Opening speech – Ecosocialism Conference 2026

Opening speech by Paris Wilder

Thank you all for coming today, we’re really excited to have you all here. I’m Paris, I’m a member of the Ecosocialist group AntiCapitalist Resistance and the Ecosocialist Action Network, which was launched out of our last conference. We’ve got a great panel of speakers for this first plenary that I will introduce to you shortly but first I’m going to talk a bit about why we think the Ecosocialism Conference is necessary in our current times.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have experienced the record breaking temperatures across the UK over the last week or so. A welcome break from winter was needed but I’m sure for the majority of us in this room, it was a stark reminder of the effects of runaway climate change. Temperatures reached 34 degrees and we haven’t even made it to June. This is not normal, this is the beginning of what experts are predicting as a ‘Super El Nino’ weather event which could be “powerful enough to trigger record-breaking temperatures, devastating floods, droughts and climate disruption across the globe” – their words, not mine. 

Since our conference in 2024, we’ve already seen a global temperature of 1.48 degrees, just 0.2 degrees away from the 1.5 limit that has been put forward by climate scientists – anything beyond this will cause serious climate disruption. Extreme weather events have intensified with severe storms and wildfires globally and in the UK, the arctic sea ice hit its lowest recorded thickness level since monitoring began in 1974 leading to emperor penguins now being on the endangered species list, and we crossed the 7th of the 9 planetary boundaries, Ocean acidification. And this is just a tiny snippet of the many changes that have happened in the last 18 months to our planet.

In addition to the changes to the climate, we must also acknowledge the political climate that we’re living in. Reform UK and other far right parties and actors, have been gathering popularity, primed for a 2028 government unless we fight back now. These are parties that are not just politically but ideologically opposed to climate action and policy, considering it efficient or at worst, a complete hoax. Just this week, we saw former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair come out of retirement to suggest the current Labour government throw out all net zero targets and exploit its remaining oil and gas reserves. The years of progressive policy being popular are out, we have entered an era defined by a kind of ‘zen fascism’; a radical acceptance that we’ve ruined it so badly that we might as well continue to make it worse and live the brief remainder of our lives without the hassle.

And it’s with this that we get to the heart of why we have organised a third Ecosocialism conference and why we want this one to be different. Tony Blair’s comments aren’t just damaging, they are incorrect. To suggest that we should stop net zero targets, as if we’ve made any meaningful progress with them, is laughable. We have done nothing but continue to exploit our oil and gas reserves even when we are told time and time again to keep fossil fuels in the ground. And until this last weekend, it hasn’t been our problem. In the Global North, we’ve had the luxury of being able to ignore most of the detrimental effects of the climate crisis but this is not the case for those in the global south. They are suffering now because of our reckless consumption and obscene tech billionaires. In fact, the original 1.5 figure was changed by groups like the Alliance of Small Islands who argued that 2 degrees in rising temperatures would threaten their entire existence. But whilst it’s important to mention the detrimental effects of the Global North on the Global South, it is in fact the Global South who have been leading the fight for radical climate policy. Columbia has put in place a binding commitment to eliminating emissions, as well as a program of adaptation reducing the socio-economic risk. We must follow their lead.

When we talk about climate action that works, we have to make the connection between the climate and our everyday lives. Too often we are willing to separate the two, we don’t see that those who pollute our planet the most are also causing extreme inequality through tax breaks. 

We must make the connection between our current economic system of capitalism, and the harm it is doing to our planet. 

The planet is our home. Without it, there can be no society and definitely no socialism. Further than that, we have to examine, as a collective, whether we can ever have a thriving planet under capitalism. We live on a planet with finite resources. A capitalist system functions on growth alone at any cost. But it is not the growth of knowledge, love, community or the incredible ecosystems and species that we share our planet with. It is concerned only with the growth of profit for the ultra rich, the tech billionaires pushing massively destructive, and inherently exploitive, technologies like AI. They do this at the expense of human life and the planet itself.

The reality of the climate crisis is a hard one to swallow. It is easy to become apathetic, try to ignore what’s happening to avoid having to reckon with the sort of inhabitable wasteland that awaits us in the future if we don’t do something now. That’s why it’s so important that we promote and envision an ecosocialist future. We want to channel hope into action. We want to fight for and build the future we all deserve. One where the planet, and the humans and wildlife on it, can flourish. We sit in this room today to think differently about the climate crisis, to see it as a call to action. A call to not only fix our planet, but fight for the things we need in life to be happy because we can’t have one without the other. 

We must create a broad mass movement and push for revolutionary demands outside of the limitations of capitalist society. We make the core point today that without a change to the capitalist system that relies on exploitation, ecological collapse is inevitable. So we hope that you enjoy the day and take advantage of the different sessions, conversations, workshops and network opportunities happening, to take climate action further and make it happen. Because change needs to come from the bottom up. If we want it to change, we need to make it happen ourselves in our communities, unions, workplaces, housing associations etc. We cannot put our faith in has-been, warmongering politicians with other political motives. 

And that leads me on to our first panel. To create a broad movement, we must use the avenues we have at our disposal including the electoral, ecosocialist left.