{"id":198898,"date":"2021-11-08T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=198898"},"modified":"2021-11-05T04:41:59","modified_gmt":"2021-11-05T04:41:59","slug":"at-un-climate-summit-its-people-power-vs-fossil-fuel-dinosaurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/11\/at-un-climate-summit-its-people-power-vs-fossil-fuel-dinosaurs\/","title":{"rendered":"At UN Climate Summit, It\u2019s People Power vs. Fossil Fuel Dinosaurs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

4 Nov 2021 – <\/em>The United Nations climate summit known as COP26 has convened in Glasgow, Scotland after being delayed a year by the COVID<\/span>-19 pandemic. The COP<\/span> is a proceeding of the UNFCCC<\/span>\u2013the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But the United Kingdom, hosting COP<\/span> this year, has thrown up entry barriers that are proving insurmountable for many activists and observers from the Global South. Critics point out that this will be the whitest and most privileged COP<\/span> since the first in 1992, due to vaccine apartheid and the UK\u2019s obstructive visa requirements. An estimated 30,000 people have converged on Glasgow to attend the summit, and thousands of climate justice activists, mostly from Europe, are arriving to organize outside the summit compound, demanding action.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis climate summit has been billed as the 1.5 degree climate summit,\u201d Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, which is organizing a large march and rally in Glasgow followed by a four-day counter summit, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. \u201cThe window is closing on that target, which, if breached, will spiral us into catastrophic climate change. But the reality is, world leaders, particularly from the richest countries, are coming with such weak pledges that this might as well be called the 3-degree summit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c1.5 degrees\u201d refers to the extent human-caused global warming will increase the average surface temperature of the earth, in degrees Celsius, over the pre-industrial era. The Paris Agreement\u2019s principal goal was to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). If that goal is met, the science says, the impacts of climate change could actually be halted, and even reversed. If we cross that 1.5 degree threshold, the consequences will likely be irreversible.<\/p>\n

Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, is one of those activists for whom entering the UK for the summit proved nearly impossible. She spoke to Democracy Now! from Maputo, Mozambique:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe organization of this COP<\/span> has been very deliberately done by the U.K. government to be this really exclusionary space. They know that if the progressive civil society from the Global South is not there to hold people accountable in the halls of power, it\u2019s going to be a lot easier for them to get away with carbon markets, not putting the finance or emissions reductions on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNet zero,\u201d according to a recent report from Friends of the Earth and others, is \u201ca big con,\u201d nothing more than \u201cschemes\u2026to mask inaction, foist the burden of emissions cuts and pollution avoidance on historically exploited communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brianna Fruean, a 23-year-old climate activist from Samoa, spoke at the opening session of COP26, pleading for climate action to save her low-lying Pacific island nation from destruction by the rising ocean.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the recent IPCC<\/span> report [the UN\u2019s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a consortium of thousands of climate scientists from around the world], the projections are that low-lying atolls have around a decade,\u201d Brianna Fruean said on Democracy Now! \u201cA decade is if we\u2019re lucky, at the current trajectory that we\u2019re on. For our smaller islands, it means the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced, to great fanfare, that wealthy nations would create a fund of $100 billion per year by 2020, to help poorer nations adapt to a changing climate and to build renewable-powered economies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re coming with basically one-fifth of that on the table. Of that, 80% is in debt-creating loans,\u201d Rehman said. \u201cThey\u2019re moving the goalposts on finance.\u201d He added, \u201cWe know change is coming. The only fight now is: What kind of change will it be?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Paris Agreement doesn\u2019t even mention coal, oil or gas, which is why a movement has been launched for a Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation treaty, modeled on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.<\/p>\n

Much of the energy and direction in the climate justice movement is coming from young people around the world. Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swede who sparked the global Fridays for Future student strike movement, slammed the decades-old climate negotiations at a \u201cPre-COP\u201d in Milan last month:<\/p>\n

\u201cBuild back better, blah, blah, blah. Green economy, blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050, blah, blah, blah….This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words that sound great but so far have led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises.\u201d<\/p>\n

These global youth leaders, including Brianna Fruean from Samoa and Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, bring personal, frontline experiences with the climate emergency and a deep commitment to intersectional organizing and global justice to their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s now up to people,\u201d Asad Rehman concluded. \u201cPeople power is the only solution that\u2019s left.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Nov 2021 – The UK, hosting COP26 this year, has thrown up insurmountable entry barriers for many activists and observers. This will be the whitest and most privileged COP since the first in 1992, due to vaccine apartheid and obstructive visa requirements. An estimated 30,000 people have converged on Glasgow to attend the summit, and thousands of climate justice activists, mostly from Europe, are arriving to organize outside the summit compound, demanding action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[229,686,2604,2716,401,2721,993,639,124,2338],"class_list":["post-198898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-activism","tag-climate-change","tag-co2","tag-cop26","tag-environment","tag-glasgow","tag-global-warming","tag-uk","tag-united-nations","tag-vaccine-apartheid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}