Open Letter to the Grassroots: Help Organize for Urgent Action on Climate Change

The Mobilization for Climate Justiceis
a North America-based network of organizations and activists who have
joined together to build a North American climate justice movement that
emphasizes non-violent direct action and public education to mobilize
for effective and just solutions to the climate crisis. The
Mobilization for Climate Justice invites communities, organizations and
activists across North America to join us in organizing mass action on
climate change on November 30, 2009 (N30). N30 is significant because
it both immediately precedes the upcoming UN Climate Conference in
Copenhagen (COP-15) and is the ten-year anniversary of the successful
shut down of the WTO in Seattle, when activists worldwide came together
to demonstrate the power of collective action. The Copenhagen climate
meetings will be a major focus for international mass actions this
November and December, and the MCJ is linked to these efforts as well.

Urgent action is needed around the Copenhagen climate talks
because this is where governments around the world plan to finalize the
international climate regime that will take effect when the Kyoto
Protocol climate agreement expires in 2012. So far it appears that the
new climate agreement will be nothing more than business as
usual-sacrificing real action on climate change in favor of
market-based approaches that enhance corporate profits, while delaying
urgent measures to forestall catastrophic global heating.

A Radical Change in Direction is Urgently Needed

The MCJ invites you to inspire and
organize a radical change in direction to put climate justice,
ecological integrity and people's rights at the center of international
climate negotiations.

Market-based approaches to climate
change dominate the UN climate talks. Carbon-trading and carbon offset
projects have allowed polluters to avoid cutting emissions and
accelerated the corporate take-over of the natural world at the expense
of local and Indigenous communities. Those most immediately threatened
by climate change and its false solutions - Indigenous Peoples, people
of color, women, peasant and family farmers, fisherfolk, forest
dependent communities, youth, and marginalized communities have been
systematically excluded from the negotiations.

The climate crisis is directly linked
to the financial crisis, the food crisis and the extinction crisis, as
well as to militarism and war. They are rooted in an economic system
dedicated to economic growth at any cost. We are uniting to challenge
this system that puts profits over people or the earth. Urgent action
to solve the climate crisis must include a complete transformation away
from the dominant economic model of incessant and unsustainable growth,
oppression and injustice.

We must highlight real, effective and just solutions to climate change

Join us in promoting solutions to climate change that are locally
controlled, decentralized, bioregionally appropriate and socially just.
Thousands of these solutions already exist and need to be promoted and
supported with public funds.

Help ensure that large-scale,
destructive corporate-controlled false solutions to climate change are
eliminated. This includes so-called ?clean coal,? agrofuels (industrial
scale biofuels), nuclear power, and large-scale hydropower. It also
includes REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation)-the UN and World Bank initiative that offers incentives
for countries to sell off their forests, expel Indigenous and peasant
communities, and transform biodiverse and carbon-rich forests into
industrial timber plantations.

Some key solutions to climate change include:

• Drastically reducing emissions without resorting to carbon trading and
  offsetting or other false solutions such as nuclear energy, agrofuels,
  or "clean coal", while protecting the rights of those affected by the
  transition;
• Keeping fossil fuels in the ground;
• Re-localization of production and consumption, prioritizing local markets and cooperative economies;
• Decentralized utility systems and community controlled clean renewable energy;
• Rights based resource conservation that enforces indigenous land
  rights and ends corporate control over energy, forests, seeds, land and
  water;
• Ending deforestation and its underlying causes, imposing
  international sanctions and wood tariffs, coupled with a massive forest
  restoration effort, managed primarily by indigenous forest-dwelling
  peoples;
• Ending excessive consumption in the North and by elites in the South;
• Repayment of ecological debts owed by northern governments and resource extracting corporations to peoples in the Global South

The goals of the Mobilization for Climate Justice are:

1) To build a
global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to
avoid catastrophic climate change, and which addresses the root social,
ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward
a total systemic transformation of our society.

2) To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and
other affected peoples, (including workers in energy-intensive
industries) in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

3) To expose the consequences of false and market-based climate
"solutions" as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations,
while advancing alternatives that can provide real and just solutions
and which protect biodiversity.

Join Us in Taking Action!

Please join us in our national effort
to organize educational events and non-violent direct actions at key
locations in the U.S. on November 30, 2009. We welcome the active
involvement of organizations that are united with us in our goals
above, in our opposition to market-based false solutions to climate
change, and in support of real, effective and just solutions to climate
change.

We encourage local groups to create proposals for action on N30. We
hope to have direct actions on climate change in locations across the
U.S.

We also endorse and support a global
call for action on October 12, 2009 the International Day of Action in
Defense of Mother Earth and in Support of Indigenous Rights.

Please get involved and take action for climate justice.

Hope is not just a feeling, it is also about taking action.