Paul Murphy urges system change, criticises 'carbon footprint' focus

Thanks a lot to Keirloch and Labour for bringing forward the bill. We support the bill, support anything that will enable people to take the action that people want to take, and the evidence strongly suggests that people are in favour of doing everything that they can to try and contribute to the collective effort to avoid the climate catastrophe that we are currently hurtling towards. And that attitude of ordinary people obviously contrasts very sharply with the attitude of the global leaders seen unfortunately over the last two weeks at COP26. But the failure of COP26 I think also highlights that I do think that the thrust of the approach, like we agree with the bill no problem, but the thrust of the approach of focusing on the question of carbon footprints and people's individual choices is pointing in the wrong direction. Pointing in the wrong direction. As the main direction of what needs to be done. And I think that's highlighted by the fact that the bill is using the phrase carbon footprint, but who invented the phrase carbon footprint? It was big oil. It was the brainchild of an advertising agency employed by British Petroleum precisely to point away from the main responsibility of global corporations, global capitalism for the climate catastrophe that we are experiencing. To quote Mark Kaufman, British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations officials, Ogilvy and Mather, to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It's here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularised the term carbon footprint in their early aughts. The company unveiled its carbon footprint calculated in 2004, so one could assess how their normal daily life, going to work, buying food and gas travelling, is largely responsible for heating the globe. And of course that covers up the very important truth, that by the time an individual goes to the shop, by the time an individual travels to work, or whatever, just so many choices have already been made. And they aren't able to take the most important choices in terms of the nature of food production, the nature of energy production, etc. Those are political choices and economic choices that are made by the capitalist class and their political representatives. And there's a danger of assisting them in avoiding the truth, that the climate catastrophe is being driven by a handful of major corporations. They have names and addresses, they have headquarters, they are who we should be targeting. And ordinary people have and will, over and over again, show that they want to take whatever actions that they take. But this is fundamentally a systematic problem and requires systematic solutions. Focusing on personal responsibility will not solve the climate crisis. There is a parallel here of course with Covid, where of course personal responsibility is very important and so on, but it isn't enough such as the scale and the nature of the problem that we face. And so rather than just labeling products, and we absolutely should label products with their carbon footprint, what we need to do is actually tackle the polluting major corporations directly. And so, you know, very simply in this country we need to ban any further data centers, not just to put a sign outside saying how bad that they are. We need to force fossil fuel companies to keep the oil and gas in the ground, even though that will come at a cost to them of $5 trillion in terms of assets that are currently on their books, that simply can't be realized, as well as the various investment in fossil fuel infrastructure that will have to be stranded. We need to transform our transport system to mean that people have the real option of availing of free, green and frequent public transport, of safe cycle lanes, of walking, in order to avoid and use the reliance on private cars, either of the petrol or diesel variety, but also of the electric variety, which is also not the answer. Fundamentally, as the slogan goes and has been widely taken up, we need system change to stop climate change. And I would argue that the system that needs to be changed is the system of capitalism, of production for profit, of the exploitation, and the treatment of nature as something taken for free, as well as the exploitation of labour, and the kind of change that we need is socialist change. Individual actions that we can all do are welcome, but the crisis is beyond individual action. It requires transforming not just our public transport system, but our energy system, our housing system, and fundamentally our economic system. And so that way of organizing society, of private ownership of the core sections of the economy and production, private for profit must go. We need an alternative eco-socialist system that puts people and planet before profit. We need to have the big polluters, the currently big polluters, in democratic public ownership. And then we need to plan for a society which prioritizes the quality of people's life, which centers the idea of a good life for people, as opposed to the drive of consumption that capitalism pushes onto people. for people. a a