Note: GJEP will be blogging daily from Durban 28 Nov – 10 Dec. Please stay tuned to Climate Connections. The following video is in English and Spanish with French subtitles. -The GJEP Team
Category Archives: UN
Video: After Cancun–the Climate Justice Movement
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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, UNFCCC
On the Ground Coverage of the UN Climate Conference in Durban Starts Next Week
Note: Global Justice Ecology Project’s Climate Connections blog carries hard-to-find news from around the world on the impacts of, and peoples’ resistance to social and ecological injustice.
We will be blogging daily from the UN Climate Conference and alternative movement activities in Durban, South Africa from 28 November through 10 December 2011. For the latest from the inside negotiations and the outside 99% opposition to the commodification of life, please stay tuned to climate-connections.org.
Additionally for the third year, we are partnering with Margaret Prescod’s “The Sojourner Truth” show on KPFK’s Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, CA with a fifteen minute update (approximate) with people in Durban, Monday through Friday (28 Nov – 10 December). Live at 7 am Pacific (-8 GMT) or listen to the archives. From the halls of injustice to dissent in the streets.
-The GJEP Team
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Biodiversity, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Independent Media, Political Repression, UNFCCC
Time to “Occupy Durban”?
Note: Climate Connections will be blogging daily from the UN Climate Conference and alternative movement activities in Durban, South Africa from 28 November through 10 December 2011. For the latest from the inside negotiations and the outside resistance to the commodification of life, please stay tuned to climate-connections.org. The great graphic at the end of Patrick’s article is not from The Mercury or Daily Kos.-The GJEP Team
By Patrick Bond
The Mercury Eye on Society column, 22 November 2011
Cross-posted from Daily Kos
There they fell during 2011, one after the other in past-their-prime domino descent: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunis, Hosni Mubarak from Cairo, Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Muammar Gaddafi from Tripoli, Georgios Papandreou from Athens, Silvio Berlusconi from Rome, US football guru and sex-crime cover-upper Joe Paterno from Penn State University – with media baron Rupert Murdoch, soccer supremo Sepp Blatter, Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad and Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh looking decidedly shaky, too.
However, let’s be frank: in many cases the courageous push by the 99% against these 1% personalities only dislodged the venal creatures, not the system, so replacements crawled right back in.
Egyptian generals are just as vicious, as illustrated at Tahrir Square last week, and many Libyan ‘rebels’ are racist thugs worthy of CIA support. The new IMF managing director, French conservative Christine Lagarde, is being investigated by the Court of Justice of the Republic for abuse of authority as finance minister when she gave a $580 million payout to an Adidas shoes tycoon close to the ruling party. Greek’s new ruler, Loukas Papademos, was formerly vice-president of the European Central Bank, the institution that joins the IMF as tormentors of poor and working-class Europeans. In Italy the same job was given to Mario Monti, a former EU Commissioner with a brutal banker mentality.
On the other hand, Arab Spring political democrats and Occupy economic democrats won’t let up the pressure. I visited Occupy Dublin’s Dame Street next to the Irish central bank late last month; and Occupy Washington two weeks ago; and the next day, Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district, just prior to the New York police force’s illegal eviction of non-violent tent-residents.
In each case, the spirit reminded me of anti-apartheid movement determination, heart-felt principles and strategic clarity: no half-baked reforms like tricameral parliaments to polish apartheid’s chains will satisfy the Occupiers, who are demanding fundamental system change, and who enjoy huge popular support.
Surprisingly perhaps, the argument to extend Occupy to Durban is advanced by a former manager of the Davos World Economic Forum and president of Costa Rica, José María Figueres, who is the brother of Christiana, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. He was asked by OneWorld tv last week at the Climate Vulnerable Forum in Bangladesh, “You’ve expressed your sympathies with the Occupy Wall Street Movement and called for an Occupy Durban. What would that look like and what could it achieve?”
Figueres replied, “The riots of London, and the indignados of Madrid and the now growing global Occupy Wall Street movement is a sign of the frustration felt by many given that we are not addressing their economic needs. So with respect to climate maybe we need an Occupy Durban.”
Figueres wants to see “A sit in, by the delegations of those countries that are most affected by climate change, that are going from one COP to the next COP to the next COP without getting positive and concrete responses on the issues that they want dealt with.”
And outside Durban’s International Convention Centre, in the broader society, is there a potential for a Climate Spring like the Arab Spring? “The history of humanity shows us that it has always been a big crisis that has made us move,” he responded.
That crisis is surely upon us, with more than 300,000 people dying annually because of climate change, according to demographers. Might the UNFCCC live up to global-governance potential – last realised in the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs to save the ozone hole – or instead will Durban be known as the Conference of Polluters, the place the Kyoto Protocol’s mechanism for binding emissions-cut commitments died, while carbon trading remained the vehicle the 1% chooses for its climate gambling?
Even though Zurich’s UBS bank last week predicted a total collapse of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme in coming months, it looks like we will suffer the latter when COP17 closes on December 9.
So in order to save the planet and people, the 99% should challenge the UNFCCC’s for-profit mentality. An interesting email hit my inbox on November 10: “The Occupy movement that is sweeping the globe shines a light on the unjust systems which benefit a small group of elite individuals and corporations, consolidating wealth and power for the few to the extreme detriment to the majority of the world’s inhabitants and the planet as a whole.”
The COP17 will, according to the email, “do nothing to address this imbalance of power and resources and instead would give those same people and institutions who have caused economic ruin control of our land, water and atmosphere to trade as nothing more than money-making commodities.”
One response, wrote the anonymous emailer, is to “Occupy COP17”, and a website (www.occupycop17.com), Facebook page (www.facebook.com/occupyCOP17) and Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/OccupyCOP17 and #occupycop17) are already operational. The Occupy movement considers the UNFCCC to be “United Nations Fools, Clowns and Carbon Criminals” and it’s hard to argue against that based on 16 past performances.
There are many South Africans with genuine grievances who will be part of the anti-COP17 protest scene, in part because of Eskom’s mismanagement of energy (more coal-fired power plants as Greenpeace dramatised by blocking Eskom construction at Kusile last week) and electricity (high-priced for the masses, low-priced for Anglo American and BHP Billiton).
Others will show up just to make a fuss: Business Day last week headlined on the front page, “Malema supporters to ‘disrupt climate conference’” in the wake of the thrashing the African National Congress disciplinary committee gave the Youth League leadership.
For those serous about climate justice, some of the most interesting reflections of 99% thinking and practical alternatives will be at the People’s Space, which was recently moved to the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Howard College campus, starting with the Conference of the Youth (no relation to Juju) on 25-27 November, and then open to the public from 28 November until 9 December. A nightly teach-in from 7:30pm at our Centre for Civil Society adds academic rigour to activist passions. Delegates include hundreds from the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance and the Rural Women’s Assembly, and a myriad of events can be perused at http://www.c17.org.za
All it takes to join People’s Space, Occupy Durban and the Global Day of Action march on December 3 is a healthy degree of skepticism for what the 1% are cooking up inside the UNFCCC’s smoke-filled ICC rooms, and a genuine respect for the People’s Power that again and again rises in the least expected places.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, UNFCCC
OCCUPY COP 17! [in Durban, South Africa]
Note: COP-17 refers to the 17th Conference of the Parties of the UN Climate Convention, which this year will be held from November 28 through December 9, 2011. Global Justice Ecology Project will be in Durban and blogging daily from both the official UN events on the inside of the conference and from the alternative activities–such as Occupy COP 17–on the outside.
–The GJEP Team
Cross-Posted from Watts Up With That on November 1, 2011
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Anyone concerned about the huge influence of Wall Street on our lives should definitely be protesting the influence of Wall Street on the upcoming climate conference in Durban, South Africa. Durban is the latest incarnation of the occasional IPCC celebration. I’m not sure what it celebrates, perhaps they are celebrating being given prepaid tickets and receiving a salary plus a per diem to fly halfway round the world to a lovely remote spot to listen to people talk about wasting fossil fuel.
I know I’d celebrate if some one paid me to do that. In any case, the last party was in Cancun, and the party before that in Copenhagen. The hard life of the climate bureaucrat. The web site for the party is here, so you can see what your taxes are paying for.
This image illustrates the change in climate that the participants in the Durban COP 17–CMP 7 will be forced to endure. The “17″ means that this is the seventeenth time they’ve had this party, or as they call it, this “Conference of Parties”. Seventeen. Parties. The majority of the participants will be moving from late fall/early winter to late spring/early summer in Durban. I doubt that there will be many complaints about the warming involved in that change of seasons, despite the fact that it will be more than the dreaded 2°C tipping point of warming..
So what is Wall Street’s take on the Durban CO2 conference? What do the bankers say about the proposed extension of Kyoto? Here’s one man’s take, from Reuters :
“Parties must take the opportunity in Durban to send strong signals to the carbon market regarding their commitment to its continuation and future development,” said Jose Tumkaya, chief operating officer at UKemissions-reduction project developer Ecosecurities, a JP Morgan-owned firm. SOURCE
So we have a carbon offset project developer. Said carbon reduction person makes money from reducing carbon. Banks like money. They bought up the carbon offset project development firm. It is now owned by JP Morgan.
And now, being owned by JP Morgan, and thus being Very Important People (ex officio), they get interviewed by the media to give us their impartial view of the situation:
“Negotiators should be concerned about the historic low carbon prices as they do reflect, to some degree, a lack of confidence in the long-term commitment to existing emission reduction targets, as well as continued uncertainty with regards to a future international agreement,” he said.
Be concerned, be very, very concerned …
Ah, well. The bankers are pleading for the negotiators to come up with something, anything, to keep their Rumplestiltskin machine spinning carbon into money.
So we’ve got the banks against us … gonna be a long fight. This is Wall Street at its worst, looking to keep the carbon hype afloat and pushing to keep those sweet carbon bucks rolling in.
Where are the OCCUPY! folks when we need them? I say bring on the tents and the undercooked bulgur wheat, let’s OCCUPY COP 17–CMP 7!
w.
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GJEP on KPFK Pacifica Los Angeles This Week: Climate Change, Forests, and the Keystone Pipeline
Global Justice Ecology Project partners with Margaret Prescod’s Sojourner Truth show on KPFK–Pacifica Los Angeles radio show for a weekly Earth Minute on Tuesdays and a weekly 12 minute Environment Segment every Thursday.
This week’s Earth Minute discusses the impacts of climate change on bark beetles, which are wiping out vast expanses of conifer forests in North America. On this week’s Earth Segment, Kari Fulton, of Environmental Justice Climate Change discusses the recent announcement that the decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would be “postponed.”
Text from this week’s Earth Minute:
At the upcoming UN climate conference in Durban South Africa later this month, protecting forests will once again being looked to as the solution to climate change. Meanwhile a tiny beetle, assisted by warming temperatures, is devouring coniferous forests across North America.
Since the 1990s, bark beetles have killed 30 billion trees in North America. Climate change is expanding the range of the beetles and increasing their numbers, while human activities–such as wildfire prevention and logging the best and strongest trees–has further assisted the beetle epidemic.
But instead of stepping back to evaluate what’s causing this forest crisis, the timber industry is moving ahead with plans to turn these trees into wood chips to be shipped around the globe for so-called “renewable” electricity production. While this will supposedly help replace fossil fuels and mitigate climate change, it will also result in bark beetles spreading into and destroying new conifer forests–which will, in turn, worsen climate change.
For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth show, this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project.
To listen to the Earth Minute, Click here: earth-minute-11_15_11
To Listen to the Earth Segment with Kari Fulton of Environmental Justice Climate Change being interviewed about the recent Keystone XL Pipeline decision, click here and scroll to minute 48:45.
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Filed under Climate Change, Earth Minute, Energy, Indigenous Peoples, Natural Disasters, Posts from Anne Petermann, Tar Sands, UNFCCC
Video: Patrick Bond, Raises Concerns About Upcoming COP 17 Conference in Durban, South Africa
Note: Global Justice Ecology Project will be blogging daily from the UN Climate Conference (COP-17) in Durban, South Africa from November 28th through December 10th.
Patrick Bond, co-author of Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, has already expressed skepticism about COP 17, a climate change “cop out”, pretending to be a climate “change” conference when in fact its main use is to serve and protect the interests of carbon traders and those who profit from exploiting the environment. The conference is set to take place in Durban between November 28th & December 9th.
In the following video, Bond argues that these conferences are really just a way for big business to negotiate on the price it will cost for them to pollute the environment. The interest in the conference has more to do with commodifying nature, and less to do with protecting its resources.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, UNFCCC
Occupy Burlington Dialogue on Ecology and Justice-The System of Debt is the System of Death
Bridging mass movements for economic and environmental justice
The System of Debt is the System of Death:
Examining the intertwined root causes of the crises we face
A workshop and dialogue hosted by Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle
of Hinesburg-based Global Justice Ecology Project
11am, City Hall Park
Saturday, Nov. 12th
“We live in a toxic crisis-ridden world because choices are driven, not by ethics or morals, not by justice vs. injustice, not even by objective science. Choices are driven by the bottom line. The 1% who run corporations make their decisions based on profits–on advancing their own self-interests to the detriment of all other life on Earth.”
In this workshop, we will discuss the intertwined root causes of the crises we face, and develop ideas about what we can do to build alliances based on these commonalities to diversify and strengthen our movement.
Coordinated by the #OWS-VT Burlington Environmental Working Group
http://owsvt.wikispaces.com/burlington+environmental+working+group
The System of Debt is the System of Death Workshop/Dialogue
The use of taxpayer money for the outrageous bailouts of banks engaged in high stakes gambling, and the subsequent slashing of the social safety net has mobilized people, around the world, with “occupy” movement rising up in 1,500 cities globally. One of the biggest galvanizing issues has been rapidly expanding economic injustice, exemplified in the U.S. by the enormous debt burdens being carried by graduating college students.
Combined with the million plus people who’ve lost their homes to foreclosure because of predatory lending scams by huge financial firms, there is no doubt as to why many thousands of people across the U.S. are mobilizing for a more just economic system.
But the financial crisis and its outcomes are merely symptoms of a much greater crisis. The crisis of death: exemplified by the climate crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and on and on…
The climate crisis is fast becoming climate catastrophe as region after region suffers the impacts of extreme weather–from floods to hurricanes to droughts to tornadoes to snowstorms–in a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.
Hundreds of species go extinct every day to extinction. The oceans have lost 90% of their life due to industrial fishing and climate change. The world’s forests–known both as the cradles of biodiversity and the lungs of the earth–are rapidly being destroyed, and there are plans to accelerate this deforestation to produce wood-based electricity.
We live in a tangled and beautiful web of life. This means that these myriad crises are reflected in our own bodies. Cancer is an epidemic. One in two men in the U.S. will develop cancer over the course of their lives; as will one in three women. Think about all of your family and friends. Now realize that one in two or one in three of them will develop some form of cancer. Imagine what that means.
We live in a toxic crisis-ridden world because choices are driven, not by ethics or morals, not by justice vs. injustice, not even by objective science. Choices are driven by the bottom line. The 1% who run corporations make their decisions based on profits–on advancing their own self-interests to the detriment of all other life on Earth.
The system must be transformed. It cannot be sustained.
In this workshop, we will discuss the intertwined root causes of the crises we face, and develop ideas about what we can do to build alliances based on these commonalities to diversify and strengthen our movement.
Outrage! Many young people were rounded up after a protest and put on a bus to take them off the grounds of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (2010) in Cancun, Mexico. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC
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Filed under Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Genetic Engineering, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Natural Disasters, Rio+20
FALSE CLIMATE SOLUTIONS EXPOSED
Earth Grab
Geopiracy, the New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes
Diana Bronson, Hope Shand, Jim Thomas, Kathy Jo Wetter
Preparations for the Rio+20 meeting that could decide whether humans survive or not are hotting up. 1 November 2011 is the deadline for official contributions to its Zero Draft document but over the next seven months decision-makers and campaigners will need all the facts they can lay their hands on.
‘Earth Grab – Geopiracy, the New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes‘ – essential, cutting-edge climate science in everyday language – is published this week (27 October 2011). The authors reveal information that the large corporations who profit from climate change do not want the public to know.
‘Earth Grab’ analyses how Northern governments and corporations are cynically using concerns about the ecological and climate crisis to propose geoengineering ‘quick fixes’. These threaten to wreak havoc on ecosystems, with disastrous impacts on the people of the global South. As calls for a ‘greener’ economy mount and oil prices escalate, corporations are seeking to switch from oil-based to plant-based energy.
The authors expose some truths behind the exploitation of biomass, which is far from the solution to environmental problems that many have claimed it to be. A biomass economy based on using gene technologies to reprogramme living organisms to behave as microbial factories will facilitate the liquidation of ecosystems. This constitutes a devastating assault of the peoples and cultures of the South, accelerating the wave of land grabs that are becoming common in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The book shows how the worlds largest agribusiness companies are pouring billions of dollars into, and claiming patents on, what are claimed to be ‘climate-ready crops’. Far from helping farmers adjust to a warming world – something peasant farmers already know how to manage – these crops will allow industrial agriculture to expand plantation monocultures into lands currently cultivated by poor peasant farmers. They are not a solution to growing hunger, they will feed only the corporate shareholders’ profits.
Eminent environmentalist Vandana Shiva, founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, writes in her foreword that this research ‘pulls back the curtain on disturbing technological and corporate trends that are already reshaping our world and that will become crucial battlegrounds for civil society in the years ahead’.
The book has already captured the attention of writer Naomi Klein, who writes that this ‘crucial book reveals … Indispensable research for those with their eyes wide open’. Campaigner George Monbiot adds that its exploration of ‘three crucial issues which will come to dominate environmental and human rights debates in the coming years make it an essential resource for anyone trying to keep up with the times’.
‘Earth Grab – Geopiracy, the New Biomassters and Capturing Climate Genes‘ is written by ETC Group, renowned for its research into biotechnologies, plant genetics and biological diversity, and for its analysis of the consequences of new technolgies for corporations and humans.
Published by Pambazuka Press, it is available from www.pambazukapress.org and all good bookshops.
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Filed under Biodiversity, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Geoengineering, Green Economy, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean, Rio+20
