As the youth of Europe we are often told by our leaders that they are leading the way in combating climate change and that they are doing the most they can in tough economic conditions. In this blog I’ll outline why we shouldn’t believe them and why Europe must stand up and show the world the value of ambition. There are many ways you can tell our leaders what we need; whether this is by writing to your MP, joining a campaign group and taking action in your spare time or telling everyone you know how important it is that we take action on Climate change, it all makes a difference.

The European Union makes up some of our planet’s richest and most technologically advanced nations and accounts for around 17% of global emissions[1]. What’s more, after 150 years of industrialisation and pollution the EU is responsible for a large chunk of historical emissions. Now, the EU finds itself at a unique crossroads for the future of the world.

Climate change is a complex issue and perhaps we have already lingered too long to take action to prevent it, but we do know we can limit its effects with swift and decisive action. Europeans have both the ability and responsibility to take strong steps to limit their impact on the environment through strict targets. Only through a high level of ambition from the European Union will we have the leadership that is needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Scientists have confirmed that in order to prevent runaway climate change we must ensure warming doesn’t go above 1.5 degrees as 2 degrees warming would already have dire consequences. However, the current pledges for emissions reductions put us on a path of over 3.5 degrees or more. Warming on this scale would have dire consequences for the people of our world and the ecosystems on which we depend. There is a critical need for world emissions to peak and swiftly decline in the very near future if dangerous levels of warming are to be prevented.

A clear lack of ambition

The EU has committed to cutting emissions to 20% below 1990 levels with an extra offer on the table to reduce emissions by 30%, but only if other major emitters will do the same. This is a hugely pathetic offer considering the EU has already reduced its emissions by 16.5% and is on course to hit the current targets well before 2020. Rather than playing a waiting game until the 2020 deadline, the EU has a chance to show some climate leadership to the rest of the world by increasing its ambition in line with its historical responsibility. By setting a stronger target for 2020, as well as a binding interim target for 2025, the EU has a chance to influence the current lack of ambition shown by many developed countries ahead of the upcoming global talks from Warsaw (this November) through to Paris (in 2015).

An urgent need for leadership

We have two and a half years until the 21st annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris. This Conference of the Parties (known as COP21) presents an opportunity for the world’s nations to gather and fulfill the promises made in Durban at COP17. They must agree a global climate deal setting a path towards a lower carbon world in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, while adapting to those impacts of climate change that are already in motion. This deal must ensure that the world’s poorest nations do not shoulder the burden of climate change, and that they have the technology to adapt and follow a clean route to development.

The 2015 agreement will not be possible without action from the richest and most developed countries in the world. Only the EU is in a place to provide this leadership. If the EU moves towards 2015 without a commitment to more credible and ambitious targets on the pathway to a low-carbon economy then it will be failing in its duty to its own citizens, those of the world and those of all future generations. We owe it to our children and their children to leave a planet on which they can live.

At the moment we are not on the path to the clean just future that our generation is owed, power is still in the hands of the older generation that has created this crisis and it is up to young people to stand up and say enough is enough. It is possible to turn this ship around and achieve a just and sustainable deal for both people and the planet. Push Europe is calling for swift and decisive action by the developed world on climate change, in line with science and equity. We can settle for nothing less.

1 Data from the U.S Environmental Protection Agency

Links for more info:

http://www.eea.europa.eu/pressroom/newsreleases/eu-greenhouse-gases-in-2011.5

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html

http://pusheurope.eu/

http://ukycc.org/

Some tricky terms:

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): – The international legal framework adopted in June 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit to address climate change. It commits the Parties (the countries) to the UNFCCC to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at levels that would prevent dangerous man made climate change. We say it, the “U-N-F-triple C”.

Conference of the Parties (COP) – The meeting of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Also known as the UN Climate Talks. The number corresponds to the year so COP18 was the 18th annual conference, held in 2012 in Doha.

Kyoto Protocol – Adopted at the Third Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change held in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997. The Kyoto Protocol (or KP) commits industrialized country signatories to reduce their carbon emissions by an average of 5.2% compared with 1990 emissions, in the period 2008-2012.

Words below from the UK Tar Sands Network http://www.no-tar-sands.org/2013/03/pembrokeshire-community-urges-nick-clegg-to-keep-tar-sands-oil-out-of-europe/Today Eleanor Clegg, Llangolman resident and member of Pembrokeshire Friends of the Earth, was joined by a coalition of concerned citizens and campaigners to present a petition to Nick Clegg in Whitehall, London. The petition, organised UK Tar Sands Network, 350.org, Campaign Against Climate Change, People & Planet, and Pembrokeshire Friends of the Earth, urged the Deputy Prime Minister to support the EU Fuel Quality Directive (FQD), legislation which will discourage imports of tar sands oil to Europe. The petition pointed out that increasing amounts of tar sands oil are expected to be imported to the UK, especially via Valero‘s refinery in Pembroke. Valero, a key supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline which would take tar sands oil to Texas, has also been the target of recent protests in the Gulf Coast. The petition had 4,000 signatures, and was received by the Deputy Prime Minister’s office, who claimed they were unaware of Valero’s plans to import tar sands oil to the UK.

The Canadian tar sands industry has received a barrage of international criticism from environmentalists and human rights campaigners for its devastating effects on nearby Indigenous communities, decimation of local ecosystems and contribution to global climate change.

A key issue of concern in Europe is the Fuel Quality Directive (FQD), which, if implemented as planned, would label tar sands as highly carbon intensive, thereby cutting off the EU market from tar sands-derived fuels and potentially setting a precedent for other markets to refuse tar sands oil. The legislation has been met with unprecedented lobbying from the Canadian government and oil industry, delaying the proposal significantly. The UK government has been one of several member states reluctant to support the proposal, abstaining at the last vote in February 2012. Another vote of EU member states is expected in October 2013.

“I have travelled to London today on behalf of my community because Pembrokeshire is likely to be the first port of call for tar sands oil to enter the UK,” said Eleanor, from Pembrokeshire Friends of the Earth. “Our community is strongly opposed to a fuel derived from such an environmentally damaging source being refined and used in Britain, and we certainly don’t want it imported through local ports. The Fuel Quality Directive is our best chance at slowing the rate of tar sands expansion and we urge Nick Clegg to step in and ensure the UK supports it.”

“It is absurd that our government has been so receptive to the aggressive lobbying from the Canadian government and oil industry,” said Philippa de Boissiere, from the UK Tar Sands Network. “The vote in October will be a pivotal moment for both the tar sands industry and the reputation of the Liberal Democrats, who can expect to see an escalation of campaigning on the issue by the climate movement in the UK. Will Clegg drive a stake through the expansion of the world’s most destructive industrial project– or through his own reputation as a green force in the Coalition government?”

Please support our efforts to get EDF to drop the unjust lawsuit against those who stood up for a sustainable future!

Add your name here: http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/tell-edfenergy-to-drop-legal-action-against-no-dash-for-gas-activists

Suddenly I thought, if we would lose the ability to make people laugh even when it’s about the biggest and toughest problem ever – we’d simply lose our fight for the climate.

Sarcasm and irony are key communications tools, which we need to use more effectively as a European movement, even when we all know that we are facing doom and gloom in a 4-5-6 degree warmer world. No matter how tiring and challenging our campaigns are going to be, we shouldn’t ever lose our wit and the ability to make fun of ourselves and of those blocking positive change.

Enjoy, and tell me, how do you love Oil? :-)

Oh yeah, and the recent TV ad made in time for America’s biggest climate march – pulled off air in the last minute due to the heavy lobbying effort by Exxon.

Written by Anjali Appadurai and Nathan Thanki

Connie Hedegaard doesn’t respond to our tweets. She ignores us in the halls of UN climate talks. So when we read her in the Guardian dismissing civil society frustration at the outcome of the recent talks in Doha, we had to set the record straight. Doha’s outcome was not even a partial success and did not come as a surprise to civil society, as Hedegaard suggests. Rather, we have only been grimly affirmed in our observation that the “leadership” of the world still seems to suffer from the remarkable cognitive dissonance that characterizes the type of outcome Hedegaard calls a success. To label it as such is insulting.

Worse – it is dangerous.

Yes, if things go according to plan for the big 2015 climate talks, they will yield a new “outcome with agreed legal force,” probably similar to the Kyoto Protocol. But that deal won’t even come into force until 2020, nearly a decade down the road. While the science tells us that global emissions must peak by 2020 in order to have a 40% chance of staying below two degrees of warming, our leaders tell us to trust them while they manufacture a deal with the odds increasingly stacked against them.

Regardless of the timeline, Doha was supposed to lay a strong foundation for an effective 2015 deal, and it failed in this regard. Instead, what have we?

We have a purely symbolic second commitment period of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The EU commitment of 20% reductions below 1990 levels is already fulfilled thanks to a couple of lone stars and several members’ declining economies – but without setting further targets before 2020, they are congratulating themselves for eight years of inaction.  A 40% minimum reduction was demanded by the small islands – supposed allies of the EU – but that was never considered. A five-year second commitment period was another key, ignored demand from civil society and vulnerable nations.

In the end we have the “do nothing” approach of an eight-year commitment, locking in low ambition until the end of the decade.

Similarly lacking is finance for urgently needed adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. Three years of “fast start finance” with its broken promises have fostered distrust, and Doha did nothing to mend that rift – no plan for long term finance was made, no work was done on finding new sources, and the feeble trickle of current finance remains mostly repackaged development aid.

The terrible irony of climate finance has not diminished: there are trillions to bail out banks and wage wars, but barely anything to support the world’s poor to cope with climate change.  To make it sound like a good deed is dangerously misleading: climate finance is a moral and legal obligation under the UN.

And the other shiny trinkets we were sold in Doha? A work-plan for the Durban Platform, a “view to considering raising ambition” in 2014 (diplomatic-speak for promising nothing), a declaration not to buy any more “hot air” (unused surplus carbon credits from the first Kyoto period), and a potential future EU offer to move from 20% to 30% cuts. Such offerings are no replacement for immediate, meaningful emissions cuts and finance. Behind the political rhetoric, intentions are clear: Kyoto was extended not out of an imperative to reduce emissions, but rather to continue the farcical carbon markets, to be a bargaining chip in forcing the rest of the world to accept Doha’s “package” deal, and to maintain the pseudo-green EU image.

Hedegaard’s measure of success is based upon EU goals going into Doha, and these – as pointed out by civil society – lacked ambition from the start. Doha gave us meager crumbs from the EU table while constructing a “bridge” to a new system that evades the very root of the issue: rich countries must make deep cuts to avoid runaway climate change and to repay the debt of 200 years of unabated industrial emissions. Focusing energy on bringing emerging economies to the same level of obligation wrenches the spotlight away from the true blockers of progress (led by the USA) and shines it falsely upon developing nations with tiny per-capita emissions mostly accumulated from producing goods we consume. In Doha this was called “progress” (read: dangerous misconception) and given the dubious label of “leadership.”

Such is the cognitive dissonance that prompted civil society outrage not only in Doha but also in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban. The chasm between political discourse and concrete action – reflected in the gaping holes in finance and emissions reductions between now and 2020 – is so huge that Doha’s incremental steps are insignificant when viewed in context.

What we are seeing is a clear message from the EU and other developed nations that they don’t want the responsibility of dealing with a problem they caused. Since Copenhagen there has been a collective forgetting, a wiping clean of the institutional memory of the Convention so as to disregard the past 20 years of inaction and the disparity of responsibility for the problem.

The final insult of Hedegaard’s piece is that it dismisses the outrage of civil society, from youth and grassroots groups representing social movements to brand NGOs like WWF – who publicly endorsed an open letter from civil society to negotiators and issued an emergency appeal for immediate action. We were in the room as NGOs of every shape and size labored over decision texts fresh from the negotiating rooms, we were in the halls as youth from all over the world chanted angrily our condemnation of the same texts, and we were at the meetings where each detail of the Doha decisions was pored over and translated for observers in home countries.

The analysis of experts, activists and researchers is first-hand and legitimate; undermining it is perhaps the biggest failure of political vision. Frustration is renewable, and it’s also compounding.

The UN climate convention has had a clear objective since 1992: to “achieve […] stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.” Self-congratulatory politics won’t do anything for this objective; they only reinforce the false notion of EU “leadership.” In truth, the only thing we are progressing toward is the edge of a climate cliff.

Failure, check.

WEN STEPHENSON writes on December 14, 2012 for the Boston Phoenix. Read the original article here.

Naomi Klein, black-clad and sharp-tongued mistress of the global anti-corporate left, friend to Occupiers and scourge of oil barons, stood outside a dressing room backstage at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre one night last month, a clear-eyed baby boy on her hip.

“I’m really trying not to play the Earth Mother card,” Klein told me over the phone the week before, as she talked about bringing Toma, her first child, into the world. But she didn’t need to worry.

>> INTERVIEW: Naomi Klein on motherhood, climate justice, and the failures of the environmental movement <<

Inside the dressing room, she’d been fielding questions from a small gaggle of young reporters alongside 350.org’s Bill McKibben, who had invited her to play a key role in the 21-city “Do the Math” climate-movement roadshow that arrived at the sold-out Orpheum that night. With a laugh, Klein noted to the reporters that McKibben’s devastatingRolling Stone article last summer, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” — revealing that the fossil-fuel industry has five times more carbon in its proven reserves, which it intends to extract, than the science says can be burned if we want to avoid climate catastrophe — had received no industry pushback.

“I mean, that’s remarkable, for a piece like that, to not feel the need to correct the record in any way? Actually, we don’t plan to destroy the planet.”

Then she offered an anecdote, as if to dispel any assumptions that she’s a conventional green, planet-saving type. Fresh from the Superstorm Sandy disaster zone, she described visiting an “amazing” community farm in Brooklyn’s Red Hook that had been flooded. “They were doing everything right, when it comes to climate,” she said. “Growing organic, localizing their food system, sequestering carbon, not using fossil-fuel inputs — all the good stuff.” Then came Sandy. “They lose their entire fall harvest, and they’re pretty sure their soil is now contaminated, because the water that flooded them was so polluted.”

“So, yeah,” she said, “it’s important to build local alternatives, we have to do it, but unless we are really going after the source of the problem” — namely, the fossil-fuel industry and its lock on Washington — “we are gonna get inundated.”

For McKibben and Klein, going after that source means, to begin with, going after the industry’s business model and its very legitimacy. To that end, they’ve used the sold-out national tour, which ended on December 3 in Salt Lake City, to help launch a student-led divestment campaign calling on universities to stop investing in fossil fuels. As of early December, that effort had already spread to more than 150 campuses around the country, including more than a dozen in New England. The point of divestment may not be whatever economic leverage it can wield over some of the richest companies on Earth, but instead a kind of moral leverage, as a rallying point for a broad-based movement — committed to mass protest and nonviolent direct action — that aims to delegitimize what McKibben calls a “rogue” industry and its lobby.

Later that night, on the Orpheum stage with McKibben, Klein told the audience: “Remember this moment. This was the moment we got serious.”

Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have been plenty serious, in their respective ways, for a long time. McKibben, one of the world’s leading environmental writers and activists, has fought the climate fight in every conceivable way. In 2007, together with a small band of students at Middlebury College, where he teaches, he founded the global 350.org network. Last year it spearheaded the campaign against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, resulting in the largest civil-disobedience action in a generation at the gates of the White House. (The week after the election, they were back, thousands strong, pressuring Obama to kill the pipeline once and for all, and a major action is planned for Washington on February 17.)

For her part, Klein “came of age politically,” she told me, with the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, when she was 29, shortly after which her international best-seller No Logo made her an intellectual star of the anti-globalization movement. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, her 2007 magnum opus, exposed the ways neoliberal free-market profiteers have exploited chaos and catastrophe in disaster zones, from hurricane-shocked New Orleans to “shock-and-awe”-shocked Iraq.

So seeing McKibben and Klein on stage together, launching a mathematical and moral assault on the carbon corporatocracy, says something significant about the charged atmosphere of this particular moment — as we end a year, the warmest on record, in which we lost half the Arctic ice cap and saw off-the-charts global weather extremes, while the political and media establishments seemed not to notice. It also says something about the direction the climate movement may be taking — or, rather, the direction McKibben and Klein argue it should be taking, as they seek to merge climate and economic justice in a way that goes beyond both traditional environmentalism and the old-school, climate-clueless left.

Each has a tough-love message for their own constituency — McKibben for an insular environmental movement that’s been woefully ineffective on climate; Klein for a left, including many in the Occupy movement, that has failed to grapple with the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis. Look, they’re saying, this is it: science tells us that time is running out, and everything you’ve ever fought for is on the line. Climate change has the ability to undo your historic victories and crush your present struggles. So it’s time to come together, for real, and fight to preserve and extend what you care most about — which means engaging in the climate fight, really engaging, as if your life and your life’s work, even life itself, depended on it. Because they do.

Klein, as it happens, is at work on a book in which she hopes to tie all of this together. Due to appear late next year, it’s part of a joint project with her husband, documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis. In a long interview from her home in Toronto before coming to Boston, Klein explained how the book and film — separate but interrelated pieces of a larger whole — make an ambitious argument, one she first laid out in a cover story for The Nation last November, “Capitalism vs. the Climate.”

“The climate crisis,” Klein told me, “is the ultimate indictment of capitalism, certainly the model of capitalism that we have, and the solutions to the climate crisis are the same as the solutions to the economic crisis.” That means restoring democracy and reinvigorating the public sphere, reining in and re-regulating corporations, re-localizing our economies, taxing polluters and the wealthy to put a stiff price on carbon and bring basic fairness into the system, and building alternatives to limitless profit and unsustainable growth. The book’s argument, she said, is “an attempt to weave together disparate movements under the banner of rising to meet the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced.”

To illustrate, she pointed to a community in El Salvador, one of the many places where she and Lewis have researched and filmed. Set in a floodplain, the residents now find themselves regularly inundated. “It’s a community that was born out of the civil war, a community of refugees,” she explained, “and they bring their revolutionary history — and their history of fighting for economic justice — to the climate fight. They’re finding ways to respond to climate change that really transform their community in every way, from housing to health care.” For Klein, it shows that the climate fight can and must be about “deepening democracy.”

Indeed, Klein wants to see more young activists, inspired and galvanized by the Occupy movement, making the same connections.

“If I had a role in Occupy Wall Street, it was to try to push the climate issue,” Klein said. She told me about Yotam Marom, one of the many OWS organizers she’s met in New York. “Yotam, who’s an amazing organizer, was one of the more resistant” to integrating climate into his worldview, she said. Not that he didn’t think it’s important, “but he just couldn’t find a way to connect.” She’s found this fairly typical.

“For a really long time,” said Klein, “lefties thought climate was the one issue they didn’t have to worry about, because big, rich green groups had it covered. And now it’s like, actually, they really don’t. That was a dangerous assumption to make.”

But she had just spoken to Marom again the day before. “Obviously, Sandy has changed the game for New Yorkers,” she said. Marom told her he was writing an article that would be a kind of “12-point recovery program for leftists, about what they need to do to engage with climate.”

“But he said something so insightful,” she told me. “When he thinks about why he was resistant, he realized that if he accepted the reality of climate change, truly accepted it into his body, his soul, then he would have to drop everything he was doing. And he doesn’t want to drop everything he’s doing.”

What Klein is trying to say to those like Marom is that they don’t have to drop everything. “In fact,” she said, “you need to do it even more.”

“Climate change lends urgency to our fights for social justice, like nothing else before,” Klein said. “We have to win these battles against free trade, we have to win these battles to re-localize our economies. This isn’t just some little hobby.

“So it’s not about abandoning all of those fights, it’s actually about supercharging those fights, and weaving them all into a common narrative. That’s the story we need to tell.

“It’s a ‘go big or go home’ moment.”

I asked her what she thinks it signifies to see Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein working together so closely.

“Climate change is the human-rights struggle of our time,” she said. “And it’s too important to be left to the environmentalists alone. I mean, we need the environmental movement — but not if they’re going to be afraid of the left.”

If there’s a central idea driving Klein these days, it’s that the historic projects of economic and social justice and the urgency of climate justice are interdependent and inseparable — from the local level on up to the global.

Klein’s entry point into the climate issue was her interest in reparations for slavery and the historic crimes of colonialism. In 2008, covering the United Nations conference on racism known as “Durban II,” she realized that the reparations movement had shifted its focus to the idea of “climate debt” — that is, what the developed world, in tangible economic terms, owes to the people of developing nations who will bear (and are already bearing) the brunt of climate change, but have done little or nothing, historically, to cause it.

“The refusal to accept the importance of economic justice is the reason we have had no climate action. It’s just that simple,” Klein told me. “What has bogged down every round of UN negotiations on climate is the basic principle that the people who are most responsible for creating this crisis should take the lead and bear a heavier burden.” And for poor nations, “there should be a right to develop a certain amount, to pull oneself out of poverty.” The issue remains a sticking point for any global climate treaty, as witnessed again last week at the UN conference in Doha, Qatar, where wealthy nations failed to make concrete commitments to help the most vulnerable countries deal with climate change.

Klein first met McKibben and the 350.org team in late 2009 at the disastrous UN climate conference in Copenhagen, where she was pushing these issues. She was profoundly impressed, a friendship formed, and in April 2011 she joined 350′s board.

“I’m sort of used to the environmental movement seeing me as a pain in the ass,” she told me. “You know, when I talk about reparations and climate debt — it’s seen as being off-message. You’re just supposed to shut up about things like that. It’s inconvenient — an inconvenient truth that can’t be sold to the American public.”

“So I was surprised when Bill invited me to be on the board, because I sort of thought that I was toxic,” she said. “I think it just speaks to 350′s deep understanding that these movements have to come together.”

Klein is known for saying that the job of the left is to “move the center.” I asked if that’s what she and McKibben are up to with “Do the Math” and the divestment campaign.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “And when I said ‘Move the center,’ you know what I was always saying is, let’s nationalize the oil companies.”

She laughed, and so did I, and I reminded her that she’s also been known to say that “moving the center” can require “saying some crazy shit.”

“When I say that,” Klein replied, “I mean stuff that sounds crazy to other people. But it doesn’t sound crazy to me. I think we will get to a point where saying we should nationalize the oil companies won’t sound crazy. Because the bills are just going to add up.”

“You know what’s crazy,” she said, “is letting the corporations who’ve left us with the most expensive mess in history just keep all the money they’ve made for themselves,” instead of paying to clean up the mess, and helping fix it. “No. That’s insane,” she said.

“This economic model is failing us spectacularly, on multiple levels,” she added, “but we’re still acting as if our goal is to save it,” rather than transform it into something that won’t destroy us.

Indeed, I suggested, that appears to be the case even among progressives who still prioritize economic growth at the expense of the climate.

“The levels of denial are so complicated,” she said. “We are all in denial. All of us. People are holding back a tremendous amount of anxiety. You don’t let yourself care about something that you have no idea how to fix. Because it’s just too terrifying. And it would derail your whole life, as Yotam was saying.

“That’s why there has to be a narrative, a plan, for how we integrate so much of what we’re already doing into a common project. Because so long as people feel like nothing that they know now applies, then they will work really hard to keep this information at bay.

“This is our meta-issue. We’ve all gotta get inside it. Because this is our home. We are already inside it, like it or not, and it’s inside us. So the idea that we can somehow divorce from it is a fantasy that we have to let go of.”

I asked about her decision to have a baby, in spite of everything she knows.

She got quiet. “For a long time,” she told me, “I just couldn’t see a future for a child that wasn’t some, like, Mad Max climate-warrior thing.”

>> INTERVIEW: Naomi Klein on motherhood, climate justice, and the failures of the environmental movement <<

Somehow, though, her engagement in the climate movement seems to have changed that. Another future seemed possible. She and Lewis decided to have a child, but struggled with infertility. Then, having given up, surprise: along came Toma.

If anything, the experience has made Klein all the more a fighter. She now believes that denying her desire to have a child, because of the mess being made by those willing to destroy the planet for profit, would be a form of surrender.

“I guess what I want to say is, I don’t want to give them that power,” she told me. “I’d rather fight like hell than give these evil motherfuckers the power to extinguish the desire to create life.”

>> @WENSTEPHENSON

Wen Stephenson, a freelance journalist, serves on the board of Cambridge-based Better Future Project and is a co-founder of 350 Massachusetts (350MA.org), both allied with 350.org. His Phoenix cover story, “A Convenient Excuse,” appeared in the November 2 issue.

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/148879-id-rather-fight-like-hell-naomi-kleins-fierce/#ixzz2GOiV8qrp

Doom at Doha, but hope outside

If you’re already thinking that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP) process is a bit of a joke when it comes to dealing with climate change, then you may sense a fitting and tragic irony in this year’s summit being held in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Geographically isolated and politically non-democratic, the Qatari emirate not only has the world’s highest GDP per capita but also the highest carbon dioxide emissions thanks to its petrodollar economy.

It would have been difficult and expensive for many climate activists to get themselves to Doha to either participate in or protest against the conference. But arguably the time is past when activists – or journalists, or indeed national governments – took these annual meetings seriously, at least as a forum for getting real action on climate change. At Copenhagen in 2009, which drew the largest crowds both inside and outside the conference hall, those in the streets were already under no illusions as to the likelihood of a fair deal. They went to Denmark to shine a light on the corruption of the negotiations by corporate interests and the inherent structural injustice of the process for those in the global South. 

Copenhagen failed to deliver that elusive ‘binding agreement’ and three years on, with the Kyoto Protocol on the point of extinction, plus ca change. At Durban last year the decision was taken to postpone until 2015 an agreement that would only take effect in 2020. The 20th anniversary in June of the Rio Summit, which first gave birth to the Conference of the Parties, was a sad coming of age, barely registering in the public consciousness. It delivered little besides the advancement of a dubious ‘green economy’ agenda that seeks to give an exploitable market value to every last bit of sadly abused nature.

As to the much-lauded Kyoto Protocol, as Oscar Reyes commented after last year’s COP, ‘Durban reduced the protocol to a zombie-like state,’ moving yet further from binding emissions targets. With Canada, Russia and Japan all signalling their intention to abandon the agreement, it’s no wonder Janet Redman of the Institute for Policy Studies questions ‘what the use would be of enforcing the treaty anyway’.

Of course, not all environmental organisations have disengaged completely from the UN process. Of the 17,000 or so expected in Doha, around 7,000 are likely to come from NGOs. The Climate Action Network remains attentive to the negotiations, and continues to optimistically present demands to the new ‘Ad Hoc Working Group’ established in Durban on how to achieve a ‘fair, ambitious and legally binding deal’. There are also those who point out the dangers of simply leaving the negotiators to their own devices, with no civil society eyes upon them. Nele Marien, formerly part of the Bolivian climate negotiating team, admits that ‘the negotiators, they do whatever they want anyway’ but nonetheless thinks ‘it’s better that [NGOs] are there paying attention to them’, for the purposes of public awareness if nothing else.

The Bolivian negotiating team has itself played a particular role in the past few years, establishing itself as a key point of resistance to the corporate-friendly agenda of rich countries and a voice for the dispossessed south. Marien and her colleagues in the team saw themselves as part of the climate justice movement that gathered outside the conference walls, and she considers Bolivian initiatives (such as pushing for carbon budgets) as important alternatives to the business-as-usual approach of many nations. However, she quit the negotiating team ahead of last year’s COP, knowing that Bolivia would sign the Durban Accords, and unwilling to agree ‘with something that is just un-agreeable’.

Surprising alliances

Now, with even these points of resistance seeming to lose their footing, many simply regard the UN process as a waste of climate activists’ time. Post-Copenhagen the ‘movement’ has been through a period of fragmentation and is still at a time of reassessment. I spoke to several people, however, who noted a reinvigoration of climate activism thanks to the spirit that Occupy and similar economic justice movements have inspired for grassroots action and civil disobedience. This is translating into concrete campaigns to block fossil fuel extraction, with these forming behind some occasionally surprising alliances.

Scott Parkin is an organiser with the Rainforest Action Network and has been active for years with Rising Tide North America. The latter group, under no illusions about corporate influence post-Copenhagen, ‘embarked on this strategy – which I would say is playing out well nearly three years later – of putting a really big emphasis on grassroots action at the point of extraction’. Parkin expresses optimism about what he prefers to pluralise as the ‘climate movements’ in the US, describing 2012 as a ‘big year’.

He says the radical wing has been able to push the mainstream ‘big greens’ more and more to the left. ‘Now they all really embrace working with frontline communities, and are more open to the tactics of nonviolent direct action.’ He attributes this to ‘the economic state of the world, Occupy and things like this’.

The big thing happening right now in the US is the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas, the next phase of the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. Parkin tells me that first on the scene at the blockade were Occupiers from Dallas and Austin, ‘but also they’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Texas landholders, conservatives, some of whom are self-identified Tea Party members.’ Unlikely coalitions are forming on the basis of frontline exposure to ‘eminent domain’ land grabs by companies that go on to poison local communities with pollution from coal mining or transportation, or dangerously toxic crude oil pipelines.

While it looks like Keystone may already be a ‘done deal’, for Parkin ‘the more important thing is that it’s a training ground and a place for strengthening involvement in the direct action movement. We’re giving more power and credibility to what Occupy did, and then we’re doing it on fossil fuels. It’s a movement-building moment for climate.’

Back to the grassroots

Chris Kitchen, a researcher for Corporate Watch and part of the UK Climate Justice Collective, decided after going to COP 14 in Poznań (with the Climate Action Network) that it was ‘a waste of time trying to influence the process’. He went to Copenhagen the following year in order to highlight this failure and help build a network for genuine action. While he acknowledges that the kind of media attention garnered at Copenhagen can sometimes provide good opportunities for messaging, if articulated correctly, he regards the COP as already so ‘overtaken by corporate and national interest that any civil society engagement acts as a legitimising force . . . some street mobilisation can still be interpreted as mobilisation for the process itself, so you have to be very careful.’

The grassroots movement on climate has always seen ecological crisis within the wider lens of a socio-political critique of capitalism per se. Like Parkin in the US, with the global rise of dissent towards the austerity conditions of economic crisis Chris sees UK activism on climate in something of a ‘recovery phase’. It’s a ‘great thing’, he says, ‘this realisation that going on a march and getting your MP to sign something won’t cut the mustard.’

Some of the UK movement’s energy has gone into the fight against fracking. Many of those now involved in Frack Off UK were key organisers in the climate justice protests in Copenhagen. One of them told me that ‘hope of a global deal that would seriously address humanity’s present predicament, if it ever existed at all, has now completely evaporated . . . So called “green capitalism”, which is just business as usual with a load of greenwash poured over it, is centre stage now.’

In the face of this, ‘the only possible hope is concerted grassroots action by communities to force change. While this may seem like a pipe dream, in fact the effects of climate change and energy extraction give us some hope. As the desperate rush to keep fossil fuels flowing is pushing extraction almost literally into people’s back gardens, more and more people are seeing the effects of this system up close and personal.’

Frontline campaigns

A set of recent profiles of climate campaigns by the Bolivia-based Democracy Center provides further evidence that communities on the frontline of climate change-causing decisions, and exposed to their localised effects, are taking matters into their own hands. What is more, their success in winning the support necessary to achieve this is precisely based on strategies that highlight the impacts of these decisions on local people – rather than by talking about ‘global climate change’.

As with Keystone, the Power Past Coal coalition in Washington state – one of the featured campaigns – is targeting the infrastructure that delivers dirty energy (in both these cases designed to take it overseas to Asian markets). It is by talking about the blight that huge coal trains will have on things such as local tourism and air quality that the campaign has gained momentum. This dynamic also demonstrates the importance of fighting to retain the power to affect these decisions at the local level – rather than leaving them up to national institutions, or multilateral ones such as the World Bank, where corporate power is strong and citizen power at its weakest.

The World Bank has been pushing, along with the US State Department, for a new generation of coal power in Kosovo – a small, low income nation vulnerable to such pressure given its currently insufficient and inefficient energy supply system. But campaigners in Kosovo, backed up by allies in the US who object to their country’s financial involvement in the plans, are doing all they can to halt the process, arguing instead for a long-term sustainable energy strategy. Along with academic analysis that busts open the myths about new coal being ‘clean’ because it would replace dirtier and less efficient power stations currently in operation, campaigners in Kosovo have again managed to bring farmers and rural landowners into the coalition and given them a chance to talk about the direct impacts they experience from strip mining on their land.

Things are happening outside the US and Europe, too. In a very different kind of ‘campaign’, one couple in Thailand, well versed in the decision-making processes of the Thai government on energy issues, have steered a quiet revolution in renewable energy by working with ministers and the state utilities companies. Policies that allow for generation and grid feed-in from small energy producers – from solar, biomass, biogas and other sources – are being looked at as a sustainable model for developing economies.

India, meanwhile, is another nation aggressively pushing for coal-fired power to meet its burgeoning energy requirements as it follows the well-trodden path to fossil-fed ‘development’. But here too campaigners – fisherman and farmers, supported by legal activists – are literally putting their lives on the line to block the government’s plans and defend their livelihoods, power station by power station.

So as we gear up for more of the same old nothing at Doha, it is to these multiple and various examples of grassroots mobilisation against the fossil fuel industry that we should be paying attention. That is where the real action lies, and that is where new connections – between peoples and ideas – are being made.

Mads Ryle is the communications director for the Democracy Center

“I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people.  No matter who I was dealing with.  I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer.”

- ‘K’, in Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

It’s raining and I’m walking home at pace, eager to check the news, reply to emails.  Something is happening that occupies my attention, months in planning, consistent gravity on my bank balance.

Nothing could be more important to me.  The choices we make now about climate change will radically change the world we grow up into.  It’s the natural disasters, conflicts, migrations and resource crises I’ll witness.  It’s my family, my job, our future.

The news arrives hard: progress on a climate deal is slow, powerful forces have outmanoeuvred you.  The hope you tried so hard to spread was misplaced, a strange churning of guilt and heavy empathy in your stomach.

“I’ve got to try harder.”

We’re ambitious, sharply honest and strong in our idealism- but with a portacabin ceiling above us.  Smaller numbers of us working harder towards more concrete goals is not going to generate the shift in power we need.  The climate movement needs to be bigger, a lot bigger.  That means being broader, more loosely connected, and service-oriented.

This year, the Canadian Government opened bidding for companies to begin an environmentally damaging method of extracting natural gas, called fracking.  The Fort Nelson First Nation community were angry that they hadn’t been included in consultations, despite their water being used extensively in the extraction process.  They started an online petition on Change.org, and over 25,000 people joined them.  In Turkey, 46,000 people stopped a construction magnate from building in their forests.  10,000 in Indonesia revoked a logging license from a destructive Palm Oil company.  These aren’t your usual group of climate activists, nor are they being used as the face of a climate campaign, these are their own concerns.  Tens of thousands of people is just the start – I believe we will see these types of campaigns proliferate quickly.  Compare this to the static or dwindling numbers of people that have been engaging meaningfully with the UN Climate Talks.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t have people speaking out for climate justice in those artificially-lit halls of power.  Activists bring increased transparency, ambition and moral urgency to high-level decision-making.  But much too often discussion is about policy and framing, with certain groups spending more energy criticising other members of civil society for their positions, than trying to engage new people.  Most people will never be interested in whether a weak deal or no deal is a better political outcome, and it’s conceited to think they should be.

As next year’s “Global Power Shift” of thousands of youth climate activists seems to recognise, we need to be a movement, not a unified campaign.  That means shifting our focus to service: providing people with the tools, skills and narratives to launch their own campaigns on climate and energy.  That means diversifying into a multitude of specific campaigns against polluters, companies and local councillors.  Those of us that like to be in control will have to let go, and there will be conflicting frames, disunity. 

But so be it.  This is a necessary part of growing.

Let’s allow potential to flourish, unleash ideas we could never have thought up, reach people who are currently feeling no pressure, and welcome many, many more people than we’ve managed before.

“I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself any more. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”

- Sumire, in Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

 

- Danny Hutley

Danny Hutley has been involved in International Youth Climate organising for two years through the UK Youth Climate Coalition, and is now working at Change.org

Doha climate talks: Industrialised countries block climate action

DOHA, QATAR, December 8, 2012 – Friends of the Earth International has strongly condemned the governments of industrialised countries for blocking action on the climate crisis at a failed UN climate summit in Qatar.

- Cameron Fenton, National Director, Canadian Youth Climate Coalition
Original Article here

Cameron Fenton of the Canadian Youth Delegation talks at an action in Doha

“So what now?”

As the final hours of COP18 dragged towards their close, the question was on the tip of the tongue of all of civil society. After 18 years, the United Nations climate talks have failed to reach maturity. Even the most significant and celebrated milestone of the past decades of climate talks, the Kyoto Protocol, may have been delivered its final death blow on the air conditioned floor of the Qatar National Convention Center.

For the past two decades the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been considered by governments and civil society groups as the platform that would deliver a global climate deal to keep us beneath dangerous warming trends.

Yet after the Copenhagen talks failed to deliver the global deal it was built up to, the past three years have seen the United Nations climate process lose steam year after year. Historical polluters have successfully undermined some of the founding principles of these talks; equity and the recognition that historical polluters have a greater responsibility for addressing climate change than the developing world. More simply than this, the UN has enshrined policies that have set the world on the path for a 4f-degree world, blowing past its own mission and mandate to limit warming be 2 degrees.

So again, what now?

The climate talks have not failed alone. We are not falling off the climate cliff without first being pushed by the fossil fuel industries dirty energy, dirty money and dirty politics. Each day the fossil fuel industry spends $167,000 on lobbying the US congress. The fossil fuel industry has worked to undermine clean energy legislation in Europe, California, Australia, South Africa and Japan.

They have been bankrolling climate denial since I was a baby. Simply put, in order to meaningfully address climate change, we need to deal with the political and financial clout of an industry that holds nearly six times the limit of carbon that can be emitted to maintain a 2-degree limit, that’s where we go from here.

We need to build a movement that can take on the greatest, and fastest planetary shift that we have ever seen. Not simply numbers, we need a movement that runs deep, recognizing the connections between social movements around the globe, and a movement that can harness the moral voice and imperative of youth around the world.

This June is the first step with the launch of Global PowerShift. Bringing together hundreds of young organizers from climate justice movements from all corners of the world to Istanbul, Global PowerShift is the first stage in a plan to launch the youth climate movement like never before.

The math is simple. We have 565 gigatonnes worth of carbon space left in the atmosphere and 2,765 gigatonnes worth of fossil fuel reserves that big oil, coal and gas are planning to burn. With current projections, we have 13 years before we break the carbon budget.

Thankfully we also have millions of youth around the globe who have grown up in a world 1 degree warmer than the pre-industrial average, and who refuse to inherit a world on track for a 4-degree warming path. Over the past two years youth have been at the lead of movements pushing the political boundaries, from the Occupy movement to the Quebec student strike, the Arab Spring and beyond.

In the past month the movement to divest campuses in the United States from fossil fuels has exploded. Even as the climate talks continued in their monotonous din of inaction, the frustration of youth could be felt as climate inaction was juxtaposed against the backdrop of Typhoon Bopha.Rallying to stand with the Philippines and offering solidarity to those countries fighting for real, just climate action young people from around the world sent a clear message; if you stand for youth, we will stand with you.

By the end of this decade, the world will be on track for an unprecedented level of warming, unless by the end of 2013 the world will have witnessed an unprecedented level of climate organizing world-wide, united in the pursuit of science and justice-based transformative action on climate change. As Munira Sibai told the final plenary of the UN talks “outside of these walls, a movement is growing.”

Follow Cameron Fenton on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CamFenton