The Dominion - Poland

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

International News Briefs

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 06:43:25 +0000

Headlines:In it for the Oil: Polish Foreign Minister ¶ Israel Occupies New Land ¶ Terrorism Suspects: Confess or Die? ¶ Dell Stops Using Prison Labour ¶ Apartheid by Any Other Name ¶ US and Iraq Briefs

In it for the Oil: Polish Foreign Minister

Prisoners at camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, their faces and eyes covered: unnamed detainees are denied access to lawyers and face secretive tribunals. photo: US Navy

Poland's Foreign Minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, admitted that Poland was motivated to support the US invasion of Iraq by the possibility of access to Iraq's natural resources. "We have never hidden our desire for Polish oil companies to finally have access to sources of commodities," he told a Polish News Agency.

Poland currently has 250 soldiers in Iraq, but the country will send 2,500 more in September as a part of a peacekeeping force. Poland has been a staunch supporter of the US-led invasion. At the time of Cimoszewicz's interview, a group of Polish companies had signed a deal with Halliburton, which has been granted multi-million dollar contracts in Iraq by the US government. US Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton before entering the 2000 Presidential campaign. (Middle East Online, Washington Times)

Israel Occupies New Land

Even as Israeli forces relinquished control of Bethlehem and parts of Gaza, the government appropriated hundreds of acres of the West Bank, north of Jerusalem. The first phase of the road map requires Israel to stop confiscating Palestinian property and to freeze all settlement activity.

Palestinians and Israeli human rights activists say Israel is taking land to further a plan for a "greater Jerusalem". The Israeli official in charge of the land seizures told the Guardian, "this is nothing special. My work is enforcing the law. I can't talk". (Guardian)

Terrorism Suspects: Confess or Die?

According to American legal sources cited by The Observer, "two British terrorist suspects facing a secret US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty." The sources said the dilemma was designed to ensure "maximum cooperation". Prisoners in the US prison at Guantanamo have not been allowed access to lawyers, and Amnesty International has alleged that many captives have suffered "severe abuse". According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon has said that it may "continue to hold the suspects even if they are acquitted by a tribunal". Military officials asserted that prisoners' status as "unlawful combatants" is separate from guilt or innocence on charges brought before a tribunal.

Amnesty International has also condemned US interrogation methods in Iraq. One Iraqi businessman claimed that U.S. interrogators "deprived him of sleep, forced him to kneel naked and kept him bound hand and foot with a bag over his head for eight days," according to the Associated Press. Other journalists have witnessed detainees "wearing only underwear and blindfolds, handcuffed and lying in the dirt 24 hours after their capture." US officials have declined to comment on specific cases.

(Observer, New York Times, Associated Press)

Dell Stops Using Prison Labour

Dell Computer has cancelled a recycling contract with UNICOR, a Washington D.C. based company that makes use of prison labour. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a California environmental group, had recently released a report calling Dell's UNICOR operation a "primitive" system that exposed inmates to dangerous chemicals. CEO Michael Dell claimed the report had nothing to do with the company's decision.

Prison labourers in the US are paid as little as one dollar per hour for their work, though contracters pay the federal minimum wage to the prison. One prison official quoted by the Daily Texan said that "the idea was started to get prisoners to pay for their own incarceration." UNICOR (also known as Federal Prison Industries) is run by the US department of justice, and offers prison labour for work in electronics, textiles, graphics, services, and other areas. Over two million people are currently incarcerated in the US.

(AP, Daily Texan, www.unicor.gov)

Apartheid by Any Other Name

Of 45 million South Africans, 31 million are black, 5 million white, 3 million colored and one million are Indians. Whites, however, still control roughly three quarters of equity in South African businesses, leaving the majority of the population at a major economic disadvantage.

The recent introduction of legislation of "Broad-based Economic Empowerment", also known as "Black Economic Empowerment", has highlighted existing political divisions in the country. White business groups claim that the legislation places too many restrictions on investors, and could scare away internation investment. Labour leaders and black business groups say the plan doesn't go far enough to create jobs and basic services for the country's poor and unemployed.

Manila Times

US and Iraq Briefs

George W. Bush appointed a pharmaceutical executive to administer US AIDS relief funds. The Council on Foreign Relations released a report which concluded that US government agencies were vastly underprepared to deal with a terrorist attack.

US official Richard Perle told the American Enterprise Institute that "we have a responsibility, a stewardship, not to turn [Iraq] over to institutions incapable of seeing this through to a successful conclusion... the last thing the Iraqis need is French statism or German labour practices." According to the Washington Post, "cities and towns outside of Baghdad are largely administered by former Iraqi military and police officers and people who had close ties to the Baath Party". UNICEF officials claimed that the US invasion and occupation has made Iraq's entire population dependent on food aid.

George Bush reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that "god told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." (Observer, Ha'aretz, Washington Post, Inter Press News Service)