz surrounding the Glasgow climate change summit this week masks a fundamental shift in how global capitalism and the international financial system is orientating. The lure of Big Bucks and vast profits is causing the system to shift from denying climate change – as it did previously by denying the harmful effects of nicotine – towards subverting the green agenda for its own use. As Prince Fabrizio famously says in The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

There is a slogan in the green movement: “System change not climate change”. This slogan pierces straight to the centre of the issue. Climate change is a function of runaway greenhouse gas emissions. This in turn is the product of the growth-for-growth’s-sake promoted by an economic system based on production of commodities for sale rather than use. We have to turn off production for sale (and profit) and create a system based on production for use. Only that will remove the imperative to over-exploit the Earth’s resources and generate cheap, dirty energy to maximise production.

UNFORTUNATELY, the trajectory of the COP26 agenda is away from such a genuine “system change” towards using the climate emergency to give the neoliberal capitalist system a new lease of life – to the ultimate detriment of the planet. Capitalist markets need willing, passive consumers. So every marketing agency worth its salt is now telling each and every one of us that climate change is our fault. And that we need to make a personal effort to alter our spending patterns, the better to make more profits for industry. We need to buy a new electric car. We need to eat new, synthetic food products instead of meat. We need to buy clothing and make-up brands that are somehow “ethically” better than others, though this always boils down to better marketing.

In other words, at core, corporate action against climate change involves an insidious reshaping of our consumer personality by the global advertising market – worth a cool three quarters of a trillion dollars per annum and rising. We are now made guilty if we aren’t doing “our bit” to fight climate change – a bit that involves consuming, consuming, consuming. TV ads

are full of children making adults guilty about buying the wrong products. Yet none of this does anything to eliminate an economic system based on runaway consumerism. Quite the reverse, the corporate capture of the green agenda has become a pretext for reinforcing that very system.

Which brings us back to Tesla as an example of the insanity of the new green economics. The boom in Tesla shares is simply a gigantic gamble by investors that the value of the company will go on rising forever. But economic logic says that is possible only if another bunch of fools come into the market and buy those shares at an ever-higher price. And so on. As it is, the real dividend returns on owning Tesla stock are practically non-existent. At some point the bubble has to burst. The New Green Deal looks very much like the unstable capitalism that brought us the 2008 banking crisis.

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I’m not decrying the need to invest in new technology. I’m questioning the surrender of climate mitigation to corporate interests that retain the same old goals of investment for profit, an economy based on the logic of buying more and more, of putting profit before planet. A false logic that ultimately separates human beings from nature itself. But we don’t own the planet; we are part and parcel of its ecosphere.

What is to be done? First, we need to recognise that COP26 has become a vast pantomime that is unlikely to point the world in the direction of mitigating climate change. On the contrary, it will camouflage the corporate capture of the climate emergency agenda. It might help if Scotland, as host nation, was able to champion this rather pretending COP26 is the solution to everything.

Any real movement for system change will have to come from below, starting on the streets of Glasgow – not in the conference chamber. COP26 in Glasgow could be the start of something new. It could be a gathering that marks the moment when the world’s poor, angry, dispossessed, young, radical, and concerned decided that the system really did need to be changed. That the elite nexus of politicians and corporate interests could be challenged. That true change is possible. That planet

Earth can be saved.