The Dominion - Ben Powless

Canadian Reflections on the Cochabamba Climate Summit

Cameron Fenton — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:06:25 +0000

TORONTO—Last month, representatives from around the globe gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia for the first World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Called by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of last winter’s Copenhagen United Nations Summit, he called “the peoples of the world, social movements and Mother Earth's defenders,” to gather for a People’s Summit. The conference captured popular sentiment, ballooning from an expected 5,000 participants to well over 30,000 from over 140 countries. This compares with around 40,000 participants to the Copenhagen summit, although "civil society" only made up half that number—making it the largest gathering of non-governmental voices on climate change.

High-level delegations also came from Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Cuba, with representatives of 40 other governments present. Crucially, however, talks were led by those in attendance, not by governments. This was a sharp distinction from any UN processes, where civil society and Indigenous Peoples must often fight to be heard, let alone have their input respected. This meant that those voices had not only the opportunity to talk climate justice; they had the ability to challenge the terms of the traditional climate debate and put forth radically different solutions.

These are reflections from Canadians who attended the summit in various capacities.

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I was invited to sit as Secretary of the Indigenous Peoples Working Group, one of 17 distinct working groups. In all of the working groups, we built upon an online discussion process that had started weeks before, and involved people who couldn’t make it to the conference. In all the working groups, Indigenous peoples from South America were prominent, which gave a particular flavour to the documents and discussions.

This was evident in the discussions that pushed for a return to principles of "living well," granting rights to nature, and building upon long-ranging debates about interculturalism—beyond laissez-faire liberal multiculturalism—while ensuring that these ideas found a receptive audience in the global climate justice community.

After prolonged debate on the various issues, our job as secretaries was to come up with a final text from each working group. Eventually, the results of each working group were consolidated into one final text, which was presented to a crowd of tens of thousands on the final day of the conference.

Indigenous peoples called for transnational corporations to be banned from Indigenous lands, while calling for the universal application of the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, not only as a protective measure for the climate, but also against the negative impacts of any climate "mitigation" projects, such as biofuels or mega-dams, which have already devastated many Indigenous communities. Indigenous groups also made a call for people to "live well" instead of seeking unimpeded economic growth.

 In the end, the participants made a call to developed countries to reduce emissions by 50 per cent within the next decade, while paying off the ecological debt owed to the countries and peoples most impacted by climate change.

Also noteworthy was the development of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, which attempts to articulate a new class of rights towards the non-human world. This compliments the proposal to form an International Climate Justice Tribunal that would be empowered to prosecute countries and companies who violate environmental agreements.

Key ideas articulated in this Universal Declaration, already forwarded to the UN by the Bolivian government, include granting Mother Earth and her dependent beings the rights to life, to water, to be free of contamination and genetic modification, while laying out complimentary obligations for humanity.

Participants also issued a rejection of carbon markets as a neo-liberal means of avoiding real emissions cuts, while privatizing the planet. Understanding these projects as a way to impose devastating mega-projects on many local communities, they soundly condemned the UN proposals on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) as another mechanism that threatens to privatize and rob Indigenous peoples of their land, while letting developed countries off the hook.  

Despite all the powerful words, the conference still faced a number of challenges, starting with an unruly volcano in Europe that kept many participants from attending. Timelines were short, resources were sparse, and sufficiently large meeting rooms far too uncommon. Three presidents even had to stay home because of domestic issues, leaving only Morales, Hugo Chavez and Esteban Lazo Hernandez, vice-president of Cuba, to attend.

The challenges internationally stemmed from the lack of attention paid to the conference by the international press, except to an out-of-context statement by Morales on the potential effects of growth hormones in poultry on male sexuality, for which he was ridiculed to no end. Otherwise, the conference was a media black hole outside of South America, with Canadian press not even showing up to a joint press conference organized in Ottawa during the conference.

In the long term, the challenge will be to use the momentum and strategies fostered at this conference to build and strengthen local movements worldwide, and force real change in government and non-governmental institutions. The other challenge is to translate and communicate the conclusions of this historic conference into local contexts and strategies. Here in Canada, reports have taken place and are planned for different communities. But it will not be enough—movements and organizations in Canada and abroad must make the space for the voices from the South to inform and lead.

The mobilization towards the G8/G20 in Toronto and the US Social Forum in Detroit cannot miss this important opportunity to advance the case for climate justice and build the connections between peoples and movements to challenge Canadian governments and corporations. With only six months remaining until the Cancun Climate Conference, we have a chance to see if we’ve learned anything since Copenhagen.

—Ben Powless

When I think back to Cochabamba, there’s one afternoon I remember. Surrounded by Indigenous families, it was very different from any conference I’d been to before, where the only "civil society" present are representatives from NGOs, civil servants and union leaders. The vast majority of people in Cochabamba were community members—individuals and families whose livelihoods are deeply threatened by the climate crisis. They weren’t speaking about someone else’s struggle, but their own—a vast contrast from the typical climate conference, and this influenced the type of discussions that were had. What I learned in those few hours was far more valuable than anything a scientific report could tell me.

In Cochabamba, I heard story after story of people’s direct knowledge and experience with climate change—droughts have ruined harvests for poor farmers; floods have displaced families; melting glaciers have led to extreme water shortages in major cities—it was all right in their backyards. People were telling their own stories as evidence of how climate change has exacerbated poverty, illness and displacement for their communities. As I listened to people’s interventions, I realized how different the discourse in Canada is. Our arguments for climate action are mostly based on science and scary predictions about a looming future, because many of us are not personally impacted by the climate crisis yet. We use numbers and statistics as evidence that we have an unprecedented crisis on our hands, but we just end up confusing Canadians along the way.

There was also a common thread in people’s stories that afternoon—of the extreme air, land and water pollution, health impacts, and military presence of mining industries forcefully setting up shop in their communities. The connection between the extractive industries and the creation of the climate crisis was seamless, as were the links to the global capitalist system, which has allowed unregulated resource extraction to ravage the people's land, their health, their way of life and their self-determination as Indigenous peoples—all this in the name of unfettered profit for the global North.

That afternoon I realized, maybe we—the Canadian climate movement—have been asking ourselves the wrong questions. We have been so focused on how to "fix" climate change that we haven’t spent enough time asking ourselves, what caused such an unprecedented catastrophe to begin with? Is the way that we frame the issues and solutions in Canada only validating the existing capitalist system that has caused the climate crisis? Are we even educated enough to know the difference between false solutions that perpetuate human inequality and ecological destruction, and the real, just solutions expressed in the People’s Declaration from Cochabamba? How often do we talk about the depth of systematic change that is needed to overcome this crisis?

It is time that the climate movement in Canada better aligns itself with the demands of the growing resistance in the global South.

The Climate Change Accountability Act has passed its third reading—an amazing victory—but the hard work comes as we determine how Canada will achieve these targets. Moving forward, we have to question how each of our actions and strategies fit into a larger struggle—restructuring our relationships, our jobs, our economy and our production and consumption of goods. Each small victory should be one step closer to transforming the overarching systems we wish to change. Each victory should bring us one step closer to the paradigm shift that we envision as a movement. If we are committed to climate justice, then we are committing ourselves to challenging current global systems that continue to exploit, oppress and kill. We are committed to standing in solidarity with communities on the front lines of this struggle. We are committed to spreading the real solutions articulated in the People’s Declaration with our families, our peers, our communities and our politicians. The world has spoken in Cochabamba and it’s time to heed the call.

As we mobilize toward the Toronto G20 this month, followed by the UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, in November, we will see if the voices of the global civil society, so beautifully articulated in the People’s Declaration, will be heard by the world’s biggest powers and polluters.

—Kimia Ghomeshi

Kimia Ghomeshi is an Iranian-Canadian based in Toronto. She works as the G20 Campaign Co-ordinator for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition.

Ben Powless is a student at Carleton University in Ottawa, and works as a climate justice campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network in Ottawa.

Cochabamba, Evo and Hugo

Cochabamba, Closing

Collapse in Copenhagen

Moira Peters — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:17:02 +0000

Negotiations, uninvitations, and what the Accord really means

OTTAWA—Unless you’ve developed a habit of only reading government press releases, you’ve probably gotten the idea by now that Copenhagen was more like Flopenhagen.

After negotiations spilled a day over the planned two weeks, countries failed to reach any sort of final deal and the proclaimed Copenhagen Accord failed to reach consensus, winding up as a reference document.

What went wrong?

The proffered reasons are nearly as abundant as the puns on Copenhagen (Brokenhagen, Nopenhagen, Jokenhagen—you get the idea).

In the weeks leading up to it, there was no shortage of chatter over the importance of Copenhagen’s Climate Conference, formally the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In the end, over 46,000 delegates would show up to the meeting, including over a hundred Heads of State.

The first cracks in a deal came during the first week of the talks, as countries from the G77-plus-China group (actually made up of over one hundred "developing" countries) forced some of the negotiations to stop until their concerns were heard. Then, the much-reported “Danish Text” was leaked to journalists and civil society members, spurring outrage from developing countries that documents were being written in secret by select countries.

The conference also saw unprecedented attendance from civil society, which comprised 24,000 of the total 46,000 participants. This number only included accredited participants permitted inside Bella Center, the negotiations venue. A number of simultaneous fora were organized, the biggest being the Klimaforum, co-ordinated by Danish civil society and open to everyone. At Klimaforum, several thousand individuals and representatives of interest groups from the world over participated in dozens of workshops and discussions, finalizing a People's Declaration that focused solely on climate solutions.

On Saturday, December 12, mid-way through the talks, an estimated 100,000 people took to the streets of Copenhagen. Carrying banners proclaiming, “There is no Planet B,” “Climate Justice Now!” and “Tar Sands Oil is Blood Oil,” Indigenous Peoples from around the world led the march.

Despite the non-violence of the event, 1,000 arbitrary, “preventative” arrests were made. Only about five marchers would eventually be charged, but the bitter smell of the security state was already in the air. Human rights organizations denounced the police’s “kettling” of protesters as illegal and the tactic continued throughout the week.

The UNFCCC Secretariat failed to adequately forecast the inability of 46,000 people to fit into a space with a capacity of 15,000. This meant that only 7,000 civilians were able to get into Bella Center on the second Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference.

During the final days of the conference, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of accredited participants would wait outside the doors of Bella Center for seven or eight hours. Many had travelled from tropical countries and found the freezing temperatures unbearable, compounding their existing frustrations about having to line up for an event they expected to attend. Some would be unable to get into the building at all.

In a sudden and surprising move, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Yvo de Boer, convened a meeting Wednesday night to announce that for Thursday and Friday, only 300 of the 24,000 members of accredited civil society would be allowed to participate in the formal negotiations. Environmental organizations, Indigenous groups and farmers were distraught that one per cent of their representatives would be allowed into one of the most important meetings ever held.

The Secretariat seemed to be reacting to a number of protests and specific incidents inside Bella Center. Some have speculated that it was simply an attempt to stifle public involvement. Regardless of its intention, this was the effect.

Thousands of stakeholders in climate justice who had come from around the world were now left to follow the negotiations from TVs and the internet in other parts of Copenhagen. In the eyes of many delegates, negotiations already in a state of free-fall were now doomed. No longer would they have an opportunity to hold negotiators accountable face-to-face, provide them with suggestions and feedback, communicate the proceedings to others, or even give the talks the legitimacy of public involvement.

The prime security concern on Thursday and Friday was the number of Presidents, Prime Ministers and Princes who arrived, joining ministers for the so-called High Level Segment. They gave flowery and sometimes impassioned speeches, as negotiations continued behind closed doors, and protests and vigils continued outside.

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Over the last two years, countries have been negotiating on a process known as the Bali Roadmap. The Copenhagen meeting was meant to finalize these proceedings. Many agreements had been worked along specific negotiations tracks, which included themes such as adaptation (to change climate conditions by infrastructure and building renovations, increase the flood plain, reforestation/revegetation, population relocation, higher dykes), technology transfer (of clean development technology or adaptation technology—green energy, and carbon capture and storage respectively—from countries that have it to countries that don't), and finance (or control of the capital invested by polluters to offset their emissions, via mechanisms such as the carbon market).

They were often imperfect agreements, but they reflected the voices of all countries, and were forged through a consensus process. In the eyes of most developing countries, they were meant to expand upon the binding Kyoto Protocol.

Indigenous people had been following the negotiations, often concerned for their very survival. Indigenous rights had become a battleground in the talks, with years of work securing minimal references to and rights for Indigenous Peoples, despite the efforts of many colonial countries to keep such pesky restrictions out of formal considerations.

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The United States ensured everyone was awake Friday morning as Obama delivered a speech reminiscent of Bush’s “You’re either with us or against us” rhetoric to a plenary hall of world leaders. He then assembled leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa (known as the BASIC Group) to hash out an agreement among some of the world’s biggest polluters in secret.

After hours of wrangling among the BASIC Group, these talks expanded to include 26 countries already selected by the Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, and a new document emerged: the so-called Copenhagen Accord. That it was negotiated in secret, behind doors closed to most countries, was seen by many as an obvious attempt to circumvent the democratic and multilateral nature of the talks up to that point.

While some in the media and NGO community managed to score leaked drafts of the Accord, many government delegates from Southern countries didn’t even see the “agreement.” Such was the absurd situation where the few remaining civil participants found themselves making photocopies of and explaining the document to delegates, in all its shortcomings.

Rasmussen convened countries around 1:00am Saturday, after Obama had already given a press conference to announce a done deal and hopped on a plane back to Washington. A number of countries rebelled in the final negotiating session of the conference after the three-page Accord was dropped like a bomb into the plenary room.

The Prime Minister tried to present the document and give delegates an hour to think it over, but countries were immediately furious. More than 14 hours later, it became clear there was no consensus on the Copenhagen Accord, with the largest resistance coming from developing and small island states. Finally, delegates agreed to “take note” of the Accord, leaving off negotiations until next year’s meeting in Mexico.

The blame game began immediately, with the US and European countries pointing fingers at China and other developing countries for holding back negotiations.

As Martin Kohr of the Third World Network made clear in a letter to The Guardian, “The unwise attempt by the Danish presidency to impose a non-legitimate meeting to override the legitimate multilateral process was the reason why Copenhagen will be considered a disaster.” International climate negotiations have taken on an air of exclusivity and distrust usually reserved for World Trade Organization (WTO) talks.

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The Accord itself seeks to collect non-legally binding pledges from developed countries. Even though it pushes for a global warming limit of two degrees Celcius, the UN’s own leaked research shows it would likely cause at least three degrees' warming.

One of the centrepieces of the Accord is the pledge that developed countries will “mobilize” $100 billion by 2020 for developing countries' adaptation and mitigation, though it acknowledges this could come from private and “alternative” sources, letting states off the hook, and limiting the direction of these resources to developing countries that sign the Accord, and not necessarily those that need it most.

However, the document can’t be simply dismissed as a collection of hot air about climate change. The risk remains that the Copenhagen Accord may be used to circumvent the UN process, which, while flawed, is the only truly democratic, transparent and fully multilateral process in the works.

According to Reede Stockton of Global Exchange, “The Copenhagen Accord really isn't a whole lot more than an aspirational G20 agreement. Given the method by which the agreement was reached, it really constitutes a cynical conversion of a UN process that gives significant weight to the voices of relatively powerless countries into one that completely disempowers them.”

Soon after the snow had settled on the Copenhagen Accord, the US was already pushing for a more limited role of the UN in further climate talks, and more decisions to be made by the world’s top polluters. Bolivia’s ambassador reacted swiftly, stating “The US admission that it wants to exclude the vast majority of the planet from decisions about climate change is deeply offensive, when the climate crisis will fall first on those who are most vulnerable.”

These are not idle threats. The G8 and G20 are coming to Canada in June, and climate change will be one of the biggest issues on the table. This means that Canada, as convener of the talks, could push for stronger climate action. This will not happen. More likely, efforts will be made to undermine the United Nations and block the path of progress toward climate justice, and Harper will try to drive the issue off the table altogether.

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The little good news to report out of Copenhagen comes from the empowerment and connections formed among the hundreds of groups and thousands of people who participated in the talks, and their renewed commitment to pushing for climate justice at home.

According to Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Indigenous Environmental Network, “The main good thing to come out of Copenhagen was the massive solidarity, which came out in the movements formed against the tar sands, with Indigenous Peoples leading many actions, and the convergence of people-power to confront the co-ordinated corporate efforts.”

“Massive solidarity” included almost daily actions by Canadian youth, environmental and Indigenous groups targeting Canada’s shameful behaviour in the negotiations, especially taking the tar sands to task. Canada’s maneuvres earned it the Colossal Fossil non-award, given to the country most responsible for disrupting negotiations.

Canada was roundly criticized for coming to Copenhagen with nothing to offer, and for being unwilling to co-operate with other nations accepting more ambitious targets. Canada was also one of the few nations which opposed protection of Indigenous rights. Ben Wikler, climate campaigner for Avaaz, noted, “This government thinks there’s a choice between environment and economy, and for them, tar sands beats climate every time.”

Maryam Adrangi, a Canadian Youth Delegate from Vancouver, sees the beginning of a Canadian movement for climate justice.

“Canada’s role was definitely disappointing at the talks, but there was also lots of anger and energy to build a movement at home with real representation of the voices not [previously] being heard, the people whose lives and cultures are actually threatened. There’s a serious need for activism, because our so-called leaders haven’t been listening or leading.”

This follows the six climate justice sit-ins by young people across Canada, occupying the offices of federal ministers and MPs, and the Power Shift Conference, which saw nearly 1,000 youth converge on Ottawa for a four-day conference focused on climate activism. Recent campaigns against the tar sands have also picked up and plans are under way around climate camps and actions at the G8/G20 meeting in Toronto in June.

If the climate talks fail this year in Mexico, or if some countries get in the way of progress, the UN process could be sidelined. This could lead to non-binding, weak and unjust agreements signed between select groups of countries, or the collapse of talks completely, as has already befallen the WTO talks.

Without a determined grassroots movement in Canada, our government will continue to be a barrier to progress, misrepresenting Canadians. Our country will be responsible for untold suffering around the world. There is little time to build this movement, for Canadians to make a last stand for climate justice.

Ben Powless is a student at Carleton University in Ottawa, and works as a climate justice campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network in Ottawa.

Copenhagen Evo Morales

Copenhagen Tar Sands Block

Copenhagen Indigenous Block

Copenhagen Reclaim Power

Return to Tarmageddon

dawn — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:04:51 +0000

An Italian company's plan to develop tar sands in the Congo has activists worried

IGLESIAS, ITALY—You’ve likely heard about the tar sands in northern Alberta. You’re probably familiar with the devastation—environmental and social—this megaproject has brought to the land. Maybe you even have a relative who lives or works there.

There's less chance you've heard of the tar sands in the Republic of Congo (sometimes called Congo-Brazzaville). Even people living in the African nation, home to the second largest stand of tropical forest in the world, have been left in the dark.

“There is almost no information available about the project. We don’t even know the exact location, and communities are angry that they haven’t been consulted,” Brice Mackosso of the Justice and Peace Commission, told The Dominion.

Congolese activists gathered at a recent civil-society meeting in Italy around the G8 do know that Eni, an Italian oil company, has signed agreements with the scandal-ridden government of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso for tar sands development, as well as for a palm oil plantation with the intention to make biofuels.

Eni has begun exploration and intends to start drilling by 2011.

According to these activists, the license that Eni obtained covers an area of 1,790 km² a fraction of the 140,000 km² total size of the Alberta tar sands.

Preliminary tests show that oil deposits in this area could store up to seven billion barrels of oil.

Eni has signed its lease agreements not with the Oil Ministry, but with the Mining Ministry, revealing that they may intend to strip-mine the area.

Experience in Alberta shows that this kind of extractive activity requires deforesting vast stretches of land and pollutes the air and sky with toxic runoff generated in the upgrading from bitumen-laden sands into something that can be used as fuel.

The Congolese activists who spoke about these issues in Italy were alarmed to learn that Indigenous communities are being poisoned by the tar sands in Canada. “It is hard to imagine this kind of thing happening in Canada, and what would happen in the Congo,” said Mackosso.

In the Congo, the exploitation of the tar sands threatens one of the remaining great tropical ecosystems on earth, not to mention the global threat posed by greenhouse gas emissions released in the production of heavy synthetic crude.

But the immediate risk of opening up tar sands in the Republic of Congo is one that Indigenous and local communities face. Will they be poisoned and displaced to make way for the oil companies?

Even asking about the project has meant trouble for some. “People have been thrown in jail for opposing oil and gas, even for just questioning it,” said Christian Mounzeo from Rencontre pour la paix et les droits de l’homme (RPDH).

Both activists talked about how in Congo resentment still hangs in the air due to past deeds of oil companies. These companies include Congo's national Société Nationale des Pétroles du Congo and French giant Total, accused of failing to compensate local people for lands and habitats that were obliterated during previous oil exploration and extraction, as well as contaminating food and water sources.

Eni has completed an environmental impact assessment, but according to Congolese activists, a review of the company's study showed that some of the predicted impacts were underestimated.

At the local level, there are demands for an independent impact assessment and meaningful consultations with Indigenous and other local communities. Congolese groups have also called for an end to development of the tar sands and the palm-for-oil scheme until all the risks are disclosed.

“People [in Congo] are afraid to speak out. We need to get the information about the devastating impacts to communities,” said Mounzeo.

Ben Powless is a Mohawk activist with the Indigenous Environmental Network and an independent journalist and photographer. He visited Italy during the 2009 G8.

Flaring in Congo

Survival is Non-Negotiable!

dawn — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:23:13 +0000

Are climate talks the new World Trade Organization?

POZNAN, POLAND– The conclusion of December's climate change negotiations in Poznan, Poland, put another nail in the coffin for our collective survival. The event brought together tens of thousands of participants from environmental groups, Indigenous Peoples, other civil society groups, youth groups, and business interests, but meaningful action on climate change was railroaded by vetos enacted by a handful of nations, including Canada.

Be it stupidity or malice, coming from a country that is 60 per cent Arctic with an Inuit culture completely threatened by climate change, Canada’s position only helped to further the marginalization Indigenous groups have faced at these negotiations.

At the conference, I was part of the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus, as a representative of the Indigenous Environmental Network. Only recently being recognized by the UN as distinct from ‘environmental groups,’ we have struggled to have our voices heard in the debates and have our rights protected. We have often had to contend with the countries who claim to represent us telling us they are selling out our future for our best interest.

Despite being the most impacted by climate change, Indigenous Peoples often have the most to share, and our effective exclusion from the talks only shows how little concern Canada has with dealing with climate change and aboriginal issues.

In fact, Canada won the daily "fossil award" for worst performance 10 times during the conference. Canada also won the overall "colossal fossil award," at the end of the conference, for winning the most fossil of the day awards.

Canada outperformed even the United States, who had little mandate to negotiate with a lame-duck President, which left the world waiting to see how things would change under Barack Obama. Canada’s performance - which included such episodes as Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice making the members of the Canadian youth delegation cry with his frivolous jokes about the environment and forcing them to take down a photo exhibition of the tar sands - should make every Canadian wonder whose interests were being represented at the conference.

To drive the point home, Canada even brought out the ‘Minister of the Tar Sands,’ Alberta’s Environment Minister, to play cheerleader for the Tar Sands.

It wasn’t the first climate conference to end without action and it likely won’t be the last. But the successor conference to the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, failed to deliver even on the most modest aspirations held to it. This puts humanity on shaky ground as nations and civil society representatives proceed to the next round of negotiations in December 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark, to come up with a plan to tackle climate change after 2012.

In 1998, countries agreed to (and failed miserably to meet) the Kyoto Protocol, which had a series of weak targets by which developed countries would reduce their emissions levels by 2012. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of over 2,000 scientists from around the world, tells us we need to cut our emissions levels from 25 to 40 per cent (from our 1990 levels, the universal baseline) by 2020 to have a chance at survival. Common sense tells us we should set our aims much higher.

Sadly, in Poznan, countries were not able to agree on any limits to the destruction we are wreaking. Survival should not be something we are negotiating, on behalf of ourselves or the planet.

The event in Poznan was held under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the same organization responsible for the Kyoto Protocol.

Consensus was not reached on a number of important issues, particularly on whether or not developing countries are to be expected to curb their development in the name of reducing their emissions.

Decisions at COP meetings are made by the few thousand representatives of countries around the world. Other participants were limited to protesting or watching from the sidelines. Resolutions are made by consensus, and in Poznan countries like Canada and the US once again stuck up for the oil companies and their friends, continuing their effective opposition to any positive action against climate change, and putting all our lives at risk.

At the talks, a colleague remarked that climate negotiations were increasingly assuming the same atmosphere that surrounded the World Trade Organization talks. Instead of civil society groups trying to influence specific decisions, they have become critical of the process itself, and many see the talks as doing more harm than good. While this view may not be universal, it is part of the growing consensus of a number of groups that make up the environmental justice-oriented group Climate Justice Now!

Among the prime criticisms of environmental justice campaigners over the years has been the reliance of the Kyoto Protocol on market solutions to climate change, such as selling carbon credits (essentially pollution permits) from developing countries to developed ones, in return for funding for “clean development” projects.

The problems are many, but central is the equity issue: Why should developing countries have the responsibility of cleaning up the mess that Western countries have made?

That many so-called clean development projects have been proven not to generate any environmental benefits (such as when dams were going to be built anyway, but received emissions credits for business-as-usual), have caused human rights abuses (forced evictions, for example, from such dams), and are opposed by local residents, should truly trouble us.

About a quarter of all Clean Development Mechanism projects are based on hydroelectric dams, provoking concern about displacement from many Indigenous Peoples who stand between governments, corporations, and millions of carbon-financed dollars. The basic methodology for actually verifying emissions reductions has been criticized by many groups, such as environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and even carbon traders, as being riddled with corruption, having negative impacts on local communities, being mismanaged, and in many cases, not having any verifiable reductions.

There is now a similar mechanism regarding stopping deforestation on the table, referred to as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). It is based around giving forests a value while they are standing, so that they have worth while they are alive and not just as furniture in someone’s living room.

The REDD scheme seems innocuous enough, until you realize it shares many of the same risks as carbon trading, since most would like it to be a credit-generating scheme. In fact, REDD goes further by dealing explicitly with the natural environment in which many Indigenous and traditional peoples live.

We know some of the threats posed by a scheme such as REDD because of past experiences with biofuels, which have devastated territories in many places. If Indigenous rights and other crucial social concerns are not incorporated, REDD schemes may similarly force people out of their traditional homelands. Think of Indigenous groups being forced out of the Amazon in the name of ‘protecting’ the forests.

There was an effort led by Bolivia and a few other governments sympathetic to Indigenous concerns in Poznan(including Panama and Ecuador, with the support of some EU countries) to incorporate some of these concerns, but this initiative failed due to the opposition of countries like Canada and the US, provoking a large protest by Indigenous Peoples and supporters.

At first, Canadian representatives denied this, but later, embarrassed by international media coverage, they went on the offensive, proclaiming Indigenous rights had no part in a climate change agreement.

This does not have to be the case. In a last minute attempt to raise the stakes and bring attention to the talks, youth staged a protest in the UN on the last day, many risking their passes to raise the banner ‘Survival is Not Negotiable.’

In the run-up to the 15th COP in December in Copenhagen, it may take a regime change in Canada to allow for the world community to come up with an agreement that is just and climate-friendly.

Already, in anticipation of COP 15 failing wretchedly, civil society groups worldwide are planning massive mobilizations around the world and in Copenhagen on the occasion of the summit. It is up to all of us to force Canada and other countries to come up with a plan that will safeguard the survival of all peoples and living things, but that work needs to start now, because by the time we get to Copenhagen it may be too late.

Ben Powless is a Mohawk student at Carleton University who works with the Indigenous Environmental Network and Canadian Youth Climate Coalition on climate justice issues.

Climate Justice Now!

Carbon Addiction

What Wente Wrote was Really Dumb – and also Racist

dawn — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:11:08 +0000

Globe and Mail columnist stepped over the line

Not normally known for pulling punches, the controversial columnist Margaret Wente today provided an apology and justification for Olympic Committee member Dick Pound's assertions that "Canada was a country of savages" a few hundred years ago.

In her article, titled What Dick Pound said was really dumb – and also true, Wente goes on the offensive against all those who were offended by Pound's comments, and makes the case that Natives were indeed savages, and that's why Canada should continue its plans to erase their "neolithic culture".

"North American native peoples had a neolithic culture [sic] based on subsistence living and small kinship groups... They had not developed broader laws or institutions ..., evidence based science ..., or advanced technologies... Until about 30 years ago, the anthropological term for this developmental stage was 'savagery'," she writes.

Until about 30 years ago, the technical term for this would be ignorance. Today, it is just plain racism to argue cultural inferiority and pretend that all Native peoples are the same. Apparently Aboriginal problems today can be explained by the fact that we have a "relatively simple neolithic kinship-based culture" trying to make it in a world too complex for us. Broken treaties, residential schools, police discrimination? Not a problem!

Wente attempts to de-romanticize Indigenous cultures. She argues that modern drugs have no relation to Native medicines. Maybe Wente should take an aspirin, a medicine derived from willow bark, a traditional medicine. This is beyond the point. She could do her homework, but she has other motives.

Wente feels it is wrong for Canadian society to feel collective guilt, since Native peoples had "absurd" spiritual beliefs, weren't ecologically sensitive, and basically were good-for-nothing. And this guilt is what's pushing us to try and protect Aboriginal cultures – effectively dooming them.

"[A] neolithic culture cannot possibly give them a future. And it's time for us to face that." She's a brave one, concerned for poor little Indians, calling for us to accept racist policies like the ones that resulted in residential schools and Native leaders in jail. No, Margaret Wente's town isn't big enough for more than one culture, unless it's based on White values.

This kind of thinking and writing is unacceptable today. Dick Pound may have made some unsavoury remarks that he regretted, but this is just appalling. Within one day, a Facebook group was created. It already has over one hundred members, calling for Ms. Wente to be fired.

Margaret Wente should not be allowed to keep her position at the Globe and Mail, publishing such virulent lies, while Mr. Pound should resign his Olympic Committee position and McGill Chancellorship. The newspaper should distance itself from her remarks and work instead to build understanding of different cultures.

I am urging people everywhere to write letters to the editors, to Wente, and to her boss, letting them know you're not buying the paper.

We have to stop allowing such racism to go unchallenged in our society. We must demand respect and understanding for all.

Ben Powless is Mohawk from Six Nations. He is currently studying Human Rights, Indigenous and Environmental Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Ms. Wente: Racism she wrote