Climate Change

People's World Conference on Climate Change

This year, Global Exchange attended the People’s World Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where 35,000+ people  called for a dramatic rethinking of our place on this planet.  When it came time for the COP 16 climate talks in Mexico, we knew we would have our work cut out for us.  At the end of the day, the progress we made in Mexico was minimal, and we knew the best bet for real climate change solutions was a renewed organizing effort at home and around the world.  

Shannon Biggs published this on December 12th to Commondreams.org: “It is time to deliver the message of Cochabamba to the people who are capable of creating change, of creating 1,000 Cochabambas…If we want to be heard at the U.N., then we need to go home and build the revolution of change in the places where we live.”

Want to read the rest?  Click here.

Peace

Medea Benjamin speaking out

Is it crazy to act a little crazy to stop something you think is crazy?  We think not.  When Jon Stewart announced his rally to restore sanity, we had to say something. This piece written by Medea Benjamin appeared on the Huffington Post on October 27th, 2010.

“CODEPINK has been proposing solutions since the day we started.  Whether under Bush or Obama, our voices of sanity have been drowned out by a war machine that makes billions selling weapons and hiring mercenaries.”

Read the entire article here, then read how Medea was invited to appear on The Daily Show.

Antonia appearing on Democracy NOW! with Amy Goodman

Getting Tough on Big Oil

The oil spill in April opened up a lot of people’s eyes about the horrific dangers of the oil industry.  The lives lost, the ecosystems and livelihoods destroyed, plus the billions of dollars in damage were all testaments to the magnitude of the threat posed by this dirty industry.  When it came time to hear from the experts, our in-house authority on oil Antonia Juhasz weighed in on the debate. She shared her views on Democracy NOW! and in The Guardian, May 24, 2010 article entitled How Far Should We Let Big Oil Go? where she had this to say:

“The communities most directly harmed by oil’s abuse are organized, networked, and ready.  The public is roused, angered, and ready to act.  The oil corporations are on notice: the true cost of their operations is simply too great to bear.”

Click here to read more.

Reality Tours

Agriculture in Cuba

This year,  National Geographic decided to list Global Exchange Reality Tours as one of their 2010 Tours of a Lifetime.  Our Cuba trips, and the unique opportunities they afford travelers to cut through the misinformation and discover things for themselves, caught the attention of this esteemed travel magazine.

National Geographic praised our Cuba trip’s “commitment to authenticity, immersion, sustainability, and connection.”

Click here to read more.

Fair Trade

Hershey’s refuses to go Fair Trade.  Despite years of promises, despite the massive evidence of child slavery and other abuses on West African plantations, Hershey’s still won’t budge.  So, Global Exchange partners with other organizations to apply some pressure.  The result?  A CNBC news story covered far and wide, in which Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, Global Exchange Fair Trade Cocoa Campaign Director, shared:

“Hershey’s demonstrates a commitment to children in the U.S. by funding the Milton Hershey School.  They can demonstrate the same concern for children and families in the African communities that farm their cocoa by using Fair Trade Certified cocoa for their chocolates.”

Want to read the rest?  The article is still cross-posted here.

Speaking Out About Violence in Mexico

Most of us have become all too aware of the gruesome violence that has gripped Mexico over the past year.  What is not as well known is the role played by the U.S. government and its allies in the Mexican government in the problems associated with narco-trafficking and arms smuggling.  Ted Lewis, director of our Human Rights Program, spoke out in the Seattle Times in September:

“…Any effective prescription to pull Mexico back from the abyss will require cooperation as well as introspection and substantive policy changes from the U.S.”

Read more by clicking here.

What’s Next?

Hosting a peace activist in residence, more Reverse Trick-or-Treating, elections monitoring in Mexico, Reality Tours to over thirty countries, Green Solutionaries, Green Festivals, renewable power payments…there isn’t enough room to include everything we’ve got planned for 2011.  But I can tell you this for sure: we’ve got big plans.

Julianne (left) with Global Exchange's Community Rights Director Shannon Biggs

The following post was written by Global Exchange intern Julianne Stelmaszyk:

As one of the many interns who has passed through the doors of Global Exchange, I experienced more than I expected while working there.

I had the opportunity to work on an upcoming book about the Rights of Nature with leaders and activists from around the world, calling for a completely new paradigm in humankind’s relationship with nature.

I was able to read, edit, and write about this concept and when my colleagues invited me to join them in Cancun for the COP16 UN climate negotiations, I was excited to be a part of the movement for climate justice and the Rights of Mother Earth.

As a student of Environmental Studies, in class we talk a lot about solutions to climate change, particularly the United Nations and its ability to bring collective action to problems and crisis’ at the global level.  Being someone who has only learned about the “problems of the world” when I got to college, the past few years have been a wake-up call for me.  I began to think about working with an international NGO or government where I could make a change.

Working at Global Exchange opened my eyes to another side of the environmental movement that is more than just carbon trading and buying green. Going to Cancun for the climate negotiations allowed me to make deeper connections to the work I have been doing in the office.

Panel during COP16

Before Cancun, I saw these conferences as a viable solution to climate change, but after being there I’m not so sure.  The Moon Palace, where the negotiations took place, was a good 30 minute drive away from the side events held for grassroots organizations. In Cancun, we split our time between two spaces that held panels and workshops on everything from indigenous women’s rights to the truths about REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).  The negotiations were spread out all over Cancun which hindered the potential opportunity for progress.

Activists marching in Cancun

There I was, amongst the world’s top activists who are making change in communities across the globe;  Maude Barlow, Tom Goldtooth, Bill McKibben, and thousands of informed indigenous people who know what is best for their land, but because the events were so sprawled out it was challenging for activists to fully participate.  Informative panels were held at the exact same time a few blocks away from each other. So many people came bursting with ideas and solutions, yet no one could participate in them, let alone those at the Moon Palace.

Aside from the disorganization, there was still a positive outcome in the fact that activists from around the world were gathering for a united cause.  On the day before I flew home, we all marched in solidarity with thousands of activists and indigenous people towards the Moon Palace and were greeted with a wall of Federales.  Then we gathered to hear people speaking on the change that needs to be made inside the negotiations and how the indigenous voices must be heard.  It was inspirational to be walking along side people from all over the world for the same cause.

My experience at the conference made me realize how the environmental movement is actually being capitalized…how carbon markets like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) only serve as another means to profit, another market to buy and sell while fueling the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities.  I am grateful that I was able to participate in such a movement and to stand alongside people from all walks of life in solidarity to demand change. I look forward to sharing my newly gained knowledge from my time at Global Exchange and the Cancun negotiations at my university back in Boston.

Some Global Exchange staff and volunteers are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Today Shannon Biggs reports:

Months before civil society boarded planes or hopped on buses and bikes destined for Cancun (yes, we met up with a small contingent of cyclists arriving from West Virginia) — it was clear that we weren’t really very welcome.

Far too few of us were even approved as credentialed NGO observers.  The Moon Palace conference site was miles and miles away from the city center, and those without credentials were left out in the Cancun sun.  When La Via Campesina attempted to set up their gathering site nearby, the permits were denied.

For anyone who might have thought we could ingratiate ourselves upon arrival with a heartfelt message from the people of planet Earth, those notions were quickly set straight: We were eschewed, ignored, stopped, searched, silenced, kicked out, barricaded, and banned.

Despite Bolivia’s introduction to the UNFCCC of the People’s Accord that emerged from 35,000 people gathered in Cochabamba earlier this year, it mysteriously disappeared from the negotiating table in Cancun.  Police detained caravans of campesinos and internationals en route carrying messages from communities across Mexico who themselves could not come to Cancun.  When some 20 caravans finally converged for a spiritual ceremony at the ancient Mayan temple of Chichen Itza two hours west of Cancun, they were turned away at the gates. Intense police barricades stopped the civil society march miles from the official space or the public eye.  Those who dared to enter the Moon Palace to publicly oppose the market-based mechanism of the carbon trading scheme REDD were silenced, hauled away and some had their credentials revoked.

OK we get it.  Go home already.

Last year’s talks in Copenhagen made it clear that the official United Nations FCCC process is based not on the root causes of environmental exploitation—but ‘market fixes’ to the same corporate-­led economic model and ‘endless-m­ore’ value system that have driven us to the cliff’s edge.  In Cancun it has become clear that even the modest goals set forth in Kyoto can’t stand against the juggernaut of economic growth at all costs.

There were voices of reason at the table. Bolivia’s UN Ambassador and negotiator to the talks, Pablo Salon, in taking seriously the People’s Accord and Rights of Nature Declaration that came out of the Cochabamba World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth is being called an agitator stalling progress within the official negotiations.

Yesterday, Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke eloquently about the need for a radically new path forward: “In past decades, the United Nations approved human rights, then civil rights, economic and political rights, and finally a few years ago indigenous rights. In this new century, it is time to debate and discuss rights of Mother Earth. These include the right to regenerate biocapacity, the right to life without contamination.”

But the Bolivians who came to the negotiations to represent social movements and to seriously address the failure of the market to protect the planet have been isolated, sidelined and ridiculed along with the rest of us who stand outside. As Bolivia’s official statement from this morning pronounces “History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.”

Many came to bring the message of Cochabamba to Cancun. But where do we go from here if the lessons of Copenhagen and Cancun are that our leaders are deaf to the cries of the planet?

The UNFCCC may have it right—we should just go home.   It is time to deliver the message of Cochabamba to the people who are capable of creating change, of creating 1,000 Cochabambas.

Last month with the help of Global Exchange partners the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Pittsburgh, PA became the first major U.S. city to ban natural gas drilling while elevating community decision-making and the rights of nature over corporate “rights.” They join over 125 communities who are also taking local control of their destinies, refusing to become sacrifice zones for the good of the market and the destruction of the environment.

Along with CELDF, Global Exchange is working with dozens of communities here at home to do the same thing, from Mt. Shasta CA to Big Sur to Santa Monica. Buffalo New York.  New Mexico. Maine. Washington State. Ecuador. Bolivia. In all of these places, a new set of rules is being put into place.

If we want to be heard at the UN, then we need to go home and build the revolution of change in the places where we live.   That is what Global Exchange came to Cancun for — to link arms with our friends on the outside toward building a real movement for rights—for nature and for our communities.

Global Exchange, the Council of Canadians and Fundacion Pachamama‘s new report for Cancun, “Does Nature have Rights? Transformi­ng Grassroots Organizing to Protect People and the Planet” explores the grassroots movement for the rights of nature taking root. The way forward is in our own backyards.

For more COP16 updates, check back here on our Climate Justice blog. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

Last night in the wee hours, a regressive, non-binding, dangerously unbalanced climate agreement was pushed through with “consensus” by all delegations except Bolivia. Following is the statement of response from the Bolivian government.

From the Plurinational State of Bolivia:

The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly.

There is only one way to measure the success of a climate agreement, and that is based on whether or not it will effectively reduce emissions to prevent runaway climate change. This text clearly fails, as it could allow global temperatures to increase by more than 4 degrees, a level disastrous for humanity. Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

Last year, everyone recognized that Copenhagen was a failure both in process and substance. Yet this year, a deliberate campaign to lower expectations and desperation for any agreement has led to one that in substance is little more than Copenhagen II.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.
While developing nations – those that face the worst consequences of climate change – pleaded for ambition, we were instead offered the “realism” of empty gestures. Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

Bolivia came to Cancun with concrete proposals that we believed would bring hope for the future. These proposals were agreed by 35,000 people in an historic World People’s Conference Cochabamba in April 2010. They seek just solutions to the climate crisis and address its root causes. In the year since Copenhagen, they were integrated into the negotiating text of the parties, and yet the Cancun text systematically excludes these voices. Bolivia cannot be convinced to abandon its principles or those of the peoples we represent. We will continue to struggle alongside affected communities worldwide until climate justice is achieved.

Bolivia has participated in these negotiations in good faith and the hope that we could achieve an effective climate deal. We were prepared to compromise on many things, except the lives of our people. Sadly, that is what the world’s richest nations expect us to do. Countries may try to isolate us for our position, but we come here in representation of the peoples and social movements who want real and effective action to protect the future of humanity and Mother Earth. We feel their support as our guide. History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.

For more COP16 updates, check back here on our Climate Justice blog. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

—

Around 1:00 on the last day of COP16, a dozen or so activists staged an action at the Moon Palace in Cancun to protest the silencing of civil society voices by the UNFCCC. Their mouths taped over with signs reading”UNFCCC,” they locked arms in front of the escalators leading to the closed chambers where high-level negotiations were taking place.

Wearing signs saying “Global South,” “Women,” “Indigenous,” “Youth,” “No REDD,” and “Cochabamba” – a reference to the Cochabamba Peoples Agreement that was unilaterally dropped from the UNFCCC negotiating text – the group stood their ground amid an onrush of security, as Anne Petermann of Global Justice Ecology Project, Deepak Rugani of Biofuelwatch and Global Forest Coalition, and Rebecca Leonard of Focus on the Global South shouted “The UN is silencing dissent!” and other pointed political messages.

“We took this action because the voices of indigenous peoples, of women, of small island countries, of the global south, must be heard!” they shouted, as police, media and a crowd of onlookers and supporters gathered.

Nicola Bullard of Focus on the Global South, who was standing by, said, “What we see here is a group of people representing the voices that are silenced in the U.N. process. In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen the exclusion of countries of the global south,  and their proposals ignored. We’ve seen activists and representatives from civil society excluded from the meetings and actually kicked out of the UNFCCC itself. This is a symbolic action to show the delegates here that we think this process is exclusionary, that there are voices that must be heard, that there are perspectives and ideas and demands that must be included in the debates being held in this building today. These decisions are far too important to be left to politicians. We need to open this up and hear the voices of the people and the voices of the South.”

After about fifteen minutes, the activists were led out of the building by security with their arms interlocked and put on a bus that took them to the Villa Climatica, outside the Moon Palace.

Stay tuned to this Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

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In the middle of week two at COP16, protests have begun to erupt, both inside the halls of the Moon Palace, and outside in the streets of Cancun. When la Via Campesina, the world’s largest movement of peasant and smallholder farmers, called for a global day of action yesterday, people around the world responded. Actions in 30 U.S. states and over a dozen countries resonated with the sentiment among civil society in Cancun that the way forward for climate equity and climate stabilization does not lie with the elites, but with people in their communities on the ground.

Along with La Via Campesina, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Ricardo Navarro of Friends of the Earth International, and a number of social movement representatives and government officials from the ALBA countries held a press conference to condemn the false solutions and backroom deals being pushed in the negotiations, and to call for mobilizations worldwide. The key demand they pronounced was for climate solutions based on traditional indigenous knowledge, community-based practices, human rights and the rights of nature.

Miguel Lovera of the Paraguayan delegation offered a cogent summary of what many here see as a fundamental failure in approach at COP 16: “There is a lot of talk here in Cancun about money, about chainsaws, and about plantations, but there is little talk about forests, or about the real work of the people who confront climate change everyday.”

Indigenous Rights Protest at the Moon Palace in Cancun

In a similar vein, there is a lot of talk about markets, as signified by the Copenhagen Accord, but very little talk about rights, signified by the Cochabamba Agreement. Indeed, the conference began with the wholesale removal of the Cochabamba Agreement’s rights-based framework from the negotiating text.

The word on the street is, “This is not a climate conference, it’s a trade conference.” As Anne Petermann of Global Justice Ecology Project said, “In 2003 we came here to fight the World Trade Organization. Now we have to fight the World Carbon Trade Organization.” One way of looking at the problem, writ simply, is that there is a fundamental conflict between markets and rights.

By “markets,” we do not mean the simple exchange of money, the buying and selling of things, the basic transactions of the cash economy. Markets have always been places, physical places, where goods and services are exchanged, but where other forms of social and cultural exchange exchange take place as well. In any number of ways marketplaces, like our farmers markets today, have always been strongly allied with the commons – places where, despite the hand-to-hand exchange of money for goods, other things go on as well.

In contrast, when we talk about “markets” in the climate debate, we mean financial speculation, and the creation of commodities out of things that previously have been kept out of the market: water, air, Co2, biodiversity, cultural practices; investment for the sake of profit and development for the sake of economic growth.

These kind of market mechanisms, simply put, are incompatible with human rights and the rights of nature. A significant piece of the civil society struggle in Cancun is to make sure that rights are not mowed down altogether, nor taken as an afterthought, as “safeguards” in agreements like REDD, but are central to the way forward on climate.

La Via Campesina Speaks On Rights and Their Exclusion from UN Events

Natalia Green, Program Coordinator of the Fundacion Pachamama in Ecuador, is one of many people here in Cancun promoting the Rights of Nature. “The indigenous perspective that we are not apart from nature, but a part of nature has been taken up by many people,” she says, “because our juridical system that excludes nature is driving the planet to an ecological crisis. In Ecuador we worked through the political system in 2007 and 2008 to become the first country in the world to recognize rights for nature.”

The rights of nature paradigm is too complicated to explain in a blog post; for the newest material on it, see the new report “Does Nature Have Rights: Transforming Grassroots Organizing to Protect the People and the Planet.”

Ricardo Navarro of Friends of the Earth expresses concern for promoting human rights safeguards within multilateral policies, as opposed to building policies on a foundation of rights. “In regards to safeguards,” says Navarro, “what would you say if Pinochet said he would give safeguards for human rights; who’s going to believe him, by God? It’s a bank, for Christ’s sake, why would we expect a bank to promote human rights?”

Navarro continued, “We have to understand one thing; human beings are children of the Mother Earth. We often say that Mother Earth is where we live, but it’s more than that. We are like a creature in the womb of the mother earth. So, if we have rights, how is it that our mother doesn’t have rights? Its totally illogical. Mother Earth must have rights. The Government of Bolivia is absolutely correct in promoting the rights of Mother Earth. I hope other governments start to understand!”

Indigenous Environmental Network and Ruckus Society Fly a Banner

Check back here on our Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

The Via Campesina march began today surprisingly on time, at 9am. We approached the intersection just outside the space where hundreds are camping with Via members from across the Americas to a sea of green. Green scarves, flags, shirts, hats and banners – all denouncing Monsanto’s invasion of genetically modified corn into Mexican traditional strains, and celebrating campesinos.

After walking through the streets of downtown Cancun, several hundred people boarded buses and we were moved out of town towards the COP16 talks at the Moon Palace. Throughout the week decisions were being made about the specific route of the march, and it appeared that we would be advancing towards the official UNFCCC site.

I boarded a bus with the Bolivian civil society contingent and talked with elders on the bus about their journey to Cancun and their thoughts on the talks compared to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba. They shared some cocoa leaves with Medea Benjamin (Global Exchange and Code PINK Co-founder) who joined us in the downtown march, and we were strengthened for what was to be a long day.

As we gathered on the highway to the airport (and blocked a full lane of the road), thousands joined us and the chants began. The air was filled with drumming and chants of ‘globalizamos la lucha, globalizamos la esperanza’ (globalize struggle, globalize hope), ‘REDD no! Coahabamba si!’, ‘del norte al sur, del este al oeste, ganaremos esta lucha, cuesta lo que cueste!’ (from the north to the south, from the east to the west, we will win this struggle, it will take whatever it takes!)

We continued for 6 miles until we were met by a line of riot police and behind them a heavily fortified road block.

An indigenous man carrying a ‘No REDD’ banner walked to the federal police and pleaded for their compassion and understanding, explaining that we were there in legitimate protest to have the people making crucial decisions listen to us.

We spread out onto both sides of the highway and once a makeshift stage was set up with a microphone, the crowd was greeted by Bolivia’s Ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon who reported on the attempts being made by the Bolivian government to have the Rights of Nature/Rights of Mother Earth recognized on the inside. Two brief videos of his talk to the crowd are here and here (in Spanish).

A member of the official delegation from Uruguay also spoke, as did Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, their official delegate to the UNFCC and a member from CLOC in Guatemala.

Below are more pictures from today and a quick shout out to the folks in Toronto, Canada for their solidarity action this afternoon.

Global Exchange’s Medea Benjamin, Shannon Biggs and Carleen Pickard are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Today, Carleen Pickard reports:

After leaving Mexico City at 6:30am on December 1, reporting from the road proved challenging for the caravanistas, traveling day and night crossing eastern Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula. Only one short article appeared in La Jornada, reporting only on the crossing; listing the locations where they had stopped; saying that the caravans had grown to 20 buses and the participants were well.

All of this was good news, as I read it on the plane to Cancun. Although I like to fashion myself as an intrepid traveler and can continue through anything, I wisely decided to step off the caravans in Mexico City. Fighting a terrible cold, it seemed irresponsible to take down a bus of climate justice activists. Thanks to those of you on the caravan and off that counseled my ‘self care’!

So, I arrived in Cancun on Dec 2 and by following the buses’ eastern travel with text messages, myself and a contingent of North American activists from the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance organized into a mini-caravan and met the mega-caravan in the spiritual centre of Chichen Itza. Programmed by the Via Campesina team, the caravans were to stop there and share a ceremony with local indigenous leaders.  With the en route delays, however, the caravan arrived too late to access the site and after a brief confrontation the municipal authorities provided the town square of near by Piste to the caravans for the programmed ceremony.

At 7pm the ceremony began. A Mam elder welcomed everyone and spoke about the actions of so many to protect Mother Earth. She said that climate change was a result of Mother Earth being upset at all the damage being done to her. She said that the increased storms in her community are a result of Mother Earth’s tears. She noted that under the Mayan calendar today was a celebration of Mother Earth and Women, who are created in her image. All this time a small altar was being created with offering from the earth – corn, palm leaves, water and coffee. Copal (incense) was burning and we were passed out burning candles.

IEN members from the Ponca and Dakota Nations also offered blessings and song and Casey Camp named it as “sharing ceremony with relatives”.

Before boarding the buses for one last time, I had the chance to catch up with my former caravan compa, Angela Adrar, who summed up what they had seen en route and what’s next: ‘We are moving and we are getting to Cancun, I hope that Cancun is ready.”

Check back here on our Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

Global Exchange’s Medea Benjamin, Shannon Biggs and Carleen Pickard, along with some Global Exchange volunteers, are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Jeff Conant writes for Global Exchange and is collaborating media outreach with the Global Justice Ecology Project and the Indigenous Environmental Network during COP 16. Here’s his report:

At COP 16 this week, the tone has been tense and difficult, both inside the negotiations at Cancun’s opulent Moon Palace, and on the margins where social movements, NGO’s, and indigenous peoples’ groups have gathered to raise their voices in opposition to the increasingly crushing decisions of global elites. After last year’s fractious meeting in Copenhagen, and with echoes of the 2003 rout of the WTO here still lingering, Cancun at the beginning of the week was an armed encampment. Between the armored vehicles patrolling the outside and the labyrinthine and exhausting process to get anywhere near the inside, a clear attempt has been made to marginalize civil society, if not to neutralize it altogether. The title of an article in Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper last week summed up the mood well in a play on the literal meaning of the name given to this artificial Caribbean paradise: Cancun is indeed a nest of snakes.

After a year of contentious wrangling between an immovable object and an unstoppable force – the Cochabamba People’s Agreement, ratified by 35,000 people last April, and the Copenhagen Accord, rammed through by the U.S., China, and a small group of economic heavyweights last December – and with countries left and right threatening to abandon the Kyoto Protocol like rats from a sinking ship, it is more than clear that no significant agreement will come out of Cancun next week. But, given the nature of any possible agreement that might be reached, the pertinent question may be: so what?

Coming into Cancun, the refrain from Northern governments and the media has been that there are low expectations for COP 16. From the U.S., for example, the Obama administration will send the Secretaries of Energy and of Agriculture, showing a lack of will to move forward at a high diplomatic level, even as the Wikileaks diplomatic cable scandal undermines whatever vestiges of trust may have existed in the international community. In response to these pronounced ‘low expectation’, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations pointed out in an article in the UK’s Guardian, “I wonder whose expectations they are talking about? The reality is that the talk of ‘low expectations’ is a ploy by a small group of industrialized countries to obscure their obligations to act.”

While the U.S. and other powers appear to be doing ‘not enough’ on climate change, in fact they are doing more than enough – blocking the agreements, bullying the other Parties, implementing militaristic anti-immigration policies to further repress those forced to flee environmental and social collapse in the global South, and pushing climate-readiness doublespeak through false solutions like agrofuels, GE trees, and deeply dubious policies like REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

REDD – one of the key policy proposals on the table in Cancun – is indicative of the difference between Copenhagen and Cochabamba.  Far too complex to explain in a few sentences here, REDD proposes putting a price on forests based on the value of the Co2 they capture, in order to keep trees standing by making them worth more as trees than as timber. A fundamental market-based approach to mitigating the climate crisis, many indigenous people and campesino groups, including la Via Campesina and the Indigenous Environmental Network, see REDD as a Trojan Horse concealing within its byzantine innards potentially the largest land grab of all time. Indeed, many of the indigenous delegates I’ve talked to view it as a both a violation of the sacred and the next phase of the genocide they’ve survived for centuries.

Indeed, when the U.S. negotiators yesterday proposed that the words “indigenous peoples” be replaced in the negotiating text with “indigenous groups” – reversing with the stroke of a pen decades of work to gain collective rights for precisely those peoples most affected and least responsible for the climate crisis – they might as well have offered some smallpox blankets to go with it.

With the language from the Cochabamba Agreement sacked entirely from the negotiating text, leaving little but market fundamentalism on the table, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now giving attention to geo-engineering despite the recently called global moratorium, with murky politics and backroom deals standing in for the “commitment and compromise” called for by the UNFCCC, and with armed federales patrolling the streets to intimidate and criminalize dissent, it is frankly difficult to see how we’ll climb out of the viper pit.

Check back here on our Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

There’s something unsettling about the juxtaposition of negotiating the fate of the climate in the middle of the tequila-shooting, beach-clad dancing frenzy that is Cancun.

The hotel zone along the beach is effectively party central here. Upon arrival I met up with fellow US activists in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel, across the street from Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville and Senor Frog’s.  We discuss the latest announcement that the People’s Accord and the Rights of Nature language— limited as it was — has mysteriously and unceremoniously been stripped from the official documents.  From somewhere, “Jessie’s Girl” begins to play loudly for the second time tonight, and somehow signals and end to the evening’s discussions.

In the morning it is time to get my bearings. Its easy to spot the international delegates, media and activists leaving the hotel strip for the Cancunmesse and Moon Palace—where the official UN action is, and where I’m headed—by the conservative suits and ties that clash loudly against the bright colors and flip flops of the beach revelers.

By design, getting to the official site is no easy feat and it is far off the tourist map.

A shuttle leaves the hotel zone once an hour, to begin the hour-long journey to the remote area of the Cancunmesse. This is no place for massive civil society protests, marches, puppets or rallies. You must have an official UN badge to get past the gates or be briskly turned away. Many of our colleagues did not receive credentials, so we’re fortunate to have UN observer status here.

Past security, some of the panel discussions are happening on topics such as planning for adapting to climate change, or carbon trading, though the real action is yet another security checkpoint and another shuttle bus away.  Nearly two hours after leaving my hotel room, I arrive at the Moon Palace, which on any other week serves as an exclusive golf and spa resort.

There are two central buildings—the Mayan Palace and the Aztec Palace. Both are bustling with activity, and nothing but serious faces.

In the Mayan Palace somber plenaries on carbon markets and climate financing are taking place, and though the “heavyweight” officials don’t arrive until Monday, official negotiations in motion.

Across the walkway in the Aztec Palace I begin to see some familiar faces: a handful of environmental justice activists, indigenous leaders, and climate policy folks are speaking to each other, the occasional delegate and the members of the press. Inside is a large bank of computers, where a hundred people are frenetically typing press releases while simultaneously talking on one or more cell phones.

Facts and rumors are flying around and it is hard to tell the difference: I hear that the negotiating text is new and in some areas is radically different than that which was already negotiated upon in Copenhagen.  Where did this new text come from, and by what authority does the new text appear? No one seems to know.  More secretive still, are the whispers of secret deals being made this weekend by a handful of industrialized nations — led by the U.S. — to completely abandon the Kyoto protocol.

True or not, something is very clear—the international process that should be gathering the best and brightest to move forward real solutions for climate change seem to be moving in the opposite direction.  The old paradigm thinking that has taken us to the cliff’s edge is well in effect here in the isolated and protected walls at the Moon Palace.  A cynical person might begin to wonder if more progress might be made over salsa and chips at Sr. Frogs.

I take a seat in the Aztec auditorium, where observers can watch the proceedings of various rooms on a giant I-Max-like screen. It feels like a movie I’ve seen before, and I shudder to think I already know how this plays out.

Tomorrow in a location far from here, civil society will begin to congregate, and it is here that our best hope for real climate change lies, among those working with communities, where the impacts of corporate-led economic policy decisions touch down in real places.

Check back here on our Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.