Mobilization for Climate Justice

Posts Tagged ‘350’

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Press conference: 1pm CET, Frederiksholms Kanal 4, Copenhagen
Contact: Margaret Matembe, margaret.matembe@enviro-canada.ca, +45-23960186
Coverage: Click here, or click throughout press release for specific links
Videos:
Canadian announcement (hi-res download)
Ugandan response (hi-res download)
Canadian retraction (hi-res download)
Climate debt agents take responsibility (hi-res download)
More dream announcements coming soon! Come make your own or stay tuned at good-cop15.org.

Copenhagen Spoof Shames Canada; Climate Debt No Joke
African, Danish and Canadian youth join the Yes Men to demand climate justice and skewer Canadian climate policy

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – “Canada is ‘red-faced’!” (Globe and Mail) “Copenhagen spoof shames Canada!” (Guardian)

“Hoax slices through Canadian spin on warming!” (The Toronto Star) “A childish prank!” (Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada)

What at first looked like the flip-flop of the century has been revealed as a sophisticated ruse by a coalition of African, North American, and European activists. The purpose: to highlight the most powerful nations’ obstruction of meaningful progress in Copenhagen, to push for just climate debt reparations, and to call out Canada in particular for its terrible climate policy.

The elaborate intercontinental operation was spearheaded by a group of concerned Canadian citizens, the “Climate Debt Agents” fromActionAid, and The Yes Men. It involved the creation of a best-case scenario in which Canadian government representatives unleashed a bold new initiative to curb emissions and spearhead a “Climate Debt Mechanism” for the developing world.

The ruse started at 2:00 PM Monday, when journalists around the world were surprised to receive a press release from “Environment Canada” (enviro-canada.com, a copy of ec.gc.ca) that claimed Canada wasreversing its position on climate change.

In the release, Canada’s Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, waxed lyrical. “Canada is taking the long view on the world economy,” said Prentice. “Nobody benefits from a world in peril. Contributing to the development of other nations and taking full responsibilities for our emissions is simple Canadian good sense.” Read the rest of this entry »

Nasa’s James Hansen was the first to point out the perils of climate change
to the US Congress. Here, he begins a heated debate with experts from around
the world, from China to the threatened Maldives, and argues that our leaders
must be shaken out of their complacency. But will they show enough courage at next
week’s Copenhagen summit to take the first steps to saving the planet?

James Hansen
The Observer,
Sunday 29 November 2009

Absolutely. It is possible – if we give politicians a cold, hard slap in the face.
The fraudulence of the Copenhagen approach – “goals” for emission reductions, “offsets”
that render ironclad goals almost meaningless, the ineffectual “cap-and-trade”
mechanism – must be exposed. We must rebel against such politics as usual.
Read the rest of this entry »

From TomDispatch by Rebecca Solnit

We’ve just passed through a media celebration of the media’s own role in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, hilariously parodied on The Daily Show recently; and yet, to this day, few in our world grasp that, while walls were tumbling in the Soviet Empire two decades ago, they were also cracking in the American one.  Our “wall” finally began to crumble in the seasonally appropriate fall of 2008, when our economic system went over a cliff.  (You can watch a version of this, or at least a measure of the human pain it caused, via these mapped U.S. unemployment figures, month by month, from January 2004 to September 2009, knowing that the latest numbers are worse yet.) 

There were, of course, no celebrations, no cheering crowds, no cries of freedom then, and 20 years from now reporters will probably not be proudly or nostalgically recounting just where they were and what they were doing in that grim season when our “wall” fell.  Still, it is far clearer today that the Cold War, that decades-long nuclear stand-off between two mighty imperial powers and their minions, militaries, and assorted spooks, had no winner, only losers.  The other loser of the Cold War, so much stronger than the Soviet Union, remains, as in Afghanistan, intensely reluctant to leave the superpower stage.  Nonetheless, you only have to note the anxiety in this country over Obama’s “bow” in Japan or the anxious, critical reporting of his trip to China to see the intensity of the conflict here between denial of, and acknowledgement of, a new American reality in the world.

TomDispatch regular and author of the remarkable A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit is both an early warning system for, and a chronicler of, the sort of change that goes astonishingly unnoticed until it suddenly startles everyone.  Looking forward to the 192-nation Copenhagen climate change conference, due to open on December 7^th, where possibilities seem to be receding, even as global warming speeds up, and back at the unexpected upheavals of the last two decades, she offers a typically surprising view of our world and its possibilities.  (Keep in mind, by the way, that while Congress may be dragging its feet on global warming action, the U.S. Navy is already deep into preparations for an “ice-free Arctic” and the conflicts that might arise as soon as ships can float on those increasingly ice-packless waters.)  Tom    

Learning How to Count to 350
Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989
By Rebecca Solnit

Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather.  Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit.  There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first.  Activists — farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers — around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Image: "Aqualta: 5th Avenue & 53rd Street, NYC," by Studio Lindfors; larger]

Fresh hot climate radio:
300-350 show #42 Climate Justice Fast
link
download

Covers the Barcelona COP15 session
and the Climate Justice Fast

read original at Rolling Stone
The only way to stop global warming is for rich nations to pay for the damage they’ve done – or face the consequences

NAOMI KLEIN

One last chance to save the world — for months, that’s how the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, which starts in early December, was being hyped. Officials from 192 countries were finally going to make a deal to keep global temperatures below catastrophic levels. The summit called for “that old comic-book sensibility of uniting in the face of a common danger threatening the Earth,” said Todd Stern, President Obama’s chief envoy on climate issues. “It’s not a meteor or a space invader, but the damage to our planet, to our community, to our children and their children will be just as great.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly two decades after writing a book that popularized the term “global warming,” MoJo contributing writer Bill McKibben founded 350.org. He is chronicling his journey into organizing with a series of columns leading up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen this December. You can find the others here. And you can put yourself on the cover of MoJo‘s special issue on climate change here.

And so the climate show moves on. Last week it was Barcelona.
We’ve been in the out-of-town tryouts phase, everyone trying hard to
get it right before the curtain opens in Copenhagen a month from now.

Or maybe not so hard. Governments, and international negotiators, keep lowering expectations
just as fast as they can. “Of course, we are not going to have a
full-fledged binding treaty-Kyoto type-by Copenhagen,” European
Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said last week. “There is no
time for that.” Of course not-the Copenhagen meeting was only scheduled
five years ago. Added the UN Secretary General, “I am reasonably
optimistic that Copenhagen will be a very important milestone. At the
same time, realistically speaking, we may not be able to have all the
words on detailed matters.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Rising Tide North America, with Carbon Trade Watch and the Camp for Climate Action would like you to join us on the October 24th day of global climate action to spread the word about the biggest financial scam in history – Carbon Trading.

In order to stabilize the climate before billions of people around the world suffer the consequences, it is imperative that carbon-trading schemes are stopped and real, democratically determined solutions are implemented.

www.350Reasons.org

We cannot afford to waste any more valuable time and resources relying on such market-driven strategies to deliver science-based goals (such as 350 ppm of CO2) when so many lives and livelihoods are at stake. If we truly wish to protect people and planet, then we must put climate justice before corporate profits.  However, first and foremost, we need to dispel the misguided notion that carbon trading has anything at all to do with climate change mitigation, or the present and future wellbeing of our communities.

We are proud to announce the launch of www.350reasons.org – a website presenting 350 reasons why carbon trading will not serve to stabilize the climate. A staggering amount of reasons sent in by site visitors was pored over, organized, and consolidated into an upcoming on-site gallery– 35 exemplary ones  are included in the 350 Reasons ‘zine (downloadable below).  Visit 350reasons.org for printable format versions

Online Reading version

Read the rest of this entry »

Little Village Environmental Justice Organization
Climate Justice Chicago
How green is Chicago?