Mobilization for Climate Justice

Posts Tagged ‘europe’

http://counterpunch.org/tokar12232009.html

– Brian Tokar

Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still coming in, but a few things are already quite clear, even as countries step up the blame game in response to the summit’s disappointing conclusion.

First, the 2 1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to “take note” of are completely self-contradictory, and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn’t even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to “take note” of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.
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December 14, COP15 – Activists staged a protest against the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), who today had their Annual General Meeting in the Copenhagen city center.

Monks selling carbon credits

60 Activists from around Europe and abroad brought the message to IETA members: “CO2-traders = Climate criminals”. Three ‘monks’ offered carbon credits as absolution for carbon sins to IETA members going in, and to the public. An IETA businessmen invited one person to go inside and have a ‘dialogue’ with IETA members, which the action group refused.

IETA is the biggest industry lobby group present at the COP15 negotiations, bringing in 486 lobbyists. Their aim is the creation of a global market for greenhouse gas emissions, including the use of highly controversial offsetting projects through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). However, current carbon trading schemes like the ETS have proven not to reduce emissions, but largely generate profits for these companies. Offsetting and the CDM have been severely criticised because it allows rich countries to avoid making emissions cuts at home. There is strong evidence that many CDM projects are creating serious social and environmental problems in developing countries. Read the rest of this entry »

13.12.2009 On Dec. 13, 2009 a few hundred people marched from Triangle in Copenhagen towards the harbour. They were carrying a front-banner saying “Hit the Production” and were shouting “Our Climate – not your business”. From the start police with helmets accompanied the march, lots of policecars followed it. After about half an hour of walking the police suddenly blocked the road. They attacked the music truck and the people on it. After getting them off the truck they took the truck away.

The demonstrators were forced to sit down on the pavement, cuffed up with cable-straps and brought away with busses.

Click Here for Video

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[the below is from Indymedia Denmark: http://indymedia.dk/ ]

Saturday 12th began with the NOAH Flood for Climate Justice Demonstration which started at 10am and marched, danced and waved to Højbro Plads [photo report]. The 12dec Demo started at Christiansborg Slotsplads / Parliament Square [google route map], including a CJA group, and it was soon clear that it was massive, with estimates quickly reaching 100,000 protestors. This was also part of a Global Day of Action on climate change.  People were also meeting at Hojbro Plads in the same area for another action in the city.

Police Make Indiscriminate Mass Arrests

At around 3.15pm the police charged into the march near to where the CJA System Change not Climate Change group had joined the march, as well as people from the Ntac called demonstration. They cut off hundreds of people including many who were marching as part of Libertarian Socialist bloc [Pics 1> 2 | report | video]. By 5pm several hundred had been handcuffed and made to sit on the floor, where they remain in the cold for hours. The police’s press office reports that those arrested today are between 700-900 people – See AerialTwitpic.

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by Jennifer Quinn

LONDON — Thousands of people calling for a deal on climate change at next week’s United Nations conference in Copenhagen marched through central London on Saturday, encircling the Houses of Parliament in a human wave of blue-clad demonstrators.

London’s Metropolitan Police said about 20,000 people joined the Stop Climate Chaos march, which began at Grosvenor Square and wound its way to the Parliament building on the River Thames. Organizers put the turnout at 40,000. “We wanted to make a positive statement,” said retired teacher Pip Cartwright, 72, from Witney southern England. “It’s for the future. It’s not my generation that’s going to have the problem to solve.”

The coalition – which includes groups such as Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the WWF – called the protest “The Wave,” and organizers asked marchers to dress in blue. The march ended with a mass “wave” around Parliament. Thousands more people attended climate protests in Glasgow and Belfast, as well as in European cities including Brussels, Paris and Dublin. “The U.K. government must fight for a comprehensive, fair and binding deal at Copenhagen – that is our demand today and we expect it to be fulfilled,” Oxfam GB chief executive Barbara Stocking said in a statement. “They must return home with a strong, effective climate deal both for our own sakes in the U.K. and for the millions of poor people already suffering from the effects of climate change around the world.”

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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.

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[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.”
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www.climatecaravan.org

****TRADE TO CLIMATE CARAVAN***
Protest and Action around and between
7th WTO in Geneva and COP15 in Copenhagen

Two important summits take place at the end of 2009 in Europe: the 7th conference of ministers of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva and the UN climate summit in Copenhagen (COP15). With a week between them, 60 activists from the global South will travel across Europe through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France and Denmark. They will draw attention to the consequences neoliberal globalization and climate change have on their lives and show how to fight against them. Together with local activists, they look for alternatives to free trade and the privatisation of resources, and unite the North and South in their fights for another world.

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Klimaforum09 is your climate summit, the global civil society counterpart of the official UN conference in the Bella Center.

With ten thousand daily visitors, participants from over 100 countries and a comprehensive programme of events, Klimaforum09 will be the biggest climate event in Copenhagen besides the official UN conference.

The programme features international guest speakers, over 150 open debates, 60 exhibitions, music, film and art.

Klimaforum09 is not an NGO (non-governmental organisation) we have no special causes, interests or agendas.

We are here to represent ordinary concerned citizens from all around the world.

We DON’T represent vested interests such as bureaucratics, politicans, business or civil servants.

We DO represent scientists, grassroots activists, academics, writers, artists and people from all walks of life.
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Friday, November 6 2009-
Climate Justice activists closed the Barcelona plenary climate meetings with a surprise banner reading “End CO2lonialism”; they were greeted with great applause.
after a week of Annex 1 countries continuing to try to kill the Kyoto Protocol, divide the majority world, and refuse to commit to real reductions.

Some of the coverage:
Climate Radio 300-350 Show : must listen show!

Indymedia Ireland: especially coverage of direct actions

Some mainstream coverage:
Al-Jazeera English
UKGuardian

from grist

By Joshua Khan Russel

African negotiators at the U.N. climate talks in Barcelona just refused to continue formal discussions about all other issues until wealthy countries live up to their legal and moral responsibility to commit to deep emissions reductions. Rich countries (also called “Annex 1 countries”) have ground negotiations to a halt by failing to agree their new targets under the Kyoto Protocol (KP), driving developing countries to put their feet down. This walkout is significant and opens up political space – it means many of the countries in Africa just stopped one half of the UN climate
negotiation process until rich countries say how much they will reduce
their carbon.

We’re down to the wire: just four negotiating days left before the big agreement in Copenhagen is supposed to go down.  Its day one, and we saw just a taste of the breakdowns to come. While rich countries continue to undermine commitments for the Kyoto Protocol (one of two negotiating tracks for Copenhagen which is supposed to be renewed for a second commitment period of Annex 1 targets), the spin has already taken hold: they’re blaming Africa for their own delay-mongering. Oy vey.

In response, movement and civil society organizations held a demonstration at the U.N. building in support of African delegates’ insistence that developed countries commit to new, strong binding targets. Delegates and observers were invited to join a human shield against the killing of Kyoto targets (complete with an Annex 1 grim reaper) and instead urged to promote at least 40% emission reductions with no offsets by 2020.

Kamese Geoffrey of NAPE/ Friends of the Earth Uganda warned, “Rich countries are attempting to dodge their legal and moral responsibilities to reduce emissions. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they will be the first to face the devastating impacts of climate change.”

Many of us have longstanding criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, particularly its market mechanisms. But here’s why Kyoto is important:
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article from grist:
by TOM PHILPOTT
What do industrially produced meat and corn-based ethanol have in common?

Well, they both thrive on the assumption that it’s good idea to devote vast swaths of land to an incredibly resource-intensive crop—corn—and then run that crop through an energy-sucking process to create a product of dubious value.

And .. they both got tagged as major drivers of climate change this past week.

Ethanol took the harder blow of the two, I think. It came wrapped in the Oct. 23 issue of Science. In a concise and devastating “policy forum” piece, a team of authors led by University of Minnesota researcher Tim Searchinger fingered a gaping defect in existing European and pending U.S. climate policy: biofuel gets treated as carbon-neutral, ignoring carbon emissions from land-use change. According to the paper ($ub req’d),  the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union’s cap-and-trade law, and the final version of Waxman-Markey (the House climate bill that passed over the summer) all contain the a “far-reaching but fixable flaw”:

[They] does not count CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

Or, as Searchinger put it to a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy.”
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Ratcliffe Coal Action: ‘Massive Success’

October 18, 2009

Climate change activists have hailed this weekend’s direct action as a “massive success” after repeatedly breaching the fence and spending 24 hours outside Ratcliffe coal-fired power station.

Three activists are said to have recovered from injuries suffered at the hands of the police, while one more activist is believed to still be in hospital after collapsing yesterday afternoon. Footage was released last night of a protester-medic aiding a policeman taken ill at the protest (1).

Activists gathered in various points on Saturday morning, swooping on the power plant in separate groups to arrive at 1pm. Within five minutes they had already broken down one of the perimeter fences and several had entered the plant.

On Saturday night around 300 activists pitched tents in two camps outside the gates, despite attempt by police to intimidate campers by standing next to the campsite in full riot gear. The police have confirmed 58 arrests, but there are believed to be more arrestees yet to be booked in. Further action is expected to take place today.

Natasha Blair from the Camp for Climate Action said: ‘We’ve achieved what we came here to do: to show that coal has no future and there is a growing movement which is prepared to take action on climate change.”

This weekend, activists from around the world met in Copenhagen to finalist plans for similar actions during the UN climate talks taking place in December. The Camp for Climate Action has announced that they will be joining other activists in the ‘Push for Climate Justice’, which aims to take over the talks for a day.

Natasha Blair continued: “In the run up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen this December, acts of civil disobedience to confront big business and governments that are causing catastrophic climate change are gaining support.”
Notes

1. Find the full video at: http://blip.tv/play/njSBqIoGAg

Northern Indymedia firsthand article
UK Indy media: great photos
Climate Camp live video coverage and more

commercial news
photos galoorie
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