December 8, 2010

Joaquin Sanchez and Sunyoung Yang escorted out for speaking up. Photo by Diana Pei Wu

Sign the petition today to help put the Cochabamba People’s Agreement and sensible solutions to climate change back on the US political agenda.

Things are POPPIN off in Cancun – negotiations officially end Friday, and as the climate negotiation clock ticks UN officials are feelin the pressure to come up with something that resembles anything like an agreement.

The problem is, that as they try to save face by buckling down inside their militarized fortress – a luxury labrynth of a Golf resort called Moon Palace – they are kicking out anyone who disagrees with their narrow corporate agenda in the process.

Similar to the barring of several civil society organizations including Friends of the Earth from last year’s Copenhagen sham, this year COP16 enforcers have kicked out 4 of our youth delegates for chanting, and they’ve just this morning removed Tom Goldtooth Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network and key player in the debate on REDD and REDD+ from the grounds while stripping him of his accreditation.

Watch the great Democracy Now coverage of our very own Sunyoung Yang of the Labor Community Strategy Center/Bus Riders Union and Kari Fulton and Joaquin Sanchez of Youth for Climate Justice: “UN Stop Silencing Civil Society!”.

Industrialized and industrializing countries and the forces they have literally bought off seem to be clearing the way to hammer through a deal on REDD.  And while this would mean some money up front to some global south governments, it also means the privatization of the people’s forests, the permission for big polluters to pollute more, and the consequent trampling on rights that too often comes with corporate ownership and seizure of land around the world.

REDD proponents argue that we should hammer home a deal and work on securing rights later.  Hmmm.  Give em enough rope and…they make it obvious that rights-based guarantees come second if they come into play at all.

What we are saying instead is – change this system – stop trying to save polluting industries and realize it’s time to wake up and make the hard decisions necessary to put our ecosystems back on track.  REDD is not ready as Jihan Gearon of IEN says.  No deal on this is better than a bad deal as Ash-Lee Henderson of Mountain Justice says.

Let’s get a real financing agreement instead – one that creates a plan for industrialized countries to pay their climate debt to the Global South through a global climate fund that is run by the FULL UN, NOT by just the few Goliaths in the UN and NOT run by the World Bank which would pay countries in loans with strings attached not grants.  The Cochabamba People’s Agreement states, “Climate funding should be direct and free of conditions, and should not interfere with the national sovereignty or self-determination of the most affected communities and groups.”

And let’s put pressure on the Obama administration to stop ramming through the ineffective Copenhagen Accord which relies on faulty mechanisms like REDD and sets dangerously low and non-binding targets for carbon emissions.  Sign the petition today to help put the Cochabamba People’s Agreement and sensible solutions to climate change back on the US political agenda.

Check www.redroadcancun.com and www.grassrootsclimatesolutions.net for updates as they unfold in Cancun!

By Joshua Kahn Russell

Reposted from www.itsgettinghotinhere.org

December 7, 2010

Thousands of community activists around the world take action to promote Local Solutions to the Climate Crisis

The tone inside the conference center at the U.N. Climate Negotiations in Cancun has been a bit dismal this past week. Yet despite the reduced expectations inside, this morning the international peasant movement La Via Campesina gave us a new injection of hope and vision with a vibrant march of thousands of small farmers, Indigenous peoples and community activists through the streets in Mexico. It kicked off today’s international day of action – “1,000 Cancuns” – where grassroots organizations across the world demonstrated local resiliency and real solutions to the climate crisis. 30 coordinated events took place in the U.S. and Canada today, anchored by the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance.

Here in San Francisco, more than a dozen local community organizations joined forces to help convert a Mission District parking lot into a community garden and park with affordable housing units. Click here for photos.

“This action demonstrates a tangible solution to the climate crisis by promoting local food production, challenging our dependence on automobiles and strengthening bonds within the community,” explained Teresa Almaguer of People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER) “The climate crisis requires community-based solutions and an end to corporate influence within the UN climate negotiations.”

In addition to planting vegetables, participants enjoyed live music, theatrical performances and speakers all focusing on solutions to the climate crisis. A common theme at the event was increasing local food production in the fight against climate change, in contrast to the corporate-driven false solutions being put forth inside the U.N. negotiations.

“Industrial agriculture is one of the top three sources of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan of Movement Generation. “Agribusiness corporations profit from everything from fertilizer and pesticide sales to control of what goes onto supermarket shelves. The people are left paying the true costs in polluted water, depleted soil, diet-related diseases, and climate disruption. Meanwhile, U.S. agribusiness harms small farmers, farm workers and consumers – in the U.S. and around the world.”

The Mission District parking lot at 17th and Folsom streets has been the target of an ongoing campaign by community organizations to legally reclaim publicly-owned land to meet community needs. Similar efforts have been successful in other parts of San Francisco and the Bay Area largely for the creation of community gardens.

“At the UN Climate negotiations, the US government – highly influenced by corporate polluters – has pushed for an accord that would lock us in to catastrophic impacts from disrupting the earth’s climate systems,” explained Xochitl Bernadette Moreno of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER). “The Obama Administration needs to drop the Copenhagen Accord and uphold the Cochabamba Agreement which the world’s people’s movements have put forth as a real solution to solving the climate crisis.”

Click here to sign a message to Obama to stop obstructing a real climate deal in Cancun!

Event cosponsors included: Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Center for Political Education, Communities for a Better Environment, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Mobilization for Climate Justice West, Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER), People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), Richmond Progressive Alliance, Urban Tilth, West County Toxics Coalition.

Photo by Allan Lisner

update by Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, Movement Generation

As we prepare for a powerful day of action, MG joins with more than 100 groups in Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice North America to say:

Our communities are our homes!  Our local organizing campaigns offer real solutions: local agriculture for food sovereignty that will slash greenhouse gas emissions, affordable mass transit instead of expanding highway systems and automobile culture, local clean energy policies to create a just transition off fossil fuels, all grounded in values of sustainability and health for ourselves, our communities, and the planet.

On this Road from Detroit to Cancun and beyond, we are building a powerful movement for climate justice that will liberate the rivers, honor the earth, free the people, and unplug the empire!

Read more for a look at some of what is happening inside & outside!

Outside:

·      Buses have brought folks in full force from across Mexico as part of the Caravans for Life, Environmental, and Social Justice organized by La Via Campesina International. The Caravans have connected community members from across North & South America and  the world to share struggles and build a peoples movement that will win the rights of Mother Earth and her peoples.

·      As Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice, groups from the South in the North have gathered in Cancun to build a strong climate justice movement with people’s movements from around the world.

·      While social movements will march to Moon Palace where the talks are taking place in Cancun, actions will take place in 30 locations in the U.S. and Canada on December 7, 2010 as part of La Via Campesina’s call to action for local actions everywhere.

Inside:

·      Industrialized nations entered with lowered expectations and then promptly weakened the language in the official drafts.

·      This despite outcry from governments in the global south whose peoples will be most impacted by melting glaciers, rising sea levels, drought, famine, disease, forced migration, and more.  Social movements are calling for the inclusion of key points from the Cochabamba People’s Agreement which would head off catastrophic climate disruption.

·      And as WikiLeaks documents have shown, the U.S. has resorted to underhanded bullying tactics to ram through a version of the undemocratic and ineffective Copenhagen Accord while completely ignoring essential provisions of the Kyoto Protocol that must be renewed before 2012.

·      The President of the country most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions currently in the atmosphere – U.S. President Obama — fails to show up at the UN climate negotiations in Cancun.  In fact, no head of an industrialized state will be present.

photo by Orin Langelle

·      Indigenous communities along the destructive XL Pipeline staged a powerful action inside the UN Climate Negotiations calling for an end to Tar Sands extraction and pipeline construction. Other strong actions including Wastepickers for zero waste have also been held inside and outside to bring attention to the root causes of the crisis. (photos by Orin Langelle/GJEP)

·      The fight to stop REDD continues.

·      Media keeps the public in the dark by failing to cover the story.

photo by Orin Langelle

Stay abreast of new developments through these websites:

Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice North America

RedRoad Cancun

Climate Voices

Blog by Mari Rose Taruc, Asian Pacific Environmental Network & Grassroots Global Justice Delegation to Cancun (12/4/10)

Day 1, Cancun by Air

Spanning the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic & swooping from the black Gulf of Mexico, I land in Cancun Mexico at night. Exiting the plane, the first sign I get of the UN climate conference is a life-sized China-bashing poster: “80% of China’s electricity is generated by dirty coal… The world’s leaders need to free us from dirty coal and its poisons.” So why don’t we see posters of top global carbon emitters per capita—US & European nations? Racism, clearly. Needing more perspective, I struck up a conversation with the Mexican customs agent. What do you think of the climate conference? It’s bullshit, he says, lots of politics will fly but no action. I told him I’m here with a delegation of poor people, indigenous & people of color in the US fighting pollution and that we need to see solutions come out of the talks. We gave each other a high five. I walk out into the tropical sky, get picked up by the Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ) Alliance and pass hundreds of federal police holding machine guns on the way to the hotel.

Day 2, Cancun by Land

Today, I wake up to a roommate who spent the last week on a bus caravan organized by La Via Campesina (international peasant & small farmers movement. By land is actually how many social movements are getting to Cancun. 3 buses from Jalisco turned to 30 buses, multiplying along the way from the desert to Mexico City up the Mountain and to the ocean. I attended the opening ceremony of the La Via Campesina space (one of 4 main convergence spaces here in Cancun) called the “Global Forum for Life, Environmental & Social Justice”. I sat behind the Haiti delegation, listening to stories from international allies who participated in the caravans coming from all over Latin America, impacted communities in the US, India, Japan & Europe. It sounded sadly familiar—a week full of toxic tours: agribusiness destroying watersheds, uncontrolled oil refinery pollution by PEMEX, savage urbanization, mountaintop removal to extract gold, the death of a river. I’ve already seen so many communities in the US suffer environmental racism that it wrenches my heart to hear of the corporate destruction globalized. “Welcome to the nightmare, welcome to hope,” those communities said. So hope is what we’re working for in Cancun. And by the looks of tonight’s first meeting of the 60+ delegation of the US grassroots climate justice delegation composed of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network and Youth for Climate Justice, we have a fighting chance…

While the US Government Stalls in Cancun, Community-based Solutions are Cooling the Planet

December 7, 2010

3:30-5:30 pm

17th and Folsom, San Francisco’s Mission District

Frontline communities, those first and most impacted by the climate crisis, are addressing the root causes of climate disruption and leading the way toward a healthy, safe, and just future.

Join us to work on a healthy solution in the Bay Area.

Push for a public park in the Mission on publicly-owned land currently used as a parking lot. We’ll build a garden, celebrate community-based activism, and enjoy speakers, theater, and music!

Featuring the headRush crew!

More information about the 1000 Cancuns Day of Action on December 7 on Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice: North America.

MEDIA ADVISORY
December 2, 2010
December 7 Day of Action:
Grassroots Communities in North America Show That
There are Alternative Solutions to Climate Change!

More than 25 coordinated grassroots events planned across the U.S. and Canada,
part of 1000 Cancuns Global Day of Action for Climate Justice

Contact: Jen Soriano, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, 415-572-7154, jen@ggjalliance.org

WHAT: On December 7, with the UN Climate Change Negotiations in Cancun approaching
an end, grassroots organizations across the world will be taking the future of the planet into
their own hands.  More than 25 coordinated events will take place in the U.S. and Canada as
part of La Vía Campesina’s call for 1000 Cancuns for climate justice worldwide.  All of the
actions will have one common goal: to oppose carbon market schemes that prolong our
addiction to fossil fuels, and to lift up local solutions that are already reducing greenhouse gas
emissions and cooling our planet.
Actions include a mass action to protest the 710 highway expansion in LA,  an action at City
Hall in Antonio to pressure city council to turn their Mission Verde resolution into a binding law
for green jobs creation and clean energy transition, and an action in San Francisco to turn a
publicly-owned parking lot into a community garden.  Events include people’s assemblies in
Canada and educational events on climate justice at universities and community organizations
across the U.S.

WHEN: December 7, 2010

WHERE: 12 cities in the U.S and 16 regions across Canada – click here for the complete list
Regions include: Albuquerque, the Bay Area, Chicago, the Gulf Coast, Los Angeles, Madison, New
York, Olympia, Providence, San Antonio, Burlington, Washington DC, Calgary, Charlottetown,
Brockville, Edmonton, Halifax, London, Peterborough, Regina, Saint John, Saskatoon, and Toronto.

WHY: “Our communities are on the frontlines of climate devastation.  We are also at the
crossroads of the climate crisis and the economic crisis,” says Jill Johnston of Southwest
Workers Union in San Antonio, TX.  “We know from experience that the UN is not considering
what we really need to survive.  Policies like REDD and REDD+ are more of the same pollution
profiteering that got us into this mess in the first place.  Our communities and the planet
urgently need real solutions.  We are taking action to show that grassroots solutions are real
and viable solutions to the global climate crisis.”

Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan of Movement Generation in Oakland, CA adds, “Last year in
Copenhagen delegates called on the Obama administration to adopt reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions that would protect human health for frontline communities in the U.S. Instead, we
got the Copenhagen ‘Discord’.   What we need is for the United States and Canada to drop this
ineffective document and embrace the Cochabamba People’s Agreement instead, which provides
guidelines for rapid emissions reductions and a framework for addressing the climate crisis with
solutions based in human rights and the Rights of Mother Earth.”

La Via Campesina International launched this call to action leading into the climate talks in Cancun.
There will be more than 100 actions around the world, throughout Latin America, Asia, and Europe as
well as in the United States and Canada.! The actions include people’s assemblies and forums in Korea,
Uruguay, Brazil, Nepal, Turkey, and mass actions in India, Argentina, Indonesia, El Salvador, the
Philippines, and Mexico.! All together these actions and events will bring together an estimated 1 million
people.!  This people-power is nothing short of the power that will be necessary to bring just and
sustainable solutions to scale to resolve the climate crisis.! In this context, the UN negotiations can be
seen in true perspective: as a narrow slice of the climate change field – and specifically as the
multinational corporate-driven arena whose negotiations are more oriented toward saving fossil fuel
companies and the neo-liberal economic system rather than making the hard decisions it will take to
create social and environmental justice.

For more information:
La Via Campesina International Peasant Movement: 1000 Cancuns Worldwide
1000 Cancuns List of North American Actions and Resources about 1000 Cancuns
Canada – Week of People’s Assemblies
Indigenous Environmental Network Red Road to Cancun
###

Over the past year, Movement Generation has been working closely with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Grassroots Global Justice and others to bring grassroots groups from frontline communities together to build a powerful Climate Justice Movement. This movement is leading with a Real Solutions agenda to transform the system, not the climate.  We are coming together around Cancun as Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice-North America.

Read updates at the joint web portal Movement Generation, IEN, GGJ, and others are using to unite our communities towards community solutions that will cool the planet!

Photo by Diana Pei Wu

Organizations (and individuals) are encouraged to sign this petition putting forth a strategy for real solutions to climate disruption.

To the Board and Staff of 1 Sky,

(excerpt) We, the undersigned, recognize Climate Disruption as a central issue of our time. With the right set of strategies and coordinated efforts we can mobilize diverse communities to powerful action. Our organizing strategy for climate justice is to: 1) Organize in, network with and support communities who have found their frontlines  of climate justice; 2) Organize with communities to identify their frontlines of climate justice, and 3) Coalesce these communities towards a common agenda that is manifested from locally defined strategies to state and national policy objectives through to international solidarity agreements.

Grassroots Organizing Cools the Planet

To the Board and Staff of 1 Sky,

We are grassroots and allied organizations representing racial justice, indigenous rights, economic justice, immigrant rights, youth organizing and environmental justice communities actively engaged in Climate Justice organizing.

Given the very necessary discussion spurred by your recent public letter (August 8, 2010), we wanted to share with you some of the work we have been doing to protect people and planet, as well as our reflections on a forward-thinking movement strategy. Your honest reflections on the political moment in which we find ourselves, alongside the open invitation to join in this discussion, are heartening.

Organizing a Powerful Climate Justice Movement

Like you, we recognize Climate Disruption as a central issue of our time. With the right set of strategies and coordinated efforts we can mobilize diverse communities to powerful action. Our organizing strategy for climate justice is to: 1) Organize in, network with and support communities who have found their frontlines of climate justice; 2) Organize with communities to identify their frontlines of climate justice, and 3) Coalesce these communities towards a common agenda that is manifested from locally defined strategies to state and national policy objectives through to international solidarity agreements.

Community-Led Climate Justice has been Winning

In assessing the broader landscape of climate activism it is critical to recognize that despite the failure of DC policy-led campaigns, there have also been significant successes on the part of grassroots climate justice campaigns across the U.S.

Frontline communities, using grassroots, network-based and actions-led strategies around the country have had considerable success fighting climate-polluting industries in recent years, with far less resources than the large environmental groups in DC. These initiatives have prevented a massive amount of new industrial carbon from coming on board – here are just a few examples:

Stopping King Coal With Community Organizing: The Navajo Nation, led by a Dine’ (Navajo) and Hopi grassroots youth movement, forced the cancellation of a Life of Mine permit on Black Mesa, AZ, for the world’s largest coal company – Peabody Energy. Elsewhere in the U.S. community-based groups in Appalachia galvanized the youth climate movement in their campaigns to stop mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining, and similar groups in the Powder River Basin have united farmers and ranchers against the expansion of some of the world’s largest coal deposits.

Derailing the Build-out of Coal Power: Nearly two thirds of the 151 new coal power plant proposals from the Bush Energy Plan have been cancelled, abandoned or stalled since 2007 – largely due to community-led opposition. A recent example of this success is the grassroots campaign of Dine’ grassroots and local citizen groups in the Burnham area of eastern Navajo Nation, NM that have prevented the creation of the Desert Rock coal plant, which would have been the third such polluting monolith in this small, rural community. Community-based networks such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Energy Justice Network and the Western Mining Action Network No Coal Network have played a major role in supporting these efforts to keep the world’s most climate polluting industry at bay.

Preventing the Proliferation of Incinerators: In the last 12 years, no new waste incinerators (which are more carbon-intensive than coal and one of the leading sources of cancer-causing dioxins) have been built in the US, and hundreds of proposals have been defeated by community organizing. In 2009 alone, members of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives prevented dozens of municipal waste incinerators, toxic waste incinerators, tire incinerators and biomass incinerators from being built, and forced Massachusetts to adopt a moratorium on incineration.

Defeating Big Oil In Our Own Backyards: A community-led coalition in Richmond, CA, has, stopped the permitting of Chevron’s refinery expansion in local courts. This expansion of the largest oil refinery on the west coast is part of a massive oil and gas sector expansion focused on importing heavy, high-carbon intensive crude oil from places like the Canada’s Tar Sands. This victory demonstrates that with limited resources, community-led campaigns can prevail over multi-million dollar PR and lobby campaigns deployed by oil companies like Chevron, when these strategies are rooted in organizing resistance in our own backyards.

REDOIL, (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands) an Alaska Native grassroots network, has been effective at ensuring the Native community-based voice is in the forefront of protecting the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Together with allies, REDOIL has also prevented Shell from leasing the Alaska outer continental shelf for offshore oil exploration and drilling. Advancing recognition of culture, subsistence and food sovereignty rights of Alaska Natives within a diverse and threatened aquatic ecosystem has been at the heart of their strategy.

Stopping False Solutions like Mega Hydro: Indigenous communities along the Klamath River forced Pacificorp Power company to agree to “Undam the Klamath” by the year 2020, in order to restore the river’s natural ecosystems, salmon runs and traditional land-use capacity. For decades, Indigenous communities have been calling out false solutions – pointing to the fact that energy technologies that compromise traditional land-use, public health and local economies cannot be considered climate solutions.

Building Resilient Communities Through Local Action: In communities all over the US, frontline communities are successfully winning campaigns linking climate justice to basic survival:
• In San Antonio, Texas, the Southwest Workers Union led the fight to divert $20billion dollars from nuclear energy into renewable energy and energy efficiency. In addition, they launched a free weatherization program for low-income families and a community run organic farm.
• In Oakland, California, the Oakland Climate Action Coalition is leading the fight for an aggressive Climate Energy and Action Plan that both addresses climate disruption and local equity issues.

Lessons from the Beltway Strategy

Our analysis of mainstream climate advocacy’s failure to win in the federal arena echoes yours, but differs in key areas. We agree there was insufficient investment in movement building, and a “beltway strategy” was prioritized without clarity on what the bottom lines were. “Anything is better than nothing,” will always lead to nothing, because it is a declaration of our intention to compromise. As a result, a decade of advocacy work, however well intentioned, migrated towards false solutions that hurt communities and compromised on key issues such as carbon markets and giveaways to polluters.

These compromises sold out poor communities in exchange for weak targets and more smokestacks that actually prevent us from getting anywhere close to what the science – and common sense – tells us is required. We encapsulate the lessons learned as follows:

Access was confused for Influence. We do not have influence in DC, regardless of how much face-time we get with legislators, or their staffers. To start from a place of power – you must first figure out where you have power, and build from there. We have power in our communities where we have relationships and can hold politicians and corporations accountable. In DC, corporate power rules because they can concentrate energy, resources and relationships there – in ways we cannot. However, when confronting these same corporations in our tribes, cities, and towns, we reveal that they are not nimble or powerful enough to defeat our communities.

Density was confused for Depth; and Mobilizing for Organizing. Since we are calling for a redoubling of grassroots organizing efforts, we should be clear what we mean. Grassroots Organizing is the process by which people in communities rally around a common cause, acting on their own behalf with allies and networks – often against powerful interests, often building new institutions needed to win a lasting change. The material conditions in communities have to change for the material conditions in DC to change. Anyone looking to support real and effective solutions would do well to look outside the beltway.

Targets were confused for Solutions. We will never win by centering our principal energy on CO2 targets alone. Real Solutions must move past carbon targets, whether it is parts per million or percentages of emissions. Here is why:

1) Targets reinforce the “carbon fundamentalism” frame that hides the root causes of climate change. By not talking about root causes, we miss opportunities to connect climate disruption with failures of economic systems, resource wars and forced migration, for example. Targets also serve to reduce discussion on climate to arenas where corporations have greater access.

2) How we get to the targets is more important than the targets. By staking our claim solely around a target, we leave the political space for false solutions wide open. From technology solutions such ast “clean coal”, “safe nuclear” and “renewable biomass” to market solutions such as offsets – these so-called solutions serve to line the pockets of those who got us into this mess in the first place, without dealing with the root cause. The targets we do articulate along with our solutions should be extremely aggressive and aligned with call from international social movements, such as those coming from the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

Flipping the Script: Leading with the Grassroots

Given the significant gains we have had with community-led strategies for Climate Justice, and the failure of resource-intensive, beltway policy campaigns, we need to re-prioritize building power from the bottom up. The strategy we emphasize includes::

1) Investing in grassroots action at frontline struggles to win the victories that build our power, improve our communities and stop the corporations causing climate disruption;.
2) Prioritizing local organizing to build the resilient communities, economic alternatives, and political infrastructure that we need to weather the climate crisis; and,.
3) Supporting solidarity with grassroots movements around the world, to link our struggles, and to craft policies and structures we need internationally to support solutions determined locally.

International Solidarity for a Stronger Movement – Beyond Cancún

As grassroots forces, we have been building with social movements from around the world. Our groups were well represented at the World Peoples’ Summit Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in April 2010. The Peoples’ Summit Conference modeled what a more democratic, transparent policy-making process could look like and resulted in proposals that were formally submitted to the UNFCCC, Conference of Parties 16, in Cancun. These submissions are in the negotiating text, being championed by several southern nations. The demands in these submissions are clear and strong – No Offsets, No (Carbon) Markets, No Commodification of our Atmosphere or of Life.

While “offsets” are often cloaked as opportunities for “clean development”, this claim fails on two counts. First, offsets do not lead to clean development but to greater destruction, displacement and disempowerment. Second, the very premise of offsets is that it is allowable to continue polluting in poor communities and communities of color in the U.S. to justify over-industrialization of communities and their resources elsewhere.

As communities fighting climate pollution in our own backyards, we link our struggles with social movements worldwide to stand against offsets and other false solutions and to build real solutions based in our communities. We call on you to stand with us. If there is anything you can take away from this letter, we reiterate: The equation of power in our movement, just as in our country, must be inverted.

The leadership is not going to come from beltway strategists navigating federal policy, with a grass-tops cultivated to support it. The leadership is coming from the grassroots everyday.

We will win Climate Justice by supporting the hundreds of communities around the country who are targeting the climate polluters in their communities, whether that is an energy source, a toxic industry, a dirty port, a big box chain, a freeway or a developer driving gentrification. Resources should be deployed to win those fights in those communities – for their own sake.

Grassroots Organizing Cools the Planet.

In power,
Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ)
Youth For Climate Justice (Y4CJ)
Southwest Workers Union (SWU)
Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP)
Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)
Black Mesa Water Coalition (BMWC)
Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL)
Communities for a Better Environment (CBE)
Just Transition Alliance (JTA)
Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN)
Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT)
Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE)
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO)
People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER)
Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE)
Justice in Nigeria Now (JINN)
Ironbound Community Corporation
Energy Justice Network
Stand Up / Save Lives Campaign
Earth Circle Conservation & Recycling
Biofuelwatch
Rising Tide North America
Don’t Waste Massachusetts Coalition
Global Justice and Ecology Project (GJEP)
The Ruckus Society
Grassroots International
smartMeme Strategy and Training
International Sustainability Institute
Seventh Generation Fund
Berthold Environmental Awareness Committee
Save Our Sacred Earth
Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy

Last month in Cochabamba, the Bolivian government and social movements convened the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC).  The conference was ground-breaking, bringing together governments, NGO’s, indigenous communities, and social movements.  The goal of the conference was to re-ground and cohere the global forces that are working for climate justice in order to impact global climate negotiations.
Whether we work on environmental, social, or economic issues, what happened in Cochabamba is relevant to our work as Left organizers in the United States.  To help make the conferences’ relevance for our work as clear as possible, I’m going to talk about Copenhagen and the back story to Cochabamba, lay out some of the developments at the CMPCC, and explore how it all relates to the next phase of building a powerful climate justice movement.

The Back Story

Our situation is dire.  Science tells us that CO2 emissions from human activity (principally coal-burning and oil consumption, but also deforestation) are already beyond sustainability and that today’s emissions will take seventy years to manifest their full impact on global temperature.  Even with the Kyoto protocol in place, the growth of emissions in the last ten years has been the fastest ever. We need a substantial decrease in global emissions over the next 10 years, and we need to almost completely move away from fossil fuels over the next 30-40 years. If we don’t  we will almost certainly end up with irreversible changes in temperature, weather, and rainfall that will have horrendous and unacceptable social consequences.

This material reality provides the backdrop to recent international climate negotiations.  It would be a tall order to achieve that type of environmental change that we need under any economic or political system.  But the challenges are even greater under our current economic system; we are contending with neoliberal capitalism, an exploitative and often neo-colonial relationship between the global North and the global South, the corruption of most world governments by capital and corporations, and the arrogance and lack of accountability of the United States on the world stage.  The meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen laid these dynamics bare.  Although it was initially billed as “Hopenhagen” – a meeting where humanity would come together to protect ourselves and nature – the reality in Copenhagen’s meeting halls was class struggle.

In recent years, a great deal of energy has been spent in the international climates negotiations to get the US back to the table. Going into Copenhagen, it was clear that a comprehensive, equitable agreement wasn’t in the works.  Regardless, many social movements and governments from teh global South were hopeful that a global agreement would be reached that would use scientific estimates to set a global limit on emissions and provide a framework for transitioning away from fossil fuels.  There was hope that agreements could be reached that would allow for (1) adaptation by those who have already been affected by climate change and (2) the transfer of technology and funds to the South to make that transition possible without pushing the nations of the global South into poverty.  There was also the hope that developed countries would acknowledge the debt they owed to the rest of the world for damaging the climate.

Instead, with all the world’s governments assembled in the Bella Center, the global North (and particularly the United States) refused responsibility  The biggest polluters refused to commit to stop polluting. Would the North pay it’s debt for having used up the atmospheric space over the last 100 years?  Nope.  Transfer technology so that developing nations could develop with less emissions?  Nope.  Pay for damages or adaptation for communities that have already been impacted?  Nope.  Decrease domestic emissions to avoid climate chaos?  Nope.  Instead, these polluters wanted to use the UNFCCC as the basis to construct a new world order that would create a new set of economic rules to benefit northern corporations.

When President Obama showed up, he settled quickly into back-room negotiations to hammer out a proposal that would benefit the United States.  This proposal – now called the Copenhagen Accord – would create a process where each government had autonomy over what cuts it wanted to propose and where these proposed cuts would be added up and carried out through a world carbon market.  There would be no enforcement mechanism if nations don’t meet their proposed reductions.  If the US says it will decrease emissions by 4% (which is their current offer), and Costa Rica says it will be carbon neutral in the next 20 years, there is no mechanism by which the U.S. can be held accountable for greater emissions reductions.  The Copenhagen Accord was not allowed to pass during the meeting in Copenhagen, due to the resistance from ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) and African states and small island nations on the inside of the convention and to the social movements who were organizing on the outside.

Shortly after the Copenhagen Accord was released, a team of European scientists determined that if all nations lived up to their commitments under the accord, it would only amount to – at best -  a 2% decrease in emissions.  This is ten times less than what the science says is needed in order to prevent environmental catastrophe.  On the heels of this report, a team from MIT stated that – in material terms –  this 2% decrease by 2020 would commit the world to a 3-4 degree Celsius increase in temperature, an increase which would be catastrophic.

Pachamama o Muerte!

Leaving Copenhagen, there was a huge amount of righteous anger at the behavior of the US and the global North.  The time for action should have been 20 years ago.  But even this late in the game, the rich still acted with impunity.  What now?  Now that the Copenhagen Accord had come to light, the U.S.’s intentions were clear.  The next global meeting of the UNFCCC was already scheduled for Cancun in December of 2010, and the U.S. was clearly going to try to pass a proposal similar to the Copenhagen Accord at this meeting. But how could the movement that succeeded in stopping a bad agreement in Copenhagen defeat the US proposal and move negotiations back towards the kind of transformative proposals that are needed?

Evo Morales stepped into that political space by convening the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC).  As Willy Meir, a Left deputy from Spain stated at the opening ceremonies of the CMPCC in Cochabamba, “This conference has been produced from the failure of the Summit in Copenhagen, whose authors, the most developed countries, have taken us into a dead-end alley.”  The plan was ambitious: organize a conference with seventeen working groups that would develop social movement proposals on the major areas of global negotiation, proposals for other areas of importance for social movements that hadn’t been on the table in the UNFCCC, and strategies and plans to impact the negotiations.  The conference proposed responding to the back-room Copenhagen Accord which had been produced by unaccountable elites with a people’s proposal, developed in broad daylight through exchange and debate between global movements and communities.

What were these proposals?  Many of the proposals related directly to international negotiations. They included points such as:
• A 50% reduction of domestic greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries for the period 2013-2017 under the Kyoto Protocol without reliance on market mechanisms;
• The need to begin the process of considering the proposed Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to reestablish harmony with nature;
• The obligation of developed countries to honor their climate debt toward developing countries and our Mother Earth;
• The incentivizing of models of agricultural production that are environmentally sustainable and that guarantee food sovereignty and the rights of indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers;
• The protection and recognition of the rights and needs of forced climate migrants.

Beyond the points that were specifically focused on negotiations, groups developed structural critiques of the causes of climate change. They crafted proposals and declarations that pointed the way towards the kind of broader social and economic transformations that will be necessary to adequately respond to the crisis.  This section from the final conclusions of the working group on Harmony with Nature provides a good example,
“Given that capitalism is a threat to life itself, it is necessary to forge a new system that reestablishes harmony with nature and among human beings based on the principles of: equilibrium among all and with all things, complementarity, solidarity, equity, justice, collective consciousness, and respect for diversity and spirituality.”

Or the following example from the Indigenous People’s working group, proposing
“The recovery, revalidation and strengthening of our civilizations, identities, cultures and cosmovisions based on ancient and ancestral Indigenous knowledge and wisdom for the construction of alternative ways of life to the current “development model”, as a way to confront climate change.”

The working groups were successful in crafting a shared vision, but they were not lacking in strong debates.  The conference was intended to create a big tent that would hold governments, NGO’s, and social movements, so it came as no surprise that – at times – these different groupings had different agendas and goals.  Governments that participated in Cochabamba were participants in the UNFCCC, and they had to decide what the tactics of their inside strategy would be.  Carbon markets were soundly rejected by social movements in the working groups of the CMPCC, but many governments (including the Cuban government representatives) supported the continuation of the Kyoto protocol as opposed to the Copenhagen accord.[1] To the extent that there was a debate around the use of market mechanisms, the governments were clear that they were arguing that market-based mechanisms should be seen as tactical demands. But regardless of whether this difference is strategic or tactical, it significant since the hope is to have unified demands inside and outside of the Cancun meeting in Cancun.  REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a program which would incorporate forests into a global carbon market, was another big point of contention. Against the opposition of Bolivian government representations, the Indigenous Environmental Network from the United States organized hard and successfully to have the CMPCC oppose REDD.

In the end the Cochabamba protocol is remarkable for its unity.  The process was able to successfully weave together the best thinking and the on-the-grounds experience of social movements in areas as diverse as water, carbon markets, technology transfer and forests. The declarations stand as a movement-driven counter-proposal from the perspective of civil society in opposition to the perspectives of the elites.  As Colin Rajah of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights said “Cochabamba changed the game.  The U.S. will push what it’s going to push, but now there is a new proposal on the table.  It’s a counter-balance.”
What does this mean for us?

Looking back at the successes of Cochabamba and thinking about what they mean for climate justice work in the U.S., a few key questions and observations come to mind.  The overarching question that organizers and activists all over the world are asking is: What do we do about the U.S.? It’s not the first time that we have asked this question.  As recent history shows , the obstructionist position taken by the US government.  Is the primary obstacle to meaningful coordinated global action on climate issues. We need to figure out: What do we need to do to either push the U.S. to move the right direction or – at the very least – to get out of the way and stop dragging the world in the wrong direction?  I would argue that there are three key tasks that we need to take up:

1. Building a Popular Politics of Climate Justice in the US

The world needs the U.S.-based movement for climate justice to reach a new stage in the development. There are signs that this is possible.  The public awareness of environmental issues has grown markedly over the past 5 years, both in social justice movements and the broader public. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina played an important role in that process.  At the same time, this awareness is uneven. Significantly, there has been more growth among the middle class and white communities than among working people and communities of color.  This isn’t surprising, but it has meant that most environmental awareness has driven socially-conscious consumption rather than than political action.  It also has played into the hands of the Right, which has worked to make the public believe the environmentalism is a lifestyle choice made by people who have money to spend or who are recreationally green.

The key for our work is to build and strengthen a popular politics of climate justice.  When I say “popular,” I’m arguing that our demands and our approach to climate change have to resonate with the perceived needs and demands of broad sectors of society. They need to respond to poverty.  They need to respond to racism.  They need to speak to those who are underemployed and lack affordable housing, to those for whom the current system doesn’t work and for whom it never will. They need to help move those sectors into action.

To accomplish this, our U.S.-based climate justice movement needs to follow the example of the movements that led the process in Cochabamba We need to get into fights around water, food, farming, transportation, land-use, housing, toxics, community resilience, jobs, and keeping fossil fuels in the ground.  My point here is that these fights – rooted in the dire conditions of neighborhoods, communities, and even bio-regions – can help us avoid making very technical macro-level policy fights our only site of struggle.  To the extent that we can keep these community-based issues front-and-center, we open the door to creating interesting new alliances and to making these issues tangible to folks who Al Gore isn’t going to be able to reach.

2. Same struggle.  Same enemy.  New Vision?

What about the Left?  When I was on the plane coming back to the U.S. from Bolivia, I was imagining the next six months and making mental work plans.  When I landed, I was struck almost immediately by the developments in Arizona.  The racist political forces that birthed SB1070 are the same forces that are responsible for the economic meltdown in recent years, and they are the same forces that stand in the way of the development of a just and sustainable economy.

For those of us on the Left, although some of the details of climate negotiations may be  different, the nature of the struggle and the enemy is the same.  But there are some differences. Specifically, Cochabamba may offer us a different vision.  When we envision a society that exists in a sustainable relationship to nature, this society has material limits.  These limits imply things about how subsystems of the economy – like the food system or the energy and transportation systems – should be run.  These limits shed some light into what a sustainable people’s economy could look like, whether it’s in the Bay Area or Phoenix or Seattle.  They help us to think about what our cities should be like.  An understanding of ecology combined with a critique of economy can help reground our Left Vision, giving us clarity in areas where we lacked it before.  The working groups in Cochabamba developed thinking along these lines that we need to take  the time to examine.  The Left in the U.S. would be strengthened by incorporating more of this type of thinking into our analysis.  We’ll have a chance to do that soon at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in June 2010.

3. The Road from Cochabamba to Cancún

The CMPCC laid the groundwork for global movements to make a hard stand over the next year.  The US government is pushing hard for the adoption of the Copenhagen Accords in Cancun, but organizing in opposition to those Accords gained strength and clarity in Cochabamba.  In a recent message, Via Campesina called for thousands of local actions globally, and they called for a large-scale mobilization in Cancun.  And all signs point towards these mobilizations being stronger than they were in Copenhagen, from the scale of the protests and the coordination of organizing to the clarity of our proactive demands.  These public protests and actions will provide an important opportunity for our communities to weigh in and be counted.  We need a massive converegence and mobalization on the scale of the protests against the WTO in Seattle a decade ago.

What can we fight for and win in Cancun?  There are two key battles on different fronts. First, there is the battle for public opinion.  We need to broaden the public understanding of the breadth and relevance of these issues. We have the potential to shift the debate on domestic climate policies, like offshore oil drilling.  Second, we need to challenge the game plan of the U.S. delegation, especially with respect to the Copenhagen Accord.  We can have victories on both fronts if we can organize effectively. The U.S. Social Forum will provide an important jumping-off point to build the kind of coordination we need to make these victories possible.

Pa’lante Siempre!

Popular politics, deeper vision from the left, and an action plan…isn’t that what everyone’s looking for?   The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth moved the climate justice movement a few steps forward in all three areas.  But we still need to figure out how it all will come together into a successful fight over the next year.  My organization, Movement Generation, believes that the next step is to clarify our shared demands and our action plan during the U.S. Social Forum through the People’s Movement Assembly process.

On the days when I feel hopeless and when the type of change we need seems impossible, I look at kids playing outside my home and at my own children. And I know that, one day, they will ask me what I did when our planet was in so much danger.  Whether we asked for it our not, this is the defining challenge of our generation.  It’s a challenge that will be decided – one way or the other – in our lifetimes. Let’s get to work and make it count.

[1] Kyoto has a carbon market and offsets through a “clean development mechanism” that has been damaging to Southern communities.

Jason Negrón-Gonzales is the former Director of Movement Generation, and a co-founder of the MG Justice & Ecology Project. He began his political work organizing as a student around Puerto Rican community issues.  As a student at UC Berkeley he was involved in building multi-racial student alliances and worked against the ending of affirmative action and the cutting back of ethnic studies.  After graduating he began working with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), a membership based community/labor organization in San Francisco.  In his time at POWER Jason served as Organizer, Campaign Director, and Education Director as well as in alliance building work locally and nationally.  Jason is now a Program Associate at Movement Generation and works as a trauma nurse at SF General Hospital.

(photo by Marisa Franco, Right to the City Alliance)

Events in recent weeks in Arizona should be a cause for concern for all people who seek justice and progress in the US, and they have special significance for those of us who call the climate justice, environmental justice, and environmental movements our home.  These events call for a principled stand and action on our part, in defense of communities that have been displaced by economic and ecological crises, and against the racist and bigoted institutions that we also confront in the fight for a sustainable future.

In the words of Pablo Alvarado, the Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Committee (NDLON), “this week, the Arizona legislature passed the most anti-immigrant legislation the United States has seen in a generation.”  This legislation, SB 1070, will:  1. legislate racial profiling by requiring police to arrest and detain people based on a “reasonable suspicion” that they are undocumented, 2. make it a state crime to be unable to produce legal residency documents, and or to transport or shelter undocumented people, and 3. ban day laborers by making it a crime for anyone to “pick up passengers for work” and penalizing anyone seeking work at a day labor site, or those contractors who hire them.

We know from experience that nothing encourages the right wing like success. Now, less than a week since the passage of SB 1070, there are copycat bills being considered or proposed in more than a dozen states nationally.  This tide will only be turned if we face the enemies of our communities head on and stop them cold.

Same Struggle, Same Enemy

The environmental movement has historically contained a xenophobic trend which has supported laws like California’s Prop 187 and Arizona’s SB 1070.  These groups have sought to use pro-environment arguments to advocate for racist policy on immigration and population.  Let us be clear – there is not and never will be a solution to climate and environmental issues that is not built upon a strong foundation of social justice. The Tea Party Republicans that are looking to rally their troops and gain votes through cynical racist attacks on immigrant communities are the main enemies of our movement as well.  These enemies of democracy, of justice, and of the earth attempt to block everything but profits for the rich, and they will have to be systematically overcome to advance the cause of sustainability in this country. If they want to fight on immigration, let’s give them the fight they are looking for.

We can never forget that the policies that have driven migration to the US – neoliberal, free-trade policies like NAFTA that have destroyed Mexican and Central American economies (particularly rural economies), the dumping of surplus corn by the US into Mexico to bankrupt farmers, and the establishment of export processing zones and export oriented production in Mexico and around the world by US design – are the same policies that must be overturned to reach a workable solution to environmental and climate issues globally.   There will be no sustainable future without expanding local democracy and economies, which is only possible by dismantling the neoliberal policy that strips wealth from the workers and the countryside whether in Detroit or Jalisco.  And with the continued destruction of the environment in global South countries, the issue of migration as a human right for those whose land and livelihoods have been destroyed will only become more important.

Time to Stand Up

Leading immigration rights organizations based in Arizona like NDLON and Tonatierra have put out the call asking for support from allies in all parts of the US.  These forces are concentrating their efforts in the next 90 days “to stop SB 1070′s implementation, to defend civil rights, and to set federal immigration reform efforts in the right direction.” Calls to action and solidarity are being coordinated through www.AltoArizona.com.

We live in complicated times with many challenging issues confronting our communities: climate change, the foreclosure crisis, the recession, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and domestic battles around immigration, health care, and the direction of the nation in general.  The solution to this complexity isn’t for us to tuck ourselves into our corner and to try to convince others or ourselves that our issue is the most important.  We need to lean into this complexity and build a movement that understands that the same characters and systems are to blame for our different problems.  We also need a movement that is developed and sophisticated enough to take on fights on multiple fronts at the same time.  It’s time to broaden the front for immigrants rights.  See you in the streets on May Day!