In the wake of the failure of the governments of the world to come any substantial consensus on what to do about climate change, and in view of their failure to even discuss real solutions to climate change, members of Eugene’s Black Tea Society staged a solidarity action in the form of a banner drop. The COP15 talks only served to reaffirm what many of us in the climate justice movement already knew: that the so-called “leaders” of the world have no intention of rising above petty national bickering to solve the most urgent crisis of our time. In the face of government collaboration and inaction it is the responsibility of every human to rise to the defence of mother earth. We are but the crest of a rising tide of popular discontent which will sweep away the old order, replacing it with one based in mutual aid, sustainable living, and cooperative economics. Our survival depends on it.

source: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/12/396276.shtml

The COP15 summit is over. But the lobbying and greenwashing continues. Monsanto has won the worst lobby award last Tuesday in the KlimaForum. But yesterday their special servant from WWF received the bonus price for greenwashing monocultures and the use pesticides and gm-crops.

To inform the employees and volunteres of WWF posters have been hung all around their local Danish office on Svanevej 12 in Copenhagen. Hopefully organisation like Fairtrade who share the office building with WWF get informed about their dirty green capitalist power games.

Source:http://indymedia.dk/articles/1974

Like most of the reasonable people predicted the COP15 did not reach a progressive and legal binding agreementin Copenhagen. The promised “Hopenhagen” was not participative and not inclusive. It was not about finding solutions for a global crisis. It was a struggle between the rich and the poorer countries about economic development.

It is important to note, that the developing countries do no beg for help but demanded for reparations or like they put it “pay our climate debt“. In the end it s about the same thing – who is getting more money out of the summit. Compared to the vast amounts spend on bailing out banks to “solve” the financial crisis and the thousands of billion dollars spend every year especially by NATO countries on military expenses the offer to save the climatewas a bad, a very bad joke.

The official summit kept on debating the “false solutions” like carbon trade or bio fuels instead of listening to the hundreds of thousands voices on the streets of Copenhagen and at the Klimaforum09. Voices which traveled often hundreds or thousands of kilometers, not rarely on their own expenses because they had something to say and live already the consequences of climate change. These voices addressed the real concerns of worlds citizens and proposed solutions based on their local experiences. There have been a Cuban delegation talking about their experiences with oil scarcity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Grass roots organisations planting their own food in urban gardens in London. Agriculture has to be in the hands of small farmers in order to empower people and combat climate change – as well in Europe! They demanded to decentralise the energy system and bring the power back into the hands of communities. There are already initiatives to bring the power back into peoples hands. For example the German cooperative “Energie in Bürgerhand” (Energy in hands of citizens) tries to create a huge fund to buy shares of the Thüga in order to have a say in the boards of the company. The cooperative will invest in renewable energy and tries to influence the policy of the Thüga away from nuclear power and fossil energy. Already on their way to Copenhagen the caravan coming from Geneva was able to see the infrastructure in Freiburg where a syndicate buys houses to withdraw them from the market and have people living in their own houses. There are countless examples of alternatives but the politicians did not want to listen to the voices on the streets.

The Voices of this massive amount of people from every corner of the world were not just ignored by the elite gathering at the Bella Center. They first tried to keep critical voices out of the country by interrupting theSchengen Agreement and closing all borders. Then they excluded in the second week various critical NGO’s and hindered others to hand out information material inside the Bella Center. Demonstrations have been violently repressed on almost every single day of the summit. People have been pre-emptively arrested for no obvious reasons. Accommodation of activists has been raided on several occasions by the police [1,2

source: http://indymedia.dk/articles/1970

Photo by Olivier Morin /UK Guardian.

By John Vidal, Allegra Stratton and Suzanne Goldenberg in Copenhagen

Saturday Dec. 19, 2009

The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord “recognises” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

American officials spun the deal as a “meaningful agreement”, but even Obama said: “This progress is not enough.”

“We have come a long way, but we have much further to go,” he added.

Gordon Brown hailed the night as a success on five out of six measures.

In a press conference held after the talks broke up, Brown said the agreement was a “vital first step” and accepted there was a lot more work to do to get assurances it would become a legally binding agreement. He declined to call it a “historic” conference: “This is the first step we are taking towards a green and low carbon future for the world, steps we are taking together. But like all first steps, the steps are difficult and they are hard.”

“I know what we rally need is a legally binding treaty as quickly as possible.”

The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session. The deal aims to provide $30bn a year for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year by 2020.

But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries which had been holding out for deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in past drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO₂ emissions by 80% was also dropped.

The agreement also set up a forestry deal which is hoped would significantly reduce deforestation in return for cash. It lacked the kind of independent verification of emission reductions by developing countries that the US and others demanded.

Obama hinted that China was to blame for the lack of a substantial deal. In a press conference he condemned the insistence of some countries to look backwards to previous environmental agreements. He said developing countries should be “getting out of that mindset, and moving towards the position where everybody recognises that we all need to move together”.

This was a not-so-veiled reference to the row over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol and its legal distinction between developed and developing countries. Developing nations saw this as an attempt by the rich world to wriggle out of its responsibility for climate change. Many observers blamed the US for coming to the talks with an offer of just 4% emissions cuts on 1990 levels. The final text made no obligations on developing countries to make cuts.

Negotiators will now work on individual agreements such as forests, technology, and finance – but, without strong leadership, the chances are that it will take years to complete.

Obama cast his trip as a sign of renewed US global leadership: “The time has come for us to get off the sidelines and shape the future that we seek; that is why I came to Copenhagen.”

But the US president also said he would not be staying for the final vote “because of weather constraints in Washington”.

Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, said the deal had “the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It’s nothing short of climate change scepticism in action. It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.”

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: “The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. Ed Miliband [UK climate change secretary] is among the very few that come out of this summit with any credit.” It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

Lydia Baker of Save the Children said world leaders had “effectively signed a death warrant for many of the world’s poorest children. Up to 250,000 children from poor communities could die before the next major meeting in Mexico at the end of next year.”

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal

Today was the day to make plans for the future. In a sesson on the future of the movement born here, a Climate Justice Action representativa says that we have to attack the institutions which form the basis of the capitalists system because this system is based on growth, so it is not compatible with emissions reductions. Ricardo Navarro, from Friends of the Earth El Salvador, notes that politicians from rich countries represent corporates’ interests, not peoples’ interests.

For Navarro, the restriction on the participation of NGOs in the COP and their expulsion in the final days shows that we live a crisis of democratic legitimacy. In its intervention, he defends local production of food as a guarantee of sustainability and local production of energy as a factor of democracy.

Naomi Klein follows, saying that some environmentalists have gone from “let’s unite and save the world” to “the human species is lost”. We have to reject this way of thinking and guarantee that the marginalized voices will be at the center of the next COP, in Mexico.

After the discussion follows a demonstration for the release of the Climate Justice Action spokespersons arrested. About 1,500 people shout “free all political prisioners” and promise to go on fighting for the rights of those arrested for fighting for a better world.

The Klima Forum ends with the passage of the testimony for Central America activists, which will take responsibility for organizing the next Klima Forum. This is only the beginning of a large movement.

Today was also the day when Obama showed up to save the world. Well, not really, he just said that the US is going to continue to do what it has done and reinforced the compromise inherent to the cap-and-trade bill being discussed in the US, weaker than the Kyoto Protocol target.

As for support for least developed countries, Obama promised 10 billion dollars until 2012 and 100 billion dollars until 2020 if a “good” agreement is signed. These numbers are ridiculous compared to military spending, for instance. There is always money to destroy the world, but there is not enough money to save it.

That was the message brought by an activist who delivered the Klima Forum declaration (link) to government delegates. But most delegates left the room to lunch, ignoring the voices from about 300 NGOs.

The great surprise of this summit came from Africa. In the beginning, African countries united in the defence of an agreement that limited temperature increase to 1.5 ^oC, and demanded at least 65 billion dollars a year for climate debt reparations. Meles Zenawi, the leader of the African Union, clearly declared that he would not accept a suicide pact and threatened with a boycott from African countries if the summit continued to be controlled by rich countries. But after these dramatic speeches and promises came capitulation.

Before arriving here, the Ethiopian dictator stopped by Paris and met with Sarkozy. He left from that meeting agreeing with a treaty mentioning a maximum 2 ^oC rise in global temperatures and 10 billion dollars a year in the next three years of finantial aid. Worse still, 20% of that aid is linked with REDD promotion, as the latest issue of Climate Chronicle denounces (PDF).

But the so-called “EU-Africa Agreement” doesn’t represent Africa’s position. In an interview with Naomi Klein (http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/12/ambassador-lumumba-what-do-you-em-really-em-think), Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for G77, rejects the agreement and talks of climate fascism and of a deliberate act of genocide. The Sudanese diplomat says that a bad deal is not acceptable, distancing himself from the Tck Tck Tck campaign for “an ambitious, fair and binding deal” (whatever that means).

At the end of the day, Obama appears on TV announcing a deal made with China, India and South Africa. The deal excludes most of the world and adds absolutely nothing to previous treaties. Are the guys from Tck Tck Tck satisfied with this?

Real change cannot come from the corridors of capitalist power, it will come from social movements, communities and individuals who are building an alternative to the social and economic model based on profit, which attacks not only the essence of humanity but also the basis of its survival. I’m proud of being a part of this alternative.