photo: project survival media

By Pablo Solon

After 9 days of negotiations there is no doubt that we saw this movie before. It is the third remake of Copenhagen and Cancun. Same actors. Same script. The documents are produced outside the formal negotiating scenario . In private meetings, dinners which the 193 member states do not attend. The result of these meetings is known only on the last day.

In the case of Copenhagen it was at two in the morning after the event should have already ended. In Cancun, the draft decision just appeared at 5 p.m. on the last day and was not opened for negotiation, not even to correct a comma. Bolivia stood firm on both occasions. The reason: the very low emission reduction commitments of industrialized countries that would lead to an increase in average global temperatures of more than 4° Celsius. In Cancun, Bolivia stood alone. I could not do otherwise. How could we accept the same document that was rejected in Copenhagen, knowing that 350,000 people die each year due to natural disasters caused by climate change? To remain silent is to be complicit in genocide and ecocide. To accept a disastrous document in order not to be left alone is cowardly diplomacy. Even more so when one trumpets the “people’s diplomacy” and has pledged to defend the “People’s Agreement” of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Bolivia last year.

Durban will be worse than Copenhagen and Cancun. Two days before the close of the meetings, the true text that is being negotiated is not yet known. Everyone knows that the actual 131-page document is just a compilation of proposals that were already on the table in Panama two months ago. The formal negotiations have barely advanced. The real document will appear toward the end of COP17.

But more importantly, the substance of the negotiations remains unchanged from Copenhagen. The emission reduction pledges by developed countries are still 13% to 17% based on 1990 levels. Everyone knows that this is a catastrophe. But instead of becoming outraged, they attempt to sweeten the poison. The wrapper of this package will be the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and a mandate for a new binding agreement. The substance of the package will be the same as in Copenhagen and Cancun: do virtually nothing during this decade in terms of reducing emissions, and get a mandate to negotiate an agreement that will be even weaker than the Kyoto Protocol and that will replace it in 2020. “The Great Escape III” is the name of this movie, and it tells the story of how the governments of rich countries along with transnational corporations are looking to escape their responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of becoming stronger, the fight against climate change is becoming more soft and flexible, with voluntary commitments to reduce emissions. The question is, who will step up this time to denounce the fraud to the end? Or could it be that this time, everyone will accept the remake of Copenhagen and Cancun?

The truth is that beyond the setting and the last scene, the end of this film will be the same as in Copenhagen and Cancun: humanity and mother earth will be the victims of a rise in temperature not seen in 800,000 years.

Pablo Solon is an international analyst and social activist. He was chief negotiator for climate change and United Nations Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (2009-June 2011). http://pablosolon.wordpress.com/

Stand

While the official United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 17) is taking place in Durban, South Africa, thousands of people are taking action locally on Saturday, creating 1000s of Durbans, and thousands more are marching on the streets of Durban to demonstrate the people’s common determination to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Find out what’s happening around the world here.

Click, Sign and Say Reject, Don’t Just Reroute the Keystone XL Pipeline here. The Keystone XL pipeline has been called the fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.

Stay informed about daily news from inside COP17 and from the streets of Durban. Both the Civil Society for COP17 site and Occupy COP17 blog have wonderful updates and photos.

Global Exchange is on the ground in Durban! Community Rights Program Director Shannon Biggs will participate in events relating to Rights of Nature, including press conference, panels, a teach in and an educational toxic tour, march and action with the residents of South Durban.

Occupy the Climate and Occupy Earth!

TAKE ACTION
Click, Sign and Say Reject, Don’t Just Reroute the Keystone XL Pipeline here.

On the way to participate in a rally organized by the international peasant group Via Campesina in Cancun, a Bolivian indigenous farmer took some coca leaves out of his hand-woven satchel and pressed them into my hand. “You will need these during the climate talks in Cancun to keep you from getting tired or hungry,” he insisted. “Pachamama—mother earth—gives us these leaves. She takes care of us if we take care of her.” Bonding as we chewed the bitter leaves together, the wizened Bolivian farmer shared his hopes that the negotiators would listen to his president, Evo Morales, and come up with an accord that would allow the world to live in harmony with nature.

The climate agreement that was ultimately hashed out in Cancun did not reflect the viewpoint of Bolivia’s indigenous community, their President Evo Morales, or Bolivia’s passionate UN negotiator, Pablo Solon. The Bolivian government and its grassroots allies wanted a binding agreement that would force significant reductions in greenhouse gases. They wanted an agreement that respected indigenous rights. They wanted an agreement grounded in a new concept – the rights of nature – that acknowledges that she who gives us life and abundance (and coca leaves) has as much right to exist as humans.

Many mainstream environmentalists were quick to defend the Cancun agreement, insisting that a weak agreement is better than nothing, since it allows the international process to go forward and allows activists to keep fighting for better outcomes in the future rounds, including at next year’s talks that will take place in Durban, South Africa. No agreement, they suggest, would have stopped the process cold.

But we should be clear that the minimalist agreement from Cancun is totally inadequate to address the climate crisis. It acknowledges that deep cuts on global greenhouse gas emissions are required, but does not set binding targets. This is due, in large part, to the refusal of the United States—from the time of the Kyoto Accords—to agree to mandatory cuts.

The agreement sets up a much-needed Green Climate Fund to help poor nations obtain clean technologies but does not lay out clear sources of financing or how the fund will be controlled. The governments agreed to give an interim trustee role to the World Bank, a move that angered groups in the global south that have suffered at the hands of the Bank and activists who have opposed the Bank on a policy level.

The agreement embraces a policy on “deforestation mitigation” known as REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This gives polluters in the north a chance to buy carbon credits for protecting forests in the global south. Bolivia, and most organizations on the ground and in the streets of Cancun for the past two weeks, object to REDD on the grounds that it commodifies the forests of the global South, endangers indigenous control over the forests and their right to livelihood, and allows northern polluters to keep polluting. Bolivian negotiator Pablo Solon said handing out carbon credits for protecting forests makes it easier for industrialized nations to achieve their emissions reductions targets without taking domestic action to rein in greenhouse gases. “We want to save the forest, but not save developed countries from the responsibility to cut their emissions,” Solon said.

At the 11^th hour, the negotiators—desperate for an agreement—were annoyed at what they saw as Bolivia’s obstructionism. “The experts that know about climate change know that we are right,” Solon insisted. “This agreement won’t stop temperature from rising by 4 degrees Celsius, which is just not sustainable. But they just want an agreement, any agreement, so they are pushing this through.” While inside the confines of Cancun’s Moon Palace Bolivia was left isolated, outside Bolivia was seen as the superhero standing up for the poor, the indigenous communities, and the rights of nature.

Addressing a news conference in Cancun on December 9, Bolivian President Evo Morales—himself an indigenous former coca farmer–made some dire forecasts. “We came to Cancún to save nature, forests, planet Earth, not to convert nature into a commodity or revitalize capitalism with carbon markets.” He predicted that without strong, mandatory emissions reductions, the world’s governments would be “responsible for ecocide”.

I think Evo and my Bolivian coca farmer friend would agree that if we are to avoid ecocide, we cannot rely on government officials meeting in plush golf resorts. Instead, the solutions will come from organic farmers and social entrepreneurs. They will come activists who confront corporate polluters. They will come from passionate environmentalists putting even more pressure on their governments. They will come from those fighting for climate justice in their communities around the globe. Ultimately, they will come from a grassroots global movement steeped in the values of mother nature.

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.

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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.

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, 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.