Zarah Sultana at the supporters’ event in County Durham. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
ZARAH SULTANA has said Your Party must be “explicitly socialist” as she argued the new left-wing party must “embrace class war.”
The independent MP, who co-launched Your Party with Jeremy Corbyn in July, made the comments at a supporters’ event in County Durham on Saturday.
She said: “You can’t beat far-right politicians and fascism by ignoring them, or, as the Labour Party are doing, copying them.
“You do it by uniting the working class around a positive vision, and by building a movement that is broad and rooted in solidarity.
“People don’t want or need cultural wars — they need hope they need material improvements in their lives.
“What I’m saying is, we need socialism. We need to be explicitly socialist.
“That is not tweaking here and there. It’s not just lowering a few bills and a wealth tax just sprinkled on top, but it is a fundamental transformation of our society: the working class controlling the wealth that they produce and the means of production in their hands.
“We need an anti-Nazi anti-fascist league for the 21st century.”
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People attending the People’s Assembly Against Austerity protest in central London, June 7, 2025
BRITAIN’S Communists meet tomorrow in Yorkshire for their 58th Congress. They will debate the urgent challenges faced by the left across the nations of Britain and more widely across the world.
Reactionary nationalism and racism, accelerated militarism and the abandonment of commitments on global warming all demand a new level of unity, a united front, not just as a slogan, but as a unifying solidarity across our communities and the organised labour movement.
How to secure that unity is a question that both unites but also sometimes divides the wider left. It is certainly not one that will be currently resolved by thinking purely in terms of political parties.
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MST activists held a protest on November 11 in the Agrizone at COP 30, an area dedicated to discussions related to agribusiness. The action aimed to denounce agribusiness as the main driver of the environmental crisis in Brazil. Photo: @alain.grao / COP30 Collaborative Coverage
Embrapa’s event at the Climate Conference is sponsored by giants such as Bayer, Nestlé, and Syngenta, accused of practices that exacerbate socio-environmental damage
The United Nations Climate Conference COP30, is currently underway in Belém, Brazil and will conclude on November 21. It has become increasingly clear that, just as the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and several other organizations, movements, collectives, and groups warned, agribusiness is at the forefront of the supposed search for solutions to the environmental crisis. This, in itself, sheds light on the fact that the Conference has become a large business expo, in which the assets will be our territories, communities, and nature.
According to Embrapa itself (the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, a state entity), Agrizone is “a large showcase of technologies, science, and international cooperation focused on sustainable agriculture and the fight against hunger in a context of climate change.” However, in practice, the space will serve as a stage for agribusiness to do business, promote its image, and increase its profits – at the expense of the destruction of nature, the concentration of land, and the expulsion of peasant communities and traditional peoples. Under the discourse of “sustainability,” what we will see is the old logic of exploitation disguised as green.
Starting with its sponsors. It is unthinkable that a space that claims to combat hunger and the environmental crisis would have Bayer, Nestlé, and OCP among its financiers. These are three companies that directly contribute to the deepening of the environmental crisis. In 2024, Bayer had to pay more than USD 2 billion in compensation to a man in the US who was proven to have contracted cancer because of one of its main products: the pesticide Roundup. The product is no longer sold in that country, but in Brazil it circulates freely. It is estimated that the company faces 170,000 similar lawsuits.
One of the panels that Nestlé will lead at Agrizone is called “Remodeling food in Brazil.” This is a very suggestive title, given that the company is already engaged in this “remodeling” – at the expense of the health of the Brazilian people. According to the company’s own criteria, 54% of its sales are products with very low health ratings. In this context, it has already been proven that the Swiss company adds more sugar to its products destined for Africa and Latin America.
Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP) is a Moroccan state-owned company focused on the extraction of phosphate, which is mainly used in the production of pesticides. The company holds 70% of global phosphorus reserves. However, most of its production comes from the Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara, a country under colonial occupation by the Moroccan kingdom. In other words, OCP literally maintains its production at the expense of looting and stealing minerals that belong to the people of the Sahara.
Agrizone panels will be dominated by giants that plunder nature
The giants of agribusiness, the ultra-processed food industry, and mining, in addition to sponsoring Agrizone, will also dominate the debate panels at the event.
Syngenta, together with Itaú Bank, will coordinate the panel “Cooperation for long-term financing in the restoration of degraded areas.”
The question to be asked is whether the transnational corporation is willing to restore areas that it itself degrades? After all, the company is responsible for a quarter of the market for profenofos, an insecticide used mainly on corn, soybean, cotton, and other crops. It turns out that this pesticide “is extremely harmful to aquatic organisms, birds, and bees. It is a powerful neurotoxin (similar to sarin gas) that can affect brain development in humans, especially in children,“ said Laurent Gaberell, head of agriculture and biodiversity at the NGO Public Eye, which published a report on the subject. In Brazil, Syngenta’s largest market, ”profenofos residues are found in the drinking water of millions of people,” the report points out.
It is also worth remembering that Syngenta was responsible for the murder of Keno, an MST activist, in 2015, in Paraná. The murder took place in a field of illegal Syngenta transgenic experiments in the city of Santa Tereza do Oeste, western Paraná, near the Iguaçu National Park. The area was occupied by about 150 members of Via Campesina. The activists were shot at by about 40 agents from NF Segurança, a private company hired by Syngenta. In addition to Keno’s murder, Isabel Nascimento was also shot and lost sight in her right eye.
In addition to Syngenta, Natura will also be at Agrizone. The cosmetics company will lead the panel “from circular carbon to sustainable cooperation.” Natura was fined by Ibama in 2010 for biopiracy. The fine, in the amount of 21 million reais, was imposed “for allegedly irregular access to biodiversity.” In addition, the company was the subject of a complaint to the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission in the Federal Senate in 2023 for exploiting traditional communities in Pará. According to testimony from Indigenous leaders at the time, cooperatives linked to Natura paid three reais per day for harvesting andiroba and copaiba seeds, which are typical of the Amazon. However, the cooperatives sold a liter of seeds for 1,000 reais, and the company further increased this profit margin.
Ultra-processed food giant PepsiCo will be the protagonist in the panel “Every drop counts: growing potatoes in a changing climate.” Residues of the pesticide glyphosate have been identified in several of the company’s products, including Doritos chips. Potential health damage can begin at very low levels, from 0.1 parts per billion (ppb) of glyphosate. But in the company’s products, levels between 289.47 ppb and 1,125.3 ppb were found. The consequences of glyphosate on the body include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and gluten intolerance.
Agribusiness controls Agrizone
Although Agrizone was officially conceived by Embrapa, control of the space is, in fact, in the hands of agribusiness. It is no surprise that important players in the sector here in Brazil, such as the Brazilian Agribusiness Association (ABAG), the Brazilian Rural Society (SRB), and Amaggi will be in the spotlight.
There is no way to build concrete solutions to the environmental crisis when the main causes of this scenario are sitting at the table, coordinating the “board room.” In Brazil, agribusiness (and the entire industrial complex surrounding it) is the main cause of this crisis. It is responsible for 74% of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.
All the supposed sustainable discourse maintained by those entities and companies in this sector – which will dominate the Agrizone panels – will actually serve two functions. First, to camouflage the real way agribusiness operates, which is based on the appropriation and destruction of nature’s common goods, in addition to the exploitation of traditional peoples. Second, in the face of the environmental crisis that they themselves have caused, to implement false solutions based on the financialization of nature – as is the case with the carbon market.
For an Embrapa that serves the people, not corporations
Embrapa is a strategic public company for the country. It suffered a profound attack during the Bolsonaro administration. However, it was not agribusiness, which was hand in hand with Bolsonaro, that defended it, but the Brazilian people and their public servants.
Therefore, it is essential that it be effectively focused on the interests of the Brazilian people and not under the control of transnational giants linked to agribusiness. The challenges related to food sovereignty and combating the environmental crisis will not come from those who profit from hunger and diseases caused by ultra-processed foods and pesticides. They will come from those who have been resisting the advance of capital for centuries and cultivating emancipated forms of relationship with nature.
This article was first published on the MST website.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Natural gas is flared off as oil is pumped in the Bakken shale formation in Watford City, North Dakota. (Photo by Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“Without rapid, deep emissions cuts—over 50% by 2030—overshooting 1.5°C becomes ever more likely, with severe consequences for people and ecosystems,” one expert said.
Despite new national policies submitted ahead of the United Nations COP30 climate conference in Belém, Brazil, the world remains on track for a disastrous 2.6°C of fossil fuel-driven warming, according to an annual analysis released on Thursday.
Climate Action Tracker (CAT) said the 2025 report marked the fourth year in a row in which there had been “little to no measurable progress” in its warming predictions for 2100 based on the current policies and commitments of 40 countries.
“The world is running out of time to avoid a dangerous overshoot of the 1.5°C limit,” Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare said in a statement. “Delayed action has already led to higher cumulative emissions, and new evidence suggests the climate system may be more sensitive than previously thought. Without rapid, deep emissions cuts—over 50% by 2030—overshooting 1.5°C becomes ever more likely, with severe consequences for people and ecosystems.”
Under the Paris Agreement, countries are required to submit nationally determined contributions (NDCs) every five years outlining their plans to slash greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. However, CAT found that nearly none of the 40 countries it analyzed had updated their 2030 NDCs or announced sufficiently ambitious 2035 NDCs ahead of COP30, which began on Monday. This means that the projected warming based on 2030 and 2035 targets remained at 2.6°C above preindustrial levels.
“We have said it before, and we will keep saying it: We are running out of time.”
“A world at 2.6°C means global disaster,” Hare toldThe Guardian, adding that it would likely trigger key tipping points such as the death of coral reefs, the transformation of the Amazon rainforest into grassland, the destabilizing of ice sheets, and the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
“That all means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humidity,” Hare explained. “This is not a good place to be. You want to stay away from that.”
CAT also made temperature projections based on existing policies and actions; pledges and targets, including binding long-term targets; and an optimistic scenario including net-zero targets. In 2025, the temperature projection for existing policies dropped from 2.7°C to 2.6°C, mostly due to a change in methodology, and the “optimistic scenario” remained the same at 1.9°C. However, the “pledges and targets” projection increased from 2.1°C to 2.2°C, predominately due to President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.
Other major carbon polluters China and the European Union did not update their plans with the ambition required to meet the Paris goals.
— ClimateActionTracker @catclimate.bsky.social (@climateactiontr) November 13, 2025
The analysis comes a week after the UN Environment Programme released its Emissions Gap Report, which found that NDCs put the world on track for 2.3-2.5°C of warming, while current policies put it on track for 2.8°C.
Overall, CAT blamed the lack of progress on the continued growth of fossil fuel production and use. It noted that several major countries had continued to expand fossil fuels, from India, China, and Indonesia building more coal plants to Japan and Saudi Arabia championing gas as a “bridge fuel.”
“Worst of all,” the report authors wrote, “the United States is actively shutting down offshore wind projects, rolling back renewable energy incentives, cutting curbs on carbon pollution, and actively expanding oil and gas production.”
However, despite their grim projections, CAT did see hope in the massive rollout of renewable energy, which generated more power than coal for the first time in 2025.
“While not at the pace needed, our analysis shows that the Paris Agreement works,” said Niklas Höhne, of CAT partner the NewClimate Institute, in a statement.
Höhne continued:
Back in 2015, our current policies scenario led to 3.6°C of warming by 2100. Today, 10 years later, our latest projections show that this has been reduced by roughly 1°C to around 2.6°C. The Paris Agreement has rewritten the rules of global climate action—sparking investment, innovation, and reforms that would simply not have happened without it.
But governments need to speed up the pace now. Although emissions have risen, the exponential pace of the renewable energy expansion allows us to now reduce emissions much faster than previously thought. Governments can strengthen or overachieve 2030 targets, implement robust policies, and ensure transparency and accountability to deliver on the Paris Agreement promise and safeguard a sustainable future.
The faster governments act, the faster they can close the “targets gap” between current emissions and how far they have to fall to keep the 1.5°C goal within reach. This gap is expected to grown by as many as 2 billion metric tons between 2030 and 2035 alone.
The longer we wait, the larger the "targets gap": from 2030 to 2035, the gap between climate targets and the pathways to 1.5°C is projected to grow up to two billion tonnes, up from 26-29 GtCO2e in 2030, to 26-31 GtCO2e by 2035. pic.twitter.com/ityn6p9wOC
— ClimateActionTracker @catclimate.bsky.social (@climateactiontr) November 13, 2025
CAT said that current research indicates that implementing the most ambitious policies could limit peak warming to 1.7°C. This could be achieved by reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions before 2050, reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the 2060s, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Under this scenario, global temperatures would return to below 1.5°C by the end of the century.
“We have said it before, and we will keep saying it: We are running out of time,” said report lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga.
“Every new fossil gas deal the EU makes, every new coal plant built in China, every fossil gas expansion project in Australia, every exported barrel from Norway, every tonne of LNG Japan pushes into neighboring Asian countries, costs billions to people elsewhere in the world as they deal with increasingly extreme weather events,” Gonzales-Zuñiga continued. “These are not abstract policy choices—they are physical realities with human consequences. The atmosphere does not negotiate, and it does not wait.”
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
A view of Consumers Energy’s J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Mich. Credit: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Midwestern electricity ratepayers will pay the still-mounting tab under a plan Consumers Energy reported to regulators and investors.
The Trump administration’s emergency order to keep the huge J.H. Campbell coal plant on Lake Michigan operating past its planned retirement date has cost at least $80 million since May, its operator, Consumers Energy, told regulators and investors this week.
The company said in its third-quarter earnings report Thursday that it would pursue the process laid out in the U.S. Department of Energy’s order for collecting those costs: It will seek payment from ratepayers across the Midwest.
Even though the peak summer electricity demand season has passed, executives at Consumers, Michigan’s largest energy provider, said that they see no sign of let-up in the emergency orders.
“We expect those to continue for the long-term,” said CEO Garrick Rochow in a conference call for investors. “And we’re prepared to continue to operate the plant and comply with those orders.”
He said the costs—$615,385 per day—should be shared beyond the 1.9 million electricity customers of Consumers Energy. The company plans to propose the tab be split among ratepayers (an estimated 42 million to 45 million electricity customers) in the nine states served by the regional electric grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO).
“The benefits go to MISO,” Rochow said. “Not just to our customers, they go to MISO.”
Rochow said the Trump administration envisioned this approach. “That order from the Department of Energy has laid out a clear path to cost recovery,” he said. Consumers Energy will have to apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in order to pass the costs to the ratepayers, and states that oppose such a cost allocation could move to intervene in those proceedings.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued two consecutive 90-day orders—on May 23 and on Aug. 20—to keep the Campbell plant open under the emergency provisions of the Federal Power Act. In the past, such orders have been used to ensure energy delivery at times of natural disasters. But Wright used the act to execute Trump’s agenda to ramp up energy production, saying Campbell needed to stay open to minimize the risk of power outages and address critical grid security issues in the Midwest.
The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Campbell cost figures, nor did MISO. When he extended the Campbell order in August, Wright said that he was directing MISO “to take every step to minimize cost to the American people.”
“This order will help ensure millions of Americans can continue to access affordable, reliable, and secure baseload power,” he said in that statement.
But critics say the operation of the 63-year-old plant is generating unnecessary costs as well as pollution. In a September regulatory filing challenging the DOE’s order, a coalition of environmental groups pointed out that even on the day of highest peak demand this summer, MISO had an unused surplus of resources greater than 10 times the power provided by the Campbell plant.
And indeed, according to recent Environmental Protection Agency data, two of the three units at the Campbell plant were not operating at all for about 30 days of the 131 days from the start of the DOE order through Sept. 30. The third unit at the plant only ran for 18 days. Such stoppages could occur for maintenance or simply because the grid operator did not call on the plant to deliver energy to the grid.
“Forcing this unnecessary coal plant to keep operating is bilking consumers for the benefit of the coal industry,” said Michael Lenoff, senior attorney for Earthjustice, which is representing the environmental groups.
Because DOE did not respond to their petition for reconsideration of the Campbell order within 30 days, the environmental groups and the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois have asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case. The purpose of the litigation, Lenoff said, is “to stop the administration from harming consumers, trampling markets and unlawfully usurping the authority of states and regulators to make decisions in the public interest.”
Campbell is by far the largest of three fossil fuel electricity plants that are staying open beyond their planned retirements under Trump administration emergency orders. Campbell released 6.6 million metric tons of carbon in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. Talen Energy’s Wagner plant near Baltimore and Constellation Energy’s Eddystone plant just south of Philadelphia, both run on oil and natural gas. Some detail on their costs for keeping open may emerge next week, when Talen and Constellation report their third-quarter earnings.
Consumers Energy, which is continuing to work toward its previously stated goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, had projected that the retirement of the Campbell plant would save its customers $600 million over the next 20 years, or $30 million per year. Instead, running the plant for the past five months has cost close to three times that annual amount.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Zarah Sultana at the supporters’ event in County Durham. Photo: Neil Terry Photography
People attending the People’s Assembly Against Austerity protest in central London, June 7, 2025
