Mobilization for Climate Justice Open Letter to the Grassroots

Help Organize for Urgent Action on Climate Change

The Mobilization for Climate Justice is a North America-based network of organizations and activists who have joined together to build a North American climate justice movement that emphasizes non-violent direct action, public education and community organizing to mobilize for effective and just solutions to the climate crisis.

The Mobilization for Climate Justice invites communities, organizations and activists across North America to join us in organizing mass action on climate change on November 30, 2009 (N30). N30 is significant because it both immediately precedes the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15) and is the ten-year anniversary of the successful shut down of the WTO in Seattle, when activists worldwide came together to demonstrate the power of collective action.

The Copenhagen climate meetings will be a major focus for international mass actions this November and December, and the MCJ is linked to these efforts as well.

Urgent action is needed around the Copenhagen climate talks because this is where governments around the world plan to finalize the international climate regime that will take effect when the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement expires in 2012.  So far it appears that the new climate agreement will be nothing more than business as usual—sacrificing real action on climate change in favor of market-based approaches that enhance corporate profits, while delaying urgent measures to forestall catastrophic global heating.

A Radical Change in Direction is Urgently Needed

The MCJ invites you to inspire and organize a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations.

Market-based approaches to climate change dominate the UN climate talks.  Carbon-trading and carbon offset projects have allowed polluters to avoid cutting emissions and accelerated the corporate take-over of the natural world at the expense of local and Indigenous communities. Those most immediately threatened by climate change and its false solutions – Indigenous Peoples, people of color, women, peasant and family farmers, fisherfolk, forest dependent communities, youth, and marginalized communities have been systematically excluded from the negotiations.

The climate crisis is directly linked to the financial crisis, the food crisis and the extinction crisis, to displacement and migration, and to militarism and war. They are rooted in an economic system dedicated to economic growth at any cost.  We are uniting to challenge this system that puts profits over people or the earth.  Urgent action to solve the climate crisis must include a complete transformation away from the dominant economic model of incessant and unsustainable growth, oppression and injustice.

We must highlight real, effective and just solutions to climate change

Join us in promoting solutions to climate change that are locally controlled, decentralized, bioregionally appropriate and socially just.  Thousands of these solutions already exist and need to be promoted and supported with public funds.

Help ensure that large-scale, destructive corporate-controlled false solutions to climate change are eliminated. This includes so-called “clean coal,” agrofuels (industrial scale biofuels), nuclear power, and large-scale hydropower.  It also includes REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)—the UN and World Bank initiative that offers incentives for countries to sell off their forests, expel Indigenous and peasant communities, and transform biodiverse and carbon-rich forests into industrial timber plantations.

Some key solutions to climate change include:

• Drastically reducing emissions without resorting to carbon trading and offsetting or other false solutions such as nuclear energy, agrofuels, or “clean coal;”
• Protecting the rights of those affected by the transition, such as workers, displaced peoples, and agriculture-based communities;
• Keeping fossil fuels in the ground;
• Re-localization of production and consumption, prioritizing local markets and cooperative economies;
• Decentralized utility systems and community controlled clean renewable energy;
• Rights based resource conservation that enforces indigenous land rights and ends corporate control over energy, forests, seeds, land and water;
• Ending deforestation and its underlying causes, imposing international sanctions and wood tariffs, coupled with a massive forest restoration effort, managed primarily by indigenous forest-dwelling peoples;
• Ending excessive consumption in the North and by elites in the South;
• Repayment of ecological debts owed by northern governments and resource extracting corporations to peoples in the Global South;
• Protecting and restoring the commons.

The goals of the Mobilization for Climate Justice are:

1) To build a global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to avoid catastrophic climate change, and which addresses the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward a total systemic transformation of our society.

2) To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and other affected peoples, (including workers in energy-intensive industries) in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

3) To expose the consequences of false and market-based climate “solutions” as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations, while advancing alternatives that can provide real and just solutions, as well as protecting biodiversity and recognizing its key role in weathering the climate crisis.

Join Us in Taking Action!

Please join us in our national effort to organize educational events and non-violent direct actions at key locations in the U.S. throughout the fall of 2009 and culminating on November 30, 2009.  We welcome the active involvement of organizations that are united with us in our goals above, in our opposition to market-based false solutions to climate change, and in support of real, effective and just solutions to climate change.

The Mobilization for Climate Justice affirms the power and necessity of nonviolent direct action in building movements for social change.  Not every person or group is required to partake in civil disobedience actions, but the MCJ recognizes that direct action, when employed strategically, is one very important tool in the toolbox.

History of the Mobilization for Climate Justice:

Representatives from organizations that would later found the MCJ attended the founding meeting of the international grassroots network Climate Justice Action in Copenhagen, Denmark in September 2008.  Climate Justice Action was formed to mobilize actions around the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen and beyond.  Its founding meeting was attended by more than 100 activists from 22 countries.  One of the mandates that emerged from this meeting was for participants to go back to their countries and organize actions to occur in solidarity with the actions in Copenhagen.

Following this meeting, activists from Global Justice Ecology Project, who had attended the CJA meeting in Copenhagen, met and strategized with members of Indigenous Environmental Network and Rising Tide North America about creating an alliance for climate justice in the United States.  The name Mobilization for Climate Justice was chosen, and meetings to discuss the nature of the alliance were held on both coasts with several other community organizing, base-building, and action oriented groups over the fall of 2008.  Since that time, the MCJ the MCJ has been slowly growing and developing with regular conference calls.

Why create another network?  While there are many groups working on climate issues in the US, few of these are truly working on climate justice, looking at climate through a justice lense and challenging the systemic root causes of climate change.  Big NGOs are mobilizing people and resources behind vague calls for “bold climate action” without really spelling out what this means or fostering a dialogue about what victory looks like, who is most affected, and who should have a seat at the decision-making table.  In this context, demands are being watered down, deals are being made, and a host of profitable new false solutions are being ushered in, most of which will only exacerbate the ecological, social and climate crises.

The MCJ was founded to draw a line in the sand and be clear about what we’re for and what we’re against when we talk about “climate justice.”  Quick fixes, green consumerism, carbon trading and other false solutions will not save us.  We urgently need a grassroots movement that is led by frontline communities, grassroots organizations, and the people who are most affected by climate change and its root causes.  We also need to take action.  The MCJ is a gathering place to bring together grassroots base-building and community organizing groups (who have been doing climate justice work for a long time) with others who are working for climate justice, confronting the false solutions, and taking direct action against the root causes of climate change.

Join us!