Category Archives: Climate Justice

by | 2014-04-17 · 13:58

The first climate justice summit: A pie in the face for the global north

Note: Building off of the energy at COP6, Global Justice Ecology Project helped co-found Climate Justice Now! at COP13 in Bali with a call to take the struggle for system change to the streets — check out the founding statement here: http://www.climate-justice-now.org/category/events/bali/

-The GJEP Team

By Frederika Whitehead, April 16, 2014. Source: The Guardian

Huaorani Indian children play with scarlet macaws in Yasuni National Park, Ecuador, where oil companies want to drill. Photograph: Steve Bloom Images / Alamy

Huaorani Indian children play with scarlet macaws in Yasuni National Park, Ecuador, where oil companies want to drill. Photograph: Steve Bloom Images / Alamy

Today it is accepted, but 20-30 years ago campaigners were struggling to even get an acknowledgement that climate change was happening, let alone that it was manmade. It would have been hard to imagine that one day we might hold the developed nations responsible and start talking about redress for victims of climate change, as we did in 2000.

The nub of “climate justice” is the idea that the developed world made the mess and therefore the developed world should pay the price for fixing the problem.

The first climate justice summit was organised to coincide with Cop 6 – the sixth session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference at the Hague in 2000. It was put together by the Rising Tide network as a radical alternative to the official talks.

Roger Geffen was at the summit as a civil society activist. He says: “the message we wanted put out was that what’s going on at [Cop6] was the wrong ideas being discussed by the wrong people.

“There were all these people in the developing world who were the real victims of climate change who had not got a voice in the process.” Continue reading →

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy

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by | 2014-01-31 · 09:00

2013 Top ten articles on Climate Connections

Note: Thanks to our readers for another excellent year!  Below are the top 10 Climate-Connections blog posts from 2013.  Over the course of the year we saw nearly a quarter of a million viewers from 206 countries.  Thanks for being one of them.  And if you are not following this blog, please do–and feel free to share them around.

Also included below are GJEP’s other Media Program accomplishments from 2013.  Check them out!

-The GJEP Team

Top 10 Climate Connections blog posts

10. Photo essay: Three brutally arrested protesting GE trees at industry conference.  (May 30)

All photographs by Orin Langelle/ photolangelle.org for GJEP

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Continue reading here

9. Transgenic DNA from GMOs in Chinese rivers – Why is it suddenly there? (March 25)

By Kurt Heidinger. Source: Biocitizen

UC Berkeley microbiologist Dr Ignacio Chapela has discovered “the escape and establishment of transgenic DNA from GMOs” in rivers in China.

That’s not good news. The introduction of new kinds of DNA into the bios creates new forms of life and diseases, as Dr. Chapela reports.  Continue reading here

8. Explosion at West Virginia frack site seriously injures four (July 11)

By John Upton. Source: Grist

fracking-fireFederal investigators are trying to figure out what caused an explosion at a West Virginia fracking site over the weekend. The blast injured at least seven people, including four workers who were sent to a hospital with life-threatening burns.

Residents and activists have long complained about safety practices by frackers operating in the state, where they draw natural gas from the Marcellus shale formation. Traffic accidents involving trucks traveling to and from frack sites in the state are common, and explosions can be deadly.  Continue reading here.

7. Fracking equipment set ablaze in Elsipogtog, New Brunswick (June 26)

Source: Earth First! Newswire

img_8210Halifax Media Co-op reports that a piece of drilling equipment was set ablaze on the 24th, by person or persons unknown.  This comes amidst escalating resistance to hydraulic fracturing by indigenous peoples in Elsipogtog, “New Brunswick”.

This comes after numerous direct actions, the midnight seizure of drilling equipment, and a local man being struck by a contractor’s vehicle.  Continue reading here.

6. Breaking: Protesters arrested at genetically engineered trees conference.  (May 27)

Source: Global Justice Ecology Project

2-dscn0847(Asheville, NC) As the Tree Biotechnology 2013 conference kicked off early Monday, two Asheville residents were arrested after disrupting a major presentation by Belgian tree engineer Wout Boerjan entitled, “Engineering trees for the biorefinery.”

The protestors said that if legalized, GE trees would lead to the destruction of native forests and biodiversity in the US South, and be economically devastating to rural communities.  Continue reading here.

5. Breaking: University of Florida threatens to arrest anti-GMO presenters and bans them from campus.  (October 28)

Source: Global Justice Ecology Project

ufpoliceGainesville, FL–The University of Florida, a leading institution researching genetically engineered (GE) trees, threatened to arrest activists from the Campaign to STOP GE Trees when they arrived on campus Saturday to prepare for a presentation to highlight critical perspectives on tree biotechnology that was scheduled for tonight. The police informed the group that their presentation had been cancelled, and warned them that they were banned from University of Florida (UF) property for three years.  Continue reading here.

4. US farmers may stop planting GM’s after poor global yields. (February 7)

By Robyn Vinter. Source: Farmers Weekly

yourfileSome US farmers are considering returning to conventional seed after increased pest resistance and crop failures meant GM crops saw smaller yields globally than their non-GM counterparts.

Farmers in the USA pay about an extra $100 per acre for GM seed, and many are questioning whether they will continue to see benefits from using GMs.  Continue reading here.

3. Three responses to Bill McKibben’s new article, “Global warming’s terrifying new math”. (July 24 2012)

By Anne Petermann, Rachel Smolker, and Keith Brunner. Source: Global Justice Ecology Project

mckibben-bieber-rollingstoneBill McKibben, in his new Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” does an effective job at summarizing the hard and theoretical numbers that warn us of the devastating impacts of continuing to burn the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves–yet it somehow falls short of its stated goal to help mobilize a new movement for climate action.

While the article is full of facts and figures and the future they portend, it falls into several traps common to US-based environmentalists, which undermine its movement-building objective.  Continue reading here.

2. How Facebook may secretly foil your activist plans.  (September 16)

By Kevin Mathews. Source: Care2

3040591-largeIn recent years, Facebook has become an unexpectedly crucial tool for activism. The social media platform allows activists to efficiently connect and communicate with one another in order to arrange meetings, protests and boycotts. Unfortunately, activists who once found that Facebook helped make organizing easier are now encountering obstacles – and the resistance is coming from Facebook itself.  Continue reading here.

1. Vermont: Protestors remove American flags at 9/11 memorial in act of solidarity. (September 12)

Source: Climate Connections

Middlebury College, VT — At 3:00PM on Wednesday, September 11, 2013, five protesters removed thousands of flags desecrating occupied Abenaki lands. The U.S. flags were part of a 9/11 memorial established by Middlebury College students.

Amanda Lickers, a member of the Onondowa’ga Nation, states, “In the quickest moment of decision making, in my heart, I understood that lands where our dead may lay must not be desecrated. In my community, we do not pierce the earth. It disturbs the spirits there, it is important for me to respect their presence.”  Continue reading here.

New Voices on Climate Change Speakers Bureau

The mission of GJEP’s New Voices on Climate Change program is to amplify voices from traditionally underrepresented communities and front line activists engaged in various environmental justice struggles.

Part of this work involves our Speakers Bureau, which features social movement leaders from North America, Latin America, Africa and the South Pacific.  In 2013, we helped facilitated over 95 connections for activists in the Speakers Bureau, including:

  • Requests for interviews with major media outlets like CBC, Russian Television, New Internationalist, and Yes! Magazine;
  • Requests to speak at universities including Middlebury College and Tufts University, major academic climate change proceedings like the International Association for Impact Assessment, and social justice events like the Democracy Convention in Madison, WI;
  • Opportunities for grant and fellowship support to environmental justice organizers, and
  • International connections between activists and organizers.

KPFK Pacifica Earth Watch collaboration 

GJEP collaborates with the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Pacifica radio on weekly Earth Minute segments and Earth Watch interviews.  The Sojourner Truth show is a nationally syndicated public affairs show drawing out how women, communities of color, and those most impacted by systems of oppression are responding.

In 2013, we coordinated 24 guests for the Sojourner Truth show, including live report-backs from the World Social Forum in Tunisia and COP 19 climate summit in Poland, interviews from international and community-led struggles against fracking, tar sands, and coal mining; and analysis of developments like the release of the Obama administration’s climate action plan.

 

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by | 2013-12-04 · 15:00

Typhoon Haiyan exposes the reality of climate injustice – We strengthen our resolve to struggle for an end to the climate madness

December 4, 2013. Source: La Via Campesina

On November 8, 2013, the strongest super typhoon ever recorded in history, with winds as high as 314 kilometers per hour, slammed into the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan devastated several cities in the islands of the Visayas, leaving in its wake, more than 5,000 dead, more than 1,000 still missing and millions impacted with thousands of families left without food, water or shelter.

The Philippines, a country used to an average of 20 typhoons a year, had never seen a category 5 typhoon so destructive that it flattened entire towns. But with climate change, this is the new reality. Warmer seas and warmer air temperatures combine to produce more violent storms. The climate is changing and as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in its report, “many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.”

The catastrophic and horrific tragedy however failed to move the developed nations into committing to real climate action. Instead, they moved backwards. Japan, one of the leading emitters, declared that instead of their original pledge to cut emissions by 25 percent, they would increase emissions by 3 percent by the year 2020 based on their level of CO2 emissions in 1990. The Durban Platform, the new global agreement that would apply to all countries and would replace the Kyoto Protocol, is supposed to be agreed by 2015 and implemented by 2020 but the past climate negotiations, including this recently concluded one in Poland, have witnessed developed countries moving further away from real commitments and instead moving towards voluntary pledges and still no specific numbers on targets or cuts.

Continue reading →

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples, Natural Disasters, Warsaw/COP-19

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by | · 09:00

Lovera: A Pathetic REDD package

Note: Global Justice Ecology Project is the North American Focal Point for the Global Forest Coalition.

Simone Lovera is co-founder and executive director of the Global Forest Coalition, an international coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations. In this guest post, she describes the REDD deal that came out of COP19 in Warsaw as “the weakest text any international forest-related body has ever adopted”.

Following the June 2013 negotiations in Bonn, GFC described the emerging REDD package as the “whatever approach”. What came out of Warsaw is no improvement. “All the REDD decisions adopted are pathetically vague and non-sensical from a legal point of view,” Lovera writes.

Lovera points out that drivers of deforestation are not addressed in the REDD deal. No finance was agreed for REDD in Warsaw, and unlike existing forest policies, “REDD+ is 100% dependent on financial support”. Governments will be allowed to produce summaries of information on safeguards. The decision on reference levels is “weak”. Lovera writes that, “such texts are an insult to international law”

-Chris Lang, REDD Monitor, December 3, 2013

By Simone Lovera, December 3, 2013. Source: REDD Monitor

simoneloveraOn 12 November 2013, the Global Forest Coalition made the following intervention during the negotiations in Warsaw on methodologies to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and enhance forest carbon stocks (REDD+):

    “The Global Forest Coalition, a worldwide coalition of 54 NGOs and Indigenous peoples’ organizations promoting rights-based forest policies shares the concerns of our NGO and IPO colleagues about the extremely weak draft decisions that have been developed in the areas of drivers of forest loss and safeguards. We particularly wonder what we are doing here if this body, and the REDD+ mechanism it is designing, is not capable of addressing the real drivers of forest loss, most of which are linked to international commodity trade. Frankly, if REDD+ is not about addressing the real drivers of forest loss, we don’t think it is a mechanism that should be supported. So we strongly urge governments to focus on developing more effective non-market based approaches to address the international drivers of forest loss, and if they feel they cannot do that within the framework of the REDD mechanism, we urge them to do so within other Frameworks for Various approaches.”

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Filed under Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Green Economy, Indigenous Peoples, REDD, UNFCCC, Warsaw/COP-19

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by | 2013-12-02 · 14:00

The Warsaw Framework for REDD Plus: The decision on REDD finance (sort of)

By Chris Lang, 29th November 2013  Source: REDD-Monitor

Negotiators at COP19 in Warsaw last week agreed seven decisions relating to REDD – the “Warsaw Framework for REDD Plus”. You can find each of the decision texts, as they came out of COP19 in Warsaw here.

This post looks at the decision on REDD finance, or, to give it its full title, the Work programme on results-based finance to progress the full implementation of the activities referred to in decision 1/CP.16, paragraph 70 (pdf file, 75 KB).

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Filed under Biodiversity, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, REDD, Warsaw/COP-19

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by | 2013-11-25 · 17:07

Earth Watch Interview: Simone Lovera of Global Forest Coalition on UN Climate Talks

Last week’s Earth Minute discussed COP-19, the UN Climate Talks in Warsaw Poland. Simone Lovera, Executive Director of Global Forest Coalition described the situation on the ground.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Pollution, UNFCCC, Warsaw/COP-19

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by | · 11:04

“We Have to Consume Less”: Scientists Call For Radical Economic Overhaul to Avert Climate Crisis

Nov 21, 2013, Source: Democracy Now!

A pair of climate scientists are calling for what some may view as a shocking solution to the global warming crisis: a rethinking of the economic order in the United States and other industrialized nations. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the influential Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in England say many of the solutions proposed by world leaders to prevent “runaway global warming” will not be enough to address the scale of the crisis. They have called for “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations.” Anderson says that to avoid an increase in temperature of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the world would require a “revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.”

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by | 2013-11-24 · 12:49

The Warsaw, Poland Exhibit at the UN Climate Conference

On 21 November 2013 various non-governmental organizations walked out of the Warsaw climate talks.  I am glad I have not attended for the last two years as I feel corporate interests have taken over the UN Climate Conference.

At this point I have no idea after the walk out if my photo exhibit was seized by UN security.  I hope the photo exhibit was up long enough for the the High Level Ministers to view and see the reality of neoliberalism and climate chaos. They may have glanced, but unfortunately those with power did not really see or care. – Orin Langelle

The photos in the exhibit were on display at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland at the IBON International booth.  The name of the exhibit was titled Neoiberal Globalization and Climate Chaos.  This exhibit took  place during the High Level Sessions of the UNFCCC meetings 18 – 23 November 2013. The conference was held at the National Stadium in Warsaw, Poland.*1 UNFCCC Gag, Indonesia(This photo was scheduled for the exhibit, but because of increased UN pressure on criticism of the UNFCCC, the photo was not shown.)

The exhibit included thirty photographs documenting Indigenous Peoples, organizations and social movements working for climate justice.  The photographs were taken at events on six continents–from Bali, Indonesia to Espirito Santo, Brazil – Durban, South Africa and Chiapas, Mexico, to name a few.

All photographs by Orin Langelle.  Courtesy Global Justice Ecology Project, Global Forest Coalition, and Langelle Photography.

Above: An Indigenous man with his mouth covered by a UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) gag during a protest at the UN climate talks in Bali, Indonesia.  The gag symbolized their systematic and forceful exclusion from a UN meeting with the UNFCCC Executive Secretary they were invited to the day before.  It also symbolized and their exclusion from the official negotiations even though it is their lands that were being targeted for climate mitigation schemes.

You can view the entire photo exhibit here

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