I wasn’t “in the room”, but I was in the building and can very strongly confirm this statement by Lynas:
… this further strengthened China’s negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity (”equal rights to the atmosphere”) in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.
This is a huge problem! Virtually all civil society movements and activists are so eager to be perceived as pro equity and pro the rights of developing countries that they sometimes fail to see the issues soberly. The global climate negotiations is not all a neo-colonialist game, western leaders aren’t totally failing to take responsibility for historical emissions and China isn’t trumping the developed world in leadership on climate change. The sooner we realize this and start to be less ideologically colored by the history of our movements the better. Rich countries have a tremendous responsibility to chair, but so do others and the rich people in eastern China and urban India has no right to use poor people on the countryside as alibis for not taking action to stop climate change.
When the negotiations boils down to a situation where U.S. politicians refuse to take action that they perceive will deteriorate an already weakening competitiveness against Chinese (and other developing countries) industries, and where the Chinese elite refuse to take any action that they fear will weaken their grip on power and limit the growth that deliver social stability - social movements have to realize that the solution can’t be to lay the blame only on governments in the developed world. Of course many countries aren’t doing nearly good enough and especially so the U.S., but we have to put pressure on all governments and not least so in countries lacking free social movements of their own!
The time to act is now (NPR, BBC, DN (Swe), SvD (Swe))
Avaaz.org - The World in Action Dear Friends,
Copenhagen’s last-ditch summit to stop catastrophic global warming is failing; only massive public pressure can save it. Sign the giant petition below - it may be the largest in history:
With three days to go, the crucial Copenhagen summit is failing.
Tomorrow, the world’s leaders arrive for an unprecedented 60 hours of direct negotiations. Experts agree that without a tidal wave of public pressure for a deal, the summit will not stop catastrophic global warming of 2 degrees.
Click below to sign the petition for a real deal in Copenhagen — the campaign already has a staggering 10 million supporters - let’s make it the largest petition in history in the next 72 hours! Every single name is actually being read out at the summit — sign on at the link below and forward this email to everyone!
An Avaaz team is meeting daily with negotiators inside the summit who will organize a spectacular petition delivery to world leaders as they arrive, building a giant wall of boxes of names and reading out the names of every person who signs. With the largest petition in history, leaders will have no doubt that the whole world is watching.
Millions watched the Avaaz vigil inside the summit on TV yesterday, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu told hundreds of delegates and assembled children:
“We marched in Berlin, and the wall fell.
“We marched for South Africa, and apartheid fell.
“We marched at Copenhagen — and we WILL get a Real Deal.”
Copenhagen is seeking the biggest mandate in history to stop the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. History will be made in the next few days. How will our children remember this moment? Let’s tell them we did all we could.
In conjunction with the COP15 conference in Copenhagen, GlobalFOCUS organized a panel discussion on a beautiful ship - Briggen Tre Kronor - in central Copenhagen. The panel was moderated by me and Hanna Helsingen and the panelists were David Andersson from Ecoera, Kyle Gracey from SustainUS, Michaela Hogenboom - a youth representative at the UN CSD and Komalirani Yenneti from IYCN.
During the hour-long session the panelists described how they through entrepreneurship have mobilized youth in the fight against climate change. The audience consisted of about 40 young leaders and the purpose of the discussion was to bring experiences and lessons learned from best examples world wide to these leaders that hopefully will be put into practical use. The panel had more than enough experience to go around and have been working in social movements, politics as well as business and educational institutions.
A few things discussed were the importance of creating easy to understand and easy to unite behind symbols of the action and message you want people to engage in and how resistance to progressive action in older generations must be understood as a difference in experiences rather than a clash of values - most people prefer not to ruin the planet and what we have to do is provide opportunities, hope and inspiration to others in order to make them pull in the right direction. If the global climate action movement could just deliver enough evidence for people to make them see that a sustainability transformation is actually possible - the world might very well unite!
This amazing tool developed by some MIT people will keep you updated on the best predictions for global warming given the “business as usual” scenario, the scenario given the most recent bids at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen and the “what we need” scenario in green. The predictions are updated daily depending on the positions of the negotiating countries at the UN Climate Summit. Please go to the climate scoreboard to learn how to embed this tool in your blog, facebook, website, etc.
Check out this list of eight jaw-dropping technologies coming out on the market in 2010. The products are inspiring, but I can’t help feel a big sad that only one (number eight) is targeting some real problems of the world; like poverty, malnutrition or climate change, but instead target well-off consumers in the rich world who doesn’t know where to put all that cash.
Anyway, the products are cool (I mean, wireless electricity, need I say more?!) and do show the potential of new technology to revolutionize how we interact with eachother and the world around us.
The most recent attempt by climate sceptics to argue for the “world is flat/nothing is wrong” hypothesis regarding climate change is to claim that the graph over the warming of the last decade shows that global warming has stopped. Take a look at the graph below showing mean temperature variation since 1880. A person must be blind not to see the long term trend. Comparing 1998 (when a strong el nino boosted the mean temperature) with subsequent years is called statistical cherry picking, i.e. you pick the one year that support your argument. If you would reduce the variational noise by removing e.g. the top 3 and bottom 3 measurements the trend is crystal clear.
On an invitation by GlobalFOCUS, the Chinese climate entrepreneur Huang Ming recently visited Sweden (see below). During the meeting Mr. Ming met with staff of the Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. This meeting resulted in a visit by the prime minister to one of Huang Mings stores in China. It’s time that the west wake up to the reality of a new and green China emerging, and hopefully we’ll soon see technology transfer from China to Europe and the U.S. Read more here.
Who, Where, Why?
I'm a 28 years old swede political economist and entrepreneur trying to make things more sustainable. Here I write about things I do and think.
