Amy Goodman : Take Me to Your Climate Leader

Photo from NASA.

In a freshly released report on Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) stated that 2000-2009 was the warmest decade ever on record. While the WMO has warned the world about this dire situation before, this new analysis further confirms the urgency and need for us to take action. The agency’s findings arrived in time to counteract the scrutiny of global warming deniers who have been increasingly more vocal as the COP15 conference to fight the effects of climate change commenced in Copenhagen. — inhabitat

Take me to your climate leader:
Activism in Copenhagen

By Amy Goodman / December 9, 2009

COPENHAGEN — “Politicians talk, leaders act” read the sign outside the Bella Center in Copenhagen on the opening day of the United Nations climate summit. Inside the convention center, the official delegations from 192 countries, hundreds of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)—an estimated 15,000 people in all — are engaging in two weeks of meetings aiming for a global agreement to stave off catastrophic global climate change. Five thousand journalists are covering the event.

Outside, Copenhagen has been transformed into a vibrant, global hub of climate-change activism, forums and protest planning. In one square, an ice sculpture of a polar bear melts day by day, and an open-air exhibit of towering photos displays “100 places to remember that will disappear.”

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week designated carbon dioxide as a threat to health, President Barack Obama has said that there will not be a binding agreement from this summit. Many see the U.S. as a key obstacle to it and are seizing the opportunity to assert a leadership role in what environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben has described as “the most important diplomatic gathering in the world’s history.” At stake are not only the rules that will govern entire economies, driven for well more than a century by fossil fuels, but the very existence of some nations and cultures, from the tropics to the arctic.

The Republic of Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, sent 15-year-old Mohamed Axam Maumoon as a climate ambassador. After attending the Children’s Climate Forum, he told me, “We are living at the very edge… because our country is so fragile, only protected by the natural barriers, such as the coral reefs and the white sandy beaches.”

Most of the 200 inhabited islands of the Maldives are at most 3 feet above sea level, and projected sea-level rises would inundate his country. Even at his age, Axam comprehends the enormousness of the threat he and his country face, and starkly frames the question he poses to people in the industrialized world: “Would you commit murder, even while we are begging for mercy and begging for you to stop what you’re doing, change your ways and let our children see the future that we want to build for them?”

Farther north, in Arctic Village, Alaska, indigenous people are fighting to survive. Sarah James is an elder and a chair member of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. I met her this week at Copenhagen’s Klimaforum09, dubbed “The People’s Summit,” where she told me: “Climate change, global warming is real in the Arctic. There’s a lot of erosion, because permafrost is melting… And last summer, there was a fire all summer long, no visibility. Last spring, 20 villages got flooded along the Yukon. Sixty villages within the Yukon area never got their fish.”

Emerging economies like China and India are growing rapidly and are becoming top-tier carbon emitters, yet none approaches the per capita emission levels of the United States. With just 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. produces about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases. The model for the past century has been clear: If you want to escape poverty, grow your economy by industrializing with fossil fuels as your main source of energy. Yet the wealthy nations have not been willing to pay for the environmental damage they have caused, or significantly change the way they operate.

Author Ross Gelbspan says poverty is at the root of the problem: Take care of poverty, and humanity can solve the climate crisis. He says retooling the planet for a green economy can be the largest jobs program in history, can create more equality among nations, and is necessary, immediately, to avoid catastrophe.

Tuesday, between sessions at the Bella Center, in the cafe area packed with thousands, a group of activists dressed as space aliens, in white spacesuits and with green skin and goggles, walked in. “Take us to your climate leaders!” they demanded. “Show us your binding treaty!” In the rarified diplomatic atmosphere of the summit, such antics stand out. But the calls from the developing world, both inside and outside the summit, to cut emissions and to compensate countries, from Africa to Asia and Latin America, for the devastating effects of global warming they did not cause are no laughing matter.

Protesters are planning confrontations as more than 100 world leaders descend on Copenhagen next week. The battle cry at the Klimaforum09 is “Mobilize, Resist, Transform.” The people are leading, while the politicians talk.

© 2009 Amy Goodman

[Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.]

Source / TruthDig / Common Dreams

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6 Responses to Amy Goodman : Take Me to Your Climate Leader

  1. two weeks of meetings aiming for a global agreement to stave off catastrophic global climate change. About the only thing that will see a catastrophe is the economy in the US if these climate change nutjobs succeed in wreaking havoc on every business that flips on a light switch.

    retooling the planet for a green economy can be the largest jobs program in history, can create more equality among nations, and is necessary, immediately, to avoid catastrophe. The jobs programs most likely to happen after Copenhagen will be opening soup kitchens for the newly homeless and jobless. But at least they can cook the food and run the lights with green technology.

    Perhaps the most obnoxious off all the recent events, is Barak Obama threatening that if Congress does not pass his energy bill, his EPA will take care of business on its own. Ummmm. No. The EPA is a regulatory agency. They regulations they are proposing derive from authority granted them via the Clean Air Act, a law passed by congress. All congress needs to do is amend the Act to remove CO2 from the regulatory scope of the EPA.

    If you think that questions about candidate views on enacting such a change will become a litmus test for candidates in the 2010 elections, then I suspect you are right.

    It is one thing for the politicians to threaten each other. But trying to intimidate the whole country just shows how disconnected and dangerous this administration is. Far more than HCR ever did, this thuggish threat will ignite and unify moderates and conservatives.

  2. I dont know what Dospesentas has experienced, but I have not experienced censorship here.

    My comments take a very different view of how best to deal with the the issues that are disucssed here. I am sure I have irritated the regular readers. But I have been free to express my views. None of my comments has ever been removed by Thorne or any other blog administrator.

    So I have to give props to Thorne and the RagBlog for allowing my views to be heard.

  3. Thanks, Extremist. We obviously don’t censor and to suggest that we do is absurd. Dospesentas has posted this comment to a whole string of articles. I believe that this is an abuse of the privilege to make comments, and I have asked HIM to remove his comments from all of the posts.

    I ask you and everyone to read my response to him, which is after the “War is Peace : WE Must Earn Obama’s Nobel” article (http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/war-is-peace-we-must-earn-obamas-nobel.html) above.

  4. Trevor says:

    Unrelated. But let's do this with Facebook. Just trying to dictate to us what we can do and can't do. I can't even sign in because of their screwups.

  5. Trevor says:

    This is true. Millions of people know it and I feel like telling this to CTV and CBS news. They're so-called improvements are not improvements at all.. They've made things worse. I'm a daily player of Mafia Wars and I can't even login to Facebook. They forced me to go to this appliucation to celebrate a victory, in Mafia world terms. Facebook does this all the time. I can see a

  6. masterspork says:

    But a quick thought; why does it seem that people try to shoe-horn in other unrelated issues?

    For example what does socialism/communism have anything to do with the conference?

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