WHEN: 4:30pm on Tuesday, March 30
WHERE: In front of Oakland City Hall, Frank Ogawa Plaza
WHAT: Rally (emceed by our very own Mateo Nube)

Stay & show your support at the City Council meeting from 5:30-8pm.

by Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan,

The Copenhagen round of the UNFCCC 15^th Conference of Parties has ended in failure  It is essential for the future of life on this planet that we achieve a global pact based on sound science and equity soon.  But given that the U.S. and its key allies were not willing to consider a fair and binding agreement, it is highly encouraging to see that social movements and many third world nations successfully united behind the slogan, “No deal is better than a catastrophic deal.”

Sadly, the US has been unwilling to put forth real solutions with the speed and scale needed. Instead, Hilary Clinton arrived on Thursday trying to extort an unfair deal by offering a vague package of $100 billion that would amount to a new climate colonialism. At the same time, a UNFCC analysis was leaked showing that the combined offerings of the US and other countries would amount to at least a 3 degree Celsius rise.  This would mean the eradication of whole island nations, dire drought for Africa, and massive displacement from increasing storms and flooding in South Asia.

The Obama Administration has offered cuts amounting to 4% from 1990 levels by 2020. To survive, the Island Nations, African Union, and other third world governments such as Bolivia joined with Indigenous People and others to call for industrialized nations to cut emissions by 49% from 1990 levels by 2020. They are demanding real solutions to the dire mitigation and adaptation issues they face.

Increasingly coordinated social movements and many 3^rd World governments held the line that no deal is better than a genocidal pact. Given this context, this is an important victory for the global south & impacted communities in the north on the path to winning:

- rapid, deep reductions in emissions;
- payment of climate debt;
- a rights-based approach to international and domestic climate change policy; and
- the inclusion of our communities in the processes.

On Thursday, December 17, US grassroots forces from impacted communities stepped up to challenge our government’s obstructive behavior.  Representatives of indigenous communities and other communities of color from the US and Canada delivered a letter to President Obama calling on him to act accountably and responsibly.

Today, Movement Generation stands proud to be building a powerful climate justice movement with

- Indigenous Peoples Movements
- Environmental Justice Communities and Coalitions
- Right to the City Alliance
- Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and
- Just Transition Alliance

We must build a powerful climate justice movement that can successfully pressure the US government to act accountably and responsibly.

The next round of negotiations will take place in Mexico City in late 2010.  Not just about climate, as Gopal Dayaneni says, “these negotiations are about everything, international trade; forests; food and agriculture; the rights of the indigenous and forest peoples; resource privatization; international finance (private and public); development rights; oceans; rivers; technology; intellectual property; migration, displacement and refugees; and biodiversity, to name a few. The reduction of emissions is only one part of the negotiations.”

One outcome could be that the ruling elites win an agreement that sets up a new global infrastructure for maintaining inequity amidst an increasingly militarized world where the rich control scarce food, water, land, and energy resources.  Or our social movements could use the next year to build our power to win a pact that helps us transition out of a capitalist system that is clearly broken and towards liberated communities that control our own land, water, and energy systems.

We must build this power starting in our own communities: talking with members, taking local action to frame the problem and the solutions. Along the way, the US Social Forum will be a critical space to align our movements and articulate an irresistible vision.

TAKE ACTION
As our delegation departs Copenhagen over the next few days, we call on you to stay connected to this historic effort to build a powerful climate justice movement led by frontline communities in the U.S.

- Look out for Report Backs & Strategy Sessions in January 2010
- Sign on to the Letter to President Obama
- Integrate Climate Justice into your basebuilding, leadership development, campaigns, and alliance building.
- Gear up to make Climate Justice a central frame of our movements at the US Social Forum through your workshops and other movement building work.

Social movements in the U.S. must seize 2010 to build our power towards winning System Change Not Climate Change. This is our moment to move millions to win a world driven by healing, cooperation, mutual aid, and a healthy relationship to the ecosystems we are a part of.

* CLIMATE TALKS UNDEMOCRATIC & ON VERGE OF FAILURE
* US/RICH COUNTRIES REFUSE SERIOUS REDUCTIONS & CLIMATE DEBT
* MASSIVE POLICE REPRESSION AGAINST NONVIOLENT CIVIL SOCIETY

WHEN: Friday December 18th 4:30-6:00PM
WHERE: Danish Consulate,1 California St, at Market St. (Embarcadero BART), San Francisco [view map]
Bring candles and friends.

“First they shut the public out of the climate negotiations, then they shut out 80% of NGOs who have been accredited to attend, and now they are jailing people who challenge the undemocratic nature of the climate negotiations, while the future of life on earth literally hangs in the balance.”
— Dorothy Guerro, Focus on the Global South, Climate Justice Now Network.

WHY?
UN CLIMATE TALKS ON VERGE OF FAILURE: Because the US and other wealth climate polluting nations refuse to significantly reduce climate pollution and to pay our ecological debt to climate-impacted developing world and because of the lack of democracy in the UN climate talks. On Tuesday, US climate negotiator Todd Stern said he foresees no change in President Obama’s offer to cut emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by2020. The proposal has been widely criticized because it amounts to just a four percent cut when adopting the 1990 emission standard used by the rest of the world. Scientists call for a 40% cut by 2020in order to prevent an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. Meanwhile, developing countries including the US, UK and Denmark drafted and circulated a document to completely circumvent the UN from all further future negotiations.

* CIVIL SOCIETY NGO’S BANNED FROM UN: Accredited civil society groups including Friends of the Earth, Avaaz, Tck Tck Tck, and Via Campesina have been banned from the UN Climate Conference. ”The surgical removal of non governmental organizations underscores the lack of democracy inherent in these negotiations. The only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is fully supporting and including peoples movements like the very ones illegitimately removed from this process.,” said Professor Micheal Dorsey, a member of the Climate Justice Now! Network.

* DENMARK VIOLATES DEMOCRATIC & HUMAN RIGHTS, ATTACKS NONVIOLENT ACTIVISTS: Danish police have engaged in mass preemptive arrests, detentions, clubbed and pepper spayed nonviolent activists, raided organizing centers and suspended basic civil liberties and democratic rights. Dr. Tadzio Mueller of Berlin, an accredited NGO observer at the COP 15 and the spokesperson for Climate Justice Action, was arrested without provocation by plain clothed police shortly after a press conference announcing nonviolent demonstrations plans. He remains in jail awaiting trial.

SING A PETITION TO THE DANISH GOVERNMENT:
http://www.petitiononline.com/ Tadzio/petition.html

WHO: Mobilization for Climate Justice West: A coalition of thirty climate justice, environmental justice, community, peace and human rights organizations. http://west.actforclimatejustice.org

MG’s Gopal Dayaneni is leading the delegation, a vehicle to build strategic alignment with global south movements, and other grassroots movements..

The group will work closely with several groups, including the Indigenous Environmental Network and Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative. Delegates include: Gopal Dayaneni, MG; Alicia Garza, POWER (and MG Bay Area network, RTTC, GGJ); Mari Rose Taruc, APEN (MG Bay Area network, GGJ); Marisa Franco, RTTC; Kalila Barnett, ACE (and RTTC); Roxana Aguilar, SAJE (RTTC); Jill Johnston, SWU (GGJ); Diana Lopez, SWU (GGJ); José Bravo, Just Transition Alliance (GGJ); Cecil Corbin-Mark, WEACT (EJ Leadership Forum); Jacqui Patterson, Women of Color United; and Diana Pei-Wu, MSC.

What is COP 15?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the new vehicle of global economic governance, for the simple reason that the only way to deal with ecological crisis (or at least pretend to) is to reorganize the global economy (or at least pretend to). This year marks the 15th Conference of Parties (COP 15) to the UNFCCC and most nations will be represented at the convening in Copenhagen, Denmark from December 7-18, 2009. As we approach the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 (which the US never ratified), Copenhagen and beyond become critical in determining the future of climate architecture.

The Moment:

A recent report by top climate scientists updating the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment issued in 2007 shows worse-than predicted consequences. They’ve announced that most parts of the Earth’s climate systems are changing faster and more severely than they had predicted. Recommendations by a panel of UN scientists include that “developed countries make cuts of between 25 percent and 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid a catastrophic rise in sea levels, harsher storms and droughts and climate disruptions.”  The news tells us that the US is proposing 17 percent cuts but this is based on 2005 levels and is really only a cut of about 3.5 percent from 1990 by 2020.

What the world really needs to successfully weather the transition is:

1. Targets that are real, binding, enforceable, verifiable and in line with the science, that reduce emissions at the source
2. A transparent, democratic funding mechanism to administer the ecological debt owed by the industrialized countries to the Global South for mitigation and adaptation (or… Industrialized nations spent the last 200 years creating the problem that other people are now suffering from. They must pay for the damage.)
3. The recognition and protection of the rights of all peoples’ in all aspects of climate policy.

Anything less will be disastrous for the planet and for her peoples.

Goals for the Delegation:

1. Exposure: Build the Climate Justice analysis of grassroots base-building organizations working on racial, economic and environmental justice in the US and expose them to global movements working on the intersections between ecological sustainability and justice.
2. Relationships: Connect folks with social movements, primarily from the South, for long-term alliance building, and amplify the presence of the “South in the North,” those communities hit first and hardest from climate disruption and who are suffering from racial, economic and social inequality in the US. We need to bust open the view of the US as a monolithic “rich country.”
3. Participate in justice-based activities (marches, events, etc.) that have leadership from Global South movements and justice-based movements in the North.
4. Support existing US-based, climate justice groups, including, EJCC, IEN and others.
5. Use this exposure opportunity to build towards the USSF in 2010, COP 16 in Mexico in 2010 and the WSF in 2011.

Follow the delegation on Movement Generation’s Facebook page, Twitter, and our blog!

Support for this delegation provided by Solidago Foundation, Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and individual donors.  If you know of foundations or individuals who may be interested in contributing to building the grassroots climate justice movement, please contact Mateo Nube at mateo@movementgeneration.org. To volunteer time, press contacts, or if you have questions about the delegation, contact Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan at michelle@movementgeneration.org.

“When someone drives around drunk and starts running over people and crashing into cars, you don’t re-fill their tank or give them ‘one for the road’.  The rich economies have been driving around drunk on oil and running over poor people; it is time to take away the keys, throw ‘em into rehab and make them pay for the damages.  Taking away the keys means not letting them drive false solutions. Rehab means cutting off access to fossil fuels- an immediate ramp-down of consumption. Paying for the damage means ecological debt- a transparent funds-based mechanism for cleanup, mitigation, and adaptation from rich economies to the poor. The only force powerful enough to pull-over the U.S. is a trans-local grassroots-led social movement allied with movements in the Global South.”

— Gopal Dayaneni, Movement Generation

[interview with Gopal Dayaneni begins at minute 24:13]

Making Contact – December 2, 2009
Trade Shifts: Reflections on the Seattle WTO Protests

Ten years ago this week, thousands of people shook the streets of Seattle in protest of the World Trade Organization. We revisit the voices from that week and find out how global economic forces have shifted since.

Saturday, August 15

at the Richmond BART station
Rally & Festival at 11:30,
March on Chevron Refinery at 1 pm
followed by non-violent civil disobedience
[download flyer for more details]

Let’s stand beside our friends in Richmond (APEN-LOP, CBE & West County Toxics Coalition) as they face down California’s biggest corporation – and the World’s 5th largest – Chevron.

We will continue to step up the street heat with actions leading up to the UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen this December:

* Sept 18-21 West Coast Convergence for Climate Justice & Action
* Oct 24: International Day for Climate Action
* Nov 30 (10th Anniversary of WTO Seattle): International Day of Action for Climate Justice

Activist individuals and groups can get involved by:

1. Attending organizing meetings and helping to coordinate neighborhood events/teach-ins
2. Outreaching and mobilizing your members, constituents, networks and communities to participate in the actions.

If you are able to commit to any of these, please contact MCJ Organizer Ellen Choi by phone: 510 550 2836 or email: ellenvchoy@gmail.com.

For MCJ meeting dates and events, send an email to mcjbay@gmail.com
Download a poster, visit our facebook page and invite your friends, or get more info at www.actforclimatejustice.org.