Reclaim Power! Mass Street Action Announced in Bella Center

Global Alliances Announce they will Protest 15 Years of Failed Climate Negotiations with Mass Non-Violent Civil Disobedience

At a press conference today inside the Bella Center, home of the COP 15 negotiations, civil society groups allied with the Climate Justice Now! (CJN) and Climate Justice Action (CJA) networks announced their plans for tomorrow’s Reclaim Power! demonstration, a confrontational mass action of non-violent civil disobedience.

Today representatives of CJN and CJA declared that given the urgency of the climate crisis it is time for dramatic action to expose the COP process as undemocratic, unjust and inadequate to deal with the scale of the problem. The purpose of this action is to reaffirm the historical responsibility owed by the North to the South for the climate crisis and focus on alternative solutions such as local sustainability and food sovereignty which consistently take a back seat to the “market-based solutions” hyped in the formal negotiations.

“Over the last 15 years, the COP process has been corrupted by corporate money and the refusal of the rich countries of the world to take responsibility for the problems they have created. At a very fundamental level, we need to talk about how we leave fossil fuels in the ground, but no one is talking about that inside the talks in Copenhagen,” said Ivonne Yanez of Accion Ecologica, which is a part of Climate Justice Now!

The action called for Wednesday December 16th will involve groups of activists simultaneously descending on the Conference centre from different starting points. The march will have 4 blocs: a general Blue Bloc led by movements from the Global South, a Green Bloc which will be a more mobile unit, the Yellow Bloc for those NGOs accredited to the COP15 but unable to access the meetings because of the secondary badge restriction and a creative Bike Bloc.

At noon, they will join up with the mass of people walking out of the climate talks, to hold the ‘Peoples’ Assembly’, a participatory platform of marginalized voices and real solutions to climate change.

“We have no more time to waste. If governments won’t solve the problem then its time for our diverse people’s movements to unite and reclaim the power to shape our future. We are beginning this process with the people’s assembly. We will join together all the voices that have been excluded-both within the process and outside of it. We will be both non-violent and confrontational. We will not let fences and physical barriers stand in our way, and we call upon the police to respect our right to make our voices heard.” said Stine Gry, a representative of Climate Justice Action.