climate justice

By James Jordan - Links, January 13, 2016

Image: Activists deliver the Our Power Plan to the EPA’s regional office in San Francisco on January 19, 2016 (Facebook/CEJA)

It has been a month since the UN climate summit in Paris, aka COP 21. One might expect the kind of ebb and flow we often see in popular movements. Interest in climate issues, the cause of the day during the summit, might be expected to wane and move to the back burner of public discourse until such time as another development pushes it forward again.

However, climate change is fundamentally different. It is going to get worse — we will be getting slapped in the face with this one for a long, long time, even under the best scenarios. Only a few weeks after COP 21, the world experienced a wave of floods and extreme weather exacerbated by global warming. In the US, there were record-setting floods along the Mississippi River. In South America, floods caused the evacuation of 180,000 persons. In Scotland, floods cut across class lines to threaten a historic castle neighboring the Queen's Balmoral residence, its foundation being eaten away by the swollen Dee river. Meanwhile, oil wars and drought continue to drive an immigration crisis in Syria and throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. The issue of climate is not the “struggle du jour” - it is going to be the main course for quite a while.

Shamefully, the broad, “mainstream” climate movement in the so-called “developed” world is woefully inadequate to address this concern. It is not producing the kind of real life strategies, analysis and resistance that current conditions call for. Right now, the dominant character of this movement is actually holding us back, not pushing us forward. It is a movement that trumpets ambiguous desires for sustainability, but is all too silent when it comes to meaningful demands.

What we got from COP 21 was an accord that set inadequate and unenforceable carbon emissions limits; failed to guarantee reparations or support for the poorest, most exploited nations to develop alternative technologies; adopted market-based schemes that entrench international inequality; ignored the demands of indigenous peoples; and refused to address the huge and negative climate impact of US militarism and resource wars. Of course, no one expected such measures to be passed, so it might be justly claimed as a victory that any kind of agreement or protocol was passed at all. As has been noted, had the agreement been enforceable, the Republican-dominated US Congress would have quashed that government's participation. But what victory there has been is a Pyrrhic one.

The good news from Paris was those groups that defied the ban on public marches and protests instated following the November 13 terrorist attacks. There were some 200 protesters arrested on November 29, the opening day of the summit, when they broke ranks with officially-tolerated activities and took to the streets, despite authorities having “preventatively” detained a number of activists before the summit began. There was also the December 6 flotilla of indigenous peoples protesting the exclusion of indigenous rights from the accord minus a brief mention in the preamble. The flotilla exposed the machinations of the US, European Union, Australia and others to exempt indigenous rights from the body of the agreement. It was refreshing to hear of these and others who refused to cooperate with this gag rule.

Around the world people are getting radicalized and making bold efforts to save this biosphere we know and love. In the US, Flood the System called for and carried out multiple climate justice actions. The Global Climate Convergence is continuing its work to build a Peoples Climate Strike. Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network and Climate Justice Alliance are confronting the legacy of colonialism and its damage to land and water. Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network is organizing to divest universities from the oil and coal companies. Still, the reality is that the broad climate movement in the “developed”world has mostly been a failure and an obstacle to building an effective and truly relevant movement.

By Carl Sack - Socialist Action, January 20, 2016

Photo: Demonstration for climate justice near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Dec. 12. David Sassoon / Inside Climate News

After 10 days of talks at the COP 21 climate conference in Paris, negotiators from 195 countries celebrated the adoption of an agreement that calls for a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5^o Centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

On one hand, the agreement goes farther than any previous accord to acknowledge the need for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Its preamble includes the “principle of equity” that rich countries must do more than poor countries. It even pays lip service to indigenous rights, gender equality, and a “just transition of the workforce.” It calls for holding the global average temperature “well below 2^o C above pre-industrial levels”—the suicidal temperature ceiling advocated by the U.S. and European countries—and aspires to limit the temperature rise to 1.5^o C. Many poorer nations pushed for the 1.5^o target.

On the other hand, despite the enlightened preamble, the document is utterly empty of any concrete measures to curb planet-destroying carbon emissions. It relies on countries to set their own “intended nationally determined contributions” or INDCs, which are to be updated every five years. The language used is revealing; INDCs are voluntary pledges that are non-binding and therefore have no real impact.

The agreement does not lay out any roadmaps for how individual countries will achieve their pledges. It fails to even mention reducing the consumption of fossil fuels beyond a vague reference to “domestic mitigation measures.” Even if all countries were to follow through on all of the pledges made just prior to the Paris conference, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research peg the result as a disastrous 2.7^o C warming by the year 2100—just 0.9 degrees below the “business-as-usual” scenario.

Worse, like its predecessors, the Paris agreement endorses counterproductive market-based carbon-trading schemes. Carbon markets introduced under the Kyoto Protocol (called the “Clean Development Mechanism”) have attracted rampant corruption, promoted big development projects like hydropower dams that displaced sustainable communities, and ultimately collapsed due to a lack of demand for carbon offsets. Forest protection credits, sold as carbon offsets under the UN REDD program, have accelerated corporate land grabs in developing countries and hastened the conversion of natural forests into private monoculture tree plantations.

Provisions of the agreement could also be interpreted as promoting speculative carbon-capture technologies and risky geo-engineering schemes.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen called the agreement “a fraud” and “a fake.” “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises,” Hansen said in an interview with The Guardian. Hansen supports a carbon tax with public redistribution of the proceeds as a means of curbing fossil fuel use.

Perhaps proving Hansen’s point, the Paris talks do not seem to have spurred any immediate action to curb emissions by the world’s worst polluters. In fact, just before the Paris talks, President Barack Obama signed a transportation bill including a provision that fast-tracks environmental review of new oil and gas pipelines and strictly limits lawsuits aimed at stopping such projects. Just after the talks, he signed a spending bill that ended the 40-year-old oil export ban, allowing U.S. fossil fuel corporations to ship crude oil overseas.

By staff - It Takes Roots to Weather the Storm - January 2016

The Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015 is a dangerous distraction that threatens all of us. Marked by the heavy influence of the fossil fuel industry, the deal reached at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) never mentions the need to curb extractive energy, and sets goals far below those needed to avert a global catastrophe. The agreement signed by 196 countries does acknowledge the global urgency of the climate crisis, and reflects the strength of the climate movement. But the accord ignores the roots of the crisis, and the very people who have the experience and determination to solve it.

Around the world, negotiators use the term “red line” to signify a figurative point of no return or a limit past which safety can no longer be guaranteed. Our communities, whose very survival is most directly impacted by climate change, have become a living red line. We have been facing the reality of the climate crisis for decades. Our air and water are being poisoned by fossil fuel extraction, our livelihoods are threatened by floods and drought, our communities are the hardest hit and the least protected in extreme weather events—and our demands for our survival and for the rights of future generations are pushing local, national, and global leaders towards real solutions to the climate crisis.

We brought these demands to the UNFCCC 21^st Conference of Parties (COP21) as members of the delegation called “It Takes Roots to Weather the Storm.” Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ), the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), and the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) organized the delegation, which included leaders and organizers from more than 100 US and Canadian grassroots and Indigenous groups. We helped to mobilize the thousands of people who took to the streets of Paris during the COP21, despite a ban on public protest—and amplified the pressure that Indigenous Peoples, civil society, and grassroots movements have built throughout the 21 years of UN climate talks.

The Paris Agreement coming out of the COP21 allows emissions from fossil fuels to continue at levels that endanger life on the planet, demonstrating just how strongly world leaders are tied to the fossil fuel industry and policies of economic globalization. The emphasis within the UNFCCC process on the strategies of carbon markets consisting of offsets and pollution trading created an atmosphere within the COP21 of business more than regulation. The result is a Paris Agreement that lets developed countries continue to emit dangerously high levels of greenhouse gasses; relies on imaginary technofixes and pollution cap-and-trade schemes that allow big polluters to continue polluting at the source, and results in land grabs and violations of human rights and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Our analysis of the Paris Agreement echoes critiques from social movements around the world, led by those most impacted by both climate disruption and the false promises that governments and corporate interests promote in its wake.

“Frontline communities” are the peoples living directly alongside fossil-fuel pollution and extraction—overwhelmingly Indigenous Peoples, Black, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander peoples in working class, poor, and peasant communities in the US and around the world. In climate disruption and extreme weather events, we are hit first and worst.

We are Mother Earth’s red line. We don’t have the luxury of settling for industry or politicians’ hype or half measures. We know it takes roots to weather the storm and that’s why we are building a people’s climate movement rooted in our communities. We are the frontlines of the solution: keeping fossil fuels in the ground and transforming the economy with innovative, community-led solutions.

By Jeff Mackler - Socialist Action, December 21, 2015

The Bay Area IWW sponsored this event, and IWW EUC members participated in its organizing:

Organized by a broad coalition of environmental, social justice, labor, antiwar, anti-racist, and faith-based groups across Northern California, some 3000 mobilized on Saturday, Nov. 21, to demand immediate action to stop and reverse global warming and associated climate-change-influenced catastrophes.

The mobilization was part of the worldwide effort to protest the Nov. 30–Dec. 12 UN COP21 Paris climate conference, where little or no substantial actions were expected to stop and reverse the climate crisis.

Major organizing efforts began here some five months ago, an important factor that made the Oakland march and rally the largest in the U.S. to date among the many planned in cities across the country both before and after the UN-sponsored Paris talks.

Some 200 groups endorsed this action, initiated and sponsored by the Northern Climate Climate Mobilization. Fifty to sixty dedicated activists, representing almost as many organizations, met bi-weekly for months and then weekly to broaden and build this essential “movement of movements” to demand immediate action to eliminate fossil fuel-based energy systems and rapidly replace them with 100 percent clean, safe, and sustainable alternatives to “Defend the Planet.”

In fact, “Defend the Planet” against corporate and government polluters soon became the eye-catching focus of coalition flyers and of the eight-foot advertisements that were posted at seven BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train stations, at a cost of $7000. There was little or no doubt among the coalition activists that the consequences of the corporate polluter profit-driven polices to increase fossil-fuel extraction, and the government’s associated actions to promote these policies, threaten life on earth.

The high-spirited and colorful march was led by some 100 Native American Idle No More frontline community activists from Sonoma County to San Jose. It contained new, diverse—but still only modest—representation from the critically necessary sectors of the country’s labor, youth, and oppressed nationalities. The multi-cultural outpouring, included several bands and singing groups, youth contingents, socialist contingents, LGBT groups, high school student organizations, and more.

Speakers at the rally included the main leaders of the San Francisco and Alameda country labor councils, an IBEW local president, and a key representative of the California Nurses Association. All these organized modest contingents of workers in the mile-long march from the Lake Merritt Amphitheater to Oakland’s Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Civic Center Plaza. Keynote speaker May Boeve, national executive director of 350.org, stressed the need for a united mass movement to challenge the governments worldwide whose UN climate proposals fall far short of the measures needed to stop and reverse the horrific consequences of global warming.

The adopted demands included opposition to oil wars, racism, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, corporate and government-backed and implemented policies that foster increased, not decreased, fossil-fuel extraction as well demands for reparations to fund poor nations around the world to guarantee the introduction of sustainable energy systems, a just job transition for all workers at union wages, civil and democratic rights for all in a world where Black Lives Matter, for immigrant rights, and an end to environmental racism.

Following a month of democratic discussion and debate, these points of unity and demands were hammered out and adopted unanimously, an indication of the growing radicalization and sophistication of the climate-crisis movement. Indeed, the ideas presented by the local chapter of System Change Not Climate Change and various socialist groups found a hearty reception among virtually all the activist participants. See the full demands and points of unity at NorCalClimateMob.net.

A spirited and enthusiastic post-Nov. 21 evaluation meeting on Dec. 3 attributed the fact that this year’s march was not qualitatively different in size from last year’s Sept. 21 effort to the relative lack of national coordination.

It was noted that local climate actions initiated by national 350.org were organized mostly on a last-minute basis and on a number of different dates before and after the Paris talks. In contrast, last year’s Northern California mobilization significantly benefited from the “wind in our sails” flowing from the New York City mobilization of 400,000 organized by the People’s Climate March.

This year’s relatively diffuse choice of mobilization dates and organizing activity limited most U.S. actions to a few hundred participants at best. The post-COP 21 Dec. 12 national and international mobilizations promoted by 350.org and other world environmental organizations have been called to make the point that an ongoing movement is sorely need “through” Paris and afterward.

At the close of the UN conference, 350.org leaders are expected to set a national date for coordinated May 2015 spring regional mobilizations in some nine to 12 U.S. cities.

Meanwhile, the Nor Cal Climate Mob, as this new Oakland-based united front mass action coalition is popularly known, voted unanimously at its Dec. 3 evaluation meeting to continue its efforts through the spring actions.

The S.F. Bay Area branch of Socialist Action played an important role in helping to initiate the Nor Cal Climate Mob and build its September 2014 and November 2015 marches. Socialist Action’s tent was a popular rally attraction, with activists purchasing some $150 in Socialist Action newspapers and pamphlets. Forty-two participants, mostly youth, signed our mailing list for more information and to meet Socialist Action members.