The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (16 page)

If anyone fits that role, it’s Bill McKibben. He’s been speaking, writing, and organizing globally to stop climate change for more than two decades. I recently asked him about the extreme weather / climate change connection:

We’re making the Earth a more dynamic and violent place. . . . We’re trapping more of the sun’s energy in this narrow envelope of atmosphere, and that’s now expressing itself in many ways. We don’t know for sure that any particular tornado comes from climate change. There have always been tornadoes. We do know that we’re seeing epic levels of thunderstorm activity, of flooding, of drought, of all the things that climatologists have been warning us about.

McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate-action organization 350.org, critiques media coverage of the disasters: “You didn’t see . . . pictures from Sri Lanka, from Vietnam, from the Philippines, from Brazil northeast of Rio, where they’ve had similar kinds of megafloods, now Colombia.”

When McKibben speaks of a “more dynamic and violent place,” he’s talking about the climate. But climate change, increasingly, can cause actual political violence. This week in Oslo, people gathered for the Nansen Conference on Climate Change and Displacement, to work on the growing problem of climate refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, warned of two threats: slow onset disasters like drought and desertification that lead to “a tipping point at which people’s lives and livelihoods come under such serious threat that they have no choice but to leave their homes,” and “natural disasters [that] uproot large numbers of people in a matter of hours.”

A principal concern is that these millions, even billions, who are or will be displaced will be denied safe haven. As Naomi Klein, a true Paula Revere, warned recently, “This crisis will be exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents.”

UNHCR’s Guterres notes that most of the climate refugees will be internally displaced within their home country. And you needn’t look as far away as Pakistan to see evidence of that. Just this week in the United States, people have been forced to flee tornadoes in western Massachusetts, flooding in Iowa and Colorado, and wildfires in Arizona. Record-breaking heat levels in Washington, D.C., and Texas are threatening lives, with the hottest summer months yet to come.

Not far from Oslo, in Bonn, Germany, more than 3,000 participants from some 180 countries are gathered to plan for this December’s U.N. climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Addressing the meeting, Tove Ryding of Greenpeace said, “What we are talking about here is actually millions of green jobs, to transform our societies to energy systems that are safe, that are stable and that are based on renewable energy and energy efficiency.”

That move, away from fossil fuels and nuclear toward renewable energy, is being embraced now by more and more countries, especially after the Fukushima disaster. Japan just revealed that there were three full nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima.

Switzerland and Germany have announced they will be phasing out nuclear power. China, Germany, and Japan, three of the world’s top five economies, are charging ahead on renewable-energy research and deployment.

The Obama administration’s paltry funding for renewable-energy research pales in comparison with the tens of billions in subsidies for the oil, coal, and nuclear industries.

The global climate is changing, and humans are the principal cause. Will we in the U.S., the world’s historically largest polluter, heed the warnings of our environmental Reveres, or will the troubled sky, as Longfellow wrote, increasingly reveal the grief it feels?

November 30, 2011

Cry, the Beloved Climate

The United Nations annual climate summit descended on Durban, South Africa, this week, but not in time to prevent the tragic death of Qodeni Ximba. The seventeen-year-old was one of ten people killed in Durban on Sunday, the night before the U.N. conference opened. Torrential rains pummeled the seaside city of 3.5 million. Seven hundred homes were destroyed by the floods.

Ximba was sleeping when the concrete wall next to her collapsed. One woman tried to save a flailing one-year-old baby whose parents had been crushed by their home. She failed, and the baby died along with both parents. All this, as more than 20,000 politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists, and activists made their way to what may be the last chance for the Kyoto Protocol.

How might the conference have prevented the deaths? A better question is, how might the massive deluge, which fell on the heels of other deadly storms this month, be linked to human-induced climate change, and what is the gathering in Durban doing about it? Durban has received twice the normal amount of rain for November. The trends suggest that extreme weather is going to get worse.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a group with thousands of scientists who volunteer their time “to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change.” The group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Last week, the IPCC released a summary of its findings, clearly linking changing climate to extreme weather events such as drought, flash floods, hurricanes, heat waves, and rising sea levels. The World Meteorological Organization released a summary of its latest findings, noting, to date, that 2011 is the tenth-warmest year on record, that the Arctic sea ice is at its all-time low volume this year, and that thirteen of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past fifteen years.

Which brings us to Durban. This is the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or, simply, COP 17. One of the signal achievements of the U.N. process to date is the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty with enforceable provisions designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. In 1997, when Kyoto was adopted, China was considered a poor, developing country, and, as such, had far fewer obligations under Kyoto. Now, the U.S. and others say that China must join the wealthy, developed nations and comply with that set of rules. China refuses. That is one of the major, but by no means the only, stumbling blocks to renewing the Kyoto Protocol (another major problem is that the world’s historically largest polluter, the United States, signed Kyoto but did not ratify it in Congress).

In Copenhagen in late 2009 (at COP 15), President Barack Obama swept in; organized back-door, invite-only meetings; and crafted a voluntary—i.e., unenforceable—alternative to Kyoto, angering many. COP 16 in Cancún, Mexico, in 2010 heightened the distance from the Kyoto Protocol. The prevailing wisdom in Durban is that this is make-or-break time for the U.N. climate process.

Exacerbating Obama’s failures is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that largely holds human-made climate change as being either a hoax or simply nonexistent, as do eight of nine Republican presidential candidates. Oil and gas corporations spend tens of millions of dollars annually to promote junk science and climate-change deniers. Their investment has paid off, with an increasing percentage of Americans believing that climate change is not a problem.

Coincident with the disappointing U.N. proceedings has been a growing movement for climate justice in the streets. Protests against fossil-fuel dependence, which accelerates global warming, range from the nonviolent direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia to the arrest of more than 1,200 people at the White House opposing the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

Which is why Durban, South Africa, is such a fitting place for civil society to challenge the United Nations process. The continent of Africa is projected to experience the impact of climate change more severely than many other locales, and most populations here are less well-equipped to deal with climate disasters, without proper infrastructure or a reserve of wealth to deploy. Yet these are the people who threw off the oppressive yoke of apartheid.

South African novelist Alan Paton wrote of apartheid in 1948, the system’s first year, anticipating a long fight to overturn it, “Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.” The same determination is growing in the streets of Durban, providing the leadership so lacking in the guarded, air-conditioned enclave of COP 17.

December 7, 2011

Listen to the People, Not the Polluters

It was no simple task. Despite the morning sun and blue sky, the wind was ferocious, and the group hanging the banner wasn’t exactly welcome. They were with Greenpeace, hanging off the roof of the Protea Hotel Edward.

Inside, executives gathered at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), an organization that touts itself as “a CEO-led organization of forward-thinking companies that galvanizes the global business community to create a sustainable future for business, society and the environment.” Down at street level, as the police gathered and scores held signs and banners and sang in solidarity with the climbers, Kumi Naidoo lambasted the WBCSD, labeling it one of Greenpeace’s “Dirty Dozen.”

Naidoo is no stranger to action on the streets of Durban. While he is now the executive director of Greenpeace International, one of the largest and most visible global environmental organizations, in 1980, at the age of fifteen, he was one of millions of South Africans fighting against the racist apartheid regime. He was thrown out of high school and eventually had to go underground. He emerged in England, living in exile, and went on to become a Rhodes scholar. Naidoo has long struggled for human rights, against poverty, and for action to combat climate change.

A colleague and I scrambled up to the roof to film as the seven banner-hanging activists were arrested. South African climber Michael Baillie, one of them, told me: “Our goal here today was to highlight how governments are being unduly influenced by a handful of corporations who are trying to adversely influence the climate negotiations that are happening here in Durban. They are holding the climate hostage.”

Later, at the U.N. conference inside the Alfred Luthuli International Conference Center, named after an early president-general of the African National Congress and the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Naidoo told me about that morning’s action: “We are not opposed to the idea of dialogue with corporations, but clearly corporations are not actually moving as fast as we need them to move and, in fact, are actually holding us back. Therefore, we think that calling them out, naming and shaming them, is critically necessary so that people know why these climate talks here are not actually going as fast as we need them to go.”

The Dirty Dozen in Durban include Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and BASF, along with industry trade groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the WBCSD, and the American Petroleum Institute. Greenpeace highlighted these corporations and corporate umbrella groups for their presence in Durban, and for their actions throughout the global-climate-change negotiating process, in undermining meaningful progress. The full report, titled “Who’s holding us back? How carbon-intensive industry is preventing effective climate legislation,” details how these corporations not only derail national legislation on climate change across the globe, but are also gaining privileged access to the global negotiations like these crucial United Nations talks in Durban.

Former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed a rally before the summit, describing climate change as a “huge enemy. . . . We are saying this is the last chance, please for goodness’ sake take the right decision, this is the only world we have, the only home we have, if it is destroyed, we all sink.” Former Irish President Mary Robinson added, “People are suffering because of the impact of climate change, those who are suffering most are not responsible, so the rich world has to take its responsibility, we have to have a continuation of Kyoto, a track that leads to a fair, ambitious and binding agreement, and we have to do it here in Durban.”

There is a growing consensus here in Durban that the United States is the main impediment to progress at these crucial talks. A consortium of sixteen of the major environmental groups in the U.S. wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who directly oversees the U.S. climate negotiations. They pointed out that, while President Barack Obama originally campaigned on a promise to lead in global climate negotiations, “three years later, America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change, but as a major obstacle to progress.”

The fossil-fuel industry exerts enormous influence over the U.S. government, and over the U.S. public, with tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and PR campaigns to shape public opinion. Kumi Naidoo, who has been jailed many times for his activism, compared the struggle against apartheid to the fight against climate change: “If people around the world can actually unite—trade unions, social movements, religious leaders, environmental groups and so on, which we saw in the march on Saturday—I pray and hope that we will have a similar kind of miracle to get these climate negotiations to deliver a fair, ambitious and legally binding outcome.”

December 14, 2011

Climate Apartheid

“You’ve been negotiating all my life,” Anjali Appadurai told the plenary session of the U.N.’s seventeenth “Conference of Parties,” or COP 17, the official title of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. Appadurai, a student at the ecologically focused College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, addressed the plenary as part of the youth delegation. She continued: “In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises. But you’ve heard this all before.”