Posts Tagged ‘UNFCCC’

Published on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

The People Speak on Climate Change

by Karyn Strickler

“If it was easy, they wouldn’t call it a ‘struggle.’” –Rising Tide North America

A mighty, sleeping, giant rose with the sun in the east yesterday and the swell of resistance thundered westward across North America.  The Mobilization for Climate Justice called for urgent action on the global climate crisis.  Organizers contemplated the protests in Seattle a decade ago, that shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) and looked ahead to Copenhagen, where the world will go to set international standards for reversing climate change.

Ananda Lee Tan, who helped organize the WTO protests and today’s Mobilization said in an interview with Democracy Now, “I think we’re at a place where once again we’re faced with turning out massive numbers of people on the streets to challenge the corporate interference with international climate policy talks, but also here in the U.S.”

Activists launched non-violent fasts, die-ins and blockades in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Ontario.  Bold climate activists in Greenville, SC chained themselves to the Cliffside Coal Plant Power Generator; in Washington, DC, they blocked K Street, where the corporate lobbyists roost; in Chicago, IL, they were arrested by the dozen in the financial district; they held a die-in in Denver; and in San Francisco, CA 200 activists took control of the Bank of America headquarters on Market Street, locking themselves to the revolving doors prior to being arrested. Read the rest of this entry »

Wanna watch the whole thing, click HERE!

What is The Story of Cap & Trade?

The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the “devils in the details” in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what’s really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you’ve heard about cap and trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

November 30, 2009 (Whitby, Ontario) — The third of a series of peaceful sit-ins staged by a coalition of concerned individuals who are targeting elected officials, tar sands financiers, and the coal and tar sands industries began at Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s office today, located at: 701 Rossland Road East- Unit 204, Whitby. Seven people entered the office just after 9:30 refusing to leave, demanding that the federal government act to combat the climate crisis and stem the millions of deaths and displacements that will result from more inaction.

“While our government delays millions of people will die or become displaced due to the climate crisis. If they fail to reach an agreement the Canadian government is saying it does not care about the lives of those currently and most affected by climate change,” said Greenpeace Climate and Energy Coordinator, Dave Martin from inside the office, “Minister Flaherty must put pressure on the Government to act and push for a just, ambitious, and binding deal in Copenhagen with science based targets, that is led by the voices of those who are most directly impacted by the climate crisis.”
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Mobilization for Climate Justice

For immediate release November 30, 2009

Global Day of Action on Climate Crisis on November 30

On November 30, major demonstrations, teach-ins and civil disobedience actions will take place in nine cities around the U.S.—in Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Burlington, VT and two cities in Maine, and Washington DC, as well as several other countries—one week before the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen open, and on the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protest in Seattle in 1999. The Mobilization for Climate Justice, a broad and diverse coalition of organizations working for social, environmental, economic and racial justice is calling for urgent action on the global climate crisis, based on equitable, democratic and science-based solutions.

As world leaders gather in Copenhagen, the people hit hardest by this crisis and the least responsible for its cause—working class, Indigenous and people of color communities around the world—have been systematically excluded and are demanding a voice at the table. Meanwhile, the world’s major corporations have been dominating international and domestic climate policy – as they did in the international trade policy arena. Carbon-trading and carbon offset projects have already allowed these polluters to avoid cutting emissions and expand their markets into poor countries, accelerating corporate take-over of the world’s resources at the expense of local and Indigenous communities.
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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.
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Published on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by The New Internationalist

A new realism has emerged. Climate change is no longer rejected as a bogus theory the economy can ill afford. Instead, it’s a business opportunity

by Oscar Reyes

Sign the Petition Here

By Patrick Bond

23 October 2009

The decade since the Seattle World Trade Organisation (WTO) fiasco taught civil society activists and African leaders two powerful lessons. First, working together, they have the power to disrupt a system of global governance that meets the Global North’s short-term interests against both the Global South and the longer-term interests of the world’s people and the planet.

Second, in the very act of disrupting global malgovernance, major concessions can be won.

The spectacular November 30 street protest against the WTO summit’s opening ceremony is what most of us recall about Seattle: activists ‘locking down’ to prevent entrance to the conference centre, a barrage of tear gas and pepper spray, a sea of broken windows and a municipal police force later prosecuted for violating US citizens’ most basic civil liberties.

That was outside. Inside the convention centre, negotiations belatedly got underway, and African leaders quickly grew worried that further trade liberalisation would damage their tiny industrial sectors.

The damage was well recognized – an OECD study found Africa to be the continent that would suffer the worst net losses from corporate-dominated free trade. The US trade representative, Charlene Barchefsky, repeatedly insulted African elites who raised this point.
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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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By Patrick Bond

It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible position on climate than that of South Africa’s environment minister, Buyelwa Sonjica, who spoke to parliament in early November about SA’s posture for the Copenhagen Summit.

Sonjica announced, ‘South Africa is a developing country with huge developmental challenges, and needs carbon space in order to meet our developmental needs. We cannot afford to take on any binding emission reduction targets. Expectations for the outcome of the conference in Copenhagen are informed by our national interests and our strategic priorities.’

The ‘interests and priorities’ are clear: the SA government wants to continue supplying the world’s cheapest electricity to the world’s biggest companies in the destructive mining/smelting sectors, firms which are rapidly mechanizing and shedding jobs, and which send such large profit/dividend outflows to London and Melbourne headquarters, that SA has one of the world’s worst balance of payments problems (for which The Economist rated SA as the world’s riskiest emerging market last year).

As for energy costs to poor South Africans, they are rising by the world’s fastest amount, so that Eskom can raise funds for building hundreds of billions of rands worth of dangerous coal/nuclear-fired electricity, putting SA at the top of the world’s rankings in per person output of electricity per unit of GDP.

This minister is a maniac, but luckily as she showed in August 2008 during the Xolobeni titanium mining controversy, she can swing a U-turn as wildly as Julius Malema, once social protest plays a role.

More such protest is needed against Pretoria, Washington, Brussels, Beijing and other major pollution-lobby centres in coming weeks. In the run-up to the Copenhagen Summit from 7-18 December, the October-November Bangkok and Barcelona negotiations of Kyoto Protocol Conference of Parties functionaries confirmed that Northern states and their corporations couldn’t get their act together. Nor will Southern elites in high-emitting countries, especially South Africa.
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Climate Vulnerable Forum Maldives

We gather in this hall today, as some of the most climate-vulnerable nations on Earth.

We are vulnerable because climate change threatens to hit us first; and hit us hardest.

And we are vulnerable because we have modest means with which to protect ourselves from the coming storm.

We are a diverse group of countries.

But we share one common enemy.

For us, climate change is no distant or abstract threat; but a clear and present danger to our survival.

Climate change is melting the glaciers in Nepal.

It is causing flooding in Bangladesh.

It threatens to submerge the Maldives and Kiribati

And in recent weeks, it has exacerbated drought in Tanzania, and typhoons in the Philippines.

We are the frontline states in the climate change battle.

Developing nations did not cause the climate crisis.

We are not responsible for the hundreds of years of carbon emissions, which are cooking the planet.
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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.”
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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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