Category Archives: Solutions

Historical Critique of the Corporate Takeover of the UN

This piece examines the history of the takeover of the UN Climate Conferences by industry and promotes the US climate movement getting on board with the fundamental demands and actions, and alternative solutions being advanced by social movements around the world.  It also gives a nod to the work of GJEP in this arena and credits our report, The Green Shock Doctrine. Thanks Margaret and Kevin!

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Protest at UN Climate Conference, Cancun, Mexico 2010. Photolangelle.org

Climate Alarm Bells Ring but UN and Obama Administration Fail To Act
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. The Smirking Chimp. September 5, 2014.

The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most worrisome so far. Paired with data from the 2014 National Climate Assessment, there is no question that the climate crisis is here and is accelerating at a faster pace than predicted. Its effects are widespread and dangerous, yet real solutions are being suppressed.

The climate crisis is a ticking clock that demands immediate effective action, but the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP), which is the international body responsible for creating agreements on climate change, has become nothing more than a tool for multinational corporations and financiers to force a neo-liberal agenda and profit from the crisis. The false solutions being promoted displace and exploit people, destroy the environment and worsen climate change.

The climate crisis is our greatest challenge. Significant work has been done over the past decade by civil society groups around the world cooperating to create plans for resistance to the corrupt COP process and a vision for a just transition to sustainable systems. Now is the time for organizations throughout the United States that advocate for justice to recognize that the climate crisis affects all of us and to participate in this global movement.

Effective strategy requires knowledge of the political environment, the entities involved and an understanding of real versus false solutions. The United Nations, the United States government, Big Green Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the corporations that exert influence over them all are obstacles to effective action. Solutions exist but they won’t be coming from above, rather they will come from a mobilized grass roots demanding transformation to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy.

To read the entire article, click here.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Copenhagen/COP-15, Corporate Globalization, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Greenwashing, Natural Disasters, Solutions, UNFCCC, Warsaw/COP-19, World Bank, WTO

KPFK Sojourner Truth Earth Watch: Clayton Thomas-Muller on Quebec oil disaster, Tar Sands Healing Walk, Sovereignty Summer

Note: Clayton Thomas-Muller is a good friend and member of the board of Global Justice Ecology Project.

-The GJEP Team

July 11, 2013

kpfk_logoClayton Thomas-Muller co-director of the Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign discusses the oil rail disaster that left scores dead in Quebec, the Tar Sands healing walk and Sovereignty summer.

Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Pacifica Los Angeles for a weekly Earth Minute each Tuesday and a weekly Earth Watch interview each Thursday.

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Filed under Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Indigenous Peoples, Oil, Pollution, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions, Tar Sands

KPFK Sojourner Truth Earth Minute: La Via Campesina international gathering ends, rejecting capitalism and promoting agroecology, solidarity

kpfk_logoGlobal Justice Ecology Project teams up with the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Pacifica Los Angeles for a weekly Earth Minute each Tuesday and a weekly Earth Watch interview each Thursday.

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Filed under Africa, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions

Pablo Salon: How to overcome the climate crisis?

By Pablo Salon, March 15, 2013. Source: Climate Space 2013

logo_finall_ok_1There is no single answer, no single campaign nor single approach.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that avoids catastrophe, we need to:

  • Leave more than two-thirds of the fossil fuel reserves under the soil;
  • Stop the exploitation of tar sands, shale gas and coal;
  • Support small, local, peasant and indigenous community farming while we dismantle big agribusiness that deforests and heats the planet;
  • Promote local production and consumption of products, reducing the free trade of goods that send millions of tons of CO2 while they travel around the world;
  • Stop extractive industries from further destroying nature and contaminating our atmosphere and our land;
  • Increase significantly public transport to reduce the unsustainable “car way of life”;
  • Reduce the emissions of warfare by promoting genuine peace and dismantling the military and war industry and infrastructure.

In other words we need to come out of the endless growth paradigm that is the basis of the capitalist system, and seek for a new kind of society that is grounded on care for each other and nature. A society that seeks happiness for all and not profit for a few. A society based on a different concept of prosperity and well-being. A bio-society for life that includes humans and nature.

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Indigenous Peoples, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions, UNFCCC

Direct Action for Climate Justice: Confronting False Solutions to Climate Change

by Anne Petermann,  Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

23 August, 2012, Source: Daily Kos

Over August 9-12, fifty participants and trainers gathered in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for a Climate Justice Direct Action Training Camp.  The camp, organized by Red Clover Climate Justice and co-sponsored by Global Justice Ecology Project provided essential direct action skills including formation of affinity groups, blockading tactics, legal rights as a protester, a history of non-violent civil disobedience, strategic planning for direct action, and the nuts and bolts of media work to ensure actions and their messages are seen as widely as possible.

Climate justice involves taking real and just action to address the root causes of the climate crisis, and transforming the system that is driving it. Direct action has a rich history of achieving the unthinkable, of changing “the impossible.” It is defined as action to directly shut down the point of production.  In the case of climate change, it would be action to shut down the point of destruction.  With the climate crisis worsening exponentially with every passing day, shutting down the point of destruction is critical.

It was with this in mind that the direct action training camp was organized.  Coincidentally, it came just two weeks after the 36th Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers in Burlington, Vermont.  A major focus of that conference was energy.  Vermont, which has an image of pristine greenness, relies on dangerous and dirty energy sources.  This includes its aging Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant; hydroelectricity from massive dams on Indigenous Peoples’ lands in northern Quebec; and large-scale biomass electricity, which dumps more pollution into the air than coal.

Although these various mega-projects do not rely on fossil fuels as the main source of their energy, they are still “false solutions.”  They cause vast ecological and social destruction and can worsen the climate crisis.  Their primary function, in fact, has nothing to do with the climate.  It is to maintain business as usual.  While the climate crisis demands a radical re-think of how we live on and with the Earth, a fundamental changing of the system, “false solutions” are specifically designed to prevent real change.  They enable the Global Elite–“the 1%” –to maintain their power and profits in the face of mounting social and ecological crises.


Activists disrupt the Northeast Governors’ Conference cruise in protest of Hydro-Quebec.  Photo: Will Bennington

Hydro-Quebec plans to build a series of new mega-dams on First Nations land in northern Quebec. They will drown forests, pollute fresh water, and displace villages and release huge amounts of methane–a greenhouse gas 35 times more potent than CO2.
In response, a delegation of Innu people came to the Governors’ Conference to raise awareness about and protest these new mega-dams. When the Innu delegation tried to enter the Governors’ Conference to speak with the decision-makers, however, they were refused entry.

The Governors’ Conference was emblematic of the unjust system that must be changed if we are to successfully address the climate crisis.  A group of privileged white males sat down to make decisions that would irrevocably impact the lives of First Nations peoples in Canada, as well as rural communities throughout the region.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Political Repression, Pollution, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions, UNFCCC

La Via Campesina at Rio+20: The people of the world say “No to the Green Economy”

For a week throughout the People’s Summit, Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant farmers, mobilized in Rio de Janeiro to say “No to the Green Economy” and to reinvigorate the process of building new alliances thanks to plenaries, social movements’ assemblies, street demonstrations to show the real needs and aspirations of our peoples.

Download the article in PDF format.

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20, Solutions

Earth Minute: Extreme Weather, Climate Change, and Taking Action

Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with the Sojourner Truth show every Tuesday for an Earth Minute and every Thursday for an Earth Segment interview with front line activists from around the world.

This week’s Earth minute focuses on the extreme weather that has been taking its toll on the US and asks what we can do about it.

To listen to or download the show, click on the link below:

Earth Minute, July 10, 2012

The text from this week’s Earth Minute is below:

Increasing numbers of people across the US experienced the impacts of extreme weather last week–from the immense wildfires devouring Colorado, to the heatwave that broke 4000 records across the country, to the wild and freakish derecho storms that left millions without electricity.

The National Weather Service is warning that dryness and drought will continue to increase both in extent and intensity across much of the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, the Corn Belt region, the middle and lower Mississippi Valley, and much of the Great Plains.

These impacts were predicted by climate scientists.  That they are now real should be enough to shove our collective consciousness into high gear to find real and just solutions to the climate crisis.

That there will be a great shift in the way humans live on this planet is not in question.  The question is, will we be proactive in developing a new way to live in harmony with the earth, or will we do nothing, and hope that our children can survive on a decimated planet?

For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth show, this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project.

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Earth Minute, Natural Disasters, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions

Rio+20 Peoples’ Summit closes with Declaration and points of struggle

June 25, 2012. One of the opening paragraphs of the Declaration produced at the close of the Peoples’ Summit states:

“The Peoples Summit is a symbolic moment of the beginning of a new cycle in the course of global struggles, which produced a new convergence of the movements of women, Indigenous Peoples, people of African descent, youth, family and peasant farmers, workers, the poor, and traditional communities such as quilombos, those who fight for the right to the city, and religious groups world wide.”

80, 000 people attended the Peoples’ Summit and at least 30,000 mobilized daily in different activities.


The full Declaration has yet to be translated into English (and Climate Connections will publish or link to it when it is), but it closes with these consensus points of struggle going forward:

We are:

  • Opposed to militarization of territories and states.
  • Opposed to criminalization of social movement organizations.
  • Opposed to violence against women.
  • Opposed to violence against LGBT people.
  • Opposed to large corporations.
  • Opposed to imposing payments of unjust financial debt and for popular hearings on them.
  • For guaranteeing the right of the people to land and territory, urban and rural.
  • For free informed and prior consultation and consent, based in the principle of good faith as per Convention 169 of the ILO.
  • For food sovereignty and healthy food, against agrochemicals and transgenics.
  • For the conquest and guarantee of rights.
  • For the solidarity of peoples and countries, chiefly those threatened by military or institutional coups (like the recent one in Paraguay).
  • For the sovereignty of the people over ownership of the commons, against attempts to privatize and commodify.
  • For changing the current energy grid and system.
  • For democratization of the communications media.
  • For a recognition of the historic social and ecological debt.
  • For building towards a worldwide GENERAL STRIKE.

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Filed under Climate Change, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20, Solutions