The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (13 page)

In December 2004, on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal, India, disaster in which a Union Carbide plant gas leak killed thousands of people, Andrew Bichlbaum of The Yes Men appeared on BBC News posing as a representative of Dow Chemical (which bought Union Carbide), claiming Dow would finally take full responsibility for the accident.

In 2007, Yes Men Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno addressed Canada’s largest oil conference, posing as executives of ExxonMobil and the National Petroleum Council. They announced a plan to convert the corpses of the expected millions of victims of climate change into a fuel they called “Vivoleum.” They were ejected, after which Bonanno told the press: “While ExxonMobil continues to post record profits, they use their money to persuade governments to do nothing about climate change. This is a crime against humanity.”

At this week’s faux press conference in Washington, D.C., Bichlbaum read from a statement: “We at the Chamber have tried to keep climate science from interfering with business. But without a stable climate, there will be no business.”

Fox Business News and other global news outlets carried the story of the chamber’s surprise support for climate-change legislation. During the press conference, an actual U.S. Chamber of Commerce employee entered, loudly declaring the event a fraud, but exposing himself to probing questions about the chamber’s position on climate change.

Several major corporations have quit the chamber because of its opposition to genuine climate-change legislation, including Apple, Exelon, PG&E, and Levi Strauss & Co.

The U.S. chamber’s resistance to science-based climate policy is nothing new. Career public relations executive James Hoggan is the author of
Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming
. Hoggan told me, “The PR stunt wasn’t pulled off by The Yes Men; the PR stunt is basically being pulled off by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and it’s been going on for decades.”

Hoggan’s book describes what he calls “a two-decade-long campaign by the energy industry in Canada and the United States, basically designed to confuse the public about climate change, and to give people the sense that there is a debate about the science of climate change.”

October 24 is the global day of action organized by the group 350.org, which includes environmentalist Bill McKibben. Named after what scientists have identified as a sustainable target for carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million (we are currently at 387 ppm), 350.org lists close to 4,000 events around the world on October 24.

The goal is to pressure government representatives before their departure for the major United Nations climate summit that will be held in Copenhagen in December.

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Republic of Maldives is already taking action. Last week, he held an underwater cabinet meeting, donning scuba gear and literally meeting in twenty feet of water in the world’s lowest-lying country. They signed an “SOS from the frontline” declaration, reading, in part, “If we can’t save the Maldives today, you can’t save the rest of the world tomorrow.” He will carry the declaration to Copenhagen.

U.S. government leadership will be critical to clinching a substantive deal in Copenhagen, but the Senate has not finalized any climate legislation, which essentially ties the hands of U.S. negotiators. Oil, gas, and coal interests are spending $300,000 a day lobbying the government. The moment of climate-change truth is upon us, and the professional deniers are up to their old tricks.

December 9, 2009

Take Me to Your Climate Leader

COPENHAGEN—“Politicians talk, leaders act” read the sign outside the Bella Center in Copenhagen on the opening day of the United Nations climate summit. Inside the convention center, the official delegations from 192 countries, hundreds of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)—an estimated 15,000 people in all—are engaging in two weeks of meetings aiming for a global agreement to stave off catastrophic global climate change. Five thousand journalists are covering the event.

Outside, Copenhagen has been transformed into a vibrant, global hub of climate-change activism, forums, and protest planning. In one square, an ice sculpture of a polar bear melts day by day, and an open-air exhibit of towering photos displays “100 places to remember that will disappear.”

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week designated carbon dioxide as a threat to health, President Barack Obama has said that there will not be a binding agreement from this summit. Many see the U.S. as a key obstacle to it and are seizing the opportunity to assert a leadership role in what environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben has described as “the most important diplomatic gathering in the world’s history.” At stake are not only the rules that will govern entire economies, driven for well more than a century by fossil fuels, but the very existence of some nations and cultures, from the tropics to the Arctic.

The Republic of Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, sent fifteen-year-old Mohamed Axam Maumoon as a climate ambassador. After attending the Children’s Climate Forum, he told me, “We are living at the very edge . . . because our country is so fragile, only protected by the natural barriers, such as the coral reefs and the white sandy beaches.”

Most of the 200 inhabited islands of the Maldives are at most three feet above sea level, and projected sea-level rises would inundate his country. Even at his age, Axam comprehends the enormousness of the threat he and his country face, and starkly frames the question he poses to people in the industrialized world: “Would you commit murder, even while we are begging for mercy and begging for you to stop what you’re doing, change your ways and let our children see the future that we want to build for them?”

Farther north, in Arctic Village, Alaska, indigenous people are fighting to survive. Sarah James is an elder and a chair member of the Gwich’in Steering Committee. I met her this week at Copenhagen’s Klimaforum09, dubbed “The People’s Summit,” where she told me: “Climate change, global warming is real in the Arctic. There’s a lot of erosion, because permafrost is melting. . . . And last summer, there was a fire all summer long, no visibility. Last spring, twenty villages got flooded along the Yukon. Sixty villages within the Yukon area never got their fish.”

Emerging economies like China and India are growing rapidly and are becoming top-tier carbon emitters, yet none approaches the per capita emission levels of the United States. With just four percent of the world’s population, the U.S. produces about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases. The model for the past century has been clear: If you want to escape poverty, grow your economy by industrializing with fossil fuels as your main source of energy. Yet the wealthy nations have not been willing to pay for the environmental damage they have caused, or significantly change the way they operate.

Author Ross Gelbspan says poverty is at the root of the problem: Take care of poverty, and humanity can solve the climate crisis. He says retooling the planet for a green economy can be the largest jobs program in history, can create more equality among nations, and is necessary, immediately, to avoid catastrophe.

Tuesday, between sessions at the Bella Center, in the cafe area packed with thousands, a group of activists dressed as space aliens, in white spacesuits and with green skin and goggles, walked in. “Take us to your climate leaders!” they demanded. “Show us your binding treaty!” In the rarified diplomatic atmosphere of the summit, such antics stand out. But the calls from the developing world, both inside and outside the summit, to cut emissions and to compensate countries, from Africa to Asia and Latin America, for the devastating effects of global warming they did not cause are no laughing matter.

Protesters are planning confrontations as more than 100 world leaders descend on Copenhagen next week. The battle cry at the Klimaforum09 is “Mobilize, Resist, Transform.” The people are leading, while the politicians talk.

December 16, 2009

Copenhagen Climate Summit: The Empire’s New Clothes

Denmark is the home of renowned children’s author Hans Christian Andersen. Copenhagen is dotted with historical spots where Andersen lived and wrote. “The Little Mermaid” was one of his most famous tales, published in 1837, along with “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

As the United Nations climate summit, called “COP 15,” enters its final week, with more than 100 world leaders arriving amid growing protests, the notion that a binding agreement will come from this conference looks more and more like a fairy tale.

The reality is harsher. Negotiations have repeatedly broken down, with divisions between the global North, or industrialized countries, and the global South. Leading the North is the United States, the world’s greatest polluter, historically, and a leader in per capita carbon emissions. Among the Southern nations are several groupings, including the least-developed countries, or LDCs; African nations; and nations from AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States. These are places where millions live on the edge, directly impacted by climate change, dealing with the effects, from cyclones and droughts to erosion and floods. Tuvalu, near Fiji, and other island nations, for example, are concerned that rising sea levels will wipe their countries off the map.

New conceptions of the crisis are emerging at COP 15. People are speaking of climate justice, climate debt, and climate refugees. Indian scientist and activist Vandana Shiva was among those who addressed a climate justice rally of 100,000 Saturday in Copenhagen. Afterward, I asked her to respond to U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing, who said the Obama administration is willing to pay its fair share, but added that donors “don’t have unlimited largesse to disburse.” Shiva responded, “I think it’s time for the U.S. to stop seeing itself as a donor and recognize itself as a polluter, a polluter who must pay. . . . This is not about charity. This is about justice.”

Shiva went on: “A climate refugee is someone who has been uprooted from their home, from their livelihoods, because of climate instability. It could be people who’ve had to leave their agriculture because of extended drought. It could be communities in the Himalayas who are having to leave their villages, either because flash floods are washing out their villages or because streams are disappearing.”

Both inside and outside the summit there is a diverse cross section of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, from indigenous-peoples delegations to environmental and youth groups. Their separate but connected efforts have been coalescing into a new movement, a movement for climate justice. Broad consensus exists among the NGOs and the global South that any agreement coming out of the U.N. process must be fair, ambitious, and binding, or as they put it, “FAB.”

The Bella Center itself, where the summit is being held, is said by the U.N. to be at capacity. Thousands of people line up daily in the cold, vainly hoping to get in to the Bella of the Beast. Thousands more, from the NGOs, are having their access stripped, ostensibly to make room for visiting heads of state, their entourages, and security.

Outside, Copenhagen is seeing an unprecedented police crackdown, with the largest and most expensive security operation in Denmark’s history. More than 1,200 people were detained over the weekend, and as this column goes to press, targeted arrests of protest organizers and police raids of public protest convergence spaces are being reported. Heavy-handed police tactics give another meaning to “COP 15.”

After South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke at a candlelight vigil for children, I asked whether he thought President Barack Obama was following through on climate change. He responded: “We hope he will, yes. He has given the world a great deal of hope. I have said he’s now a Nobel laureate—become what you are.”

Last week, as a polar bear ice statue melted downtown, revealing the dinosaur skeleton hidden within, a small ice replica of Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid statue sat outside the Bella Center, melting. She is now gone. Obama is making his second attempt to win a prize in Copenhagen, after the Chicago Olympics embarrassment. Unless he uses the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new determination that carbon dioxide is a public health hazard and nails down a fair, ambitious, and binding agreement, we may see Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” played out on the global stage.

December 23, 2009

Climate Discord: From Hopenhagen to Nopenhagen

Barack Obama said, minutes before racing out of the U.N. climate summit, “We will not be legally bound by anything that took place here today.” These were among his remarks made to his own small White House press corps, excluding the 3,500 credentialed journalists covering the talks. It was late on December 18, the last day of the summit, and reports were that the negotiations had failed. Copenhagen, which had been co-branded for the talks on billboards with Coke and Siemens as “Hopenhagen,” was looking more like “Nopenhagen.”

As I entered the Bella Center, the summit venue, that morning, I saw several dozen people sitting on the cold stone plaza outside the police line. Throughout the summit, people had filled this area, hoping to pick up credentials. Thousands from nongovernmental organizations and the press waited hours in the cold, only to be denied. On the final days of the summit, the area was cold and empty.