Callout from Rising Tide North America for action on October 3-4
against G8 climate negotiations and for climate justice.
October 3-4, 2006, Mexico City
Oppose fraudulent G8 climate negotiations!
Stop carbon trading, stand up for climate justice!
A zero emissions world is possible! Make it real!
Please forward widely
Visit http://rtc.revolt.org/node/337 for article below with links
On Tuesday, October 3 in Mexico City, the Energy and Environment Ministers
from the "Group of Eight" (G8) industrialized countries are scheduled to
begin negotiating a climate change deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol,
which expires in 2012. They will be joined by Energy and Environment
Ministers from the five "emerging" countries of Brazil, India, China,
South Africa and Mexico. All together, these "G8 + 5" countries represent
58% of the world's human population, 61% of oil consumption, 80% of coal
consumption, and 73% of C02 emissions, the leading greenhouse gas causing
climate change via industrial-scale burning of coal, oil and gas for
energy. Yet rather than plan how to radically reduce their contribution to
global warming, the substance of these G8 + 5 talks in Mexico City is set
to be about how the Earth's largest economies can “maintain”, “encourage”
and “expand” their status quo of massive dependence on fossil fuels, while
presenting a fraudulent face of "energy conservation", "sustainable
development" and "market-based solutions" to citizens, climate activists
and environmental refugees horrified by growing global evidence and
personal experience of climate catastrophe.
The October 3-4 G8 + 5 Climate Summit in Mexico City will closely follow
the course established by the July 15-17 2006 G8 Summit held in St.
Petersburg, Russia, where leaders released their "Communique and Plan of
Action on Global Energy Security". That document, roundly condemned by
numerous international environmental networks and worldwide protests,
committed the G8 to ensuring "trillions of U.S. dollars in investment
through the entire energy chain by 2030." Most of that funding would be
used to bulk up hydrocarbon production, processing and transportation
capacity for energy demand "estimated to rise by more than 50% by the year
2030, approximately 80% of which would still be met by fossil fuels, which
are limited resources," says the G8 Global Energy Security Plan. The G8
countries are the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan and Russia.
The G8 Communique's final paragraph points forward to the Mexico City
round of negotiations, known officially as the "G8 + 5 Energy Ministers
Meeting of the Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change." The document
declares: "We look forward to the next Ministerial meeting in Mexico in
October 2006, where we will continue to identify opportunities for greater
collaboration to tackle climate change, while pursuing energy security and
sustainable development through deployment of cleaner, more efficient and
low-carbon energy technologies, finance and market mechanisms, including,
as appropriate, Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation,
emissions trade, and adaptation."
While such language may sound deceptively "green" to those unfamiliar with
the nuances of capitalist doublespeak, climate justice activists are not
fooled! For years, the aspects of the Kyoto Protocol that have come most
under fire from activists are "loopholes" that help corporations evade
emissions cuts. These loopholes include the agreement's "Flexible
Mechanisms," such as trading in carbon credits, as well as Joint
Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Carbon markets
and mechanisms like the CDM are funded by the industrialized North and
enforced by multilateral development agencies including the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund.
In April 2005, the non-profit monitoring group CDM Watch, based in Bali,
Indonesia, published a report that exposed as false the World Bank's
claims that carbon market modalities such as the CDM are consistent with
its own stated objective of reducing poverty, promoting "sustainable
development," and financing renewable energy and "sustainable forestry"
projects. The report shows that these claims are untrue and that these
goals and project types are not, in fact, being advanced by the carbon
market; that the World Bank's ongoing financing of fossil fuels and
unsustainable forestry projects works directly against the Bank's stated
objectives in developing a carbon market; that despite its rhetoric, the
Bank is in fact using carbon finance to support unsustainable technologies
and practices such as industrial plantations and large dams; that many of
the Bank's top finance recipients in recent years have been major fossil
fuel companies, including many who were members of the openly anti-Kyoto
Global Climate Coalition; that the Bank's funding for renewable energy is
dwarfed by its continued investment in fossil fuel extraction projects;
and that the carbon market is bypassing the poorest countries and
communities, while investment is focused overwhelmingly on the richer
developing countries (such as the five who are joining the G8 in Mexico
City for the October 10-11 Climate Summit) and is not going to projects
that alleviate poverty or deliver sustainable economic alternatives within
these countries.
Is this the "cleaner, more efficient, low-carbon" development that the G8
countries claim emissions trading will promote? Other important analyses
that reveal the environmental destructivness and social injustice of carbon
trading schemes include reports by Carbon Trade Watch, Sinks Watch, the
International Rivers Network, the World Rainforest
Movement, the Global Justice Ecology Project, Rising Tide UK and the
Transnational Institute. Excellent essays include "Carbon Trading or
Carbon Justice?" by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero ( ¿Comercio de carbono o justicia
climatica? in Spanish), "Trouble in the Air" by Patrick Bond and Rehana
Dada, "Carbon Colonialism and Climate Fraud" by Heidi Bachram, and
"Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: The G8, Climate Change and Free-Market
Environmentalism."
However, with over 100 signatory groups from all continents, the landmark
statement against slash-and-burn neo-colonialism masquerading as virtuous
ecology remains the "Climate Justice Now! Durban Declaration on Carbon
Trading." Drafted in October 2004 at a People's Summit in the coastal
South African city of Durban, this declaration commits climate defense
activists to "help build a global grassroots movement for climate justice,
mobilize communities around the world and pledge our solidarity with
people opposing carbon trading on the ground."
In March 2006, tens of thousands of people gathered in Mexico City to
demonstrate against the commodification and privatization of water at the
Fourth World Water Forum. As the G8 Energy Ministers meet this October 3-4
to advance their criminal agenda auctioning off the air and atmosphere
beneath the cynical banner of cleansing the climate, and amid the global
warming crisis that every day grows undeniably graver, dare our resistance
be any less? Reclaim our fate! Resist the G8!
Join the mobilization for climate justice!
Contact:
g8(AT)risingtidenorthamerica.org (English) OR
justiciaclimatica06(AT)gmail.com (Español) NOW!
-----------------
LATEST UPDATE, SEPT 21st 2006
Is it too late for revolutionary cultural change preventing the worst
effects of unimaginable climate chaos? Can a white desperado and dropout
from middle-class USA suburbia learn anything about effective resistance
and struggle from the social insurrections currently shaking Mexico to its
core, from Oaxaca to Atenco? A traveling correspondent wonders...
=+=+=+=+=+
Dear action heroes of the Earth,
Greetings from the US-Mexico border!
Actually at the moment I'm still dozens of miles north in Tucson, Arizona,
but here too one sees evidence of the ideological and legal war over
migration everywhere -- progressive homes and stores showcase posters
saying "Humanitarian Aid Is Never A Crime - No More Deaths / No Mas
Muertes" while less compassionate political placards of candidates running
for election call for "secure borders" and fascistic signs abound
reminding citizens that hiring or helping "illegal aliens" is criminal
behavior...
Elsewhere around the USA, from Santa Cruz to rural Georgia, federal agents
are currently rounding up undocumented immigrants in Operation "Return to
Sender," and destroying entire communities, with quiet and ruthless
efficiency eerily reminiscient of Hitler's Germany. You won't hear about
this in the mainstream media, but it's really happening!
Within days I will cross over the border en route to Ciudad de Mexico
(Mexico City) to join Rising Tide North America's Climate Justice
Convergence countering the October 3-4 "G8 plus five" Energy and
Environmental Ministers Meeting on Climate Change.
A central purpose of this mobilization in Mexico City is to highlight the
connection between climate change and human migration -- and to confront
the corporate / governmental policies systematically violating both the
Earth's climate and the human rights of migrant people.
Extreme weather ... environmental refugees ... free trade ... maquiladoras
... trucks freely crossing borders, spewing carbon dioxide, while poor
migrants displaced from their land by the industrial agriculture and
factories of corporate globalization die trying to cross the desert ...
rich consumers flying into exotic Third World resorts, spewing more C02
... McDonald's burning rainforests, destroying the "lungs of the Earth"
that breathe in irreplacable magnitudes of C02 and driving the indigenous
inhabitants -- where?!? ... Is the connection clear?
And yet, some people possess the privilege, by virtue of white skin or
economic well-being, to easily cross these borders, and aim to use that
privilege to increase the momentum for solidarity across borders, human
liberation from the chains and walls of oppression, and radical ecological
defense in the face of an insane machine-minded culture thoughtlessly
eradicating all biodiversity and rapidly transforming the very climate
that had sustained our own species for thousands of years.
Is it too late for revolutionary cultural change preventing the worst
effects of unimaginable climate chaos? Can a white desperado and dropout
from middle-class USA suburbia learn anything about effective resistance
and struggle from the social insurrections currently shaking Mexico to its
core, from Oaxaca to Atenco? Only time will tell, but we can hope...
To learn more about and/or stay updated with the cross-border, bi-lingual
Mexico City mobilization against the G8 + 5 Climate Summit, visit:
http://risingtidenorthamerica.org/g8 http://contrag8.revolt.org
** And don't forget! ** There are concrete ways you can help this
mobilization from the USA, or anywhere! Help is needed with translations
from and into Spanish, as well as English-language independent media
activism countering the G8 corporate spin --- and there's a beautifully
eloquent fundraising call for immediate support on the websites that y'all
should read and forward widely! Please contact
G8@RisingTideNorthAmerica.org with your expressions of solidarity and
support -- large, small or life-changing.
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