Tag Archives: UNFCCC

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 | 2013-11-20 · 14:15

Poor countries walk out of UN climate talks as compensation row rumbles on

By John Vidal, 20 November, 2013. Source: The Guardian

UN climate change conference in Warsaw: delegates from the G77 and China in talks before staging a walkout. Photo: Francis Dejon/IISD

UN climate change conference in Warsaw: delegates from the G77 and China in talks before staging a walkout. Photo: Francis Dejon/IISD

Representatives of most of the world’s poor countries have walked out of increasingly fractious climate negotiations after the EU, Australia, the US and other developed countries insisted that the question of who should pay compensation for extreme climate events be discussed only after 2015.

The orchestrated move by the G77 and China bloc of 132 countries came during talks about “loss and damage” – how countries should respond to climate impacts that are difficult or impossible to adapt to, such as typhoon Haiyan.

Saleemul Huq, the scientist whose work on loss and damage helped put the issue of recompense on the conference agenda, said: “Discussions were going well in a spirit of co-operation, but at the end of the session on loss and damage Australia put everything agreed into brackets, so the whole debate went to waste.”

Australia was accused of not taking the negotiations seriously. “They wore T-shirts and gorged on snacks throughout the negotiation. That gives some indication of the manner they are behaving in,” said a spokeswoman for Climate Action Network. Continue reading →

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Filed under Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Green Economy, Warsaw/COP-19

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by | 2013-11-19 · 09:39

IBON International COP19 Climate Update 2

By Tetet Nera-Lauron, 19 November, 2013. Source: IBON International

Activists drop a banner of the Polish Economy Ministry in Warsaw on Monday, Nov 18th, the opening day of the World Coal and Climate Summit. Photo: AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski

Activists drop a banner off the Polish Economy Ministry in Warsaw on Monday, Nov 18th, the opening day of the World Coal and Climate Summit. Photo: AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski

‘Coal power can be part of the solution to tackling global warming. If there’s a will, there’s a way.’

This was the message of UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres at today’s opening of the 2-day World Coal and Climate Summit. While stating that her presence at the Summit is ‘neither a tacit approval of coal use, nor a call for the immediate disappearance of coal’, Figueres enjoined the coal industry to ‘change rapidly and dramatically for everyone’s sake.’

The 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body tasked to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change, stated that the world will overshoot the internationally agreed goal to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius if energy demands are met in the same way as it had been in the past. The UNFCCC Chief outlined the parameters of this ‘paradigm shift’ for the coal industry: (a) close all existing subcritical plants; (b) implement safe carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) on all new plants; and (c) leave most existing reserves in the ground. Continue reading →

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by | 2013-11-18 · 09:00

IBON International Update from Warsaw Climate Conference

Climate, Number 1

Warsaw, November 18, 2013

The nineteenth meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 19) is taking place inWarsaw, Poland, the 10th largest consumer of coal in the world, and producing 92% of its electricity from coal. According to many, must mark a ‘turning point’ for the international climate negotiations. Among the key outcomes expected from this meeting are on issues around mitigation, scaling up finance especially for adaptation, setting up an international mechanism toaddress loss and damage, and a plan for reaching a new legal agreement on climate action in 2015.

The COP 19 opened last week with the world witnessing the massive devastation wrought by super typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and with that, the impassioned appeal of Philippine Climate Change Commissioner Naderev Sano to ‘stop the madness’ of a few rich countries that continue to renege on their climate commitments amidst the worsening impacts of climate change. Sano also announced that he will go on voluntary fasting throughout the COP 19 meetings, and this has snowballed all over the world, with many organizations and individuals going on solidarity fasting for the climate.

But as the first week of the 19th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP18) drew to a close, fault lines between developed and developing countries are becoming clearer.

Continue reading →

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by | 2013-11-15 · 17:08

Friends of the Earth International strongly denounces Japan’s inaction on climate

WARSAW, POLAND, November 15, 2013 — Friends of the Earth International today strongly denounced the Japanese government which stated at the UN climate talks that it is breaking its promises to reduce climate change-causing greenhouse gases. [1]

Japan is the world’s fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

“While the planet is hurtling towards catastrophic climate change, and thousands are dead due to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Japan announced it will not reduce its carbon emissions as much as previously promised. This Japanese announcement flies in the face of the scientific evidence recently released by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change,” said Dipti Bhatnagar, International Coordinator of the Climate Justice & Energy programme, Friends of the Earth International.

Continue reading →

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by | 2013-11-14 · 18:33

Audio: Will Typhoon Haiyan Affect the Debate on Global Climate Change?

Note: Anne Petermann, Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project, was featured in a press release by the Institute for Public Accuracy on the link between Typhoon Haiyan, climate change, climate justice and the upcoming UN climate conference in Poland.  The link below is to one of the interviews she gave.

–the GJEP Team

Released on Nov 12, 2013

The typhoon that laid waste to parts of the Philippines last week struck just before the 19th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change got underway in Warsaw, Poland on Monday.  But while there is general agreement that global climate change is a major factor in the increasing number and intensity of storms worldwide, there continues to be little progress toward limiting the emission of greenhouse gasses.  We speak with Anne Peterman, executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project.

To listen to the show, go to Left Voices

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Filed under Climate Change, False Solutions to Climate Change, Natural Disasters, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, UNFCCC

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by | 2013-11-08 · 16:12

Typhoon Hiayan “Demonstrating How Global South Pays Price for Emissions Historically from North”

PM Friday, November 8, 2013

During the last major climate conference in 2012 in Doha, Tetet Lauron, a delegate from the Philippines, spoke of the devastating effects of Typhoon Bopha that hit the Philippines during that conference, killing hundreds. She said then: “I am Tetet. I am a citizen of the world. This is not an equal nor equitable or world — and I’ve had enough! To the wealthy, industrialized countries who are bracking and deleting away the survival of the people of the developing world [a reference to the rich nations’ tactics during negotiations over text]: You’ve used up more than the lion’s share of the world’s resources and you are historically the world’s largest polluters. We want you to commit — and honor those commitments. …” See below:


ANNE PETERMANN, globalecology@gmavt.net, @Climatejustice1
Petermann is executive director of the Global Justice Ecology Project, which runs theclimate-connections.org blog.

She said today: “With Typhoon Hiayan ripping through the Philippines, we are once again staring climate catastrophe square in the face. This typhoon, with winds up to 230 mph is being called the strongest cyclone ever to make landfall. But it is likely just the beginning.

“The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this past September was once again clear in its warning that a warming globe means more unstable weather. The waters of the Pacific that fed this typhoon were unusually warm, lending tremendous energy to the storm.

“Typhoon Haiyan is ravaging the Philippines only a few days before the opening of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland on Nov. 11, where once again it is predicted that no concrete action to limit climate change emissions will take place.

“But this storm should be a wake up call to the UN negotiators in Warsaw regarding the concrete impacts of their decades of inaction.

“Typhoon Haiyan is once again demonstrating how countries in the Global South sit directly in the path of the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions historically put out by the Global North.

“We are trying to reach our colleague, Tetet Lauron, of the Peoples’ Movement on Climate Change, who is based in Manila for first hand word of this storm, but so far phone calls are not going through.”

Also see Institute for Public Accuracy news release from 2012 Doha conference: “Doha Deal will Result in “Unprecedented Ecological and Social Collapse.’”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

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