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yeb sano
Paris--and the World--Is Burning
PARIS--The candles still burn across this city at the massacre memorials to the more than 130 people killed by armed militants identified with the Islamic State (which, many Muslims point out, is neither Islamic nor a state), from the Bataclan theater to the restaurants attacked nearby and the national stadium. Flowers, messages, French flags, photos and mementos of the dead, reproductions of the now-iconic peace sign with the embedded Eiffel Tower--all are arranged in a heartfelt outpouring of grief where these acts of violence occurred.
Dec 04, 2015
PARIS--The candles still burn across this city at the massacre memorials to the more than 130 people killed by armed militants identified with the Islamic State (which, many Muslims point out, is neither Islamic nor a state), from the Bataclan theater to the restaurants attacked nearby and the national stadium. Flowers, messages, French flags, photos and mementos of the dead, reproductions of the now-iconic peace sign with the embedded Eiffel Tower--all are arranged in a heartfelt outpouring of grief where these acts of violence occurred.
It is in this context that one of the most significant global summits in history is happening: COP 21, the 21st "Conference of Parties" to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Here, almost every nation on the planet is represented as negotiators attempt to forge a treaty by Dec. 11 to stave off irreversible, catastrophic climate change.
COP 21 is supposed to be a culmination of more than two decades of work at the U.N. to transform society, ending the fossil-fuel era and shifting to renewable energy and drastically reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. A mass march was organized in Paris for Nov. 29, the day before the climate summit was to begin, with more than 400,000 people expected. But French President Francois Hollande declared a state of emergency after the attacks, banning all demonstrations. Many critics say that the warming planet is another state of emergency - and that dissent is the only thing that will save us.
Over the weekend, 10,000 Parisians and international activists formed a human chain stretching for blocks in Paris. After that action ended, they defied the French ban on protests and tried to march to the Place de la Republique, where thousands had placed candles and flowers in remembrance of the terror victims. While the French president blamed the protesters for destroying the memorial, "Democracy Now!" video footage showed protesters joining arms to protect the memorial from hundreds of riot police as they moved in with tear gas, concussion grenades and pepper spray.
The next day, inside the climate summit, we bumped into Yeb Sano, former chief climate negotiator for the Philippines. We last saw him in 2013 at the U.N. climate summit in Warsaw, while Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest cyclones in recorded history, devastated his country, killing thousands of people. At the time, Yeb made headlines with an emotional plea to the world body to take immediate action on climate change:
"Typhoons such as Haiyan and its impacts represent a sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to delay climate action. ... It must be poetic justice that Typhoon Haiyan was so big that its diameter spanned the distance between Warsaw and Paris." He implored his fellow negotiators, "If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?" He had just learned that his brother, A.G. Sano, had narrowly survived the typhoon in his devastated town of Tacloban.
The following year, as yet another deadly storm battered the Philippines, Yeb Sano was unexpectedly absent from the U.N. Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, shocking many. He had been pulled from the delegation at the last minute, leading to speculation he had been targeted for his outspokenness amidst pressure from wealthier countries, like the United States. At the time, he tweeted: "They can silence my mouth. But they cannot silence my soul."
This year, Yeb Sano is back at the U.N. climate summit, not as the chief negotiator for the Philippines, but as a grass-roots activist. He had just walked 900 miles over 60 days from Rome to Paris on a People's Pilgrimage for Climate Action. At his side was his brother, A.G. A street artist, along the way he painted six beautiful murals depicting pilgrims from around the world walking to Paris. Since he had no official credentials to access the summit, I interviewed him outside the secure zone. A.G Sano offered a tribute to a friend of his, killed in Typhoon Haiyan:
"I came here to bring the voice of my dead friend. I'd just like to tell the world the name of my friend, Agit Sustento. Climate change is as real as Agit Sustento. I was with him the night before, and the last thing that I told him was to take care of himself and his family because that's the strongest typhoon in recorded history that we're about to face, and that was the last time that I ever talked to him. He lost his wife, his little boy, his mom and dad. My promise to him is that I'll tell the world about his name. His name is Agit Sustento, and he will never get to see the sun rise again."
A fitting honor to those who died here in Paris, and to the countless victims of climate change, would be a fair, ambitious and binding agreement at the climate summit, to help make the world more safe, equitable and sustainable.
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Thousands Defy French Ban on Public Protest - Demand Liberte and Action at COP21
The day began at dawn, as Avaaz and their early-bird volunteers laid out a couple thousand pair of shoes in the Place de la Republique, in the shadow of the statue of Marianne.
Nov 30, 2015
The day began at dawn, as Avaaz and their early-bird volunteers laid out a couple thousand pair of shoes in the Place de la Republique, in the shadow of the statue of Marianne.
You've seen the statue of Marianne if you've seen any picture of people mourning in Paris: it's where votive candles, French flags, and flowers surround a powerful woman holding out an olive branch. It's the most iconic site of sorrow - where people rub their eyes and then, these days, whip out their cell.
This woman, Marianne, is perhaps the French equivalent of our Statue of Liberty - with a dash of the Mockingjay mixed in. She is the symbol for French's overthrow of its monarch-led past, and represents "an icon of freedom and democracy against all forms of dictatorship."
And so it had a degree of irony that, in the same park as Marianne, activists were forced to host a silent shoe's-only demonstration, since President Hollande recently banned all public protests as part of an unprecedented state of emergency.
The photos though were powerful. Kids shoes mixed with high heels, mixed with Keds - each representing the thousands who were forbidden from marching. Former Philippines Ambassador Yeb Sano donated his shoes, which carried extra meaning, considering he had just walked all the way Rome, on an awareness-raising pilgrimage to the talks.
All the shoes, 1000s of which were generously donated by Parisians over the past few days, were then bagged up and donated to a local charity.
Then came a "Human Chain"--an action that was seemingly blessed by the police, in which people locked arms for what seemed like an endless number of blocks, holding messages you'd expect about Mother Nature and going vegan, but also you couldn't help but notice the peace signs. One child caught my eye who was holding a rainbow flag (which represents peace in Europe), with the word "Climate En Danger" emblazoned over it.
Like the shoes-only action, the images generated by the Human Chain were beautiful and more jubilant than solemn.
Bu the day did not end there.
After the chain dispersed, many people returned to the Place de la Republique, and what seemed like a hybrid occupy and black bloc contingent started to gather momentum - French chants of "Let's destroy capitalism because it's destroying the planet" moved through the crowd. Bandanas, scarves, and red noses covered peoples' faces. But it wasn't just undercover radicals: some people were wearing hot pink Climate March t-shirts (the same shirts as the shoe-action organizers).
Within short order, this mass had cycloned itself into a march, and took the streets - surprisingly a few thousand strong. There was no doubt left: every one of these protestors was in defiance of the President's orders.
It wasn't long until the march met a line of riot cops - gendarmes had blocked off all the side streets leading from the Republique.
The protesters got louder, holding up their own barricades. The clowns got up close to the riot shields, someone threw a shoe into a shield (one expects it came from the free pile), someone else threw a bottle. Then cops threw a tear gas canister back, which exploded with a bang.
In the wake of the arrests, there's been some distancing between the shoe and human chain organizers on the one hand, and the more raucous tear-gas exposed protesters on the other.
It's kind of easy to write off these black bloc activists as trouble-makers, as people who violated the delicate negotiations that are clearly in play between activists and the police (whether real or played out in the streets).
And yet public defiance is just what this moment calls for. As Naomi Klein tweeted late Sunday night, "the government response to the climate crisis is wholly inadequate and puts us all in great danger. Obedience in the face of this failure would be tantamount to acquiescence."
Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist in the US, wrote on Nov 17th that a banned protest makes for a more powerful one.
"Our movement has the choice of how to respond to this attempt at repression, and this development just raises the stakes," wrote DeChristopher. "Since the power of our movement is in the display of commitment and resistance, an unwanted protest is far more powerful than a sanctioned one."
My sense of things is that these Parisian bottle-throwers just made a massive opening for the climate organizers who've clearly been on the weaker end of police negotiations. Until now, we haven't had any leverage with the gendarmes. Now we can say: If you don't let us raise our voices and march for our demands, we will promise simple, blunt revolt. You cannot contain a revolution: a vice-like grip only makes protest uglier. Now give us some more leeway than just a place to put our shoes or lock arms.
I don't know much about French history, but I'm guessing Marianne would be proud.
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With World on Fire, No Time to Lose on 'Loss and Damage' for Climate Chaos
Because of the bullish insistence by the U.S. and other wealthy nations against paying for the damage of historic pollution, the current Paris draft makes no mention of actual reparations or clear compensation language.
Nov 18, 2015
Earlier this month, on Nov 3rd, the French government opened up applications for $60 million in reparations for American and other non-French Holocaust survivors who were transported by French trains to concentration camps during World War II.
This celebrated "measure of justice" was decades in the making--seven decades to be exact.
France's human rights ambassador Patrizianna Sparacino-Thiella, marked the initial announcement last year as "a further contribution to recognizing France's commitment to facing up to its historic responsibilities." After 70 years, the French foreign ministry admitted that France was responsible and would "assume the consequences."
And here we are, on the road to the Paris Climate Summit--with poor countries on the edge of an unraveling planet, demanding in ever louder voices some kind of reparations for the unavoidable, inevitable destructions that wealthier, carbon-polluting nations have wrought upon the world.
"Loss and damage is part of the climate justice we are asking for. We are at the brink of survival while rich countries continue to pollute and harm us. It needs to stop. We need to make them accountable." --Ayeen Karunungan, Philippines climate activistSpecifically, poor countries are fighting for a powerful agreement on what is called "Loss and Damage."
Loss and Damage refers to the waves and wildfires and other climate wrecking balls we can't stop anymore, largely because we've dragged our feet as a planet for over twenty years on climate action. It's about getting poor countries, who've contributed very little to the climate crisis some measures of justice for the climate impacts for which no level of preemptive "adaptation" can account.
Given its central importance among the world's most vulnerable countries, ActionAid's Harjeet Singh says a lack of progress on Loss and Damage could "absolutely" trigger a breakdown of the upcoming talks in Paris.
Ambassador Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa, who leads the G77 + China bloc (134 developing nations), said "Loss and damage is not optional. We experience in our hearts the broad spectrum of climate change impacts. We are trying to see loss and damage have a role in this agreement."
Meanwhile, Ambassador Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, who leads the 37-country Small Island Bloc, AOSIS, said Loss and Damage is a must have. "There has to be a home for loss-and-damage in the agreement."
The US, on the other hand, is not pleased about potentially paying up.
Todd Stern, the US climate envoy, told the press in late October that he supports Loss and Damage "as an idea" but said the United States, simply put, "is not going to accept compensation and liability being in the agreement."
Stern's words echo his message at the last iconic climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, saying the U.S. would acknowledge responsibility, but not culpability. "We absolutely recognize our historical role in putting emissions in the atmosphere that are there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I categorically reject that."
If the U.S. and other wealthy allies like Australia and surprisingly Switzerland continue to insist on cleaving compensation from Loss and Damage, which seems very likely, the fight will be to salvage something that still gives the whole issue enough momentum to carry forward in the years ahead.
One battlefront involves getting rich countries to admit their historical responsibility for the glut of carbon emissions. Another front involves getting Loss and Damage out from under the "Adaptation" category in the UN framework, where it stands to be confused with preparing for the worst, instead of compensating for the unimaginable.
As the Angolan diplomat Giza Gaspar Martins, who leads the 48 least developed countries bloc, recently told Reuters: "(Loss and damage) is when you can no longer adapt to any potential change - that reality is deserving of special consideration."
A more tangible fight in the the Loss and Damage negotiations involves fighting for a UN climate refugee program--called "displacement coordination facility" in the UNFCCC lexicon--which could assist with emergency relief, migration support, and planned relocations for populations who are literally washed away, or whose crops just don't cut it anymore. (Something like this, one could aruge, may have been handy for the current Syrian refugee crisis.)
Negotiations will surely get heated, but all the negotiating in the world tends to overlook how very real the need for a Loss and Damage program already is.
Ayeen Karunungan, a Philippines climate justice advocate, felt Loss and Damage up close in late 2013.
Karunungan witnessed how Typhoon Haiyan, which claimed over 6,300 lives, devastated her home country of the Philippines. "I have met people who lost their whole family to Haiyan, who lost their whole agricultural lands, who were left with nothing," she said.
For Karunungan, the concept of Loss and Damage is a matter of justice, not for some later date, but for the here and now.
"If climate change is human induced, and it is, someone has to be responsible for all this damage," she continued. "Loss and damage is part of the climate justice we are asking for. We are at the brink of survival while rich countries continue to pollute and harm us. It needs to stop. We need to make them accountable."
When Yeb Sano, the Philippines negotiator took the stage at the climate talks in 2013, his words came in tears. After describing the "hellstorm"" of Haiyan that had just unleashed devastation upon his island home, he declared that it was "time to confront the issue of loss and damage."
"It is now too late, too late to talk about the world being able to rely on developed countries to solve the climate crisis," Sano declared. "We have entered a new era that demands global solidarity."
The same year Haiyan took 6,300 lives in the Philippines, the US spewed 6,673 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the atmosphere, and while they were at it, showered $21.6 billion in subsidies on the fossil fuel industry.
Because of the bullish insistence by the U.S. and other wealthy nations against paying for the damage of historic pollution, the current Paris draft makes no mention of actual reparations or clear compensation language. As it stands, the G77 plus China bloc was able to squeeze different scenarios on Loss and Damage into brackets in the latest draft for future debate in Paris.
Almost all of the bracketed ideas on Loss and Damage are building blocks to further mechanisms and frameworks that may one day be able to deliver real support and perhaps real compensation. In other words, even if the G77 is able to move forward on their already weakened positions, it would take years or far more likely many painfully long decades to even build a working framework for doling out "measures of justice" for those who've lost everything.
It took well over half a century for one country to take responsibility and "assume the consequences" for something that was a very obvious evil--one not nearly as complex as getting the world's nations to match their historical carbon emissions with hunks of responsibility for a broken world, and then figure out shares of reparations and so on from there.
Unfortunately, we don't have 70 years for the survivors of a climate nightmare-made world. Knowing how long it took France to realize its latest reparations means Paris needs to find some equivalent to Godspeed on Loss and Damage.
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Is COP21 a Con?
If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?'
These were the questions put to a filled Warsaw conference hall by a man whose eyes were bright with anger. It was at the 19th conference of the parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Climate Change, the man's name Yeb Sano, and he was speaking as the chief climate negotiator for the Philippines. As the negotiators had gathered and prevaricated in Poland, his family, friends and countrymen were searching for the thousands missing and dead amongst the devastation left by super typhoon Haiyan.
Sep 24, 2015
If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?'
These were the questions put to a filled Warsaw conference hall by a man whose eyes were bright with anger. It was at the 19th conference of the parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Climate Change, the man's name Yeb Sano, and he was speaking as the chief climate negotiator for the Philippines. As the negotiators had gathered and prevaricated in Poland, his family, friends and countrymen were searching for the thousands missing and dead amongst the devastation left by super typhoon Haiyan.
As emotions filled his eyes and thickened his voice, he continued, 'What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness... we can stop this madness right here in Warsaw'.
Yeb had asked those same simple questions at the COP preceding Warsaw, and doubtless anticipated being at the subsequent meeting. However, as negotiators gathered in Peru for the 20th conference and yet another typhoon made lethal landfall in the Philippines, Yeb did not appear. He had, it seems, been replaced as chief negotiator because of pressure exerted by the USA and EU.
A climate negotiator denied a seat at the table because he demanded real action. A man from a developing country who defied the odds and structure of these COPs, to make his voice heard, prevented from even taking his seat. This within a structure which allows the rich and powerful nations to decide the outcomes in unofficial secret talks, and where the influence of the fossil fuel industry and corporate lobbyists is ingrained, literally and figuratively as part of the furniture, as the exhausted negotiators sprawled on the infamous Emirates Airlines beanbags in Warsaw could almost comically attest. A system where the smaller delegations are overwhelmed by the multitude of meetings in the official negotiation process. A process where the direction is backwards, away from states taking responsibility for the damage they have caused and towards blaming the lack of action from poorer states for the lack of action from the rich.
The USA and EU cannot be said to be participating in the international climate process in good faith, if they are prepared to pressurise the Philippines to exclude their chief climate negotiator, because he called for action, rather than further prevarication and procrastination.
As no credibility can be attached to such a negotiation process, and with the 21st COP meeting in Paris in December this year, we need to hold a spotlight to the international climate negotiations, show the corruption at its heart, stand with those most affected, and call for real action.
But we also need to make that step change to a low carbon world, and we need to organise and make it happen. Because really, neither the market nor the climate negotiators in Paris are going to do it. We need to get beyond turning off lights and recycling and ask the real questions on what we need to do here in the UK.
How do we run our energy sector so that we can plan strategically for the future and provide the energy we need at reasonable prices? Do we need to renationalise our utilities and railways? How do we divest from fossil fuel companies, whose business plans take the climate over the edge, and who fund climate change misinformation? How do we make our pension funds support long term sustainable development instead of speeding us towards that edge? How do we reduce the impact of our food systems, but still produce enough? Do we slash emissions and future-proof our homes with mass, street by street, energy efficiency programmes? Creating in the process real jobs, warmer homes, and healthier people? Can we use green quantitative easing to fund improvements in every street and every home? Would this stimulate the real economy enough, improve wellbeing and make that step change to a low carbon world possible?
We 'saved' the bankers, temporarily at least, from themselves so surely we can also mobilise real resources to save the world from climate chaos, and build a sane future. I think we can do it, but we need to drop the expectation of leadership from a Byzantine international negotiating process, which as it enters its third decade, has been hijacked by lobbyists, is mired in short term self interest, and where the attendance of eloquent and effective negotiators calling for real action is not required.
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Everything's Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart: The Climate for 2015
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I've ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways.
Dec 23, 2014
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I've ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It's popular to say that the experiment failed, but that's too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet's changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).
How to Topple a Giant
As it happens, the planet's changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).To use Le Guin's language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor nonwhites pushed back.
In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayor's seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron's toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said -- by Chevron -- to be harmless, as with last Thursday's flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.
As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:
"We've accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We're a sanctuary city. And we're defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra dollars in taxes."
For this November's election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who's long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.
Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.
If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9 billion in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn't easy in Richmond and it won't be easy on the largest scale either, but it's not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up, and exercise our power to counter theirs.
That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on December 17th, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It's a landmark, a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that other things -- the health of its people, the purity of its water -- matter more. And once again, the power of citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.
Just a few days before the huge victory in New York, the nations of the world ended their most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global climate treaty -- and they actually reached a tentative deal, one that for the first time asks all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has to get better -- to do more, demand more of every nation -- by the global climate summit in Paris in December of 2015.
We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy.It's hard to see how we'll get there from here, but easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. As New York State and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is possible has been changing rapidly.
Three Kinds of Hero
If you look at innovations in renewable energy technologies -- and this may be an era in which engineers are our unsung heroes -- the future seems tremendously exciting. Not long ago, the climate movement was only hoping against hope that technology could help save us from the depredations of climate change. Now, as one of the six great banners carried in the 400,000-strong September 21st climate march in New York City proclaimed, "We have the solutions." Wind, solar, and other technologies are spreading rapidly with better designs, lower costs, and many extraordinary improvements that are undoubtedly but a taste of what's still to come.
In parts of the United States and the world, clean energy is actually becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. The price of oil has suddenly plunged, scrambling the situation for a while, but with one positive side benefit: it's pushed some of the filthier carbon-intensive, cutting-edge energy extraction schemes below the cost-effective point for now.
The costs of clean energy technology have themselves been dropping significantly enough that sober financial advisers like the head of the Bank of England are beginning to suggest that fossil fuels and centralized conventional power plants may prove to be bad investments. They are also talking about "the carbon bubble" (a sign that the divestment movement has worked in calling attention to the practical as well as the moral problems of the industry). So the technology front is encouraging.
That's the carrot for action; there's also a stick.
If you look at the climate reports by the scientists -- and scientists are another set of heroes for our time -- the news only keeps getting scarier. You probably already know the highlights: chaotic weather, regular records set for warmth on land and at sea (and 2014 heading for an all-time heat high), 355 months in a row of above-average temperatures, more ice melting faster, more ocean acidification, the "sixth extinction," the spread of tropical diseases, drops in food productivity with consequent famines.
So many people don't understand what we're up against, because they don't think about the Earth and its systems much or they don't grasp the delicate, intricate reciprocities and counterbalances that keep it all running as well as it has since the last ice age ended and an abundant, calm planet emerged. For most of us, none of that is real or vivid or visceral or even visible.
For a great many scientists whose fields have something to do with climate, it is. In many cases they're scared, as well as sad and unnerved, and they're clear about the urgency of taking action to limit how disastrously climate change impacts our species and the systems we depend upon.
Some non-scientists already assume that it's too late to do anything, which -- as premature despair always does -- excuses us for doing nothing. Insiders, however, are generally convinced that what we do now matters tremendously, because the difference between the best- and worst-case scenarios is vast, and the future is not yet written.
After that huge climate march, I asked Jamie Henn, a cofounder of and communications director for 350.org, how he viewed this moment and he replied, "Everything's coming together while everything's falling apart," a perfect summary of the way heartening news about alternative energy and the growth of climate activism exists in the shadow of those terrible scientific reports. This brings us to our third group of heroes, who fall into the one climate category that doesn't require special qualifications: activists.
New technologies are only solutions if they're implemented and the old carbon-emitting ones are phased out or shut down. It's clear enough that the great majority of fossil fuel reserves must be kept just where they are -- in the ground -- as we move away from the Age of Petroleum. That became all too obvious thanks to a relatively recent calculation made by scientists and publicized and pushed by activists (and maybe made conceivable by engineers designing replacement systems). The goal of all this: to keep the warming of the planet to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), a target established years ago that alarmed scientists are now questioning, given the harm that nearly 1 degree Celsius of warming is already doing.
Dismantling the fossil-fuel economy would undoubtedly have the side effect of breaking some of the warping power that oil has had in global and national politics. Of course, those wielding that power will not yield it without a ferocious battle -- the very battle the climate movement is already engaged in on many fronts, from the divestment movement to the fight against fracking to the endeavor to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and others like it from delivering the products of the Alberta tar sands to the successful movement to shut down coal-fired power plants in the U.S. and prevent others from being built.
Climate Activism: Global and Local Movements
If everyone who's passionate about climate change, who gets that we're living in a moment in which the fate of the Earth and of humanity is actually being decided, found their place in the movement, amazing things could happen. What's happening now is already remarkable enough, just not yet adequate to the crisis.
The divestment movement that arose a couple of years ago to get institutions to unload their stocks in fossil fuel corporations started modestly. It is now active on hundreds of college campuses and at other institutions around the world. While the intransigence or love of inertia of bureaucracies is a remarkable force, there have been notable victories. In late September, for instance, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund -- made fat upon the wealth of John D. Rockefeller's founding role in the rise of the petroleum industry -- pledged to divest its $860 million in assets from fossil fuels. It is just one of more than 800 institutions, including church denominations, universities, cities, pension funds, and foundations from Scotland to New Zealand to Seattle, that have already committed to doing so.
The Keystone pipeline could have been up and running years ago, delivering the dirtiest energy from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast with little fanfare, had activists not taken it on. It has become a profoundly public, hotly debated issue, the subject of demonstrations at dozens of presidential appearances in recent years -- and in the course of this ruckus, a great many people (including me) were clued in to the existence of the giant suppurating sore of sludge, bitumen, and poison lakes that is the Alberta tar sands.
Canadian activists have done a similarly effective job of blocking other pipelines to keep this landlocked stuff from reaching any coast for export. One upshot of this: quite a lot of the stuff is now being put on trains (with disastrous results when they crash and, in the longer term, no less disastrous outcomes when they don't). This exceptionally dirty crude oil leaves behind extremely high levels of toxins in the mining as well as the refining process.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported:
"The Keystone XL pipeline was touted as a model for energy independence and a source of jobs when TransCanada Corp. announced plans to build the 1,700-mile pipeline six years ago. But the crude-oil pipeline's political and regulatory snarls since then have emboldened resistance to at least 10 other pipeline projects across North America. As a result, six oil and natural-gas pipeline projects in North America costing a proposed $15 billion or more and stretching more than 3,400 miles have been delayed, a tally by the Wall Street Journal shows. At least four other projects with a total investment of $25 billion and more than 5,100 miles in length are facing opposition but haven't been delayed yet."
The climate movement has proved to be bigger and more effective than it looks, because most people don't see a single movement. If they look hard, what they usually see is a wildly diverse mix of groups facing global issues on the one hand and a host of local ones on the other. Domestically, that can mean Denton, Texas, banning fracking in the November election or the shutting down of coal-powered plants across the country, or the movement gearing up in California for an immense anti-fracking demonstration on February 7, 2015.
It can mean people working on college divestment campaigns or rewriting state laws to address climate change by implementing efficiency and clean energy. It can mean the British Columbian activists who, for now, have prevented a tunnel from being drilled for a tar-sands pipeline to the Pacific Coast thanks to a months-long encampment, civil disobedience, and many arrests at Burnaby Mountain near Vancouver. One of the arrested wrote in the Vancouver Observer:
"[S]itting in that jail cell, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. One that I was only partially aware that I have been carrying for years now. I am ashamed by Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and our increasingly contemptible position on climate change. If these are the values of our society then I want to be an outlaw in that society."
Making the Future
Just before that September climate march in New York, I began to contemplate how human beings a century from now will view those of us who lived in the era when climate change was recognized, and yet there was so much more that we could have done. They may feel utter contempt for us. They may regard us as the crew who squandered their inheritance, like drunkards gambling away a family fortune that, in this case, is everyone's everywhere and everything. I'm talking, of course, about the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will see us as people who fiddled while everything burned.
They will think we were insane to worry about celebrities and fleeting political scandals and whether we had nice bodies. They will think the newspapers should have had a gigantic black box above the fold of the front page every day saying "Here are some stories about other things, BUT CLIMATE IS STILL THE BIGGEST STORY OF ALL."
They will think that we should have thrown our bodies in front of the engines of destruction everywhere, raised our voices to the heavens, halted everything until the devastation stopped. They will bless and praise the few and curse the many.
If you are a resident of a country that is a major carbon emitter, as is nearly everyone in the English-speaking world, you are part of the system, and nothing less than systemic change will save us.There have been heroic climate activists in nearly every country on the planet, and some remarkable things have already been achieved. The movement has grown in size, power, and sophistication, but it's still nowhere near commensurate with what needs to be done. In the lead-up to the U.N.-sponsored conference to create a global climate treaty in Paris next December, this coming year will likely be decisive.
So this is the time to find your place in a growing movement, if you haven't yet -- as it is for climate organizers to do better at reaching out and offering everyone a part in the transformation, whether it's the housebound person who writes letters or the 20-year-old who's ready for direct action in remote places. This is the biggest of pictures, so there's a role for everyone, and it should be everyone's most important work right now, even though so many other important matters press on all of us. (As the Philippines's charismatic former climate negotiator Yeb Sano notes, "Climate change impinges on almost all human rights. Human rights are at the core of this issue.")
Many people believe that personal acts in private life are what matters in this crisis. They are good things, but not the key thing. It's great to bicycle rather than drive, eat plants instead of animals, and put solar panels on your roof, but such gestures can also offer a false sense that you're not part of the problem.
You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social. If you are a resident of a country that is a major carbon emitter, as is nearly everyone in the English-speaking world, you are part of the system, and nothing less than systemic change will save us.
The race is on. From an ecological standpoint, the scientists advise us that we still have a little bit of time in which it might be possible, by a swift, decisive move away from fossil fuels, to limit the damage we're setting up for those who live in the future. From a political standpoint, we have a year until the Paris climate summit, at which, after endless foot-shuffling and evading and blocking and stalling and sighing, we could finally, decades in, get a meaningful climate deal between the world's nations.
We actually have a chance, a friend who was at the Lima preliminary round earlier this month told me, if we all continue to push our governments ferociously. The real pressure for change globally comes more from within nations than from nations pressuring one another. Here in the United States, long the world's biggest carbon-emitter (until China outstripped us, partly by becoming the manufacturer of a significant percentage of our products), we have a particular responsibility to push hard. Pressure works. The president is clearly feeling it, and it's reflected in the recent U.S.-China agreement on curtailing emissions -- far from perfect or adequate, but a huge step forward.
How will we get to where we need to be? No one knows, but we do know that we must keep moving in the direction of reduced carbon emissions, a transformed energy economy, an escape from the tyranny of fossil fuel, and a vision of a world in which everything is connected. The story of this coming year is ours to write and it could be a story of Year One in the climate revolution, of the watershed when popular resistance changed the fundamentals as much as the people of France changed their world (and ours) more than 200 ago.
Two hundred years hence, may someone somewhere hold in their hands a document from 2021, in wonder, because it was written during Year Six of the climate revolution, when all the old inevitabilities were finally being swept aside, when we seized hold of possibility and made it ours. "Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings," says Ursula K. Le Guin. And she's right, even if it's the hardest work we could ever do. Now, everything depends on it.
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Fighting for the Climate in the Heart of the World
LIMA, Peru--Lima, the capital of Peru, has become a city of gustatory renown, attracting foodies from the world over to sample dishes from its famous ceviche to favorites from the Andean highlands. So it is an appropriate place, perhaps, for what has become a genuine movable feast, the world-roving series of summits organized by the United Nations to tackle the crisis of climate change.
Dec 11, 2014
LIMA, Peru--Lima, the capital of Peru, has become a city of gustatory renown, attracting foodies from the world over to sample dishes from its famous ceviche to favorites from the Andean highlands. So it is an appropriate place, perhaps, for what has become a genuine movable feast, the world-roving series of summits organized by the United Nations to tackle the crisis of climate change. This year's meeting, known as "COP 20," the 20th Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, is the last high-level meeting with presidents and prime ministers before the December 2015 climate summit in Paris.
The Paris meeting is supposed to produce an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, a new, global, legally binding treaty that restricts global warming to an increase in average global temperatures to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). As such, all eyes are on Paris. But if the devil is in the details, it is here in Lima that the details are being worked out. But if the devil is in the details, it is here in Lima that the details are being worked out. You can't spell "climate" without L-I-M-A.
First, it's necessary to understand the setting, and who is at the table and who is not. Inside, the summit proceeds in an orderly manner, with U.N. police standing watch and a rarified air of diplomatic decorum. It is hard to feel any sense of urgency. This is astounding, as the science is clear: The world is warming rapidly, and without action, catastrophic climate change will soon become irreversible.
The official COP 20 is being held on the grounds of the Peruvian army headquarters--ominously named "El Pentagonito," or "the little Pentagon." In this militarized zone, the U.N. climate summit occurs in a Potemkin village, with formal ceremonies and intermittent, preapproved protests.
The imagery is not lost on many Peruvians organizing for climate justice. Wilfredo Saavedra Marreros, president of the Environmental Defense Front of Cajamarca, told "Democracy Now!": "It's a farce. ... The representatives of the states of the world are meeting in a place that is stained with blood. In the Pentagonito, that military base, they have extrajudicially executed our brothers, they have burned them, they have disappeared them."
Outside, in the bustling city streets of Lima, a city of more than 8 million people with interminable traffic jams, grass-roots activists are hosting their own "cumbre de los pueblos," a people's summit on climate change, in a public park across town. On Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, thousands of people marched through the streets, demanding genuine action on climate change.
Pascoe Sabido, with the group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), is organizing both inside and outside the COP 20. Together with other groups he released a report titled "Corporate Conquistadors: The Many Ways Multinationals Both Drive and Profit From Climate Destruction." At one action inside, Sabido and others descended on a meeting sponsored by oil giants Shell, Chevron and other fossil-fuel interests. "There were lots and lots of very angry and active people there trying to protest against the presence of the fossil-fuel industry here in these talks," he later told me. "Twenty years we've been going without progress towards a fair, ambitious climate deal that we need. One of the big reasons is because of the aggressive lobbying of the fossil-fuel industry, both at the national level and here in the talks."
Another organizer at COP 20 is the Nigerian environmental leader Nnimmo Bassey. He said: "Before I left Nigeria, my temperature was gauged twice, to determine if I have high fever or if I have Ebola. Now, the temperature of the Earth has gone 0.8 degrees above preindustrial levels. If the Earth was to go through the same process ... it would've been quarantined because the Earth would've been judged to have high fever or Ebola. But, we can't quarantine the Earth. We need to find who are the climate criminals and quarantine them."
It's also important to note who isn't here at COP 20. Yeb Sano was the lead climate negotiator for the Philippines last year. To the shock of many, he was pulled from the delegation this year and is home, as his nation is devastated by Typhoon Hagupit. Sano tweeted: "They can silence my mouth. But they cannot silence my soul." Sano made waves at COP 19 in Warsaw, Poland. The Philippines was being hit then by Typhoon Haiyan. Sano wasn't sure if his family had survived. In an emotional address to the summit, he said: "If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?" Many climate activists from the Philippines think concerted pressure from the U.S. and European governments prompted Sano's removal, as he was becoming a forceful proponent of climate justice for the Global South.
Atossa Soltani, founder of the nonprofit organization Amazon Watch, told me that, despite all the COP's deficiencies, she's glad this global gathering is here in Peru, where more than 60 percent of the country--an area the size of Texas--is rain forest. "It's the first COP ever in an Amazon country. And the Amazon is incredibly important in the climate debate. ... It's the heart of the planet, pumping moisture and vapor," Soltani said. "That's why this COP is important-to put the Amazon on the map, to put indigenous rights central to the debate, and to call for the end of the fossil-fuel era. That's why we're here."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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Climate Change Is Not a Debate: It Is a Struggle That Pits Survivors Against Fossil Fuel Profiteers
Climate change is not a debate. The scientists couldn't be clearer about how real and how harmful it is. But governments are still not basing their commitments on what is needed, and fossil fuel companies remain confidently fossilised in their economic outlook and plan.
Apr 10, 2014
Climate change is not a debate. The scientists couldn't be clearer about how real and how harmful it is. But governments are still not basing their commitments on what is needed, and fossil fuel companies remain confidently fossilised in their economic outlook and plan.
So why haven't the facts haven't driven the policy? In part, it's the collective action problem. But let's not be naive: there are billionaires getting richer and richer from fossil fuels. For them, the collective failure to responsibly manage fossil fuel reserves isn't a failure at all, it's a hugely profitable success.
Climate change is impossible to make sense of as a debate, precisely because it is not a debate. It's a struggle.
As has been said of "failed states", you can only understand them if you understand who is doing well out of the so-called failure. The same is true of "failed global politics": The broken-down Warsaw talks sponsored by the coal industry were a huge success for the sponsors. Don't assume that politicians who second-guess scientists are being stupid - look at their donors, and you'll find many of them are being very clever. Likewise the "sceptical" think tankers paid for from oil tankers. In successfully ensuring a recurring "not yet" to any decent plan to tackle climate change, the fossil fuel lobby make the tobacco industry look like amateurs. As Democracy Now's Amy Goodman puts it, "fossil fuel money is drowning democracy".
The fossil fuel lobby is determined to hold out. But they are beatable. We've seen them make one tactical retreat already. Those who didn't want climate change to get in the way of their irresponsibility used to say that climate was a myth; now they are starting to say it's inevitable. It's a shameless pivot from denialism to fatalism, of course, a clever move that will buy the fossil fuel lobby more time. (And time is money.) But that they have been forced to pivot is an indication of weakness, a chink in the armour.
The fossil fuel lobby is weakened too by the growing movement pushing for other parts of business to separate themselves from, and start to take on, the fossil fuel lobby: we've seen the wiser parts of the finance industry start to connect the sustainability of their investments with the sustainability of the climate, and to recognise the risks inherent in betting on unlimited carbon use; and we've seen the wiser parts of the food industry - an industry which both contributes to and suffers from climate change - start to look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and protect the agricultural and water resources on which they depend. As they start to shift, the fossil fuel lobby will become ever more isolated.
But what most threatens the fossil fuel lobby is the power of survivors as campaigners. Of course, this is not the first time that affected people have spoken out about climate change, but one of the consequences of climate change is that the numbers of the affected grows ever larger. The raw, brutal, damage to people wrought by climate change has been a spur for re-energised powerful grassroots activism, driven by experience, by groups ranging from Nicaraguan coffee growers to Manilla slum dwellers. Communities hit by extreme weather in countries like the UK and US are getting more organised too. And increasingly the governments of the poorest countries are speaking on behalf of their people. Diplomats have stopped being diplomatic. The ecological has become personal.
This movement of the affected is still inchoate, but it is the most important force for action on climate change. Just as people affected by HIV took on the pharmaceutical industry (and, ultimately, and with great sacrifice, won), so too the people most affected by climate are taking on the power of the fossil fuel lobby. They are making it clear that this is a struggle between interests. And they are calling upon others to choose a side.
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Response to Typhoon Disaster Latest Reminder - We're Lucky to Have RNs in the World
Nov 24, 2013
As the heart wrenching images crossed across our screens from the Philippines, the largest U.S. organization of nurses, National Nurses United, was getting in motion as well.
Our Registered Nurse Response Network put out a call. The response was overwhelming. In little more than one week, nearly 3,000 RNs from all 50 states and even 19 countries had signed up to volunteer to provide hands-on disaster relief to those in the path of the super storm.
RNRN plans to continue to provide support for the Philippines long after the media spotlight has faded. We invited the public to support this effort here: https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/pages/rnrn-disaster-relief-fund
Within a week, our first delegation, an advance team sent to see where our volunteers would be most effective and provide some direct care themselves, was already on the ground.
Our second delegation is now engaged as well, setting up camp in Roxas City on the northern end of Panay, an island slammed by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda.
In conjunction with area public health officials, physicians, provincial government officials, and community groups, our volunteers will work in temporary medical clinics that rotate among various Barangays (local neighborhoods) across Roxas City, providing wound care, vaccinations, antibiotics and other medications, and other general basic medical care.
We've also been greatly facilitated by the birth of an international movement of RNs and healthcare workers, Global Nurses United, earlier this year. Our GNU sister union, the Philippines Alliance of Health Workers, has worked with us daily, in scouting locations and working shoulder to shoulder in the clinics. Other GNU partner unions are also preparing to send RNs to work with our deployment.
The need is obviously great. At least 4,400 died, with thousands more injured and missing. According to the Philippine disaster council, about 3 million people have been displaced with 400,000 living in nearly 2,000 evacuation centers.
"What we've seen is total devastation," said RN Joseph Catindig, a member of our first deployment team. "People have lost their homes, lost their livelihood, lost their animals that helped with their livelihood. They only ask for a little. They need medical care. They lack medicine, lack nurses, lack doctors. In each area we go to this is their plea, to help."
At another rural site near Sara on Panay, RN Marti Smith describes how the economic livelihood for many, based on fishing and agriculture, has also been demolished. "The boats are destroyed. The agriculture they depend on, coconut, bananas, rice, coffee, is devastated. Banana and coconut trees are broken in half and gone. Coffee trees are gone too. Hills are deforested, which will cause big environmental problems and landslides. These peoples' livelihood is destroyed. They've lost not only their homes, but also their ability to feed their families."
It's stories like this that have prompted our organization and nurses who work with us to act - even while so many who should be doing more stand on the sidelines.
It is that need to act that sparked the creation of RNRN nearly a decade ago, with multiple RNRN deployments, first following a cataclysmic South Asia tsunami, then the disgraceful governmental indifference following Hurricane Katrina. And on and on, through the earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Sandy, and other calamities.
If it seems that RNRN has been on call a lot, and that disaster is one of the few growth industries in troubled global economies, that's not an illusion. Poverty and economic inequality of course contribute greatly to a disproportionate impact among those slammed by the disasters. But the biggest culprit is climate change.
Meteorologists and NASA scientists have called Haiyan/Yolanda the most destructive and powerful tropical cyclone ever to hit landfall. One reason, as noted by U.S. News and World Report, https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-the-edge/2013/11/18/haiyan-sandy-a... sub-surface ocean waters have been recorded at up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average fueling the strength and size of the storm.
Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged the U.S. East Coast a year ago, which was also spurred by warmer ocean waters, record droughts that debilitate arable lands and prompt mass population migrations, and many other not-so-natural disasters are similar reminders of our failure to adequately act.
Coincidentally, Haiyan/Yolanda hit during a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw. The Philippine lead climate negotiator Yeb Sano, called the typhoon a "sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to procrastinate on climate action and that Warsaw must muster the political will to address climate change."
But as representatives from the wealthiest nations, including the U.S. continued to try to shift the responsibility to poorer nations, even though our country has long been one of the principal producers of the emissions that are a major factor in climate change, a group of 133 developing nations staged a walk out.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that Typhoon Haiyan puts "an anguished human face" on climate change and he hopes that "all tragic devastation would really give us a wake-up call."
In case anyone still wonders why NNU and so many others also continue to protest the pipeline, which would further accelerate climate change, look at the faces in the Philippines today.
"So many don't have any shelter, they have lost everything, clothing, belonging," said Michelle Vo, RN member of the first team. "Many are sleeping on makeshift tents in the rain. We see people who are dehydrated, malnourished, kids sick with fever. They need nurses, equipment and supplies."
"Being able to help people in need is why I went into nursing," says University of Michigan RN Tim Launius, a member of the second delegation who also who helped provide medical relief to victims in Texas after Hurricane Katrina. "As an experienced nurse, I have skills and training that can be put to good use."
The volunteers not only provide medical support and comfort, they come back too, often moved into the additional activists our we so desperately need.
"You think you went there to change peoples lives, but you are the one who is going to be transformed. You will never see things the same way again," Catindig says.
This is the experience of almost all of the nurses that go on these deployments. They come back changed. It is moving and profound. We are very luck to have people like these in our world.
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Corporate Lobbyists Flood Warsaw Climate Talks
WARSAW, Poland--The United Nations is holding this year's climate conference in Warsaw, a city steeped in history. Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer who first posited that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, is celebrated here. The Frederic Chopin Airport is named for the brilliant composer who lived here.
Nov 21, 2013
Here also was the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the many awful hallmarks of the Holocaust, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned before being shipped off to their deaths at Treblinka and other Nazi concentration camps. It was under the oppression of the German occupiers that the Jews of the Ghetto rose up, in a courageous act of self-defense. Later, inspired by the Ghetto uprising, the non-Jewish residents of Warsaw rose up as well and fought for two months before being crushed. By the end of World War II, 6 million Poles, half of them Jews, had been killed. Eighty-five percent of Warsaw was demolished.
This is where the so-called COP 19 is being held, the 19th conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC. Sequestered in the new National Stadium, thousands of negotiators from the body's 198 member countries hurry through the temporary, canvas-walled corridors erected on the stadium's field, along with representatives of countless nongovernmental organizations and members of the press. This year's meeting has a new feature: corporate sponsorship.
"This is perhaps the most corporate climate talks we have ever experienced ... not to say that previous ones haven't had a large corporate influence," Pascoe Sabido told me. "But what's different this time is the level of institutionalization, the degree to which the Polish government and the U.N., the UNFCCC, have welcomed this with open arms and have actively encouraged it." Sabido works with Corporate Europe Observatory, which published the pamphlet "The COP 19 Guide to Corporate Lobbying: Climate Crooks and the Polish Government's Partners in Crime." Among them, Pascoe says, are "General Motors, known for funding climate skeptic think tanks like the Heartland Institute in the U.S.; you have BMW, which is doing equal things in Europe, trying to weaken emission standards." LOTOS Group, the second-largest Polish petroleum corporation, has its logo emblazoned on the 11,000 tote bags handed out to delegates here.
Poland, which gets 80 percent to 90 percent of its power from coal, hosted a parallel conference with the World Coal Association, called the International Coal and Climate Summit. UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres enraged many climate activists by dignifying the coal conference with a keynote address. Outside the summit, Greenpeace activists in climbing gear hung from the Ministry of Economy with a huge banner, in the red and white of the Polish flag, stating "Who Rules Poland: Coal Industry or the People?" On the roof, others unfurled "Who Rules the World? Fossil Fuel Industry or the People?" On the plaza below, hundreds rallied against coal, arriving in a procession called "Cough 4 Coal" with two huge inflated lungs, signifying the destructive impact of coal on the atmosphere and human health.
Back in the National Stadium, the negotiations were breaking down. "WTF?" activists shouted in unison. "Where's the finance?" Wealthy countries had pledged financial support for poorer, developing countries to move to renewable energies ("mitigation") and to prepare for the onslaught of climate change ("adaptation"). Oxfam estimates that to date this fund has raised only $7.6 billion, far short of the promised $30 billion to $100 billion. This is not charity; polluters should pay. The Philippines' chief climate-change negotiator, Yeb Sano, spoke with me on the ninth day of his fast, which he started on the day COP 19 opened. "The U.S., accounting for at least one-fourth of cumulative emissions, has a huge responsibility, a moral responsibility, to tackle climate change, not just to address it domestically, but also to be able to provide support for developing countries."
Typhoon Haiyan's destruction provides a grim backdrop to the negotiations in Warsaw. Yeb Sano learned that his brother survived only by seeing him on a news report, helping to collect the dead. The science is clear: With increasing temperatures, extreme weather events will become more frequent and more deadly. After Sano announced his fast in an emotional address to the plenary, several students silently walked with him as he exited, holding a banner commemorating the dead in the Philippines. For this spontaneous act of solidarity, they were banned from the climate proceedings, for a year. One of the banned, Clemence Hutin from Paris, told me, "I don't understand why civil society isn't welcome here and corporations are."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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#WeStandWithYou: Young Activists Fast for the Climate
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Nov 20, 2013
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
W.H. Auden wrote that, sitting in a dive on 52nd Street nearly three-quarters of a century ago, as the world plunged into darkness on September 1, 1939. I've been thinking of those words a lot lately. Because it feels to me, and many others I know, like we're poised at the edge of another darkness.
It's a darkness already visible, right now, in the Philippines, where thousands are dead and many hundreds of thousands made refugees by the force of a storm like none had ever seen.
And it's a darkness visible in the bright corporate halls of a conference center in Warsaw, where delegates to the nineteenth annual U.N. negotiations on climate change are divided and dithering, even as the window to prevent civilizational catastrophe rapidly closes.
In those same bright halls last Monday, during the opening session, the Philippines' lead negotiator, Naderev Yeb Sano, announced in a powerful and emotional speech that he would eat no food for the duration of the twelve-day conference, or until meaningful action was taken to address the global crisis, and sparked an international outpouring of solidarity.
It so happens that two young friends of mine, Adam Greenberg and Collin Rees, recent Boston-area college grads, are in Warsaw as youth delegates to the U.N. conference with SustainUS, and they and other young people there immediately joined Sano in his hunger strike--and have now been fasting for more than a week. (Adam and Collin are allowing themselves some liquid nutrients so they can keep up the grueling conference schedule.)
By coincidence, it also happens that I spent this past weekend with a core group of about fifty committed student climate organizers from Students For a Just and Stable Future (SJSF) at their fall convergence in Worcester, Massachusetts, as they spent two full days in trainings and strategy meetings to strengthen their network and support the fast-growing grassroots climate movement in New England and beyond. And yesterday, the SJSF groups at Tufts and Brandeis launched a weeklong fast in solidarity with Sano and the people of the Philippines (as well as their friends Adam and Collin), and held a candlelight vigil in Cambridge. They're joined by people throughout Boston and the region, and coordinated fasts and vigils are being planned around the U.S. and the world for Thursday and Friday, the final days of the Warsaw conference.
These students (many of whom I've come to know personally as we've worked side by side in the 350 Massachusetts network) understand full well what's happening to the climate, and are acutely conscious of the fact that time is running out for their generation--and, especially, those that will follow. They know that we simply cannot wait until 2020, or even 2015, to turn things around decisively. It has to be now. And they're prepared to engage in the kind of hard work and struggle that building their movement will require.
In an email last week, Adam Greenberg told me:
I'm fasting because we need to, as Yeb said, stop this madness. I refuse to accept that we can't. I refuse to accept that we won't. I refuse to let the fossil fuel companies win. This is about justice, this is about taking action, and this is about preventing harm both now and in the future. We know what needs to happen. The science and the deadly simple math could not be more clear. Walking away from these talks each year without making progress is morally unacceptable.
I followed up with some questions for the two of them, and Collin Rees was able to respond last night. Noting that expectations for what the UN process can achieve are exceedingly low, I asked if he could describe what the atmosphere at the Warsaw conference was like coming in, and how the devastation in the Philippines and the action by Yeb Sano has changed it.
Collin Rees: Expectations from the UNFCCC are traditionally very low; this has been even more true in Warsaw. There was not a lot of hope for real action coming into the talks; there was some fairly vague talk about a loss and damage mechanism and some small hopes for moving on finance. Ever since Copenhagen expectations have been kept exceedingly low to avoid disappointment--I think they've actually been kept artificially low through this method, and this week has shown us there's still a lot of hope.
People are now talking about real advances in the loss and damage arena, and tangible movement on finance. Discussions on REDD+ has been surprisingly hopeful, and sessions have run late into the night as countries continue debate. It hasn't changed everything and expectations are still low, but I think we're seeing real movement and that's something we can continue to push for as we move into the second week.
I also asked what the goals of SustainUS were for Warsaw, and whether they had changed, and what the US delegation's reaction has been, if any.
CR: SustainUS's goals for Warsaw were largely related to two campaigns--inserting intergenerational equity into the negotiating text for 2015's agreement and sparking a climate conversation in the U.S. about this June's upcoming Clean Air Act Section 111(d) EPA standards for existing-source power plants. Both campaigns have been going well, but the domestic efforts especially have been augmented by Haiyan's devastation and Sano's courageous stand. The media is connecting climate change to real impacts, and the need for climate action is clear. The upcoming EPA regulations are a simple, easy way the U.S. can instantly become a leader on climate action, by implementing aggressive standards that force the worst energy sources out of the equation. These regs will be issued; the only question is how much of an impact they will have. They're a chance to avoid a completely dysfunctional Congress and take real action with immediate impacts.
The large majority of the U.S. delegation didn't show up until this week, so they've been largely absent from the dialogue thus far. We're planning to bring it to their attention, but we're also cognizant of the fact that they've essentially been given their marching orders from Washington and have very little flexibility in their actions here in Warsaw. What we need in the U.S. is aggressive domestic action, so that in the next two years we can come to these negotiations and be a real leader in the international sphere. This fast is about solidarity with climate change victims worldwide, but it's also about getting action back at home (in every country, not just the U.S.).
I asked Collin, as someone in his early twenties, what he wanted people to understand about what's happening there in Warsaw right now--not just in terms of the negotiations, but in terms of what's truly at stake.
CR: We want people to understand that negotiators are coming to the table with full knowledge of the science of climate change and its devastating impacts. They're coming with knowledge of what needs to be done, and the steps that need to occur to get to that point.
They're coming with all of this knowledge, they're waving their arms and giving windy, empty speeches for two weeks, and they're walking away WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING. This is not a process that's subtly flawed, it's a process that's being hijacked by a small group of countries who refuse to commit to action. That's morally unacceptable.
If we don't take action on climate change, we're condemning the entire world to an unlivable future. We're condemning those currently living in vulnerable regions disproportionately affected by the ravages of climate change, and we're condemning all future generations to a world incompatible with life. That's what's at stake here, and that's why inaction is so unacceptable.
[Update, 11/20/13: The Guardian reports that a bloc of 132 poor and developing countries (the G77 and China) have walked out of the Warsaw negotiations in an "orchestrated move," protesting wealthy nations' refusal to discuss "loss and damage" compensation until after 2015.]
* * *
A personal note: As I post this, I'm nearing twenty-four hours without food myself, as I fast in solidarity with Yeb Sano, the people of the Philippines, people suffering the effects of climate change everywhere--and with these young friends of mine in Warsaw and at home. It's a small thing, not eating for a day or two, by choice. A very small thing. And yet, fasting last week and again now, it has been a profound reminder of my physical connection to, well, everyone and everything.
"No one exists alone," Auden wrote in that same poem, "September 1, 1939," just before the lines about hunger and love I quoted at the outset. It's also worth noting how Auden ended that poem. After telling us that "we must love one another or die," he leaves us in the final stanza with an image that, the more I repeat it to myself, retains an uncanny staying power:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
"Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden wrote in another famous poem (his elegy for Yeats) earlier that same year, 1939. And yes, I know, my temporary self-imposed hunger doesn't either.
But as all those fasting this week must feel in their guts and bones, it's not really about the fast itself. It's about the flame that started it--and keeps us going.
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