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.
This week’s Earth Minute addresses the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, and why many climate justice organizations have decided not to attend this year’s climate conference, and are organizing with social movements and communities instead.
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Filed under Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Earth Minute, Earth Radio, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Geoengineering, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Oil, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Synthetic Biology, UNFCCC
Note: The photos in the upper right and lower left of this poster were taken in the indigenous village Amador Hernandez on the border of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve by Global Justice Ecology Project Board Chair Orin Langelle during an investigative trip to Chiapas, Mexico with GJEP’s then-Communications Director Jeff Conant. The trip was organized in March 2011 to identify and expose the impacts on the indigenous communities in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico that would be caused by the California-Chiapas-Acre (Brazil) REDD agreement, which was announced at the Cancun climate talks in December 2010. The series of events this week in California against REDD (also see previous blog post) feature Orin’s photography as well as GJEP’s film “A Darker Shade of Green: REDD Alert and the Future of Forests.” For more, go to no-redd.com
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle, REDD
By Anne Petermann, September 2012. Source: Z Magazine
As I flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on June 12 for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)—the 20-year anniversary of the historic “Rio Earth Summit”—I read an article in the Financial Times titled “Showdown Looms at OPEC After Saudi Arabia Urges Higher Output.” The article explained that Saudi Arabia was urging OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to increase their output of oil in order to ensure that the global price of oil would not exceed $100 per barrel in order to “mitigate the risks that high oil prices pose to the global economy.”
The article pointed out that ensuring the health of the global economy requires expanding oil production. This, as we know, will worsen the climate crisis. The takeaway message of the article, therefore, is that the global economy will only thrive by destroying the life support systems of the planet.
At the Rio Earth Summit, this was also the underlying logic of the so-called “green economy” proposals that have polarized and paralyzed the talks since the first preparatory meeting for Rio+20 in May 2010.
According to Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, who wrote about the Rio+20 summit’s preparatory meetings for the Guardian back in March 2011, “Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries…and suspicions are running high that the…‘green economy’ is more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old ‘greed’ economy.”
At the Rio+20 summit, industrialized countries and multinational corporations, accompanied by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, led the push for development of the green economy—that is, to use the very ecological devastation caused by global capitalism to create markets in so-called “environmental services” by turning them into tradable commodities. These new markets would help prop up the global economy in a greenwashed version of business as usual.
“Environmental services,” provided by intact natural ecosystems—which include such things as the storage of carbon, the purification of air and water, and the maintenance of biodiversity—would be given a monetary value in the market, enabling them to be purchased and supposedly protected. In reality, however, it would allow companies to destroy a biodiverse ecosystem in one area, by purchasing the protection of an equivalent ecosystem.
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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20
Keith Brunner of Gears of Change discusses the Plan Nord, a massive development plan for northern Quebec that includes dams, mines and other industrial development. He also discusses the opposition to this plan by the Innu People who live in the region, and a delegation of Innu that are coming to Burlington, VT to protest the New England Governors’ conference, where Quebec’s Premier will also attend.
Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with KPFK’s Sojourner Truth show for weekly Earth Minutes every Tuesday and Earth Segment interviews every Thursday.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Earth Radio, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Hydroelectric dams, Indigenous Peoples
The following three pieces, by Anne Petermann, Dr. Rachel Smolker, and Keith Brunner were written in response to Bill McKibben’s new article in Rolling Stone magazine, titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math: Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – make clear who the real enemy is.”
The System Will Not be Reformed
Response by Anne Petermann
Bill 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.
The first and most obvious trap is relying on math to mobilize a movement. Environmentalists, often worried about attacks on their credibility, or afraid they will be labeled “emotional” by industry, tend to focus on statistics, mathematical analyses and hard science to make their case. Unfortunately statistics like “565 Gigatons or 2,795 Gigatons” do not inspire passion.
While McKibben is focusing on Gigatons and percentages and degrees Celsuis, however, corporations like Shell are running multi-million dollar ad campaigns with TV commercials that feature families having fun, hospitals saving lives, children getting good educations, because of fossil fuels. Coal = energy security; natural gas = maintaining the American way of life. And as Dr. Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch points out below, some of these very same companies are moving into the bioenergy realm–wreaking yet more havoc on communities and ecosystems in the name of supposedly “clean, renewable energy.” They are playing both sides of the field in the effort to ensure Americans do not feel their way of life is in any way threatened–ensuring them that they can have their cake and eat it too. For while China may have surpassed the US in total annual carbon emissions, the US still leads, by far, the per capita release of CO2 emissions.
Note: As logic tells us, Capitalism will not solve problems caused by Capitalism; the economic system driving deforestation will not stop deforestation; corporations whose sole purpose in existence is to make profits for their shareholders will not act in ethical ways that risk future profits; and the 1% will not solve the problems for which they are responsible. Solutions come from the bottom up, not the top down. The “Future THEY Want” is clearly not the “Future WE want.” One example: large-scale biofuels and hydropower are NOT renewable energy. They devastate land, air, water and communities.
Time to get off this train before it barrels off the cliff.
–The GJEP Team
Governments and businesses pledge £330bn during Rio +20 Earth Summit, including plans to eliminate deforestation from the retail supply chain
Cross-Posted from BusinessGreen, 25 Jun 2012
It has been impossible to avoid the glut of criticism from green NGOs and politicians left deeply disappointed by the lack of ambition on display at the Rio +20 Earth summit last week.
However, business leaders maintain that that while the so-called “Future We Want” is unlikely to deliver sweeping economic and environmental changes on its own, it could still mark a turning point for the green growth agenda.
Malcolm Preston, global lead for sustainability and climate change at PwC, said that during the summit United Nations leaders effectively passed the baton of responsibility for building the green economy to the business community.
He said the text would only achieve successes if governments worked in tandem with businesses to drive the green growth agenda forward, predicting that as a result of the summit we will see an increasing number of public-private green project partnerships formed over the coming years.
According to UN figures, governments and companies made 692 individual pledges during the summit, totalling $513bn (£330bn) of investment in projects aimed at boosting sustainable resource management. It is the one area where the summit can be compared favourably with the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where no corporations were present and few investment pledges were made.
One of the more ambitious pledges was an announcement by the US government to partner with more than 400 companies and brands in the Consumer Goods Forum to achieve zero net deforestation in their supply chains by 2020.
The two parties agreed on Thursday that they would meet in Washington in the next 100 days to discuss how to achieve this goal, which would focus in particular on commodities such as soy, palm oil, paper, and beef that are thought to be responsible for half of the world’s deforestation.
Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, said the agreement showed the importance of businesses and governments collaborating on boosting the sustainability agenda.
“Individually both governments and business have already mobilised significant resources to address the challenge of deforestation but we all recognise that much more can be achieved if we align our efforts and work in partnership,” he said.
Preston added that this ambitious goal would require companies to start this year to meet the demanding target of delivering zero net deforestation by 2020.
“The implications of this commitment are huge as it requires eliminating deforestation in packaging, production, the use of raw materials for the member companies of CGF,” he said, adding that it would also put pressure on countries such as China, which currently have limited demand for sustainable palm oil.
“It’s really pushing towards a segregated supply chain, rather than using certification schemes,” he said. “With the speed that technology is advancing, it is not unrealistic that we will be able to trace it all by 2020, however whether there is sufficient volume so we could achieve these targets is another question.”
The summit also gave the go ahead to the creation of a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are expected to compliment the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. However, it remains unclear precisely what those goals will be.
The United Nations General Assembly is now expected to appoint a group of representatives from 30 countries by September to develop the goals, which are expected to focus on areas such as food, water, and energy.
UK Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said efforts should now focus on “turning words into action”.
“Rio+20 has shown that there is political ambition for change,” she said. “Now we have to make sure that will is not squandered. We have already started to make headway in the talks held since the text was agreed, such as good progress towards deciding on the themes the SDGs should cover.”
However, Nicholas Stern, chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics, argued the UK should underscore its commitment to the agreement by formally backing the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which requires public and private organisations make green energy commitments by 2030.
The Brazil government, for example, pledged to invest $235bn (£151bn) over 10 years in renewable energy, mainly in hydropower and biofuels.
“The world needs clear time-bound and funded targets and practical action to get sustainable energy to poor people in all continents,” said Stern. “The UK can help show what is possible by working with countries, for example, in Africa, and their utilities and private sector to support action that gets results rapidly.
“The power of the example is the answer to international prevarication and vagueness. It is through actions rather than words that we will be able to create the future we want for ourselves and future generations.”
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Filed under Biodiversity, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Rio+20
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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Rio+20
Throughout the week, Climate Connections is posting short videos of participants in Rio+20 and the Peoples’ Summit talking about the meaning of the “green economy.”
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Filed under Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Rio+20
