Keeping the oil in the soil in latin America – withoutyourwalls

By FRANK BAJAK (AP)

JESUS DE MACHACA, Bolivia — In Ecuador, the Shuar are blocking highways to defend their hunting grounds. In Chile, the Mapuche are occupying ranches to pressure for land, schools and clinics. In Bolivia, a new constitution gives the country’s 36 indigenous peoples the right to self-rule.

All over Latin America, and especially in the Andes, a political awakening is emboldening Indians who have lived mostly as second-class citizens since the Spanish conquest.

Much of it is the result of better education and communication, especially as the Internet allows native leaders in far-flung villages to share ideas and strategies across international boundaries.

But much is born of necessity: Latin American nations are embarking on an unprecedented resource hunt, moving in on land that Indians consider their own — and whose pristine character is key to their survival.

Read on…

The Missing Link: Climate Change vs Free Trade

Oct 31, 2009 By Devinder Sharma
Devinder Sharma’s ZSpace Page / ZSpace

The countdown has begun. The forthcoming UN Climate Change conference (popularly called CoP 15) scheduled to be held at Copenhagen from Dec 7-18 2009 is generating tremendous excitement. Climate change has suddenly become the buzzword. As top political leaders are getting ready to descend on Copenhagen, there is surely a thrill in the air.

The global debate, dominated by a handful of international NGOs, have managed to very deftly shift the entire development discourse to climate change. The United Nations (not only UNEP, but all its other arms), the bilateral donor agencies like USAID/DFID, and the global think-tanks like the International Food Policy Research Institute (which are no better than the corporate rating agencies) have for quite sometime been active in putting climate change on the top of the global development agenda. And they have surely succeeded.

In the process, the real issues confronting the world have been very conveniently swept under the carpet. So much so that if you don’t talk about climate change you appear to be out of fashion, feel outdated.

I am therefore not amused to see Indian NGOs, who otherwise swear in the name of poverty, hunger and food insecurity, suddenly riding the climate change bandwagon. Even dalit and adivasi issues are being linked to climate change. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tries to find a correlation between climate change and the gender dimension. This is not only true of India but almost all the civil society organisations in the developing world. In reality, they are looking forward to an opportunity to be there where the action is. I mean travelling to Copenhagen, so that they can tell their colleagues: “yes, I was there.”

This reminds me of the euphoria that the world had witnessed before the Earth Summit held at Rio in Brazil in 1992. The Indian media I remember had gone into an overspin before the Rio Summit. Almost all who wrote front page stories on the threats facing the Earth, landed at Rio. Once the Summit was over, the journalist came back to their respective countries, and the Earth was forgotten. Environment became a downmarket subject for the media.

Nevertheless, the Copenhagen Summit is expected to be somehow different. It is not only about emission standards but if you have been following it carefully, it is all about marketing green technologies and investments. I am not therefore surprised when Heads of State talk about Green Technology Revolution on the lines of Green Revolution, not realising that Green Revolution is in a way responsible for acerbating the climate crisis. In other words, the entire debate has been hijacked by the corporates to suit their business interests.

The UN says the world needs an investment of US $ 200 billion to fight climate change, which is a euphemism for corporate investment, and like proverbial cats you will see the Heads of State fighting to get hold of a sizeable pie. It is expected that the developed countries might offer the developing countries something between US $ 90 billion to 140 billion per year to be used for clean technologies. Climate change therefore offers bright business opportunities.

Just a few days prior to the Copenhagen conference, the 7th Ministerial conference of WTO is being held at Geneva, from Nov 30 to Dec 2. The general theme of the WTO Ministerial will be The WTO, the Multilateral Trading System, and the Current Global Economic Environment. Surprisingly, the WTO Ministerial is talking in terms of the global economic environment and not climate change. You will ask me so what? Well, that is where I want to draw your attention to.

The two international treaties that have hogged the limelight for quite some time are the WTO and the Kyoto Protocol. While one relates to global trade, the other is about climate change. Global trade is not only about economic growth but also seriously impacts climate change. After all, trade is not going to be conducted on bullock carts. It will mean more transportation, which means more burning of fossil fuels and therefore more global warming.

In other words, both the ongoing international negotiations work at a cross-purpose. And yet, no one is talking about the role trade will play in bringing the world to a tripping point. The reason (why it is not being done) is simple. Any effort to bring in trade in the climate change negotiations will hurt corporate interests. And since it hurts corporate/business interests, the media, the think-tanks, the international donors and of course the politicians must not bring it up.

The World Bank has, through its Global Economic Prospects report, already said that a successful Doha Round completion could generate US $ 291 billion in global economic gains. It of course did not tell us how much the world would have to suffer by way of rise in the average global temperature. So, in other words, the Doha Development Round of WTO paves a way for US $ 291 billion gain, essentially for business and trade, whereas a successful completion of the CoP-15 would mean an additional business opportunity of U $ 200 billion for the manufacturers of green technologies.

In the mid-1980s the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) had published a study, which had estimated that by the end of 2004, when the WTO Uruguay Round was expected to complete, there would have been an increase of 70 per cent in internationally traded goods as compared to 1992. This of course would mean that more fossil fuels would be burnt to transport these goods across the continents. Already OECD estimates shows that 60 per cent of the world’s use of oil goes for transportation, which are more than 95 per cent dependent on fossil fuels.

OECD estimates had also shown that 25 per cent of carbon emissions, with some 66 per cent of this coming from rich countries, is from the global transport sector. When the Doha round comes to a close, I am sure you will agree that the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation would only skyrocket. But we will never be told how much would that be, and what should the world do to usher in green trade.

We know that each tonne of fright moved by plane uses 49 times as much energy as a ship. And a 2-minute take-off by a Boeing 747 Jumbo is equal to 2.4 million lawn movers running for 20 minutes. In the US alone, there are 7,000 planes in the sky at any given time, and their number will increase in the days to come. More than the emissions standards, what is therefore more crucial for the changing climate is the restriction needed to be imposed on global trade. We need to have trade reduction mechanism on the lines of mandatory emission cuts.

No Borders groups call to action for Copenhagen climate change summit, 7 December 2009

from interactivist, 4 October 2009:

This is a call out to action to international no borders groups during the COP 15 in Copenhagen, starting 7 December 2009

Climate change is now the ULTIMATE Shock and Awe. It encompasses all of life now, and is the new spectacle. The climate change spectacle is the complete reconstruction and revitalization of capitalism and all of its domination, hierarchies, exploitation, racism, sexism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, commodifications, privatizations, oppressions, repressions, murders, lies, and greed.

Climate change will be used to terrorize us in every way we have been terrorized before, but encompassing all the single factors into one. In the name of security, Everything that living things depend is on its way to being commodified and privatized, to push us even further and possibly completely into pure Milton Friedman ´Chicago School´ of fundamental capitalist corporatism.

We can’t not just think of this as a climate issue, it is much much more. Water, air, food, and genetic life is being privatized before our eyes. And these human rights are and will be used under the climate change banner to put up borders and go to war.

Complex surveilance systems are being put in place to keep the people from below away from its privatized riches. Indigenous, small farmers and people from below are being pushed off their lands by corporations, and massive natural disasters that are making people escape to safer regions. Also, their is the prospect of military intervention in the future to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics.

Military experts are saying that climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions. Sections of the political and military establishment are planning for the consequences of climate change and are developing military strategies to deal with it.

The debate over climate change and global warming management at the UN is a struggle among the national ruling establishments for their own interests on the international diplomatic stage. While there is concern that climate change can have unforeseen political and economic consequences, these competing capitalist states have no means of seriously addressing the issue, other than making preparations for cracking down on social unrest.

So, in closing. If we don´t start attacking climate change from its roots, and seeing that the system we are in cannot and never intended to solve climate change, then we will be doomed to even more repressive and oppressive regimes, and even a rollback on the rights that were worked so hard for by our comrades in the past and it is already happening! They have divided and conquered us for a long time! But now we have a chance to come together and fight this under the same banner to stop the revitalisation of capitalism and the borders in which it creates.

See you on the barricades!

Email: climate_no-borders09@lists.riseup.net

[original article]

When Markets Are Poison Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis

by Larry Lohmann

briefing | published September 2009 | summary | PDF

Studying the financial crisis and the climate crisis together can provide useful tools for understanding how to tackle both. Overconfident commodification of uncertainty (in the form of a trade in new and complex derivatives) helped precipitate a global economic crash. Overconfident commodification of climate benefits (in the form of a trade in carbon) threatens to hasten an even worse catastrophe.

 

Mausam (issues 2-5) Talking Climate in Public Space

by NESPON, NFFPFW and Nagarik Mancha

compilation | published September 2009 | summary | PDF

Here is the long-awaited latest issue of a magazine aimed at returning the dialogue about climate change and its solutions to the “public space.” Featured are pathbreaking articles uncovering the reality of UN-sanctioned “carbon saving” projects in the metals, hydroelectric, wind power, chemicals, waste management and electricity generating sectors, as well as analyses of the political economy of the scientific controversies over the monsoon and over Asia’s so-called “brown cloud” of pollution.

 

click on logo to download full PDF

BUKO position prevailing climate politics:

“Forget about Copenhagen! The catastrophe is occurring already.”

This position paper, written by the BUKO(1) Working Group on Social Ecology, is a contribution to the debates on climate change, with a view, in particular, to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. It also seeks to contribute to a critical analysis of the hegemonic climate discourse and to the discussions about what positions an emancipatory, antihegemonic movement should adopt. In the following text, we make the point that nothing is to be expected from the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. They are part of official approaches to climate politics according to which those market forces that have caused the socio-ecological crisis in the first place are to lead us out of that crisis again.

We maintain in contrast, that what matters is not the outcome of Copenhagen, but linking the debates on “environmental” problems to approaches that are critical of capitalism and different forms of dominance and authority. Moreover, it is essential, in our eyes, to develop approaches alternative to hegemonic climate politics. We seek, in other words, to take the ecological crisis, which is becoming worse and worse, seriously while not losing our heads – and we will continue to be critical of the system.

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BUKO is an independent umbrella organization of about 120 grass-roots third-world groups, development organizations, internationalist initiatives, solidarity groups, fair trade shops, campaigns and alternative media projects in Germany. BUKO has its roots in the solidarity movements with struggles for liberation which were and are taking place in the Global South. BUKO is a forum for leftist debates and, as an organization, takes a critical position towards all forms of domination

The authors of this paper may be contacted at mail@buko.info

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