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.

TAKE ACTION: Please email this letter to President Obama at president@whitehouse.gov

Dear President Obama,

We are here in Copenhagen as the voices of our communities and our organizations that work to protect the rights of low-income communities, indigenous peoples, people of color and immigrants in the United States.

From the melting Arctic permafrost to the catastrophe following Hurricane Katrina, from the daily toxic assault of power-plants and refineries to the loss of fresh water in the Southwest, Indigenous Peoples and poor people of color in the United States are disproportionately impacted by climate change; which is why we find ourselves at the frontlines of the struggle to reduce these impacts. Due to our shared experience of the damage caused by the climate crisis, we recognize that we are in the same boat as our sisters and brothers in the Global South. We therefore call on you to support a legally binding treaty and to oppose any treaty that does not respect the rights of frontline, climate-impacted communities, both North and South. As someone who has benefited from the experience of growing up in two countries, Indonesia and the United States, and whose family heritage can be traced to Kenya, you are uniquely positioned to respond to this problem from a global perspective.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government’s proposals and negotiating positions are the single greatest barrier to progress in the Conference of the Parties process. Between side deals, weak targets, false solutions, lack of transparency, and a failure to commit to a legally binding agreement, the U.S. is gambling with the future of life on this planet.

Our communities face a triple bottom-line threat: we are surrounded by the polluting industries that at one and the same time condemn us to disproportionate rates of asthma, heart disease and other health threats, and are the primary contributors to the climate crisis; as poor communities, we are the most vulnerable to food insecurity, lack of access to basic services, and other consequences of climate disruption, with no one being more impacted then the women and children among us; finally, should the false solutions proposed in the UNFCCC process come to fruition, our communities will continue to pay the price for corporate pollution while reaping none of the rewards of these failed policies.

As representatives of a grassroots movement across the U.S., we want to be very clear about our expectations of you and your administration:

•  We demand an equitable international negotiation process that acknowledges, respects and advances the concerns of vulnerable communities everywhere, both in the Global South, and in the United States.

• We call for a real, accountable, and just transition from fossil fuel dependency to a more localized green economy that builds community resilience and gives communities real control over the decisions that effect their daily lives.

• We condemn any and all schemes that trade pollution on the financial market and that fail to take into account the rights of indigenous peoples and the need to protect forest biodiversity, such as current cap-and-trade policy and offset-schemes. Market-based carbon reduction schemes will not lead to sufficient carbon reductions, and will continue to create greater health disparities both in the United States and throughout the world.

• We expect your administration to advance proposals that recognize the disproportionate myriad impacts of climate change, and that commit resources commensurate to the scale of the challenges our communities face now and will continue to face in the near future.

• Industrialized nations must provide for reparation of ecological debts. Funds should be provided to assist developing countries to increase their capacities to protect their people from displacement and other potential effects, recognizing the disproportionate impacts on poor women, children and indigenous communities.

The solution to the Climate Crisis requires a rights-based framework that is legally binding and that minimally agrees to the following five commitments on the part of the United States:

1. Rapid, deep reductions in emissions at the source, in the United States, through an immediate ramp-down of the US consumption load, without offsets. This means a minimum of 49% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020.
2. Recognition and payment of reparations, or climate debt, to the Global South through a transparent funding source rather than through the multi-lateral development institutions, such as the World Bank, that have thus far failed to provide sustainable development pathways for the Global South.
3. Operationalize all implementation language in the UNFCCC within all established rights-based declarations, covenants and conventions, whether or not they have been signed or ratified by the US, including the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on Biodiversity; particularly in implementation language of REDD
4. Acknowledge the traditional knowledge of grassroots communities who are and will be the first to feel the burden of climate change, and take this knowledge, along with the most current science, as the basis of policy decisions.
5. Ensure space for the real engagement and participation of our communities, for whom concepts of sustainability and resilience are not new.

In your acceptance speech last year, you spoke of your belief that change does not come from Washington, D.C. but to Washington D.C. In response to your clear call, we are now coming to you from the same communities that organized to win you the presidency, as people from across the United States who have put our confidence in you as our highest elected representative. We stand united; as poor communities we are vulnerable to your decisions, but as communities rich in history and popular will we are prepared to demonstrate our potential to lead the way toward new solutions to the climate crisis. Solutions will only be constructive to our economy if they are done with justice and equity.

The tone and substance of the current proposals in these negotiations do not represent the change you promised or change we can believe in. We expect you to deliver on those promises by standing up for those of us on the frontlines of climate change, by calling for a legally binding treaty built on respect for international human rights obligations, and the responsibility entailed by those rights.  Your role as President is to deliver a fair, just and binding agreement. As you know, our role as organizers demands that we hold you accountable to that charge.

Finally, we do not believe that any agreement is better than no agreement. We join with social movements both North and South in opposing a non-legally binding treaty or any treaty that does not respect the human rights of the Global South, indigenous people, immigrants, women and people of color throughout the United States.

Sincerely,

Advocates for Environmental and Human Rights, Alternatives for Communities and Environment,  Asia Pacific Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Building Alternatives for A Sustainable Environments, Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, Just Transition Alliance, League of Young Voters Education Fund, Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, People Organized to Win Employment Rights, Right to the City Alliance, Southwest Workers Union, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, WEACT for Environmental Justice, West County Toxics Coalition, Women of Color United (partial list of signatories)

Crafted by civil society participants at the 15^th Conference of Parties representing the above organizations.

La Paz, Bolivia, where I was born and spent my first 18 years “could perhaps be the first large urban casualty of climate change,” according to The New York Times. [1]   I’ve been tracking the melting glaciers that supply water to the La Paz metropolis for the last few years. Each year the pace of melting has outstripped prior predictions in dramatic fashion. As a kid and a teenager I used to visit the emblematic glacier, Chacaltaya, mentioned in the Times article.  It is now gone.  Extinct.  Scientists speculated that it would be gone by 2020; it formally disappeared this year.  The crisis is no longer a futuristic prediction.  It has arrived.  The human impact stands to be incredibly stark. Margarita Limachi Álvarez, a Bolivian woman living in a village impacted by receding glaciers was quoted in the Times article saying,  “A lot of us think about not having kids anymore.  Without water or food, how would we survive? Why bring them here to suffer?”

Let’s transpose that experience to a U.S. context:  Lake Mead, which is a major source of water for LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Tucson, and Phoenix, has a 50% chance of being completely dry by 2021. [2]   That is only 11 years from now.  Major urban centers in Southwest U.S. are going to suffer dramatic decreases in water supplies within the next decade.

Tens of millions of lives are at stake in Copenhagen and beyond.  Literally.  Our profit- and growth-based economy has pushed the planet’s life systems to the brink.  Hence the motto on the streets of Copenhagen this week:  “We need Systems Change, not Climate Change.”  It’s way too late for compromises.

Compromises are no longer viable, unless you are of the mind that some communities and populations are disposable.  At this point, compromises mean the eradication of entire island states. Compromises condemn entire swaths of the African continent to death from drought and severe climate dislocation. Compromises point to massive displacement and repression for immigrants and poor communities of color in the U.S. in an era of intensifying resource scarcity. I’m not willing to settle for compromise.  In my personal life, compromise may well mean the depopulation and implosion of my hometown as a “major urban climate casualty.”

The core of our current conundrum is pretty simple, really: Wealthy corporations and national elites created the carbon problem and must fix it.  My 5-year-old, Maya, gets it.  She understands the basic kindergarten notion of, “If you break it, you pay for it.”  She understands that social harmony, trust, friendship and true teamwork depend on some key values:  sharing instead of hoarding, and being accountable when an injury is committed, whether it was intended or not.  That’s the planetary moment we face.  The U.S, Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia account for 70% of the historic CO2 emissions on the planet.  Yet communities in the Global South, like folks in my Bolivian city of birth, stand to pay for the  broken dishes  with their lives and livelihoods. So we must share the responsibility for emissions reductions and the coming economic transition in a fair and accountable way.

Once upon a time, I remember Candidate Obama inviting us to move away from a ‘me society’ and into a ‘we society’.  Well, Copenhagen gives him the opportunity to walk the talk.  Business as usual is a dead end deal, in the very real sense of the word dead.  As in, 50% of all species extinct by 2100 if we remain on the current growth and profit treadmill.  As in 70 % of the world’s arable areas suffering from drought by 2025 if we stay the course.  What will it be, Mr. President?  Rhetoric or reality?  When the U.S. government’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, refuses to acknowledge our country’s historic “climate debt” to the world, he is defending business as usual.

To successfully weather the current climate transition, the world really needs:

1. Greenhouse gas emission targets that are real, binding, enforceable, verifiable and in line with the science; targets that reduce emissions at the source.

2. Agreement that industrialized nations must pay for the damage they have done to the rest of the world over the last 200 years–they must pay their “climate debt” and fund mitigation and adaptation efforts throughout the Global South.

3. A transparent, democratic funding mechanism to administer payment of the climate debt.

4. The recognition and protection of the rights of all peoples in all aspects of climate policy.

Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, made the following insightful observation upon arriving in Copenhagen yesterday: “The current United States defense budget is $687 billion. And for climate change, to save life, to save humanity, they only put up $10 billion. This is shameful. The budget for the Iraq war, according to the figures we have, is $2.6 trillion…trillions of dollars. But directed towards paying the climate debt, $10 billion. This is completely unfair…”

President Obama, the whole world is waiting.  Act now, while we still have room to breathe.

* 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

Members from several US Environmental Justice and Climate Justice grassroots organizations met today inside the Bella Center to discuss our visions for climate justice in the United States and around the world. I felt honored to sit in the room with people who have fought for environmental and climate justice since before colonization.

We agreed to call an end to the ecological tyranny of our government in the States and abroad. It is no coincidence that the same countries who historically exploit(ed) our people are also at the forefront of driving false carbon market solutions that further degrade our human rights, our land, and our spirits.

We honored those in the US suffering from diseases and disproportionate pollution. We agreed to fight together. We shall rise like a phoenix from the ashes and raise our voices against climate injustice. Tomorrow we will march with our brothers and sisters from Via Campsesina for Food Sovereignty. Fight for and end to the exploitation of our indigenous brothers and sisters in sovereign nations in Mexico, Central America, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and communities of color in the United States! Fight for Climate Justice Now! Rise Phoenix, Rise!