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.

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.

Contacts:
North American Indigenous Delegation Media Liaison    +45 5268 5594
Movement Generation Media Liaison  +45 2832 8422
(English, español, français, 普通話, portugûes)

COPENHAGEN – On the eve of President Obama’s arrival in Copenhagen to attend the fifteenth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties, organizations representing communities affected by climate change from around the United States delivered a letter urging President Obama to put a stop to the United States acting as a major barrier to real solutions to climate change, and instead to actively advance the concerns of vulnerable and impacted communities in the Global South and at home in the United States. “Global South” is a term often used to describe the G77 + China, or developing countries, including India, Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, and the Small Island Nations.

They held a press conference and rally in front of the US Embassy in Copenhagen, accompanied by chants of “Climate Justice Now!”

The letter was submitted by a convening of United States grassroots climate justice groups, including members of the North American indigenous communities delegation, the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project (MG), the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ) and the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC).

In the letter to President Obama, the climate justice groups assert, “Unfortunately, the proposals and negotiating positions of the United States government continue to be the single biggest barrier to progress in the Conference of the Parties process. Between side deals, weak targets, false solutions, a 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.”

Wahleah Johns from the Black Mesa Water Coalition offered, “Indigenous peoples and grassroots communities are consistently left out of the climate negotiations, although we are the ones who bear the brunt of the burdens of ecological crisis. For instance, Peabody Coal uses 3.3 million gallons of water every day for mining coal on my reservation. The majority of the people that live out there on the Rez don’t have running water, or electricity, but we supply southern California, Nevada, and parts of Arizona with all of their energy needs. We expect President Obama to demand and support the rights of impacted communities to be at the forefront of just and equitable international negotiation processes.”

Speakers at the press conference and rally beforehand described the impacts of current ecological crises in their communities. Surrounded by colorful signs and banners, they also offered five actions that President Obama could take to address climate change at a scale and speed that would sufficiently match the scale and timeframe of the current ecological crisis.

For instance, Kandi Mossett (Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara), a young Indigenous woman from Fort Berthold, North Dakota, is fighting a so-called clean fuel refinery in her community, including low-wage, dirty jobs and increased debt. Mossett knows firsthand the differential and disastrous impacts of oil refineries – including so-called clean ones – on community health: she’s survived cancer. She continues, “I’m lucky enough to be here but a lot of our people aren’t here anymore. They’re buried under the ground, because of what our governments are doing to us. Given what we know about climate change, why would we continue on this course? We are all going to be wiped off the face of the planet if this continues to happen.”

The letter proposes that rapid and deep reductions in emissions at the source are critical to meeting meaningful targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and urges President Obama to immediately reduce the US consumption load, without offsets, by a minimum 49% deduction from 1990 levels by 2020.

Likewise, Henry Clarke, the Executive Director of the West County Toxics Coalition from Richmond, CA, said, “The North Richmond community is on the frontline of Chevron’s chemical assault. We have experienced a lifetime of chemical exposure, asthma, cancer and death. These are human rights violations.” The letter proposes that solutions must include a rights-based framework that adheres to other United Nations rights-based frameworks set out in declarations, covenants and conventions, regardless of whether or not they are ratified by the United States.

Another necessary action demanded by the grassroots climate justice groups included the “recognition and payment of the climate debt” to the Global South. They stipulated that these climate debt repayments would have to be administered through a transparent, funding source and not current multi-lateral development institutions, which they say have failed to provide sustainable development pathways for the Global South, including the World Bank.

Jose Bravo, of the Just Transition Alliance out of San Diego, CA, added that for communities from the global South in the North, sustainability and environmentalism was not a new thing. For Bravo, “Just transition is about shifting from polluting jobs to clean jobs, polluting industries to clean industries.”

Michele Roberts, from Advocates for Environmental and Human Rights out of New Orleans, Louisiana and Washington, DC, adds that communities from the South in the North – like those in the Gulf Coast region – are on the frontlines of ecological crisis, while the beneficiaries of unsustainable resource practices will feel it less. Likewise, a 2 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature is predicted to mean at least a 3.57 degree Celsius rise over continental Africa. Gopal Dayaneni explains, “Two hundred years of compounded industrial production has already committed us to severe and catastrophic consequences for the poorest people on the planet, including much of Africa, coastal Asia, indigenous people and small island states.”

The letter was delivered by Gopal Dayaneni from Oakland, CA and Roxana Aguilar from Los Angeles, CA.

Kalila Barnett, from Alternatives for Community and Environment, out of Boston, MA, closed with the following message to President Obama: “You campaigned on a platform for change and your belief that change doesn’t come from Washington, it comes to Washington.  Change is here, on the streets of Copenhagen, and all over the world. Climate Justice Now!”

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.

i am here in copenhagen. this morning – it is 7 am in CPH, 10 pm back home in Oakland … missing you all. it snowed yesterday, wet snow that did not accumulate much; snow is expected for the rest of this week and weekend. i’m on the first half of a cup of coffee so forgive the disjointed order of words and thoughts as they come through ..

i read a facebook posting on peace, justice and development by a friend who is referencing and juxtaposing Amartya Sen’s piece, “Development as freedom,” MLK, and the Dalai Lama.

we are preparing this morning to take to the streets in a massive non violent civil disobedience.

this is the largest conference / international event that they have hosted here in Denmark. ever.

100,000 people took to the streets on Saturday to demand climate agreements that were just, equitable, and of sufficient scale to meet the need of environmental crisis that we anticipate.

After the collapse of the WTO between Seattle and Hong Kong, in their dying throes, the WTO ministerial said that they hoped that the UNFCCC could figure out global economic governance.

A crew of us who went to protest the WTO in Hong Kong in 2005 dubbed WTO “World Take Over.”

So I guess .. in thinking about .. different meaning of development, economic security, peace; why are we here in a cold Nordic country, a dark morning, house buzzing with energy slowly in a crescendo …

The movements from the Global South with whom my crew this time around (movementgeneration.org) – whose experience here in CPH i have had the honor of observing, building and documenting – have the experience, desire and dream that development is not about simple economic measures. It is about the freedom and opportunity to make our own destinies, collectively.

One delegate from Via Campesina reminded us that our communities already have the knowledges and practices that will lead the way to sustainability.

Another reminded us that this is not just a struggle for economic, historical, cultural, social well-being of communities, but also a struggle for memory.

Eduardo Galeano, Laura Pulido, Robin Kelley, Gloria Anzaldua would say it is also a struggle of the imagination, of the dreams we have for ourselves and the future, the struggle for the places we call home.

So here we are, thousands of people from the Global South and the South in the North, protesting an undemocratic process – of the more than 22,000 delegates, observers and UN parties who registered and were accredited to be inside the COP15 negotiations in the Bella Centre, less than 1,000 – including official government delegations will be allowed inside today, less than 90 on the days of High Level Sessions Thursday and Friday.

More than 25,000 additional people were planning on attending the more Social Forum like atmosphere of the Klimaforum, the climate justice oriented civil society consrtucted space a few miles from the Bella Centre, from the official COP 15 negotiations.

Protesting an undemocratic process that is threatening, yet again, to curtail the ability of ourselves, our ancestors, our brothers and sisters, our future generations, not only to breathe clean air, to grow food on good earth and in healthy oceans rivers and creeks; to swim, clean and bather in water that sustains life, but also the abilities of our future generations to dream their own dreams, and imagine futures that are similar to a present that would be good enough to be celebrated instead of spurned for a “better” future dream.

so here’s to real democratic, public access for public negotiations that affect the entire global population, and disproportionately those who are being and have been excluded.

as the youth delegations (with the notable exception of the US “officially sponsored” youth delegation sponsored by the Big Environmental NGOs) have said, no decisions about us without us.

and here’s to our dreams.

xiangwangzhengyi!

The early winter cold of Copenhagen turns my face into a popsicle, but all I had to do was join the “Flood for Climate Justice” march of a hundred thousand energetic people from around the world to feel warm. A 4 mile, 4+ hour mobilization is enough to keep anyone from freezing. Signs of hope/despair: “There is no planet B,” “Nature doesn’t compromise,” to “systems change, not climate change.”

While on the march, a UK Guardian TV reporter asked me if I was optimistic or skeptical of these climate negotiations. Both. Skeptical because there’s no denying that many of our elected officials are in bed with corporations [while I held up my transported Bay area protest sign “Chevron, Corporations OUT of Copenhagen Climate Talks”]. And optimistic because I can’t just let my babies, family & community die from climate disruption.

We have work to do. I’m already learning a lot just by allies briefing me from the first week of these climate negotiations. Something we don’t hear often in the US is “ecological debt” or what some refer to as “carbon colonization”. It’s that rich countries have colonized the atmosphere with their industrial carbon pollution for so long that it’s time they pay for the mess they’ve caused. And rightly so, as small island nations like Tuvalu are headed to go under water this century, or African nations whose severe droughts have caused massive displacement & wars, they have every right to demand the strictest emissions reductions possible to stabilize the planet. Another big debate is with REDD, which our allies oppose because it would not only displace indigenous forest-dependent peoples, but also start a huge fake forest program around the world. Some say it’s like a rich person could say they’re carbon neutral if they pay to plant a tree but still drive their gas guzzling car.

It makes me think about how deeply we here in Copenhagen really understand the weight & depth of our actions & even solutions. Right now, most of us agree that we need climate justice… but what does that really mean? In this next & last week of the climate talks, our grassroots delegations of frontline, impacted communities & countries need to be heard: from the seriousness of the problems in our communities now, to the solutions we really need to turn the ecological crisis around.

There are many exciting & important events ahead: US grassroots/EJ discussion about how we will apply pressure on Obama as he represents the US later this week, a strategy discussion between North-South base-building allies on how our movements need to step up, to the midweek convergence of “inside” & “outside” delegates into a people’s assembly for climate justice. More stories to come & flood out of our delegation.