"We're going through an epic transition. The question is, what is it going to look like on the other side?"

      -Gopal Dayaneni
        Movement Generation
        Justice and Ecology Project

It’s going to be a lively 11 days. Jacob Wheeler has already posted video (below) of a demonstration to save the climate for In These Times‘ blog, The ITT List. For live coverage of the Cop15 summit, make sure to check out video streams hosted by The UpTake and OneWorld.

Robert Eschelman reports in The Nation that Cop15’s probable outcome will be a draft agreement. But what will this potential deal look like? “Four issues will dominate the negotiations taking place inside Copenhagen’s Bella Center. First, developed nations, such as the United States, must commit to significant reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. Second, developing countries like India and China will have to reduce the rate at which their emissions increase over the next several decades. Third, developed countries will have to provide clean energy technologies and funding to developing nations as they address the effects of climate change. And, finally, negotiators will have to agree on how to monitor and enforce an international climate agreement.”

The U.S. has taken some good first steps to reaching such an agreement. Last week, President Barack Obama announced the country’s commitment to a global fund that will mobilize $10 billion per year by 2012 to support developing countries that are already experiencing the effects of climate change. It’s an important first step. But as Yes! Magazine reports, using the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to manage this money isn’t a good idea. “Both have track records of saddling poor countries with debt, requiring government spending cuts that undermine national economies, and handing lucrative contracts to transnational corporations.”

President Obama has also changed the timing of his Copenhagen visit from this Wednesday, Dec. 9, to the conference’s big finale on Friday, Dec. 18. Grist consulted with a panel of experts regarding the significance of the schedule switch. They all agree: It’s a big deal. Obama’s arrival on the last day “changes the game,” according to Kenneth P. Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “It suggests that a ‘deal’ is already in the bag, and Obama’s expecting that he’ll get to bask in the glow of a new global agreement, flagrantly repudiating the position of the Bush administration in previous climate negotiations.” Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, believes that Obama’s appearance at the end of the conference will “transform the Copenhagen climate conference into the largest summit yet of world leaders focused on global warming.”

Scientists warn that without such an agreement in Copenhagen, the Earth will face ever-rising temperatures, flooding of coastal cities (about half of the human race lives within 100 miles of a coastline), more extreme weather events, and the spread of diseases.

Air America features a comprehensive look at what’s at stake in Copenhagen. “The change in U.S. administrations a year ago had aroused hopes the long-running climate talks might finally produce an all-encompassing package in 2009 to combat global warming and help its victims. Too little time and too little agreement, however, especially between rich and poor countries, mean the 192-nation Copenhagen conference is likely to produce, at best, a framework—a basis for continuing talks and signing internationally binding final agreements next year.”

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. The Mulch is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

The petition is the largest climate petition ever delivered and one of the biggest petitions in history, demonstrating the broad support that a climate deal has from citizens of countries from all over the world.

Young people from around the world handed over the petition to the U.N.’s top climate official Yvo de Boer and Danish Climate Minister and President of COP15 Connie Hedegaard, following the leaders' opening press conference on the first day.

The young people held boxes representing the building blocks of a real climate deal and handed over a collection of blocks from the iconic Danish company, Lego, to symbolize the missing element needed for a global deal: public pressure.

Although the number of people that had signed the petition is a staggering figure, what really captivated the crowd was the short speech by Leah Wickham, 24, of Fiji, who spoke about the “hopes and dreams” of the ten million people that had signed the petition. Her heartfelt talk silenced the room. Small island nations like her own, she said, are on the front line of climate change. She pled to the top officials to secure an agreement that would protect her country, her people’s culture and livelihoods, and their very dreams for their children.

The Copenhagen climate treaty, said Wickham, “represents our hopes and dreams for all the generations that will be … Fifty years from now, my children will be raising their own families and it is my biggest hope that they will still be able to call our islands home.” Tearfully, she told of the struggle her people are facing every day but she said that, “In the end, climate change will not discriminate.” As President Nasheed of the Maldives has said, “If the world can't save the Maldives today, it might be too late to save London, New York or Hong Kong tomorrow."

That is why the more than 220 leading civil society organizations from the environmental, development, labor, and health fields have come together as part of the TckTckTck campaign to mobilize people around the world to call for a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty.

Minister Hedegaard said that this petition—and support of the 10 million people that the petition represents—will be the key to holding politicians to their promises to negotiate a deal in Copenhagen. “I think you have made the political price for heading home empty-handed so high that no one will be willing to pay this," she said.

Yvo de Boer responded, “This is not just about U.N. decisions and treaties, this is about people, culture, and countries’ survival. The talking needs to stop and the action needs to begin.“ He closed with what 10 million people had been hoping to hear, saying, “I promise we will deliver on the action.”

Building from this show of public support for climate action, on December 12 millions of people will gather under the banner, “The World Wants A Real Deal,” in what is expected to be the biggest global day of action on climate change in history.

Richard Graves is a blogger and online campaigner for the TckTckTck campaign and the director of Fired Up Media.

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Climate Justice Movement Breaks Through :: As the urgency of the crisis grows, so does popular pressure for action.

As negotiators from around the world gather in Copenhagen to forge an international climate treaty, they’ll be met by hundreds of young people from across the globe who have already gathered in Copenhagen to show youth support for a strong and effective treaty. This youth turnout to the most important climate meeting in years is just one of many signs from the last few months that young people everywhere are determined to protect our future from the ravages of climate change.

This fall in the United States, young people in states from Oregon to Ohio rallied their peers for eleven regional “Power Shift” summits, designed to focus the attention of policymakers on the need for leadership on the greatest challenge of our time. Staggered throughout the fall in the lead-up to the Copenhagen meetings and Senate consideration of comprehensive climate policy, the regional gatherings continued the momentum of the national Power Shift Summit held in Washington, D.C. in February, which drew over twelve thousand youth to the nation’s capital.

At many of the summits, student activists targeted their state’s U.S. senators, asking the Senate to pass strong and comprehensive climate legislation this year.

Several summits were scheduled in conjunction with the October 24th international day of action on climate change, organized by 350.org. Founded on the principle that any international climate agreement must bring atmospheric carbon dioxide down to 350 parts per million, the day of action was intended to warn world leaders that civil society will not settle for an agreement out of step with the best climate science. Though activists of all ages participated in the day of action, youth organizers were essential to the success of many of the almost 2,000 events in the U.S.—and the more than 5,200 events held in 181 countries worldwide.

The last of the Power Shift summits—Ohio Power Shift at Oberlin College and Power Shift West at the University of Oregon— concluded the weekend of November 6. “Students have been at the front of almost every social movement in this country,” said Jeremy Blanchard, a core organizer for Power Shift West, “and this movement is no exception.” One of the largest of this fall’s summits, Power Shift West drew nearly 600 youth for three days of workshops and discussion on climate activism, culminating in a march through the streets of Eugene, Oregon.

With the conclusion of the summits, young participants returned to their campuses ready to further the momentum. According to Lauren Kemp, an organizer for Appalachia Power Shift in West Virginia, “Concerned youth want to tackle this topic and look toward the future of ‘green’ jobs” that will preserve our planet while simultaneously re-charging the economy." Perhaps there’s no clearer example of the growing awareness of youth’s political power than that provided by this month’s Youth Clean Energy Forum, held December 2. In response to a nationwide youth campaign urging the Obama administration to pursue strong climate agreements at the national and international level, the White House hosted 150 young climate activists for a discussion with Cabinet secretaries and other top officials on climate and clean energy policy. The event was broadcast live, allowing young people around the country to tune in.

The Clean Energy Forum is an encouraging sign that our national leaders are finally beginning to acknowledge the power of young activists—and the events of this fall show a younger generation already stepping up to the challenge of changing history. “As young people,” says Blanchard, “it is our responsibility to make our voices heard in the halls of power. Our future is at stake—and if we don’t act now our lives will be defined by resource wars, unstable food and water supplies, and runaway climate change.”

Moey Newbold, a participant in Power Shift West and a student delegate to the Copenhagen meetings, said young people have good reason for their commitment: “I believe my generation has the unique opportunity to save the world," she said. "I am going to Copenhagen to do everything I can to ensure that a mutual survival pact is agreed upon, not a suicide pact.”

Nick Engelfried wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Nick is an environmental activist and freelance writer currently based out of Hillsboro, Oregon. 

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Climate Justice Movement Breaks Through :: As the urgency of the crisis grows, so does the pressure from activists around the world.

On November 6, I began, with six others around the world, the Climate Justice Fast—an international hunger strike calling for immediate, courageous, and moral action on climate change.

We have refused all food and drunk only water since this time, now over a month ago. We have since been joined by hundreds of others from over 20 nations—including Romania, Honduras, and the Central African Republic—who are fasting for shorter lengths of time in solidarity with us.

Our fast began on the last day of the Barcelona round of United Nations climate talks, the last day of formal negotiations before the Copenhagen climate summit. All manner of political drama had occurred; at one stage, African nations walked out of the negotiating room in reaction to the lack of commitments from wealthy nations.

Sadly, the U.N. negotiations were not then, and are not now, on track to save the future of my generation—and all future generations—from climate change. I am 24 years old today, and in the year 2050 I will turn 65 and retire.

2050 is a benchmark year for climate change, by which time science tells us we need to have reduced carbon emissions by at least 80 percent worldwide. In practical terms, this astounding figure means that by 2050—the end of my working lifetime—we must have phased out, entirely, both fossil fuel use and deforestation.

As Al Gore said in his film An Inconvenient Truth, the best science, technology and economics available tells us that achieving such a future is possible, and even affordable—but the only thing lacking is political will. Three years after the release of his film, it is still accurate.

When we honestly assess the politics of our current situation, we can plainly see that humanity is currently nowhere near on track to meeting this goal of sustainability.

Anna Keenan during the international climate negotations that took place in Bali, Indonesia in December, 2007.

Photo by Robert van Waarden

Instead, governments, business, and indeed, citizens worldwide are still working within a paradigm that encourages eternal growth on a finite planet and which sees excess and over-consumption as a virtue rather than a vice.

In response, I, and all involved in the Climate Justice Fast, have chosen to engage, through fasting, in a deeply personal and moral call to governments, to boardrooms, and to families, urging them all to reflect, to re-examine their goals, and to commit to creating a sustainable future.

If we are to solve climate change, we will need a total, global values shift that places sustainability, instead of GDP growth, in a position of top priority and that rewards sustainable, ethical consumption levels. We need to learn to be happy with enough, instead of glorifying ever-higher personal wealth.

This U.N. climate meeting in Copenhagen provides us with a remarkable opportunity to create that values shift, and to start its percolation through global political systems. We simply cannot go on consuming, pretending that there are no consequences.

One month ago, when we began our hunger strike, Agnes Kushanl, a Zambian aid worker with Cafod, said to us that she was very inspired by the move that we have taken. Referring to the situation in her home country, she said, "This year, I have seen people dying in my country, without food, because of the failed rains. It´s really, really bad back home."

Such consequences of climate change can be expected to get worse if we continue on a business-as-usual, high-consumption path. These are the consequences—raw and human—that are driving and motivating our hunger strike.

It is our hope that the Climate Justice Fast will inspire other activists to higher levels of climate activism that will move the climate debate beyond the intellectual and political—stirring people´s emotions and touching hearts.

Four of the long-term fasters will be present inside the U.N. climate summit for the duration of the climate talks, engaging with negotiators and politicians. We will also been joined by a number of others who will also fast for the two weeks of the U.N. talks, among them Deepa Gupta, founder of the Indian Youth Climate Network.

The long-term fasters will attempt to continue fasting until at least the end of the U.N. summit on December 18—over 43 days in total. The circumstances under which the hunger strike will end are not yet decided.

Anna Keenan wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Anna is a climate activist from Brisbane, Australia. She also attended the U.N. climate meetings in Bali, Indonesia and Poznań, Poland.

Interested? See more of YES! Magazine's coverage of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change here.

The Meaning of Seattle
Walden Bello: Before the 1999 WTO protests, we knew corporate globalization was increasing global poverty. But it took the collective action of ordinary women and men to make that truth real.

Small affinity groups were also created by the diverse participants in the historic action to assure that decisions were made democratically.

The success of the November-December 1999 Battle of Seattle inspired the World Social Forum (WSF) movement, begun at Porte Alegre in 2001, to proclaim that “Another World is Necessary! Another World is Possible! Another World is Already Happening!” The WSF movement brought together people from all over the world to successive gatherings in Porto Alegre and Mumbai. In turn the WSF inspired the United States Social Forum (USSF) movement which held its first gathering in Atlanta in 2007 and will bring 20,000 people to Detroit for the 2nd USSF in June 2010.

Representatives of 192 nations are gathering in Copenhagen for the climate change conference convened by the United Nations so that governments can pledge the emissions reductions necessary to stem the global warming threatening the extinction of all life on our Planet.

Meanwhile, over the last few years it has become abundantly clear, especially from the actions of the U.S., the world’s leading emitter of climate-altering gases, that we can no longer depend upon governments—even relatively progressive ones like Obama’s—to stop global warming. They are all too beholden both to the corporations most responsible for pollution and to the World Bank, most responsible for fossil-fuel financing. The best that can be expected of them are terribly weak targets and market mechanisms like carbon trading that appease polluting capitalists.

As a result, activists from around the world are gathering at Copenhagen to make clear that the people, not governments, are now the only ones who can preserve Life on Earth.

It is a sign of the revolutionary movements of our time that the most contentious issue at the Copenhagen Summit is the moral responsibility of the people of the Global North to the people of the Global South.

Because of our consumerist/materialist lifestyle, we, the people of the Global North, are the ones most responsible for environmental degradation and climate change. But it is the peoples of the Global South who suffer the worst consequences of our irresponsibility. U.N. experts, for example, predict that 90% of the African peasantry will be out of business by 2100 due to drought, floods, extreme weather events, disease and the resulting political instability.

The 2009 Climate Change Vulnerability Index lists 22 African countries out of 28 at “extreme risk,” whereas the United States is near the bottom of the world rankings of countries at risk, even though it is the leading per capita contributor to climate change.

Restorative Justice demands that those most responsible for global warming should pay climate reparations.

On September 2, the World Council of Churches (WCC) members adopted a formal statement affirming the North’s “deep moral obligation to promote ecological justice by addressing our debts to peoples most affected by ecological destruction and to the earth itself.”

University of KwaZulu-Natal honorary professor Dennis Brutus has proposed that we “Seattle” Copenhagen.

African Union insiders, he says, should work with massed protesters outside to prevent the North from doing a deal in its interests but against Africa’s and the planet’s.

This kind of “Seattle Goes to Copenhagen” organizing is what we need in the age of Obama. The activists at Seattle in 1999 and at Copenhagen in 2009 represent the sovereign people of the world establishing the Justice which flows from the Humanity we share on Planet Earth.

Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author of the autobiography Living for Change. 

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A Lifelong Search for Real Education :: Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs brought people together to rebuild inner-city Detroit and to teach the things you can’t learn in a classroom. At 94, Grace is still at it.

As the world's attention converges on the Copenhagen climate summit, a little-mentioned issue is the proper role of patents in encouraging the development of emissions-free energy technologies. Large tech companies like to claim that they need broad patents to encourage their investment in innovative new technologies. And they are poised to make a fortune by selling patent licenses for new “green technologies” designed to abate carbon emissions.

But David E. Martin, an intellectual property activist who works with many developing countries, argues that a great many green technologies are already in the public domain and ready to be developed. They just need to be identified and used.

Martin’s brilliant and subversive innovation, launched earlier this month, is called the Global Innovation Commons (GIC). The project is described in a cover article in the German magazine Der Spiegel called "Patent Lies: Who Says Saving the Planet Has to Cost a Fortune?"

The Global Innovation Commons is a massive interactive archive of energy-saving technologies whose patents have expired, been abandoned, or simply have no protection. The idea is to let entrepreneurs and national governments query the database on a country-by-country basis to identify helpful technologies that are in the public domain. Once identified, these technologies for energy, water, and agriculture are prime candidates for being developed at lower costs than patented technologies.

The World Bank is a partner on this project, along with the International Finance Corporation’s infoDev unit. The World Bank has estimated that the technologies in the GIC database could save more than $2 trillion in potential license fees. The Global Innovation Commons essentially seeks to bring the advantages of the open-source software development model—open participation, faster innovation, greater reliability, cheaper costs—to technologies that are claimed to be patented.

Here’s how the Global Information Commons describes the role of patents in impeding innovation—and how the new database helps establish a new open-innovation commons:

For the past 30 years, patents have been abused. Rather than serving the public’s expansion of knowledge, they’ve been used as business and legal weapons. Over 50,000,000 patents covering everything you do have served to keep you from benefiting in many aspects of your life. Many life-saving treatments have been kept from the market because they threaten established business interests. The world’s ecosystem has been severely damaged because efficiencies have been kept from entering the market.

In the face of all this, however, there is the good news: The thirty-year “cold war” of innovation is over. Today, you now have access to it all. In the Global Innovation Commons, we have assembled hundreds of thousands of innovations—most in the form of patents—which are either expired, no longer maintained (meaning that the fees to keep the patents in force have lapsed), disallowed, or unprotected in most, if not all, relevant markets. This means that, as of right now, you can take a step into a world full of possibilities, not roadblocks. You want clean water for China or Sudan—it’s in here. You want carbon-free energy—it’s in here. You want food production for Asia or South America—it’s in here.

Der Spiegel notes that the Global Information Commons database represents such a huge advance because it aggregates so many different patent-free technologies from so many different parts of the world:

[Martin’s] custom-made software and a vast server are programmed to trawl and compare hundreds of thousands of files containing patent information from what would seem an incongruous list of places: Papua New Guinea, Berlin, the Brazilian rain forest, New York. Some of these patents are current; others have expired. What Martin—and those who work with him at M-CAM—say they found is that one in three patents registered today on energy-saving technology duplicate gadgets that were first dreamed up in the wake of the 1970s oil crisis and are now freely available.

Martin says that a great many patents are not novel at all. They simply duplicate innovations that were made decades ago. But patent applications often disguise this fact by using colorful and complicated language. Overworked government patent examiners, struggling with limited resources and seeking to avoid legal hassles, often grant new patents that are not truly warranted.

Act Up. Act Now.
We have the wherewithal to avert climate disaster. Now it's time to build the political will.

Martin is a major irritant to large tech companies because he is challenging a key rationale for patents: that they are essential to promoting innovation. He argues that patents often serve to impede innovative technologies and make them unaffordable—at precisely the time when all countries of the world, rich and poor, need to adopt cutting-edge energy technologies to cut carbon emissions.

In touting “open innovation,” Martin takes the tradition of free software and digital commons to exciting new frontiers. The Global Innovation Commons promises to spur a strong new wave of technological innovation through the sharing of new ideas rather than through exclusive, private control of them. As Martin puts it, “What we do is trawl documents for their true meaning. But what we care about are basic human issues. In this case, it’s to show what belongs to the big guys and what belongs to society.”

A hearty commoners’ salute to Martin and the Global Innovation Commons for reclaiming technological know-how for the common good at this moment of urgent necessity.

David Bollier is editor of OntheCommons.org and author of Silent Theft, Brand Name Bullies and the forthcoming Viral Spiral.

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Stand Up to Corporate Power :: YES! Magazine's special issue introduces you to the people and communities declaring themselves free from the dominance of corporate power.

Reclaim the Commons: The air, water, sky; open spaces; our history and the know-how passed down through generations — there is a wide variety of "commons." This issue shows how they can be protected from abuse, pollution, and efforts to privatize them.

Beginning in the second week of December, representatives to the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen will wrestle with the challenge of climate change. This week, influential actors in the World Trade Organization Seventh Ministerial Conference taking place in Geneva are trying to push for a conclusion to the nine-year-old Doha Round of trade negotiations.

The two meetings are at cross-purposes and their juxtaposition highlights a profound reality: The world has to choose between free trade and effective climate management.

The Global Downturn: Relief for the Climate

The last 12 months have seen the unraveling of a particular type of international economy: export-oriented and marked by the accelerated integration of production and markets. This globalized economy has been transportation-intensive, greatly dependent on ever-increasing long-distance transportation of goods. For instance, a plate of food consumed in the United States travels an average of 1,500 miles from source to table. Transportation, in turn, is fossil-fuel intensive, accounting in 2006 for 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and 23% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

A downturn in the export-dependent global economy thus brings about a significant downturn in carbon emissions as well. It spells relief for the climate. In 2009, the drop in the level of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) has been the largest in the last 40 years. The thousands of ships marooned by lack of global demand in ports such as New York, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, and Seoul means a significant reduction in the use of high-carbon Bunker C oil, which is used in 80% of ocean shipping. The cutback in air freight has meant a significant reduction in the use of aviation fuel, which has been the fastest growing source of GHG emissions in recent years.

Deglobalization as Opportunity

In response to the collapse of the export-oriented global economy, many governments have fallen back on their domestic markets, revving them up via stimulus programs that put spending money in the hands of consumers. This move has been accompanied by a retreat from globalized production structures or "deglobalization."  "The integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front," writes the Economist. While the magazine says that corporations continue to believe in the efficiency of global supply chains, "like any chain, these are only as strong as their weakest link. A danger point will come if firms decide that this way of organizing production has had its day."

For many environmentalists and ecological economists in the South and the North, the unraveling of the export-oriented global economy spells opportunity. It opens up the transition to more climate-friendly and ecologically sensitive ways of organizing economic life. But the fossil fuel-intensiveness of global transport and freight is merely one dimension of the problem. Environmentalists insist there must be a change in the reigning economic model itself. The global economy must make a transition from being driven fundamentally by overproduction and overconsumption to being geared to real needs, marked by moderate or low consumption, and based on sustainable and decentralized production processes.

Accordingly, the assumption of most policymakers in the North that consumption trends can continue—and that the only challenge is the transformation of the energy mix and the adoption of technofixes such as biofuels, "clean coal," nuclear power, carbon sequestration and storage, and carbon trading—is not only based on illusions but positively dangerous. Indeed, the climate problem cannot be addressed strategically without addressing the inherently environmentally destabilizing dynamics of capitalism—its incessant drive, motivated by the search for profit, to transform living nature into dead commodities.

Instead of heralding this transition to a much less fossil-fuel-intensive and ecologically sustainable production, most technocrats and economists see only a temporary retreat from export-led growth until global demand makes the latter viable again. The policy debate in establishment circles focuses on who will replace the bankrupt American consumer as the engine of global demand. With Europe stagnant and Japan in almost permanent recession, the hope is that China's growth will be the basis of global reflation. This is a mirage. China's 8.9% annualized growth in the last quarter is due to their current stimulus, a $585 billion program that has been funneled mainly to the countryside. Domestic demand will likely cease to grow once the money is spent. A limited spurt of cash will not transform Chinese peasants into the saviors of the global economy. After all, because they bore the costs of the country's export-oriented economy, these peasants have seen their incomes and welfare severely erode over the last quarter of a century.

The Doha Dead End

But however this debate over the global consumer of last resort is resolved, the World Trade Organization and its most influential members, both from the North and the South, hope that completing the Doha Round at the Seventh Ministerial Meeting in Geneva will bring about a resumption of the carbon-intensive march toward globally integrated production and markets.

The preoccupation of economists and policymakers with the export engine to revive the global economy, which often excludes concerns about the negative impact of export-led globalization on the climate, is a dangerous divide leading up to Copenhagen. Says John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies: "We have economic policymakers concerned with reversing recession and ecological economists concerned with strategic ways of reversing climate change talking past one another."

The climate negotiations have their own share of problems, even without the WTO threat. In the lead-up to Copenhagen, the focus of the climate discussions has been on two issues: mitigation and adaptation. Both are stymied, largely owing to the positions of the industrialized (Annex 1) countries. On mitigation, pivotal developed countries have so far resisted offering legally binding cuts. And what voluntary cuts they have offered are slight. In the case of the United States, President Obama's nonbinding commitment is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 17% from 2005 levels. This translates into an insignificant 4% reduction from 1990 levels, which serve as the benchmark for serious cuts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has asserted that a 25-40% cut in GHG by 2020 is the minimum figure that would keep global mean temperature from rising above two degrees centigrade during this century. And, already, the latter is said to be an underestimate.

The Meaning of Seattle
Walden Bello on the legacy of the 1999 WTO protests.

In the area of adaptation—assisting the poorer countries to prepare themselves for the consequences of climate change—the negotiations have been held up by the rich countries' reluctance to come up with the minimum amounts of aid necessary, to transfer technology unconditionally, and to channel the sums to the developing world through institutions apart from the World Bank, which they control.

The challenges in these two areas are daunting enough. And yet, unless the question of which economic model or strategy the countries of the world should move toward is front and center in Copenhagen, even the most ambitious agreements on mitigation and adaptation will be simply a Band-Aid. Unless the negotiators in Copenhagen dethrone the Doha model, the fundamental driver of climate change—an export-oriented globalized capitalist economy based on perpetually rising consumption—will continue to reign.

Walden Bello is a YES! Magazine contributing editor, a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, a senior analyst of Focus on the Global South, and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article was first published.

For nearly any major disaster—natural, economic, or military—there was a moment when tragedy could have been prevented.

In just the last decade, experts warned that a subprime mortgage bubble could lead to financial collapse and that a hurricane could devastate New Orleans. But our leaders failed to head off disaster, and the public knew little until it was too late.

Now we face the largest potential Katrina the world has ever seen, an imminent catastrophe we refer to blandly as “climate change.” Neither your mayor, nor your senator, nor certainly, your president has declared a climate emergency. But in the time since you may have watched An Inconvenient Truth, global emissions have worsened, and the scientific predictions have become much more frightening.

 The carbon dioxide that we have already put into the atmosphere makes it a near certainty that our oceans will become steadily more acidic, eventually destroying coral reefs and sea life. Glaciers will continue to melt year by year, eventually threatening the water supply of as much as 25 percent of the human population [1]. Sea levels are already rising, and will continue to rise for hundreds of years.

Bangladeshi villagers look for safe refuge after Cyclone Aila floods villages in the low-lying coastal southwest.

Photo by Jonathan Munshi.

In many parts of the world, the climate emergency has already arrived. An estimated 26 million people have already been displaced by the increases in hurricanes, floods, desertification, and drought brought on by climate change [2]. In the North Atlantic, Category 5 hurricanes, the most destructive kind, occur three to four times more often than they did a decade ago [3].

While no single weather event can be tied directly to global warming, droughts, dust storms, and wildfires are becoming more common worldwide, and climate models predict that trend will accelerate. Southern California’s worst wildfire in 30 years scorched 20,000 acres last spring [1]. And in September, Sydney, Australia, choked on its own version of the Dust Bowl: More than 5,000 tons of orange dirt swirled around the city during one of the region’s worst droughts.

We’re no longer talking about future generations; it’s about us.

Why haven’t our leaders responded? They have been relying on old, conservative estimates of global warming effects. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections used baseline scenarios from the 1990s, when scientists and government leaders assumed that by now, popular and political support would have led us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions [4]. That means politicians and the people they represent have been looking at optimistic projections based on improvements that didn’t happen.

In fact, global fossil-fuel and industrial carbon emissions have grown by 3.5 percent a year since 2000, faster than the worst-case scenario predicted by the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC [4]. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are now at their highest levels in the last 15 million years, since before humans walked the earth [5].

Lake Mead shrinks, exposing bleached banks. The Mead-Powell system supplies water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas.

U.N. senior official Luc Gnacadja recently told the press that by 2025, 70 percent of the world’s land could be suffering from drought [6]. In the United States, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists says that in just a couple of decades, average summers in the country’s bread basket, Illinois, could be hotter than the 1988 heat wave that wiped out $40 billion worth of food crops [7]. In the next 12 years, there’s a 50-50 chance that a combination of climate change and overuse will dry up Lakes Mead and Powell, say scientists with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography [8]. Mead and Powell supply 90 percent of Las Vegas’ water, along with irrigation and drinking water for more than 20 million people in Los Angeles and across Nevada and Arizona.

The vast majority of scientists agree that if we keep the Earth’s temperature from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, we have a fighting chance of avoiding the most civilization-shaking impacts of climate change. The G8 leaders agreed to that target at their July meeting.

Shoot past this limit, and the planet’s­ ecosystems may enter a point of no return. We push the Earth into vicious spirals of feedback loops that make things even hotter. Sea ice melts, and the dark, open ocean absorbs more heat. The Amazon rainforest burns and releases even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Weather patterns like El Niño transform from occasional to annual hurricane-brewing phenomena [1]. Grain crops fail [4]. One to 3 billion people face water shortage. The basic systems that support us, our societies, and life on the planet start breaking apart.

We have the wherewithal

We have a choice to make. According to a consensus of hundreds of climate scientists, we can avert crashing the planet only if we make a sharp global U-turn by 2015: Level off emissions worldwide and bring them back down in the next few decades [4].

To do this, we must switch to much more efficient transportation, manufacturing, and buildings, and to solar, wind, tide, and biomass energy. Agriculture must make a rapid switch to organic and ecologically sound practices. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that livestock are responsible for more than half of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. We have to stop destroying forests for cattle ranches, palm oil plantations, and paper pulp, so we can preserve their ability to soak up carbon.

We need the world’s governments to form ambitious and binding agreements at Copenhagen and beyond. These agreements need to regulate and put a high price on emissions, and create incentives for a transition to a clean energy economy. The agreements must include help for the Global South in making the transition to a green economy.

We can afford to do this. The Economics of 350, recently released by the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network, says the cost of reducing CO2 to 350 parts per million—the amount necessary to avoid a 3.6-degree temperature rise—would be between 1 percent and 3 percent of world GDP.  It will cost far less than the 3.3 percent of GDP spent globally on insurance or the 4 percent-plus of GDP the United States spends on its military. And it will do more than either of those to increase our security.

Investments in renewable energy, building retrofits, and efficient mass transit will put people to work and create whole new industries, kick-starting an economic recovery that immediately benefits ordinary people.

The low-carbon culture we need to prevent climate catastrophe is not a culture of deprivation. We can move away from consumption for consumption’s sake, gaining time to enjoy our lives more fully, and creating a world where our children and grandchildren have the opportunity to thrive.

What’s Holding Us Back?

View Sources.

Contrary to popular perception, the scientific community has reached a broad consensus that global warming is happening and that humans have caused it. So why has the United States been so slow to react to the warnings?

The misinformation sown by industry-­funded climate deniers, the lack of national leadership, and the chronic failure of U.S. media to report the story leave many Americans confused about what to think.

Then there’s the convenient excuse that those of us in developed nations should wait until those in the developing nations, particularly India and China, agree to act at the same speed. That argument ignores the fact that the vast majority of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere came from industrialized nations. U.S. carbon per capita emissions are more than four times China’s and almost 18 times India’s. There’s a fundamental fairness to requiring wealthy nations to clean up the mess we created and to help the poorer ones avoid making the same mistakes. More to the point, the nations of the Global South will only be able to sign on to an agreement that allows them to secure food and an economic future for their citizens. If the deal isn’t fair, it won’t happen.

A Climate Justice Mobilization

View sources.

How do we muster the political will to make the changes necessary?

The American people effectively mobilized in the buildup to World War II. When we faced a war emergency, we didn’t take half measures: We converted automobile factories to tank factories and learned to recycle everything. The unemployed got jobs—even those previously excluded from the workforce, like women and people of color.

The war mobilization was the organizing principle of life, and many believe it not only got us out of the Great Depression, it also launched us into decades of sustained prosperity. Think about the sense of shared purpose that resulted from that mobilization, and you begin to see the potential.

Today, a 21st-century people’s movement is building, motivated by the climate crisis coupled with the opportunity for a clean-energy future. Youth from rich countries are supporting climate justice for the poor. Scientists like James Hansen are risking arrest along with social justice advocates. Union officials are standing with greens.

Like other social movements that have changed our world, the climate justice movement is getting traction by taking the high ground. It is sticking to strategies that are nonviolent and inviting ordinary people to be part of creating a clean and prosperous world. And it is insisting on a fair shake for all the world’s people.

Economic Change

View sources.

People are energized by the prospect of a green economy and new, clean technologies, and they want the opportunity not only to avert a climate catastrophe, but to help build a better future. Seventy-seven percent of those polled by Public Agenda say “investing in creating ways to get energy from alternative sources like solar and wind” is the best way to get the economy going, while just 16 percent believe “investing in finding more sources of oil, coal, and natural gas” is the answer.

This excitement is especially evident among those who were left out of the last wave of economic growth and today are sidelined by the so-called “jobless recovery.” Among the supporters of green jobs and clean energy are urban youth, steelworkers, solar developers, architects, farmers, and all sorts of people who see the prospects for a green economic recovery that actually puts people to work.

The climate movement is demanding action in Washington, but not ­waiting for Congress to act. Businesses are adopting green practices and ­walking out on climate-denier associations, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (See Who´s Polluting the Climate Conversation?)

Workplaces, homes, places of worship, and schools are being upgraded to become more climate-friendly and less costly to operate. Communities are making serious commitments to re­ducing their carbon emissions, restructuring their economies, and making neighborhoods green, resilient, and inclusive (see Towns Rush to Make the Low-Carbon Transition).

Buy-local campaigns are cutting down on long-distance transport and climate emissions. The strengthened local economies offer diverse livelihoods that meet people’s immediate needs while weaving together the relationships that help people weather anything from an economic downturn to climate catastrophe.

Cultural Change

View sources.

From “No Impact Man” to “The Story of Stuff,”, a different idea about our way of life is taking hold. Simple living, green lifestyles, buying local are becoming mainstream. Large majorities are prepared to change their lives to make a difference (see Public Attitudes, Knowledge, and Values Around the Climate).

We’ll have to ramp up those changes to address the climate crisis in the time and at the scale we have available, and many Americans know that won’t be easy; 48 percent of those polled by Public Agenda say reducing the effects of global warming will require major sacrifices.

No social movement gets everyone on board. But movements succeed when thousands change their attitudes and practices, and then speak out and influence others. A climate-friendly life is becoming “cool,” even heroic.

In the old economy, the heroes were the ones who made lots of money even if it was at the expense of other people or the planet. The new heroes are those who defend the planet. They restore land that is degraded and poisoned, clean up sources of climate-altering pollution, rebuild soil, and plant trees and vegetables. And they aren’t afraid to get arrested when it’s time to take a stand.

Rebuilding our economy will mean more people will have meaningful work. A more frugal society means less waste, less time devoted to “stuff,” and more time for things that make for genuine happiness (see Fight Climate Change: Live the Good Life). And we can create well-being that isn’t reliant on someone else sacrificing their own.

When we learn to live within our ecological means, we won’t need to fight wars over resources like oil or water. Men and women in uniform can be redeployed to the critical tasks of restoring damaged ecosystems, coping with the inevitable natural and climate-induced disasters, and revamping infrastructure so it can withstand the coming storms.

There Is Still Time

We can still avert the extreme droughts, floods, storms, and displacements that could result if climate change reaches critical tipping points. It’s still possible to save ourselves and generations to come from a climate so unstable that it can no longer support civilization as we know it. But we can’t leave it to our leaders to fix it; the possibility only exists if we rise up and act now.

Sarah van Gelder, Madeline Ostrander, and Doug Pibel wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine.

Sources:

1. United Nations Environment Programme, Climate Change Science Compendium, 2009. www.unep.org/compendium2009

2. Global Humanitarian Forum, Human Impact Report: Climate Change: The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, 2009. www.ghf-geneva.org/OurWork/RaisingAwareness/HumanImpactReport/tabid/180/Default.aspx

3. Greg Holland, “Climate Change and Extreme Weather,” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2009. www.iop.org/EJ/article/1755-1315/6/9/092007/ees9_6_092007.pdf

4. International Alliance of Research Universities, Synthesis Report from Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges, and Decisions, 2009. climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport

5. “Last Time Carbon Dioxide Levels Were This High: 15 Million Years Ago, Scientists Report.” ScienceDaily, October 9, 2009. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm

6. Marianne Bom, “Close to 70 Percent of the Earth's Soil in Risk of Drought,” United Nations, COP15 online coverage, en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2273

7. Union of Concerned Scientists, Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Midwest: Illinois, 2009. www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/climate-change-midwest.html

8.  Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, “When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?” Water Resources Research, 2008.

See citations for the polling data here: Public Attitudes, Knowledge, and Values Around the Climate

So why has so little happened? Why do people who claim to be very concerned about climate change continue their high-carbon lifestyles? And why, as the warnings become ever louder, do increasing numbers of people reject the arguments of scientists and the evidence of their own eyes?

These, I believe, will be the key questions for future historians of the unfurling climate disaster, just as historians of the Holocaust now ask: “How could so many good and moral people know what was happening and yet do so little?”

This comparison with mass human rights abuses is a surprisingly useful place to find some answers to these questions. In States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, Stanley Cohen studies how people living under repressive regimes resolve the conflict they feel between the moral imperative to intervene and the need to protect themselves and their families. He found that people deliberately maintain a level of ignorance so that they can claim they know less than they do. They exaggerate their own powerlessness and wait indefinitely for someone else to act first—a phenomenon that psychologists call the passive bystander effect. Both strategies lie below the surface of most of the commonly held attitudes to climate change.

But most interesting is Cohen’s observation that societies also nego­tiate collective strategies to avoid action. He writes: “Without being told what to think about (or what not to think about) societies arrive at unwritten agreements about what can be publicly remembered and acknowledged.”

Dr. Kari Marie Norgaard of the University of California reaches a very similar conclusion, and argues that “denial of global warming is socially constructed.” She observes that most people are deeply conflicted about climate change and manage their anxiety and guilt by excluding it from the cultural norms defining what they should pay attention to and think about—what she calls their “norms of attention.”

According to Norgaard, most people have tacitly agreed that it is socially inappropriate to pay attention to climate change. It does not come up in conversations, or as an issue in voting, consumption, or career choices. We are like a committee that has decided to avoid a thorny problem by conspiring to make sure that it never makes it onto the agenda of any meeting.

There are many different ways that the proximity of climate change could force itself onto our agendas. We already feel the impacts in our immediate environment. Scientists and politicians urge us to act. The impacts directly threaten our personal and local livelihoods. And, above all, it is our consumption and affluence that is causing it.

However, people have decided that they can keep climate change outside their “norms of attention” through a selective framing that creates the maximum distance. In opinion poll research the majority of people will define it as far away (“it’s a global problem, not a local problem”) or far in the future (“it’s a huge problem for future generations”). They embrace the tiny cluster of skeptics as evidence that “it’s only a theory,” and that “there is still a debate.” And they strategically shift the causes as far away as possible: “I’m not the problem—it’s the Chinese/rich people/corporations.” Here in Europe we routinely blame the Americans.

In all of these examples, people have selected, isolated, and then exaggerated the aspects of climate change that best enable their detachment. And, ironically, focus-group research suggests that people are able to create the most distance when climate change is categorized as an “environmental” problem.

If we take a step back we can see that the impacts of climate change are so wide-ranging that it could equally well be defined as a major economic, military, agricultural, or social rights issue. But its causes (mainly pollution from burning fossil fuels) led it to be bundled with the global “environmental” issues during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. From that point on it has been dealt with by environment ministers and environment departments, and talked about in the media by environmental reporters.

The issue was then championed by environmental campaigners who stamped it indelibly with the images of global wildlife and language of self abnegation that spoke to their own concerns. The current messaging of climate change—the polar bears, burning forests, calls to “live simply so others may simply live” and ‘‘go green to save the planet”—has been filtered through a minority ideology and worldview.

Thus, within a few years, the issue had been burdened with a set of associations and metaphors that allowed the general public to exclude it from their primary concerns (“I’m not an environmentalist”), as could senior politicians (“environment is important but jobs and defense are my priority”).

Progressive civil society organizations also avoided the issue because of its environmental connotations. Two years ago I challenged a senior campaigner with Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights organization, to explain why Amnesty did not mention climate change anywhere on its website. He agreed that it is an important issue but felt that Amnesty “doesn’t really do environmental issues.” In other words it was outside their “norms of attention.”

Far more aggressive responses that stigmatize environmentalists create further distance. In a 2007 interview,  Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryan Air, the world’s largest budget airline, said:

“The environmentalists are like the peace nutters in the 1970s. You can’t change the world by putting on a pair of dungarees or sandals. I listen to all this drivel about turning down the central heating, going back to candles, returning to the dark ages. It just panders to your middle-class, middle-aged angst and guilt. It is just another way of stealing things from hard-pressed consumers.”

 O’Leary’s diatribe—which could be echoed by any number of right-wing commentators in the United States—plays further on the cultural norms theme. By defining climate change as an environmental issue that can be placed firmly in the domain of self-righteous killjoys who want to take away working people’s hard-earned luxuries, his message is clear: “People like us don’t believe this rubbish.”

But, as is so often the case with climate change, O’Leary is speaking to far more complex metaphors about freedom and choice. Climate change is invariably presented as an overwhelming threat requiring unprecedented restraint, sacrifice, and government intervention. The metaphors it invokes are poisonous to people who feel rewarded by free market capitalism and distrust government interference. It is hardly surprising that an October 2008 American Climate Values Survey showed that three times more Republicans than Democrats believe that “too much fuss is made about global warming.” Another poll by the Canadian firm Haddock Research showed half of Republicans refuse to believe that it is caused by humans.

This political polarization is occurring across the developed world and is a worrying trend. If a disbelief in climate change becomes a mark of someone’s political identity, it is far more likely to be shared between people who know and trust each other, becoming ever more entrenched and resistant to external argument.

This being said, climate change is a fast-moving field. Increasingly severe climate impacts will reinforce the theoretical warnings of scientists with far more tangible and immediate evidence. And looking back at history there are plentiful examples of times when public attitudes have changed suddenly in the wake of traumatic events—as with the U.S. entry into both world wars.

CLIMATE HERO

Rev. Sally Bingham, founder of the Regeneration Project, helps places of worship get greener and more energy-efficient. Read more.

In the meantime there is an urgent need to increase both the level and quality of public engagement. To date most information has either been in the form of very dry top-down presentations and reports by experts or emotive, apocalyptic warnings by campaign groups and the media. The film An Inconvenient Truth, which sat somewhere between the two approaches, reinforced the existing avoidance strategies: that this was a huge and intractable global issue. The film was carried by the charm and authority of Al Gore, but this reliance on powerful celebrities also removes power from individuals who are, let us remember, all too willing to agree that there is no useful role they can play.

It is strange that climate communications seem to be so deeply embedded in this 19th-century public lecture format, especially in America, which leads the world in the study of personal motivation. Al Gore, after all, lost a political campaign against a far less qualified opponent whose advisors really understood the psychology of the American public.

How people get involved

How can we energize people and prevent them from passively standing by?

We must remember that people will only accept a challenging message if it speaks to their own language and values and comes from a trusted communicator. For every audience these will be different: The language and values of a Lubbock Christian will be very different from those of a Berkeley Liberal. The priority for environmentalists and scientists should be to step back and enable a much wider diversity of voices and speakers.

We must recognize that the most trusted conveyors of new ideas are not experts or celebrities but the people we already know. Enabling ordinary people to take personal ownership of the issue and talk to each other in their own words is not just the best way to convince people, it is the best way to force climate change back into people’s “norms of attention.”

And finally we need to recognize that people are best motivated to start a journey by a positive vision of their destination—in this case by understanding the real and personal benefits that could come from a low-carbon world. However, it is not enough to prepare a slide show and glossy report vision that just creates more distance and plays to the dominant prejudice against environmental fantasists. People must see the necessary change being made all around them: buildings in entire neighborhoods being insulated and remodeled, electric cars in the driveway, and everywhere the physical adaptations we need to manage for the new weather conditions. If the U.S. government has one strategy, it should be to create such a ubiquity of visible change that the transition is not just desirable but inevitable. We need to emphasize that this is not some distant and intractable global warming, but a very local and rapid climate change, and we need to proclaim it from every solar-panel-clad rooftop.

George Marshall wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. George is founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network. He is the author of Carbon Detox: Your Step by Step Guide to Getting Real About Climate Change (carbondetox.org) and posts articles on the psychology of climate change at climatedenial.org.

At Climate Ground Zero Direct Action Training Camp in Montana, activists learn everything from tactical communications to creative campaigns, such as rappelling off rooftops for Greenpeace.

View photo slideshow.

Photo by Matt Leonard.

In early September 2006, Johann Hari, a columnist for the British newspaper The Independent, visited what was then an unusual gathering: a climate action camp. A village of tents had appeared in the shadow of Selby, England’s, towering Drax coal-fired power plant—one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Europe. Hari found some elements of a counter-culture festival, but he also witnessed what amounted to an “open-air science seminar, where 600 protesters discussed climate chaos with a level of knowledge that would shame our news broadcasters.”

The camp was also a launching pad for direct action, culminating in an effort to temporarily occupy the power station. “These protesters,” Hari observed, “were tired of praying the world’s scientists have made some unprecedented collective error, or waiting for a political Messiah to solve the problem.”

Like earlier mass movements in their infancy, the campers had plenty of knee-jerk detractors. The right-wing Sun newspaper dubbed them “naïve beyond belief.” Hari saw it differently. He pointedly asked in his column, “isn’t the real naïvete coming from people like them who say we should just sit back … and continue to drastically change the chemical composition of the atmosphere?”

Leaving the camp, he declared “the birth of a new protest movement to force action on global warming.”

Climate-change activism has been taking place in some form for decades, but in recent years the ripples created by events like the Selby camp have been swelling into something larger—something that is attracting ever-greater numbers of mainstream environmentalists, gathering support from top climate scientists and prominent public figures, and starting to look a lot like a mass movement.

This movement is set to produce a broad wave of dissent this fall in the United States and internationally, and it is not afraid to think big. “The Civil Rights Movement, the suffragettes, India’s movement for independence. That’s the sort of scale we need to be thinking on when we’re thinking about climate change,” says Abigail Singer, an organizer with the environmental group Rising Tide and co-coordinator of the Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition.

A Global Uprising

While nothing of historic proportions has yet materialized in the United States, environmentalists elsewhere are providing impressive models for climate disobedience. “You’ve got activists in Italy doing multiple day-long sit-ins at coal-fired power plants that actually shut them down,” says Jennifer Krill, a forest and climate campaigner at Rainforest Action Network. “And in Australia you’ve got massive blockades of coal trains, as well as the coal plants themselves.”

CLIMATE HERO

Kumi Naidoo chairs the Global Campaign for Climate Action, the group behind TckTckTck, a diffuse and colorful campaign for worldwide mobilization whose name evokes a countdown for climate action.
Meet all YES! Magazine Climate Heroes

Since Selby, climate camps have become recurrent events in the United Kingdom and have also popped up in Germany, Holland, Ireland, and Australia. They have made the names of major coal-fired plants, such as Drax and Kingsnorth, synonymous with militant protest.

And they’ve had an impact on policy. Public pressure compelled Britain’s energy and climate minister, Ed Miliband, to rethink previous plans to allow plant expansion and declare in April that “The era of new unabated coal has come to an end.” Facing concerted opposition, the E.ON power company announced in October that it was shelving its plans to build a major new coal-burning facility at the infamous Kingsnorth site.

For activists from the Global South, the December 2007 U.N. climate summit in Bali was a landmark of coalescing resistance. There, a broad network of grassroots NGOs such as the Third World Network, the farmers’ coalition Via Campesina, and representatives of communities directly affected by the early impacts of global warming came together under the banner of “Climate Justice Now!” The network has maintained a visible presence at international negotiations, pressuring advanced industrialized countries that, in the words of one network statement, “have refused to live up to their own legal and moral obligations to radically cut emissions and support developing countries’ efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.”

The lesson Krill draws: “We need to turn up the heat in the United States.”

Bringing Home the Heat

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen risked arrest during a protest last March blockading the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. “There were a massive number of people willing to commit civil disobedience on climate change. That just hasn’t happened before,” said Abigail Singer, a march participant.

© Pete Muller for Greenpeace.

“In the U.S., historically, [large-scale mobilization] has tended to work best when there’s a progressive leader in power and some kind of mass awareness of the problem,” argues Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. “We have both of those things now,” he says of the climate crisis, “we just don’t have people taking to the streets.”

The Yes Men, pranksters famous for impersonating corporate spokespeople at high-profile events, are part of one coalition working to change that. They helped create BeyondTalk.net, where visitors can sign a pledge of resistance, vowing to be one of 10,000 willing to risk arrest at protests that will take place simultaneously in major cities before the December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While the United States lags behind some other parts of the world, activity has proliferated here in the past two years. This is particularly true in Appalachia, dubbed “Climate Ground Zero” by organizers who are challenging the ghastly practice of mountaintop-removal mining. The CoalSwarm website keeps a running tally of protests, and its swiftly growing list of events in West Virginia and North Carolina includes civil disobedience marches onto mining sites, tree sits to halt mountaintop blasting, and an action in which climbers scaled a dragline excavator to stop its use.

On the other side of the country, in the Navajo Nation, ongoing resistance at the Desert Rock coal-fired power plant contributed to the EPA withdrawal of its air quality permit this summer. Indeed, CoalSwarm cites more than 75 coal plants canceled, abandoned, or put on hold countrywide in 2007 and 2008, owing in large part to organized community opposition.

In early March, a coalition effort to channel local actions into a national mobilization produced crowds demanding closure of the Capitol Power Plant. The plant, one of the dirtiest coal-burning facilities in the country, sits in downtown Washington, D.C., and helps heat the chambers of Congress. The protest took place immediately after the massive Power Shift conference, which drew over 12,000 young people to the nation’s capital to attend workshops on climate activism and lobbying techniques. Thousands of people—including many Power Shift participants, as well as movement luminaries such as writer Bill McKibben and world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen—risked police reprisal when they blockaded the Capitol Power Plant’s entrances.

It worked: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid preemptively announced that they would instruct Capitol officials to shift the plant to natural gas. Activists regard this as only a partial victory, citing natural gas, along with nuclear power and “clean coal,” as among the “false solutions” currently being promoted for climate change. Nevertheless, the mobilization served as a promising sign for future resistance.

“There were massive numbers of people willing to commit civil disobedience on climate change,” says Singer. “That just hasn’t happened before.”

The Road to Copenhagen

Environmentalists almost universally agree that the upcoming Copenhagen conference represents a critical moment for the planet, and thus a key time for the public to exert pressure. Groups in NGO offices, church basements, and action camps are contributing to major climate organizing campaigns—including citizen lobbying, public awareness, and direct action—each of which could be the largest of its kind in history.

On October 24, environmentalists throughout the world joined creative demonstrations that drew attention to 350—what McKibben calls “the most important number on Earth.” He writes, “A NASA team headed by James Hansen reported that the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can safely hold is 350 parts per million, at least if we want a planet ‘similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.’ Since we’re already at 390 ppm, the message was clear: we don’t need to buy an insurance policy to reduce the threat of future warming. We need a fire extinguisher, and we need it now.”

350.org was coordinated by the same organizers who created the Step It Up campaign in 2007, which produced 2,000 demonstrations spread across all 50 states to demand that Congress cut domestic carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. This time, they worked internationally, and they were awed by the growing momentum.

HOW WILL YOU GET INVOLVED?
We don’t have to tell you to switch your light bulbs and carry a cloth bag to the grocery store: You already do. But saving the planet is going to take more than a reusable mug. So how do you take your beliefs from private home to public square?

Tell your friends. Your neighbors. The guy next to you on the bus. Talking to others about climate change may feel awkward (“So, how do you feel about greenhouse gases?”), but it helps spread the word that climate change is real, and that we can still do something about it. Talk about how you’re giving up your car, or how you’ve been writing your congressperson.

DIY. Join the No Impact Project or organize your neighbors around the Transition Towns movement. When you change the way you live, and help others change the way they live, momentum builds for legislative change.

Become a local advocate.
Send letters to the editor, work for climate-friendly policies (bike lanes, public transit), and join up with others to amplify your voice. Plug in to action-oriented organizations. Then donate, and demonstrate.

See our Climate Action Resource Guide for a list of activist groups to join.

“I can’t really believe it,” says organizer May Boeve of the events in more than 180 countries. “We have scuba divers off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and we have monks in the Himalayas, and we have musicians in all different corners of the world.” Photos or video from each site were sent to world leaders, she says, “to communicate this sense that the public is not only paying attention to Copenhagen, they know what the outcome needs to be. They know we need to get to 350.”

Another day of action, taking place on November 30, a week before the start of the Copenhagen summit, will be more likely to result in jailed activists. The Mobilization for Climate Justice, Rising Tide, and other allies will be coordinating events that target major polluters, interfere with carbon-emission-as-usual, and demand strong regulation. “For people who feel they can’t get arrested because they have too much at stake right now, the BeyondTalk.net site has an ‘action offsets’ program,” Bichlbaum explains. “Just like you can buy carbon offsets, you can buy action offsets” that will pay for training or bail for someone who can risk arrest.

“Seattle” the Summit?

A significant precedent for this fall’s protests is the 1999 mobilization against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. Not accidentally, the November 30 events fall on the 10th anniversary of Seattle’s pivotal day of action. With tens of thousands of people rallying outside the WTO sessions, Seattle brought together an unlikely coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, indigenous rights advocates, anti-sweatshop campaigners, and small farmers who recognized that the exploitative model of corporate globalization championed by the WTO cut across diverse causes and communities. The success of those groups in working together to derail the WTO talks is routinely forgotten by those who depict Seattle as a mindless riot.

Drawing inspiration for the present, a Rising Tide statement argues, “This year we have the opportunity to construct a movement of movements around climate, and find common ground in struggling for our collective survival.”

Regardless of the final shape that Copenhagen protests take, the crucial role that citizens must play in forcing better solutions is clear. “In order to get any sort of climate policy that even resembles something good,” says Singer, “we’re going to need massive amounts of people to get involved in these sorts of mobilizations.”

Bichlbaum adds, “We have the technology that we need right now to stop climate change. The technology we need is a pen and a piece of paper. All we need is to sign the right laws. And the demand for that goes through the streets.”

Mark Engler wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Mark is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance for this article provided by Sean Nortz.

Any solution to climate change will require all nations to act together to reduce global emissions. But the fact is, countries around the world are not entering a “post-carbon future” on a level playing field. Poor countries have had the smallest role in creating the climate crisis, and they have fewest resources available to change and adapt.

The climate policies we pursue will have to support poor communities and developing nations. Everyone, whether they live in industrial or developing countries, has fundamental rights to decent levels of food, housing, health, and clothing, and many nations in the Global South will not get behind a climate solution that doesn’t allow their citizens these rights.

In the United States, we need to push for solutions that equitably distribute the burdens of the coming transition between rich and poor nations. If residents of industrialized nations don’t pressure their governments to share wealth and technological capacities with the Global South, extreme poverty will inevitably aggravate the planet’s ecological stress. Poor communities that are left out of the post-carbon economy and robbed of resources by corporations will be forced to strip the diminishing amounts of clean water, forests, and land just to survive.

So what does an equitable approach look like? There is a growing international consensus around a core set of principles called “climate justice.”

Share the responsibility
for emissions reductions fairly.

A fair and workable international approach must be based on the historical responsibility wealthy industrial countries bear for causing climate change as well as the capacity of these countries to finance the necessary transition.

Over the past 100 years, the United States has been the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases, according to data from the World Resources Institute. Together, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Russia account for nearly 70 percent of the global build-up of atmospheric CO2 between 1850 and 2004. In the past two years, China has surpassed the United States as the largest CO2 emitter, but China’s population is four and a half times larger. U.S. per capita emissions are still much higher.

CLIMATE HERO

Indigenous people around the world are among those most affected by fossil-fuel development, and Clayton Thomas-Müller is organizing those communities to make sure they have a voice in the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
Meet all YES! Magazine Climate Heroes

Industrialized nations became rich at the expense of the Global South. The development and industrialization of the North has come about through the continual, and often forced, extraction of minerals, plants, fossil fuels, food, and human labor from the Global South, and through corporate globalization. Oil, extracted primarily from the Global South, has been the life-blood of globalization. Along with its sister coal, it has made industrial capitalism hum at a feverish pace for the past 200 years. By exhausting the capacity of the atmosphere, land, and ocean to absorb carbon, industrialized nations have left countries like India, China, and Brazil little room to create industrial economies that establish decent standards of living for their populations.

The prevailing proposals for financing the transition to a low-carbon economy involve distributing funds from North to South through entities like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While financing from the North is needed, these institutions are the wrong choice. Both have track records of saddling poor countries with debt, requiring government spending cuts that undermine national economies, and handing lucrative contracts to transnational corporations.

The mechanisms set up to distribute and allocate these funds should be transparent, democratic, and accountable to civil society in the Global South. People’s movements around the world and a growing number of countries—including Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and the entire African Union—have proposed requiring industrialized nations to pay their “ecological debt” through a United Nations entity. Wealthy countries would pay into the fund according to their level of responsibility for climate change, and the money would be used to finance clean technologies and adaptation strategies in poor countries.

Recently, India and China jointly called on the Global North to take the lead in reducing emissions and providing money and green technology to developing countries. And Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva recently told the press that at Copenhagen he will urge the Global North to “pay for the damage that they have already caused to the planet.”

The only way for an international climate agreement to become politically, economically, and ecologically feasible is for rich countries to resolve their ecological debt.

End overconsumption
and resource depletion.

Climate change is merely one of the most obvious symptoms of a consumer economy that is pushing our ecological and human systems to the brink. “Global economic growth is the major cause of rising emissions,” writes British journalist George Monbiot. “Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat, and animal feed to rich consumers.”

If rich communities move toward a “clean energy” paradigm but continue to depend on the natural resources and cheap labor of the Global South to feed their huge appetite for stuff (even “green” stuff), the climate crisis will only worsen.

In China, for example, “green industry” is displacing rural farming villages. A new industrial zone west of Shanghai will span 98 square kilometers and include a “Solar Valley” to produce photovoltaics and other green technologies for export. Ironically, this development zone’s energy needs will be fed by multiple coal power plants.

Reaching the aggressive carbon reductions demanded by science will require ramping down overproduction for overconsumption by the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Give communities control
over their food, land, and energy.

Place-based, democratically run communities that have a reflective and responsive relationship with their ecosystem are more capable of adapting to ecological transition.

Supporting local control, among other things, means standing with communities that are resisting fossil-fuel extraction. These communities are bearing the worst brunt of our pollution-based economy and articulating one of the simplest solutions to the climate crisis: Keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Homegrown Solutions

In Copenhagen, the question of climate equity will be contentious. But communities in the Global South aren’t waiting for an international agreement. They are turning to sustainable, climate-friendly solutions to address a problem they did little to create, but must nonetheless help to solve.
Read more.

Two years ago, the indigenous Huaorani people of Ecuador won the provisional support of the Ecuadorian government in their campaign to keep the oil in the rainforests of Yasuní National Park untouched. Rainforests store carbon and prevent it from entering the atmosphere, so the move is a big win for our planet. It’s also an expensive option for the Ecuadorian government—Yasuní’s estimated 850 million oil barrels constitute 20 percent of Ecuador’s proven oil reserves. Yet Ecuador is willing to abandon the development of an oil field in Yasuní if other countries help it recover $350 million annually—50 percent of the income it would have obtained from extracting crude oil. As of this writing, the government of Germany has committed an initial $50 million a year, and the leaders of France and Spain are considering a pledge. If successful, this initiative will be a watershed moment in the struggle for climate justice—the first time that a community on the front lines has succeeded in keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and one of the first times a developing nation has negotiated compensation for ecological service it’s providing to the world.

Here in North America, there are also inspiring struggles resisting fossil fuel extraction that merit our immediate attention and support, like the campaigns to end mountaintop removal in Appalachia, stop tar sands extraction in Alberta, Canada, and halt ­Chevron’s heavy crude oil refinement in Richmond, California. A win on any of these fronts would build momentum for a “leave it in the ground” movement in industrial countries and tell the world that the people of the United States care deeply about climate justice.

Creating a Green Economy for Everyone

It is exciting to see a multiracial movement within the United States calling for a just climate transition that helps save the planet while producing jobs, wealth, and economic stability for marginalized communities. We need to seek the same kinds of solutions internationally.

We can learn a great deal from inspiring international networks such as Oilwatch International and Via Campesina, the international organization of rural farmers and peasants. The false dichotomies of economy versus environment or race versus environment don’t exist for many of the vibrant and sophisticated movements in the Global South. Indigenous and land-based peoples’ movements understand that our collective survival is deeply dependent on our relationship to the Earth.

Communities throughout the South are resisting resource exploitation and creating their own solutions, from the indigenous U’wa people in Colombia who are campaigning against oil development on their land to Indian farmers who are organizing seed banks to protect the cultural and biological diversity that has enabled them to weather drought and flood for thousands of years.

Groups like these have an integrated vision for how food, land, and energy sovereignty will help create a resilient society.

“A global economy that takes ecological limits into account must necessarily localize production to reduce wasting both natural resources and people,” says Vandana Shiva, the celebrated Indian author and activist. “Reclaiming democratic control over our food and water and our ecological survival is the necessary project for our freedom.”

Restoring our planet’s health will require a lasting redistribution of power and resources. Recognizing our common heritage of water, food, and energy should be at the heart of a new framework for global resource management. Natural resources need to be conserved for the common good, not privatized and unsustainably exploited. We must plan and execute a just transition to a sustainable, low-carbon, resource-balanced society that promotes people’s rights, honors their work, and protects the well-being and integrity of all life on the planet.

Gopal Dayaneni and Mateo Nube wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Mateo is director for the Movement ­Generation Justice and Ecology Project, movementgeneration.org, a group that coordinates organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area working for economic and ecological justice. Gopal is an organizer with Movement Generation and a trainer with the Ruckus Society.

"The struggle for the environment is the struggle for our own survival."
Ricardo Navarro

Photo by Chris Bray.

I happened to be in New York City in September on the day the Yes Men (no relation to YES! Magazine) pulled off their latest newspaper hoax, this one devoted to the climate crisis. All over the city, young people were on street corners hawking free copies of a phony New York Post, with a banner headline pronouncing “We’re Screwed!!”

Shortly after, the Yes Men held a press conference in Washington, D.C., passing themselves off as representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They announced that the Chamber is dropping its “erroneous” opposition to climate legislation—a story quickly picked up as fact by major news outlets.

As news of glacial melts, storms, fires, and droughts gets more dire, the strategies of climate activists like the Yes Men are getting more creative and more insistent. The data coming in show actual climate impacts are at the worst end of the range of possibilities predicted by climate models.

Policymakers, however, are working from models that may be unduly optimistic—in part because they leave out the wildly unpredictable tipping points that historic climate data show can lead to rapid jumps of Earth’s climate to profoundly different states. On a crowded planet, where our food and water only barely meet the needs of billions, we are extraordinarily vulnerable to these climatic shifts. One estimate suggests that over the next 50 years, 1 billion people could become climate refugees.

Many policy observers say we are optimistic to think we can keep CO2 levels below 450 parts per million (ppm), much less the 350 ppm NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen says is necessary “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” Instead, they say we must adapt to a world of extreme heat waves, spreading deserts, flooded cities, and mass extinctions.

We dispute that. The 2008 Climate Solutions issue of YES! Magazine showed how we can avert disastrous climate change. These shifts do require us to mobilize ourselves beyond business-as-usual, but they don’t mean we have to give up on civilization. In fact, unless your definition of a good life includes a mandatory Hummer, you are likely to be as happy, or happier.

The question isn’t whether we have the off-the-shelf technologies, the proven policies, the funds, and the social stability to avert disastrous climate change—we have all that, and it is enough. The question is whether we can overcome the power of obfuscating corporations and anti-government ideologues, and their hired media and politicians to mobilize ourselves and our elected officials in time.

This issue of YES! Magazine reports on those who are stepping up to the challenge:

• The people who are taking direct action, risking arrest, building powerful climate justice movements across generations, national borders, and races.
• The people from the world’s poor countries and poor communities who are stepping up to help solve a problem they didn’t create—while insisting the solutions be fair ones.
• Those who are creating new, sustainable economies that provide livelihoods and meet our needs, running on renewable energy.
• Those pioneering ways of life that are deeply satisfying without requiring massive amounts of energy and “stuff.”

It’s going to take all of these efforts ramping up, plus technical know-how, design genius, smart policies, and global diplomacy to make the needed shift. This will not be easy, but what purpose could be more inspiring than saving the world? It beats the hell out of the alternative.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is executive editor of YES! Magazine.

Photo by Mac Urata

Kumi Naidoo learned early in life what mass movements of ordinary people can accomplish: At age 15, he organized youth and neighborhood groups to push for an end to apartheid in South Africa. Nearly 30 years later, Naidoo is building a global movement to force world leaders to adopt a binding agreement on climate change. He chairs the Global Campaign for Climate Action, the group behind TckTckTck, a diffuse and colorful campaign for worldwide mobilization whose name evokes a countdown for climate action. All of TckTckTck’s actions, from civil disobedience and street protests to a celebrity music video, send the same message to global ­policymakers: The time has come for urgent, decisive steps to curb climate change. In November, Naidoo became executive director of Greenpeace International, a partner in the TckTckTck coalition.

What is the role of direct action in shaping the debate on climate change?

History shows that we are only able to effect change when decent men and women are prepared to put their lives on the line, go to prison, take risks, and do it all peacefully. That’s what happened in the civil rights movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

If we are brutally honest with ourselves about the response of our governments to petitioning, dialogue, and other normal campaigning, we’d see that such methods have not delivered the kind of results we need. I think you will be seeing more and more civil disobedience.

What one message do you want the TckTckTck campaign to send to world leaders?

That the cost of failing to agree to a fair, ambitious, and binding deal in Copenhagen will be devastating for every single country on this planet. If we don’t act now, the world will pay a very high price in the future, both financially and socially.

What lessons do you draw from your experiences working to end apartheid?

It’s important to build as much unity as possible. We must encourage people to focus on the considerable number of areas where they agree and to respect where they have differences. We also need sacrifice, courage, commitment, and strong leadership across all sectors of society—faith, trade unions, NGOs, and the business community. And we must always look for allies within the government.

Kate Sheppard conducted this interview for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Kate covers energy and environmental politics from Washington, D.C. She currently writes for Mother Jones and was previously the political reporter for Grist.

Meet all our Climate Heroes:

Kumi Naidoo

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Rev. Sally Bingham

Marcus Ryan

Sharon Hanshaw

Lorelei Scarbro

Clayton Thomas-Müller

Clayton Thomas-Müller is working to keep corporations from privatizing the atmosphere, as they have privatized the land and exploited the natural resources that once belonged to  the First Nations of Canada. As an activist with the Indigenous ­Environmental Network, Thomas-Müller campaigns against the multinational oil companies that are stripping crude oil from the Alberta tar sands and leaving behind toxic heavy metals and carcinogens that pollute nearby native lands. Indigenous people around the world are among those most affected by fossil-fuel development, and Thomas-Müller is organizing those communities to make sure they have a voice in the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

What is the impact of the fossil-fuel economy on indigenous communities?

Thirty-five percent of North America’s fossil fuels and around 80 percent of its uranium are underneath native land. Native communities face incredible pressure to enter into the industrialization game.

What influence has tar sands development had on the communities you work with?

The five First Nations in the region of the tar sands rely on traditional food sources, like moose, fish, beaver, and muskrat, all of which have become contaminated by mining pollution. We’re talking about a community of just 1,200 that’s seen more than 100 deaths in the last decade from rare cancers and autoimmune diseases. The tar sands leases also violate aboriginal treaty rights; they were sold by the provincial government without the prior informed consent of local communities.

Based on the experiences of indigenous people, what should a climate agreement at Copenhagen include?

Focusing only on market-based solutions, most of them voluntary, will lead to further privatization of the commons, like the forests in the Global South and here in northern Canada. The strategy will commodify the Earth’s atmospheric carbon-cycling capacity. Privatization has serious implications for those living in communities near big emitters, and for everybody on Mother Earth who uses these commons to sustain life.

For example, the number one reason why Canada has never ratified the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples or made a Kyoto commitment is because Canada’s economy is based on extracting raw resources and selling them to our biggest trading partner, the United States. The only way to stop the tar sands extraction is through aboriginal and treaty rights negotiation strategies, led by First Nations in Canada.

Going into Copenhagen, we’re saying, let’s not lose sight of binding mechanisms—laws. Let’s have the governments of the world take back their sovereignty from corporations. Let’s stop subsidizing corporations with public funds. When corporations violate their emissions caps, let’s fine the hell out of them and divert those resources to the renewable energy economy.

Kate Sheppard conducted this interview for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Kate covers energy and environmental politics from Washington, D.C. She currently writes for Mother Jones and was previously the political reporter for Grist.

Meet all our Climate Heroes:

Kumi Naidoo

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Rev. Sally Bingham

Marcus Ryan

Sharon Hanshaw

Lorelei Scarbro

Clayton Thomas-Müller