Watch the video then find out more at coalitionofthewilling.org.uk

“We’re Hot as Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More”

Some choice excerpts:

• According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.
• A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.
• Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.
• And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t do less than they could have — they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.

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For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund. We owe them a great debt, and not just for their hard work. We owe them a debt because they did everything the way you’re supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and compromised at every turn.

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By the time they were done, they had a bill that only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry that if you listened closely you could actually hear the oinking. They bent over backwards like Soviet gymnasts.  Senator John Kerry, the legislator they worked most closely with, issued this rallying cry as the final negotiations began: “We believe we have compromised significantly, and we’re prepared to compromise further.”

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Step one involves actually talking about global warming.  For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else — energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that “green jobs” polled better than “cutting carbon.”

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Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we’re going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don’t actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can’t still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who’s made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business.

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Asking for what you need doesn’t mean you’ll get all of it.  Compromise still happens. But as David Brower, the greatest environmentalist of the late twentieth century, explained amid the fight to save the Grand Canyon: “We are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and find allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else propose the compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become a nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function.”

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Which leads to the third step in this process. If we’re going to get any of this done, we’re going to need a movement, the one thing we haven’t had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.

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As Tom Friedman put it in a strong column the day after the Senate punt, the problem was that the public “never got mobilized.” Is it possible to get people out in the streets demanding action about climate change? Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called the “largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind” on any issue — 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A.

People were rallying not just about climate change, but around a remarkably wonky scientific data point, 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, which NASA’s James Hansen and his colleagues have demonstrated is the most we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Which, come to think of it, we do. And the “we,” in this case, was not rich white folks. If you look at the 25,000 pictures in our Flickr account, you’ll see that most of them were poor, black, brown, Asian, and young — because that’s what most of the world is. No need for vice-presidents of big conservation groups to patronize them: shrimpers in Louisiana and women in burqas and priests in Orthodox churches and slumdwellers in Mombasa turned out to be completely capable of understanding the threat to the future.

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But no one will come out to fight for watered down and weak legislation. That’s not how it works. You don’t get a movement unless you take the other two steps I’ve described.

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Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we’ve got. It’s not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we’re going to have to raise our voices.

Read the full article here.

What the Zapatistas Can Teach us About the Climate Crisis

In the 1990s, the Zapatistas told the world “Enough already!” That message resonates in today’s climate crisis.

While political forces have conspired to make the Zapatistas largely invisible both inside Mexico and internationally, their challenge has always been to propose a paradigm of development that is both just and self-sustaining. It seems fair, then, to see if Zapatismo can shed any light on the muddle of politics around the climate crisis. Can the poetic riddles of Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos serve as signposts on the rough road toward just climate solutions?

Read the rest here.

Well, the COP15 UN Climate Summit is almost at an end. I’m sorry to say I don’t know anyone who thinks there is any chance the world leaders will rescue the sad state of affairs as they stand. Personally, I think the last two days of the conference have been more of a photo opportunity than anything else. Apparently, the text that now looks set to be the “Copenhagen Accord” basically looks the same as what was leaked from the Danes at the beginning of the two weeks. You would be justified in asking what it was all for.

Yes, my blog from Copenhagen lapsed, I’m sorry, but here’s a wrap-up of how we went with our Australian actions.

I already posted photos from our little Aussie bloc in the main protest last Saturday, but the following Monday we were actually covered on page 2 (or 4, depending on the edition) of The Australian, sadly our only national broadsheet – sad because it’s actually a really crap paper. Anyway, yay to them for covering us!

Then our little story about our first day of action outside the Bella Centre was published in the SMH on Wednesday and got republished in The Age too.

We just found out yesterday that Celia’s little piece was published in this week’s Blue Mountains Gazette too – and surprisingly have received much more feedback about that than page 2 of the national broadsheet. Ah local papers, I love you. If you can believe it, I think the title was “Local Girl Does Good”. Beautiful.

We also came across a reporter from ABC’s Radio National on the metro one day in Copenhagen, with the Sooty twins (our inflatable kangaroos) under arm and he posted one of my photos with their latest Copenhagen update, online here.

Finally, GetUp had their camera at the main Saturday protest and featured us in their “COPTV” update that recently went out to their members. Watch the video here.

We took our Aussie protest, inflatable kangaroos and new chants to the Bella Centre a few more times in the second week, even in the snow. I have to say, I was, and still am, really unimpressed with a lot of the campaign, lobby and “activist” organisations who have been whinging about not being allowed into the Bella Centre. Okay, the world needs to know. Okay, we need observers there. Okay, we need some activists on the inside. Did the Danish government massively stuff up on the number of passes issued? Yes. Okay, it’s terrible that many people flew to Copenhagen thinking they could get in for the second week and ended up wasting the carbon-debt of their long-haul flight in their hotel rooms. However, did we need as many observers as there were? No. Should there have been limits on lobbyists from both the fossil fuel and environmental sides? Yes. Should there have even been limits on government negotiators and at the same time subsidies so that Tuvalu didn’t have one person there while Australia had 100? Yes. Anyway, what really made me lose faith in some of these people was when we were out near the entrance of the conference, singing a few Aussie climate chants. In a break, the crowd, some of whom to be fair had been queuing for six hours, starting chanting ‘let us in’. Okay, that’s reasonable. Then we thought we’d offer another chant since people were obviously in the mood & it helps with the morale:

What do we want?
Climate Justice
When do we want it?
Now.

Basically no-one joined in and shortly, we had several people telling us to shut up. So many of these people are here to urge governments to do more on climate change but they want the protesters to shut up? That’s a pretty funny kind of logic.

The second major action of the two weeks was on Wednesday, Reclaim Power, when the plan was to march to the Bella Centre and attempt to breach the perimeter, taking over proceedings and creating a People’s Summit on climate change. Could have been a great idea but I think it was a little over-ambitious and because many activists arrived only days before the action, along with the Danish police pre-emptively arresting some key organisers it ended up a little disorganised. Anyway, we marched with a few Aussie signs, though sadly Sooty had taken a hit and was put out of action. The whole protest was pretty positive and very peaceful on the part of the protesters. Sadly, once we arrived at the Bella Centre the police got a little edgy and sprayed a lot of people in the eyes with pepper spray – very painful – and bashed a number of people in the head with their batons. They even assaulted one and arrested a number of other people trying to exit the Bella Centre and join the protest outside. After some time it calmed down and we actually had a great time holding a line across the road on one side of the main body of the protest so that the People’s Summit could go on outside without police intervention. We had clowns dancing around in front of the police line, sausages being thrown to their attack dogs and a classic linked-arm rendition of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”.

What else happened to us in the last week? Our last days were put partly out of action when two of our crew, Mithra and Martin had their bag, containing their passports, stolen and had to go to a cop shop (ha!), report the theft, go to the Australian embassy, etc. So we might have had one more exciting action up our sleeves but it wasn’t to be. That day I went to see Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives speak at Klimaforum which was really beautiful and powerful. We were also caught in a riot (okay, that’s probably dramatising it a little) in Copenhagen’s free, autonomous suburb of Christiania. We were at an activist gig at a bar inside Christiania. When the gig finished someone announced that the front door was closed and you couldn’t leave that way because a riot had started and the police were firing tear gas outside. It’s hard to get an exact idea of what happened, but there was a big event in a climate tent there that night that was attended by many organisers from Climate Justice Action, the main group behind the Reclaim Power action, and the word was that police used a minor excuse to try to move in and pre-emptively arrest a bunch of people. This was resisted with fire blockades and broken glass which was answered with tear gas. Anyway, we got out a couple of hours later, walking through a weird scene with helicopter searchlights shining down from above, clusters of police in full riot gear and coach-loads of riot police in the surrounding streets.

So I travelled all the way to Europe, taking five weeks to get here with one of the big motivations for my trip to be here at the end of the year in Copenhagen for the COP15 UN Climate Summit. What was it all for?

There’s not much point in rehashing words that have been eloquently written elsewhere, so here’s an excerpt from 350.org (my favourite climate campaign, and these days there’s a lot of choice) which more or less sums up what I think would have been a good outcome for Copenhagen:

we at 350.org are fighting for a deal that is fair, ambitious and binding (FAB) — fair because developed countries provide at least $200 billion a year for developing countries to develop on a low carbon pathway and face the impacts of climate change, ambitious because the treaty sets 350 ppm as a target and demands at least 40% carbon cuts by 2020 for developed countries, and binding, because it will be a legally binding treaty, not just a political agreement.

We definitely fell far short of that, but there are some things to celebrate. Over 100 countries now support a deal based on bringing global CO2 back down to 350 parts-per-million, which is well over half the countries that were involved at Copenhagen. Also, many small nations, especially small island states had an opportunity, in front of a mass concentration of global media to present to the world the stark choice that particularly rich countries are making – unless we bring the world back to 350ppm and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – we are signing a death sentence for those people and millions more across the planet. The final piece of good news is that 1.5 degrees makes a minor appearance in the text as it currently stands – that in 2016 the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees will be reviewed to see if we might need to keep it to 1.5 degrees instead, this is barely a win and more of a way to stop island nations from walking out of the summit. By 2016 it will almost certainly be too late to keep the average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Update: sadly, all references to 1.5 degrees were removed from the final text.

Even though I didn’t expect much more from Copenhagen than what we have – essentially a political agreement with no legal power for wealthy countries to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 [Update: all targets removed from the final text] and no interim (2020) targets – it is sad to see that realised. It is sad that even with a mountain of scientific evidence for the crisis ahead of us and in the face of heartfelt pleas from countries like Tuvalu, world leaders still did nothing.

Our little group of individuals just wanted to be there to show that there are Australians who aren’t aligned to any lobby group or organisation who are prepared to come halfway around the world off our own bat to freezing Copenhagen just to have what small impact we can in the face of our government offering a woefully inadequate response and even trying to wriggle out of what little targets we have offered through dodgy accounting.

Update: Please leave your comments on what you think the next steps could be for the climate movement, globally, but particularly in Australia in light of Copenhagen.