This week, as world leaders meet in Durban for the annual international climate change summit, the chances of a legally-binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seems to be receding, writes Elaine Graham-Leigh.

The Kyoto accord, which set decidedly modest targets for first world countries to reduce their emissions, expires in 2012. That at this last minute there is still no treaty to follow Kyoto is the result of the failure of the Copenhagen summit in 2009, and its follow-up in Cancun in 2010 – a failure which we learnt last week was accomplished by the US and European countries bullying representatives of the developing world into accepting the non-deal which was all they wanted to offer. Since Copenhagen clearly meshed with world leaders’ agendas, it should come as no surprise that in the run-up to Durban, the talk behind the scenes was apparently of no deal until at least 2016, and nothing after that to take effect before 2020.

In light of the IEA’s warning this month that we have five years to prevent irreversible, catastrophic climate change, to say that this is at best too little, too late seems something of an understatement. Clearly, government action is not going to provide the solution to climate change. So what else is there?

To some, the failure of the Copenhagen talks demonstrates that the only answer is the market. If governments won’t legislate our way out of climate apocalypse, perhaps corporations can trade our way out. I recently heard Nicholas Stern – the economist whose 2006 report made the case that it would be much cheaper to deal with climate change then than later – extolling the green efforts of Walmart and DuPont as hopeful signs of real action. This was also the argument of a group of climate scientists who met in 2010 at Hartwell to discuss the way forward after Copenhagen. The answer is apparently not a top-down planned shift to a low-carbon world, but a myriad of small-scale actions undertaken because they’re profitable, but which are handily green as well.

However much this is portrayed as locally-empowering citizen initiatives, it’s no sort of solution. The problem first of all is that actions on climate change are therefore limited to those which corporations can see will turn a pretty swift profit. Anything which doesn’t is off the table, regardless of how important it might be. Market mechanisms have also not proved themselves very effective hitherto in reducing emissions: carbon trading might have been a neat idea for speculators to make money, but it hasn’t brought greenhouse gas emissions down.

The idea that companies and the market can deal with climate change is based on the assumption that there are profits to be made in doing so, and the only reason why they haven’t done it already is that they haven’t had greens pointing out the possibilities. This might have been a credible argument years ago, but it’s beginning to creak a little now. It’s the same with the international summits. At the beginning, we might have thought that governments weren’t reaching real deals because they weren’t understanding the seriousness of the problem, but Durban is the 17th climate summit. If they haven’t got it by now, we have to suppose that there is some systemic reason why not.

That we have been talking about climate change for twenty years without managing to reduce emissions demonstrates what some of us have known all along; that the system which has created the problem is ill-suited to solving it. The mechanisms which generate climate change are deeply embedded within capitalism, and to deal with them there is no substitute for taking capitalism head on. We should still point out how disgraceful our leaders’ efforts to avoid a climate change deal are. It means that at the same time, the place for everyone who cares about climate change is in the fight against austerity and cuts, and all out on N30.