In recent weeks The Economist has run two major features on climate change. The first was a puff piece for all the barmy techno fixes like throwing sulphuric acid into the atmosphere. The second was even worse. It set out a coherent manifesto for doing nothing to stop human created climate change.

The starting point for the argument is that the talks in Cancun on climate change will achieve nothing. From there it goes on to conclude that it’s pretty much too late now to reverse the trend of global warming, no one is interesting in doing anything serious so let’s learn to live with it through adaptation.

The paper estimates that the planet will be 3°C warmer towards the end of this century than the pre-industrial norm and is realistic about the impact on weather systems. It acknowledges that this change is already starting to impact on human populations.

"On land, wet places, such as much of South-East Asia, are likely to get wetter, and dry places, such as much of southern Africa and the south-western United States, drier. In northern climes some land will become more suitable for farming as springs come sooner, whereas in the tropics and subtropics some marginal land will become barely inhabitable. These places may be large sources of migration. Such effects are already visible in, for example, the large part of the population of Côte d’Ivoire who come from Burkina Faso."

It even asserts that the poorer you are the worse off you will be.

"Poor countries will often lack the financial means, technical expertise or political institutions… Yet they are often at increased risk, principally because they are usually more dependent on farming than rich countries, and no other human activity is so intimately bound up with the weather. Crops are sensitive to changes in patterns of rainfall and peak temperature, as well as to average temperature and precipitation; so are the pests and diseases that attack them.”

After 20 years of discussion the rulers of the world have not had any measurable impact on climate change and The Economist is confident that they won’t. Even to meet the target of limiting the temperature rise to two degrees it would require carbon emission reductions of twice the current rate for the next ten years rising to four times the current rate in the subsequent decade.

Given this failure the adaptationists are now taking centre stage. They work out ways to live with less water, higher sea levels and higher temperatures. Harm reduction you might call it. Even the famously free market Economist is obliged to admit:

“Adaptation will require redistribution, too. Some people and communities are too poor to adapt on their own; and if emissions caused by the consumption of the rich imposes adaptation costs on the poor, justice demands recompense.”

Redistribution on anything like the scale that’s necessary is not something that individual ruling classes or the big financial institutions are going to be happy with. Appealing to their sense of fairness is about as useful as counting on Bono to sort everything out.

One of the things that happened at the Coalition of Resistance conference on Saturday was that people began setting out their ideas for how we need to offer our answers to capitalism’s financial mess. A programme, if you like. One or two of us even suggested that the environment, sustainability and climate change had to be as much a part of this as anti-racism. If your instinct is “bollocks to adaptation, let’s stop climate change” come along to Saturday’s demo.

March on Parliament for a Zero Carbon Britain

12 noon: Assemble at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park.