Following yesterday's U.N. General Assembly vote to recognize and condemn killings based on sexual orientation - a reference that had been stripped in an earlier vote and was subsequently championed by, among others, the United States - White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs issued a statement praising the 93-55 vote and reaffirming that "killing people because they are gay is not culturally defensible - it is criminal."
The United Nations-led Climate Conference at Cancun was not a diplomatic disaster, but for climate activists and grassroots groups, it wasn't a success either. Representatives sent from around the globe to hammer out an agreement on climate change were unresponsive to grassroots concerns about how to lower carbon emissions quickly, and how to ensure fairness in the process.
"Some grassroots groups are losing their faith in the U.N.'s capacity to produce meaningful results," Madeline Ostrader reported for Yes! Magazine. "After the United Nations expelled Native American leader Tom Goldtooth from the meeting last week, the Indigenous Environmental Network called the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change 'the WTO of the sky.'"
While gloomy reports before the conference worried that international negotiations could veer entirely off course, the representatives at the conference did come up with an agreement that fleshed out last year's Copenhagen Accord. It became clearer, though, that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process will not ultimately guard the interests of less powerful players.
"It's pathetic the world community struggles so much just to climb over such a low bar," commented [Kumi] Naidoo, [executive director of Greenpeace.] "Our only real hope is to mobilise a broad-based climate movement involving all sectors of the public and civil society before Durban."
Indeed, this year's conference saw a greater mobilization of outside forces than Copenhagen did. But by the end of the conference, activists were frustrated with the UN-led process, Democracy Now! reported, and began protesting in the area near the conference, under the close watch of UN guards:
When the demonstrators continued their vigil past the time allotted to them, U.N. guards moved in and dragged them towards a waiting bus. The protesters linked arms, and the scene quickly became chaotic. As they wrestled activists onto buses, U.N. guards also seized press credentials from the necks of journalists, and detained a photographer while seizing his camera.
Running REDD
There was one issue in particular, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation or REDD, a financial tool that allows countries to offset their emissions, that caused concern among climate activists. As Michelle Chen explained at ColorLines, "From a climate justice standpoint, the deal lost credibility once it was tainted with REDD, a supposed anti-deforestation initiative that indigenous communities have long decried as an assault on native people's sovereignty and way of life."
The program would seek to set aside forests, through financial incentives that would make it more profitable to preserve forests than to harvest them. The problem, in essence, is that the program would take away resources in developing countries, particularly in indigenous communities, in order to mitigate negative actions in developed countries.
At IPS, Stephen Leahy reported, "REDD remains very controversial. It is widely touted as a way to mobilise $10 to $30 billion annually to protect forests by selling carbon credits to industries in lieu of reductions in emissions. ... Many indigenous and civil society groups reject REDD outright if it allows developed countries to avoid real emission reductions by offsetting their emissions. "
Developed vs. Developing
Balancing the interests of developing and developed countries has always been the thorny tangle at the center of climate negotiations, and the Cancun Agreement, critics say, favors developed countries.
As Tom Athanasiou writes at Earth Island Journal, "There's an even deeper concern, that, in the words of the South Centre's Martin Khor, 'Cancun may be remembered in future as the place where the UNFCCC's climate regime was changed significantly, with developed countries being treated more and more leniently, reaching a level like that of developing countries, while the developing countries are asked to increase their obligations to be more and more like developed countries.'"
REDD is an example of that sort of bargain: Developing countries have to sacrifice, too. But developed countries have, in this conference and at its predecessors, refused to make any real sacrifices. This round, it became clear that, in addition to the United States, other key countries, like Japan, would not be willing to commit to binding legal targets for carbon emissions.
Who benefits?
What's worse, developed countries benefit, indirectly, from the financial mechanism proposed to regulate carbon, Madeline Ostrader writes.
"Many of the proposals for financing and regulating climate are designed to earn profits for the same banks that brought the global economy to its knees," she explains. "Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase have been vying for a stake in the global carbon offset trade-a proposed economic model for cutting emissions around the world."
The movement of non-governmental groups and activists fighting to hold rich countries accountable has gained momentum in the past year. If international leaders are ever to move away from these imbalanced agreements, that movement will have to grow and convince a vocal majority of people around the world to support its calls to action. Only then will leaders feel pressure to write stronger, fairer agreements.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
(I meant to blog about this more this week, but it got too crazy. Here's a bit of catch-up. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
The most recent round of United Nations-led climate change negotiations began this week in Cancun, and although international expectations are muted this year, the stakes are still high. As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard explains,"The 2010 meeting could make or break the future of global negotiations."
This is the sixteenth Conference of the Parties, convened by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). After the tepid results of last year's conference in Copenhagen, when a last-minute, backroom deal produced a non-binding accord, participants and observers of the negotiations are beginning to question whether it is the best forum for these sorts of conversations. Central to the progress, or lack thereof, on international climate change policy is the United States' intransigence. As one of the world most proliferate carbon spewers, it's essential for the United States to commit to dramatic reductions in its carbon emissions.
But if American negotiators have always been reluctant to make those promises, even if they did this year, their promises would ring empty. The results of the 2010 midterms mean there's little chance Congress would ratify a treaty. Republicans just eliminated a special House committee on global warming. They certainly aren't interested in making the sorts of concessions that international negotiators want and need to convince their own governments to move forward.
Signing off
It's unclear, at this point, if the UNFCCC framework will ever produce a worthwhile results. Inter Press Service's Kanya D'Almeida reports that "the meeting in Cancún is foreshadowed by a deep pessimism." D'Almedia offers, for instance, this take from Nigel Purvis, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States:
"Global climate talks have begun to resemble a bad soap opera," Purvis wrote in an essay entitled 'Cancún and the End of Climate Diplomacy. "They seem to never end, yet seldom change and at times bear little resemblance to reality. This is why climate diplomacy as we know it has lost its relevance."
The last landmark climate treaty-the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States never signed onto-will expire in 2012. The Copenhagen Accord, the agreement that came out of last year's negotiations, does not bind countries to their commitments, as Kyoto did.
The next major step in tackling climate change could be for countries across the world to re-up their commitments to reducing carbon emissions through a Kyoto-like (i.e. legally enforceable) pact. The alternative is to base global action on an agreement along the lines of the one produced at Copenhagen, with less stringent standards for accountability.
The global community has been sent a series of wake-up calls lately: the environmental crisis spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, unprecedented droughts in China, and a report outlining the disastrous impacts of the world's collapsing biodiversity. If events like these still don't send the world into action, I have to wonder what kind of devastating catastrophe finally will. Our environment is an issue facing each and every one of us, thus it will require a proactive response from all corners of the world. Let's not miss the opportunity for these tragedies to serve as a call of action to both our country, and the global community, towards a focus on a safer, healthier, and stronger planet. We, along with our partner Rainforest Alliance, hope you will help in the fight to ensure that the recent environmental tragedies we've seen become a thing of the past.
Environmental advocates from around the world gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week and resolved that, a year from now, they would hold a world's people referendum on climate change to marshal support for the rights of the planet.
"Although it is hoped that some states will cooperate, the participation of governments will not be essential to the referendum, as civil society organizations are to plan it according to their own lights and the traditions and customs of each local area," reports Franz Chavez for Inter Press Service.
The conference's democratic, citizen-oriented format starkly contrasted with March's United Nations-led summit in Copenhagen. The conference at Cochabamba emphasized inclusion and a diversity of voices, providing an antidote to processes like the U.N. climate negotiations, where smaller countries were excluded from key discussions.
No official United States delegation attended the conference, but this week, the country held its own celebration of the environment: the 40th annual Earth Day. On Thursday, arguments over climate change were put on pause, as environmental leaders recognized both accomplishments and the unfinished business of cleaning up the air, land, and water.
"Environmentalism isn't such a mysterious thing anymore. People are looking more at environmental values as being things that are tangible and relate to how we live our lives," Pete Carrels of the South Dakota Sierra Club told Public News Service.
The mystery, now, lies in finding a way to shore up defenses against old environmental hazards-dirty water, dirty air, diminishing resources-and to agree on a path towards a low-carbon future that avoids the worst calamities of climate change.
At Cochabamba
"Bolivian music, indigenous ceremonies and the Bolivian army's honor guard were on hand to greet the first indigenous president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales," Democracy Now! reported from Tiquipaya, the town just outside Cochabamba where the actual conference is being held.
In a stadium crowded with fifteen thousand people, President Morales opened the event Tuesday morning with exhortations to choose life for the planet. Franz Chavez of Inter Press Service reports:
"The stadium, ablaze with the multi-coloured traditional garments of different Andean and Amazonian native communities and the flags of people from different countries around the world that contrasted with the cold formality of presidential summits, served as the stage for Morales, of Aymara descent, to call for an "inter-continental movement" in defence of Mother Earth."
One of the main goals of the summit was to draft a "universal declaration of rights of Mother Earth," envisioned as a complement to the United Nations declaration on human rights. There were also 17 working groups that dealt with issues like climate migrants, the Kyoto protocol, and technology transfer. Any conference participant could participate in up to five working groups.
The open format was, at times, chaotic. Cormac Cullinan, an environmental lawyer from South Africa who provide the baseline text for the declaration of rights, told Democracy Now! that on one day of the conference four hundred people were contributing revisions to the text. Another day, that number jumped to one thousand.
"The challenge is to make sure we integrated all the different comments and point of view," he said. "We're essentially expressing an entirely new world view from an indigenous perspective in legal language."
Many voices, but what are the solutions?
Elizabeth Cooper affirms this emphasis on a diversity of voices in a report for Yes! Magazine. "This issue of valuing the knowledge and abilities of indigenous peoples and those from the South was an undercurrent to the rest of the afternoon as it is to the Summit as a whole," she writes.
But this scale of participation also meant that conversations could veer from essential topics. Also at Yes! Magazine, Jim Shultz asks, "If forcing rich countries to pay a climate debt is a dead end, what is the plan to move "climate debt" from a catchy idea to a real proposal with a chance of delivering some results?"
"At a workshop today on that topic, there was an abundance of declarations about why climate debt is important, but few ideas of how to make it real," he reports.
The need
There's a need, though, for people to participate in these discussions, even if the conversations don't take a smooth and tidy course. At The Nation, Naomi Klein writes that "Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness."
At a conference like Copenhagen, the worries and priorities of smaller countries were ultimately excluded from the debate. In Bolivia, Klein explains, glaciers-the water source for two major cities-are melting. Yet that problem did not earn the country a place in the Copenhagen discussions that could determine its fate. Cochabamba's goals were, in part, to reestablish a more democratic system for decision-making about climate reform.
As Regina Cornwell documents at the Women's Media Center, left to its own devices, international bodies like the United Nations easily exclude interested groups from the conversation.
"In early March, just as the entire area of Manhattan around the UN was crawling with women wearing their blue Conference for the Status of Women tags, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced a "High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing" composed exclusively of men," she writes.
Earth Day 2010
The conferees at Cochabamba traveled to Bolivia because they saw a gap in leadership after UN climate talks at Copenhagen crumbled. The ideas developed this week could prompt the world's leaders towards brave action on climate change. Strong leadership can make the difference between real change and status quo.
At The Nation, John Nichols reflects on the leadership of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who helped create Earth Day. Nelson, was "a bold progressive who recognized the need to make the health and welfare of human beings, in the United States and abroad, a priority over the profits of multinational corporations," he writes. Nelson's vision for Earth Day was to produce an outpouring of empathy for the environment "so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy."
It worked. The first Earth Day is credited with driving action on the environmental institutions that still protect Americans today: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency.
For more inspiration, check out the climate rally on Sunday, April 25 on the Mall in Washington, DC; organizers are promising the largest climate rally ever, along with an awesome line-up of speakers and performers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
In light of International Women’s Day and the 54th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, on Tuesday, March 9th, the Urban Agenda’s Human Rights Project, The National Council on Research for Women and the Center for Women’s Global Leadership joined together with The Opportunity Agenda to hold a side event at the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
Women from around the world coalesced in New York to take the front seat in the social justice debate. Regardless of dialect, religion or ethnic origin, there was one theme uniting them all in the room: women, and more specifically, women of color, are hurting in the shadows of the recession.
Last week President Obama used a strategy that should become an important part of his leadership going forward. On February 18, he issued an executive order creating a bipartisan commission on addressing the budget deficit, after the Senate failed to enact legislation that would have done so. Whatever one thinks of the commission’s mission or likely recommendations, the order should represent a rediscovery of the power of the presidency.
Perhaps because he came to the White House directly from the Senate, the President has been overly reliant on that body to achieve his goals. It goes without saying that the Senate is dysfunctional and divided—by contrast, the House has passed superior versions of many of the President’s legislative priorities, only to see more anemic version die at the other end of the building. But while the Senate is crucial to federal legislation, and federal legislation is crucial to transformative change on many issues, such as health care, financial regulation, and immigration reform, presidents wield tremendous power as presidents through their constitutional authority as executive. The executive order is a prime example.
President Obama has issued some 42 Executive Orders since he took office. But the Deficit Commission order served as a public notice—or at least it should—that the President stands ready to move solutions forward, within constitutional limits, when the Legislative Branch fails to act.
If you were to look out to the horizon of the clean energy field right now, you would see the hazy outlines of nuclear reactors. President Barack Obama announced this week that two new nuclear plants will go up in Georgia, built on the promise that the federal government will guarantee $8.3 billion in loans-nearly the entire estimated cost of the project.
"It is a slap in the face to environmentalists," says Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive. "Though these will be the first nuclear reactors constructed in more than three decades, Obama still labeled them, somehow, as part of the "technologies of tomorrow.""
The president's announcement wasn't the only environmental downer this week. Expectations for the next international climate negotiations, to be held in Mexico at the end of 2010, are already low, and yesterday Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate negotiator, said he would step down this summer and join the private sector. To top it all off, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now faces sixteen lawsuits that would block its ability to decrease carbon emissions, including one backed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
A nuclear error
Although the Georgia reactors would be the first new nuclear construction in the country in decades, they mark the beginning of what the Obama administration hopes will be a shift towards nuclear energy. In the 2011 budget, President Obama proposed an expansion of the loan guarantee program that funds projects like these from $18.5 billion to $54.5 billion.
These nuclear projects deserve close scrutiny. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman details the problems with the Georgia reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) already rejected the initial designs for the plant. That means the estimated cost could well exceed the projected $8.5 billion, which Wasserman says, was low at the start.
"Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each, in some cases to more than $12 billion today," he explains.
Risky business
In the past, energy firms like The Southern Company, the Atlanta-based group that is building the plants, could only imagine securing funding for new nuclear projects. These projects have a high risk of failure, and private investors do not dream of touching them.
Inter Press Service's Julio Godoy reviewed several European studies on the feasibility of financing nuclear plants. One study from Citibank concluded that "the risks faced by developers ... are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially," Godoy reports. These risks include uncontrollable construction costs, long delays, and the possibility of low power prices that would not support that plants' operation.
That's one reason that green advocates disapprove of nuclear energy: The money could be better spent elsewhere. "People tend to think that environmentalists have some sort of allergic reaction to nuclear because they're scared of radioactive waste and unsecured nuclear materials," writes Aaron Wiener at The Washington Independent. "But when it comes down to it...It's simply a bad investment to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a nuclear sinkhole when proven technologies such as wind and solar would provide guaranteed benefits."
Wind to fly on
While the administration lavishes attention on nuclear, other clean energy industries are trying to move forward. In Wisconsin, a Spanish company is opening up a plant to build wind turbine components, which will bring much-needed jobs to the Milwaukee area, as Kari Lydersen reports for Working In These Times.
There's always the threat, however, that gains like this will be rolled back by competition from China. Clean energy jobs can still be sent overseas, Lydersen points out. She argues that the United State could be providing a boost to the solar and wind industry in order to keep jobs here.
"Manufacturing in the United States could be driven both with incentives to the actual producers - like the tax break to Ingeteam [the Spanish company building the Wisconsin plant] and support for renewable energy through renewable energy portfolio (RPS) standards and other incentives," she writes.
China as competition
From a purely environmental perspective, China's headway into green technology is not a problem. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum reminds us that the whole world can benefit from advances in clean energy, wherever they happen. Climate change is, after all, a global crisis. But Drum concedes that fear of Chinese competition does serve some purpose:
"I've lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism," he says. "Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that's really technically accurate. Just figure that it's close enough, it's language everyone understands, and it'll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
"Is it ever 'the right time' to pass immigration reform and a path to legalization?" asks Maribel Hastings at New America Media. The short answer? Yes. Our national economic situation dictates that we are smart about the resources available to us all. It's also a moral imperative to adjust our laws to protect the most vulnerable of us.
Hastings runs through the complications, campaign promises, and opportunities facing the Obama administration in regards to immigration reform. While acknowledging the nature of our government as "a complex organism," Hastings nonetheless signs off with a warning: There are many awaiting action today, people "who voted for Democrats with the expectation that they would make comprehensive immigration reform a reality."
This year is primed for immigration reform. Activists worldwide are pushing for a "record number of ratifications" to The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families (ICRMW), as Oneworld.net reports. The ICRMW was adopted by the United Nations in 1990, and "sets standards for humane working and living conditions for migrants." To date, 42 countries have are signatory to the ICRMW and 15 more have taken "preliminary steps to approve the convention." While the U.S. debates reform, protecting and supporting migrants should be at the front of the list.
The Washington Independent looks back at 2009, a year in which immigration was never center stage, and yet it managed to impact every other major issue on the table, from health care reform to the economy. Daphne Eviatar profiles five individuals who shaped the immigration debate for good or bad in 2009. Characters such as the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, and commentator Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN are included in the list, but admirable women like Dr. Dora Schriro also made the cut. Dr. Schriro's reports on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention system led directly to "a major commitment" to overhaul it.
In the light of policy and compacts, it is important to remember that there is a dark and often violent side to the immigration reform debate. Luis Ramirez was beaten to death by multiple local youth in Shanendoah, PA. The local police worked to obscure the facts of the murder and thwart justice, but their complicity and hand in the judicial process has been uncovered, as RaceWire reports.
Former Shenandoah mayor Thomas O'Neill's description of the police department reads, essentially, as a gang felled by hubris: "If they want to help somebody, they will, If they want to hurt somebody, they'll hurt them. There's nothing they could do that they couldn't get away with. That's what they thought."
Another incident that exposes the inadequacy of current immigration laws can be found in the case of Haitian community activist Jean Montrevil, who now faces deportation, as Democracy Now! reports. Montrevil is a working father of four, married to an American woman, a "longtime community leader," is very involved with local immigrants rights groups and checks in with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regularly and voluntarily. During one such check in Montrevil was detained and marked for deportation.
ICE is removing a tax-paying and productive member of society for a 20 year-old drug conviction for which Montrevil did his time-11 years in prison. There is no chance of a legal appeal, though ICE has the power to defer the deportation. If it isn't halted, Montrevil's wife Jani will be left alone with their four children. Before 1996 immigration reforms passed by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton, a judge would have had discretion to consider the effect of such a deportation on the children.
Melissa del Bosque reports for the Texas Observer on the violent fallout from Mexican President Felipe Calderón's continued drug war "on the Mexican side of the [U.S.-Mexico] border." del Bosque notes a disturbing trend: A growing number of uninvolved people in the proximity of State- or cartel-initiated violence in Mexico are being impacted by the violence. This is an important balance to mind, as law and State forces are designed to help the populace thrive. Various sources place the death toll in Mexico between 9,000 and 13,000.
We conclude this week's Diaspora with a big shout out to Wiretap, which is closing its doors. Wiretap was a well-written, vibrant, and relevant collection of writing by younger people. Their writing on immigration was original, provocative, and useful. We wish them well. You will be missed!
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
As the climate conference in Copenhagen hobbled towards a close Friday night, the United States, in a strong-arm move, slammed through the “Copenhagen Accord" – a weak, loose, and potentially backstepping agreement negotiated by a small subset of nations involved in negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The process for striking this accord was so undemocratic and peripheral to the official UN process that in the end, the parties to the UNFCCC didn’t even know what to do with it, and finally decided to “take note” of the accord. The implications of “taking note” will be discussed and hashed out by lawyers for days, if not months, to come.
OBAMA'S GAME OF BRINKSMANSHIP
The way this agreement came into being is a study in political brinksmanship. Around 9 p.m. Friday, President Obama announced to an exclusive group of reporters that an agreement had been reached. After the story that the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa had struck a deal circulated in a number of online news stories, the United States called a press conference and President Obama announced publicly that a deal had been reached, and that “most of the text has been completely worked out.” He then left to go back to Washington in advance of the imminent snow storm that hit on Saturday. It turned out that President Obama had called it a done deal before any agreement was actually reached. All these announcements seem to have happened before some countries had even had a chance to see the text under discussion.
When the text was finally presented, a number of countries spoke out strongly against it – and particularly against the manner in which it was determined by a few countries behind closed doors and then thrust upon the 192 countries participating in the official plenary session. Into the morning on Saturday, the plenary adjourned and reconvened, attempting to determine what had happened and what the implications were.
Now that the conference is offically over, those implications are still not entirely clear. It looks like a number of countries will flat out refuse to sign the Accord. The UN operates by consensus -- and there's certainly no consensus that this weak accord is the best way forward.
WHAT'S IN THE COPENHAGEN ACCORD?
While the Accord endorses the two existing tracks of negotiations that are the focus of the UN process, it appears to set its own course when it comes to how countries would actually move forward on the key issues on which those tracks are supposed to yield agreement, including pledges for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and pledges to provide financial support to developing countries so they have the capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change.
When I and about 50 other Friends of the Earth representatives from around the world showed up at the Bella Center (site of the climate negotiations) over the course of about an hour this morning, the security staff who scanned our UN ID cards told us that they were not valid and we would not be allowed in.
Given that all of us had appropriate accreditation, as well as the "secondary badges" the UN is now requiring for admission so it can restrict the number of people inside the Bella Center at any given time, we were surprised and confused by our inability to get in.
We'd planned to spend the day monitoring the process of negotiations, working to generate media coverage of the need for a strong and just agreement, and working with delegates from developing countries to draft text that could form such an agreement.
But instead, we were denied access. UN staff told Friends of the Earth International's chair, Nnimmo Bassey, that we were considered a security threat. This begged the question of why we were singled out from the many other peaceful non-governmental organizations taking part in the talks.
In this video, our team provides an on-the-ground narrative of how the day unfolded.
When about 15 members of the UN security team surrounded us, and then asked us to leave, we refused, sitting down in the registration area and demanding that we be let in and be provided with an explanation for the UN's refusal to admit us.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer came out and spoke to us after a while and said access had been restricted because there was not enough room in the Bella Center and that he wanted to resolve the situation.
A few of our representatives went to talk to UN officials while we sat there, but our lack of access remained unresolved. We had both a member of the Norweigan and a member of the Canadian parliament come speak to us to lend us their support. Initially there were a lot of reporters, but the UN then cordoned us off and closed access to media.
Eventually they made us an offer to allow a small portion of our delegation into the conference, even though the full delegation met all the entry requirements that had allowed other groups (except Avaaz, which had also been kicked out) to gain admission.
The UN still has yet to give us a coherent reason for our having been denied access. It's hard to see how de Boer's "no room" explanation makes sense, as the UN continued to allow other NGO observers to enter even as we were denied access. And as for the security threat, we're a bunch of policy wonks and youth activists who have been participating in the negotiations every day for two weeks and represent no threat at all.
One of the key roles Friends of the Earth has played at the conference has been to advocate for climate justice and the interests of the poor countries that have done the least to cause the climate crisis but will feel some of its strongest impacts. Negotiators from those countries are tremendously under-resourced here. For example, I've worked with negotiators who have no media officers (I do media work) to help them communicate their position. They are totally outgunned by the massive delegations of the rich countries, and now thanks to the UN's decision to exclude us, they will have even less support inside the Bella Center to fight for a fair agreement. An agreement that already feels so far out of reach. It's really frustrating, and shameful.
It's been a discouraging day. But even if negotiators fail to produce a strong agreement this week, there is something we can be proud of. We're not backing down in our calls for climate justice, and we're not alone. The international climate justice movement is growing.
Tuvalu's ambassador, Ian Fry, pleaded with the UN assembly to save his country this weekend. He said it was "an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress," noting that climate change is the "greatest threat to humanity, ... the greatest threat to security." He got no response when the US ambassador spoke soon after:
The fifteenth Conference of the Parties, as many other very important gatherings are, should be known for what it is: just another place where the poor have to come begging for their lives while the wealthy make a big show of having been generous enough of their time to be present for this grimly polite supplication.
"We [are] here in Copenhagen to fight for our identity, for our culture, and for our very right to exist," she said tearfully. "All the hopes and dreams of my generation rest on Copenhagen."
As that Guardian article goes on to note, Wickham's comments were followed by very important people talking about the many reasons why nothing can be done to answer her. Hedegaard's response to the arrest of a small anachist contigent among the 100,000 or so peaceful protestors, was fascinating, saying that they didn't "have to use that kind of violence to be heard."
Well, fine. Granted. Maybe she should tell it to her own country's police forces, who detained hundreds of peaceful marchers on the ground for hours on a day when it started snowing not too long after sunset.
But seriously, wtf will it take to be heard? I don't know whether everyone's fresh out of ideas or if the jerks in power are just that deaf.
Will Hedegaard really listen to the 10 million people who signed the petition Wickham delivered to her, or the 99,000 people, give or take, who showed up peacefully with candles and signs and chants and a burning sense of urgency that brought them to Copenhagen in December where they were outside for hours in the freezing cold? Will the eminences of the G20 hear the church bells that rang 350 times today to call the world to climate justice? Will Gordon Brown and Barack Obama listen? Will the media listen? Will the haughty finance leaders who tell these presidents and ministers when they're allowed to sit down, stand up and break to scratch their bums listen to the people whose lives and futures they're destroying?
What will it take?
Because we're never going to get anywhere if industrialized and wealthy nations keep playing a destructive game of trying to get the other person to give more, first. Each nation must commit to do what's right, and they should stick to that because it would shame them to look back on this time and say that they did nothing to prevent all the suffering that's only at its beginning. They must look to find their national honor in the greatness of their souls and the depths of their humanity instead of the heights of their office towers.
If they won't do what's right, their citizens had better break through our creativity blocks to figure out a way to convince them that they can't ignore. Time is fleeting. Physics is unforgiving.
(This post is part of Friend's of the Earth sponsoring Open Left. Please check out the Friend's of the Earth website here--promoted by Chris Bowers - promoted by Chris Bowers)
Hi – I’m writing from Barcelona, where the final round of negotiations prior to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen came to a close on Friday. It’s been a tense five days here, with time running out for world leaders to get their act together. I want to share some of my reactions to what’s going on here—and in Congress back in the U.S.
This week, two very different types of stand-offs marked political negotiations over solutions to global warming, one cowardly and one courageous.
U.S. Senators Back Away from Real Action
In the U.S. Senate, Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted the scheduled mark-up of the climate and energy bill, complaining that Chairwoman Boxer (D-CA) was not giving them enough time to assess the economic impacts of the legislation. This came after Sen. Boxer had already given tardy Republican committee members an extension to offer amendments to the bill. The Republican ploy was childish, and almost certainly was an attempt to further weaken a bill that, as passed out of the committee Thursday, is already too weak to protect our climate.
African Delegates Stand Up for Real Action
Across the Atlantic in Barcelona, negotiators from African countries initiated a different sort of boycott — one with a much more constructive aim and a very urgent plea.
Monday, the first of five days of talks in Barcelona, African negotiators announced that they would not continue with formal discussions on other topics until rich countries made some real progress with their own emissions reduction targets. (These targets refer to the reductions in greenhouse gas pollution that rich (Annex I) countries commit to make by 2020.) Millions of people in developing countries are already being affected by climate change impacts such as floods and droughts. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they already face devastating impacts.
The African delegation’s action was a strategic and brave move, designed to pressure rich countries to finally step up and commit to new, deep emissions reductions targets under an internationally binding agreement. With so few formal negotiating days left before Copenhagen, time is running out for rich countries to start cooperating. Rich countries’ continued shirking of their legal and moral responsibility to set new, strong and binding targets drove developing countries to this dramatic action.
More on how it all played out in Barcelona in the extended version.
The disease, for which no effective treatment was ever developed, killed as many as 30% of those infected. Between 65-80% of survivors were marked with deep pitted scars (pockmarks), most prominent on the face.
In some ancient cultures, smallpox was such a major killer of infants that custom forbade the naming of a newborn until the infant had caught the disease and proved it would survive. WHO fact sheet on smallpox
In a conservative estimate by experts, in the 20th Century, smallpox killed 300 million people. More than Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. It left about twice as many as it killed, scarred (literally) for life. By 1967, there had been a number of failed efforts to eradicate diseases from humanity, including an effort at US behest on malaria. Defying expectations, a shoestring operation run out of that inefficient and (if you listen to conservatives) useless organization, the United Nations, managed to organize a program of vaccination and isolation that resulted in smallpox afflicting its last victim in 1977 (excepting a tragic case in a British research lab).
If the UN never did another useful thing (it has done many), this alone would justify its existence. It is past time that liberals remember this marvellous achievement, and begin to reference it more often. This is the potential of big (read: "effective") government, and speaks to the proven capacity for coordinated global cooperation to solve humanity's most pressing (and depressing) problems.
It's time, once again, to bring you the news that is not yet news.
For those not yet aware, there will be a climate change conference in New York City next week, conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.
The 100 world leaders who will be participating in the conference will be arriving on Monday, and if you're in New York City the same day, you have a chance to participate in a not-to-be-forgotten "welcome event" and pranking opportunity.
Follow along and I'll tell you how to get involved-and if you do, they'll even send you home with a lovely parting gift.
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