Well, you’d be wrong of course. A few years ago, RBS launched a self-branding scheme as ‘The Oil and Gas Bank’. Some bright spark in marketing pointed out that this was probably a social faux-pas among the millions of people concerned about climate change, resource wars and the middle eastern situation, so it got moved to the side. But that phrase does reflect the reality of the bank. In the first 6 months after the bail out, RBS was still the biggest financier of fossil fuel industries in the UK.

When it comes to climate change, there’s been a lot of bullshit from both sides. In the run up to Copenhagen, there was the awful UEA affair (for which the Press Complaints Commission is finally getting some grovelling apologies), and the rise of the somewhat senseless idea that ‘now the recession’s here, no one cares about climate change’, which would make sense if it weren’t for the shared causes of both crises.

But from the other side, those purporting to be concerned about climate change, there’s also been a wave of crap. Tck Tck Tck, the online campaign spearheaded by internet-savvy videos and texts, failed to move people into action, but also failed to say anything interesting.

The UN Summit was a trade agreement, just like WTO or G20, and so was filled with the usual imperialist bullying from the ‘big powers’, all under the auspices of benefitting the little guy. Instead of ‘trickle down economics’ however, the white-wash (or green-wash, as it’s come to be known) was ‘Solving Climate Change’. But all three mechanisms (CDM, REDD & Carbon trading) that the UN has in its solution-bag do the same thing: transfer capital from poor states to rich states, and increase the control of the Global North by covering up their carbon emissions.

So it’s not really surprising that RBS continues to finance fossil fuels, or that the UN agreements will fail to do anything about emission levels, or that the petitions of NGOs have been pretty much ignored. And the crimes of RBS’s capital just keep going. This week Cairn Energy is seeking money from Vedanta, using profits gained from the exploitation of aluminium on India in order to finance exploration in offshore arctic greenland. Oh look: both Vedanta and Cairn Energy are already majorly financed by? RBS. In fact, the most destructive, fastest expanding and quite simply most gigantic fossil fuel project in the world – the Canadian Tar Sands - is financed by? RBS.

So it turns out, this is what gets people turned on. Despite all the spleen vented about the banks (and the bankers), there’ve been no poll-tax style protests. The G20 protest was precisely that: a G20 protest. An RBS branch window was smashed in (and a 2 year sentence handed out for it) but the protest itself was at a symbolic centre of finance, and not even directly against the Bank of England. While I like the idea of going to ‘the belly of the beast’, there wasn’t exactly a demand to lower interest rates.

The Climate Camp in Edinburgh isn’t going to change the world – in fact, on its own it won’t change RBS for more than a few days, though it might disrupt it a fair bit. But in 2007, when the Climate Camp at Heathrow set up, people didn’t really think the 3rd runway would be scrapped. In 2008, when we set up near Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, we were planning for a rolling blockade: we didn’t actually think the whole project would be shelved under pressure about the needlessness of new coal.

And in 2010, how many people think we’ll actually change RBS, the banking sector, or the system as a whole? Very few. But we should start to think about what it would mean to win. I doubt that many Bolivian protesters thought that when they started demonstrating against the privatisation of their water by Bechtel, that they would actually throw the company out of the country and elect a new government on that basis. Not exactly my hopes and dreams, but it would be a start.

The Camp is from Thursday August 19th, over the weekend, and the big day of action against RBS (starting with the global HQ) is on Monday 23rd. The exact location of the site itself is still a secret (really, I don’t know where it is), but it’ll be in or very near to Edinburgh. If you can spare the time and train fare, I’ll see you there. And for those who can’t make it, I’ll try and post some stuff up here, but otherwise check out the constantly updated climate camp website, where there’ll be videos and photos posted as the camp progresses.

Climate change, responsible for the melting of the Andean glaciers, threatens the lives of millions in Latin America’s poorest country.

Sitting atop a barren mountain in Bolivia is a chunk of ice. It might be hard to imagine, on first inspection, that there is anything special about it. Ice is ice, after all; cold, hard and white. But this is all that remains of the 18,000 year old Chacaltaya glacier that disappeared last year. Once the world’s highest ski run, 5,300m (17,400 ft) above sea level, Chacaltaya is now a bare peak. Edson Ramirez, a hydrologist at San Andres University in La Paz, mourns the glacier like a dead friend. “It really hurts,” he tells the BBC’s James Painter. “We have had the privilege of seeing their [the glaciers’] beauty. The next generations will not.” Chacaltaya was around before the first humans crossed the Bering land bridge to the Americas. It has seen civilisation emerge and gods die; empires rose and fell around it; the conquistadors came, independence was won and wars were lost. But as 18,000 years of history finally come to a close, a much more serious problem is only just being realised.

It is from glaciers that, according to the World Bank, as many as 80 million people in Bolivia and its neighbouring countries, draw their water. Whilst Chacaltaya’s untimely demise is a tragedy for Club Andino who, in days of past glory, would organise skiing competitions on the slopes of this tourist magnet, it is only a symbol of a much greater tragedy in the making. Common to the major urban hubs of developing countries, El Alto, a vast suburb of La Paz, is experiencing the population boom of rural-urban migration. Last year marked an alarming turning point for Bolivia. With annual growth estimated by a Family Health International report to be at 9%, and with the glaciers of the great white-tipped mountain Illimani that supply the burgeoning population with fresh water fast melting, Ramirez gloomily predicts that from now on “demand for water will be progressively greater than supply.”

Elena, a resident of El Alto, sings hip hop to raise awareness about climate change and the right to water. Never having performed before, she admits that she was always too frightened to stand up in public. In the end it was fear that made her join Fundación Solón’s campaign to highlight Bolivia’s endangered water resources. The Andean glaciers – from which over two million people in La Paz and El Alto draw a third of their water – have shrunk by more than 30% since the 1960s, a 2007 Christian Aid report found, and the rate of retreat is accelerating. Until recently, scientists tracing Chacaltaya’s rapid decline gave it six more years of life. Its surprise disappearance last year signals the urgency of the growing crisis.

Fundación Solón – uniting performers like Elena with musicians, artists and campaigners – was instrumental in convincing the government of Evo Morales, brought to power on the aspirations of a people weary of decades of neoliberalism, to renationalise Bolivia’s water supplies. The move made affordable water available to the population of Latin America’s poorest country. “We have played our part in this process of change,” says Elysabeth Peredo, director of Fundación Solón, “just like all the people in the country.” Bolivia’s impending ecological and humanitarian crisis, however, goes far beyond Fundación Solón’s, or even its government’s, ability to influence.

“We are not culpable for climate change,” argues Oscar Paz, director of Bolivia’s National Climate Change Program, in an interview with Carolyn Kormann for Yale Environment 360. Bolivia accounts for just 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And where the United States, according to data collected in 2007 for the United Nations, is responsible for 22.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than four times the emissions of all the countries of Latin America combined, it is easy to see why Bolivians, first in the firing line of the devastating effects of climate change, are angry.

For Paz, it is a grave injustice that the world’s poorest countries, disproportionately affected by global warming, should foot the bill adapting to a crisis not of their making. “The grand question here is, who compensates,” he says. “It’s not fair that a country like Bolivia already has annual economic losses from the impacts of climate change equivalent to four percent of our GDP.” Bolivia’s current expenditure, almost $0.5bn, has been channelled into handling the aftermath of two years of devastating Amazon floods, worsened by rapid glacial melt, that have left hundreds of thousands homeless. But with Ramirez predicting the complete disappearance of the glaciers as early as 2025, the costs will soar as the government struggles to build the dams and reservoirs needed to supply safe water whilst adapting to the loss of ten hydroelectric plants that provide a quarter of the country’s electricity.

The argument has been won, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Last July, the G8, meeting at the site of another disaster, pledged twelve years too late to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C. If kept, the agreement to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is an historic one. The dismal performance and lukewarm commitments coming out of Copenhagen, however, make that seem increasingly unlikely. And whilst a general consensus has emerged amongst scientists and world leaders that human activity – primarily the burning of fossil fuels for power and transportation – is responsible for climate change, it may already be too late to save the Andean glaciers from going the way of Chacaltaya. “This is a process that now unfortunately is irreversible,” says Ramirez.

Fundación Solón has campaigned tirelessly for safe water access to be recognised as a human right. But it is no longer rights that are at issue, it is responsibilities. The 10:10 campaign, launched by the director of The Age of Stupid, urging everyone to cut their carbon footprints by 10% this year, is a vital first step for Britain. But if the people of the developed world, and those of rapidly developing countries such as China and India, cannot achieve the significant lowering of lifestyle expectations and the implementation of green technologies necessary to reduce carbon emissions to sustainable levels, then it is the responsibility of these countries to pay their ecological debt. “The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change,” environmental activist George Monbiot told me.

To the Aymara – who settled the region long before the rise of the Inca Empire and the coming of the Spanish conquistadors – the life-giving glacial peaks are mountain gods. “God is dead,” Nietzsche famously wrote. Urgent foreign assistance can help the Bolivian government prevent whole communities from dying too. But “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

Bolivian president, Evo Morales, and vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, celebrate the election victory in La Paz. Photograph: Jorge Bernal/AFP/Getty Images

Exit polls are confirming predictions that Evo Morales has won a convincing victory over his conservative rival, Manfred Reyes, in Bolivia. Whilst facing staunch opposition amongst wealthier Bolivians living in the gas-rich East, Morales – an Aymara coca farmer and the country’s first indigenous president – has always enjoyed strong support from the poorer Quechua and Aymara people in the highland West. Bolivia, Latin America’s poorest country, has suffered from decades of neo-liberalism and the coca eradication programmes carried out by previous governments on behalf of the US. However, with the continent’s second largest reserves of natural gas, the country has the tools to lift itself from destitution. Morales’s wildly popular decision to ‘nationalise’ the gas (in reality Bolivia’s gas reserves have always belonged to the state, foreign corporations were just paying a marginal amount to extract it) has helped GDP leap from $9bn to $19bn since he came to power in 2005, whilst his social programmes have helped raise the quality of life for the poorest sections of society.

For all those in the West who say socialism is dead, that it was tried and failed and no longer matters to anyone in a society where everyone is middle class – look at Latin America. This is where socialism matters. This where it is genuinely making a difference to people’s lives. This – and in all the deeply impoverished countries of the world, held back as the centuries of colonialism that have raped their resources have turned to newer, more insidious forms of neo-liberal exploitation – is where socialism is needed.

Twelve years too late, the leaders of the G8 agreed today to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 2C. An ‘acceptable’  temperature rise that will, according to the latest research, destroy half the rainforest. As some of the largest carbon sinks on Earth, after the oceans, the disappearance of the rainforests will make efforts to contain climate change more difficult than ever. The gloomiest of reports predict that the loss of carbon sinks due to rising temperatures will create a runaway greenhouse effect.

Even without a 2C rise in temperatures, over 13,000 sq km of sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula have been lost over the last 50 years, leading to rising sea levels that are already adversely affecting communities in low lying parts of the world. And whilst disappearing ice means too much water in Bangladesh, in Bolivia, where millions of people source their drinking water from Andean glaciers, it means not enough. This year saw the disappearance of the Chacaltaya glacier. The last piece of Bolivia’s famous ski resort sits in the freezer of hydrologist Edson Ramirez. For Ramirez, Chacaltaya’s disappearance is a warning of worse things to come as the retreat of the glaciers that supply La Paz and the burgeoning population of El Alto means that from this year onwards “demand for water will be progressively greater than supply.”

The G8′s agreement is, of course, a step forward. But considering the world has spent eight years limping behind George W. Bush, a step forward is not very far. The Obama administration is to be commended for finally bringing America out of the 20th Century so that progress on climate change can be made on a global level. And, if kept, the agreement by G8 nations to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is indeed an historic one. But it is not history we should be looking to. It’s the future. And I can’t help thinking, this is much too little, much too late.

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