WHAT NOW FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE? Social Movement Strategies for the Final Year of Struggle over the Next Universal Climate Treaty First published at COP 20, Lima, Peru - December 5, 2014 Revised February 15, 2015 Report compiled from the ranks of climate justice advocates and groups by the International Institute of Climate Action & Theory www.iicat.org AUTHORS: Patrick Bond, Michael Dorsey, John Foran, Pascoe Sabido, Jim Shultz, Nathan Thanki, Brian Tokar, Richard Widick, Emily Williams, and Leehi Yona Objectives: > to increase climate justice participation and influence both inside the UN’s 2015 treaty process and outside, at the local frontlines of resistance to planet-killing twentieth-century fossil fuel development; > to put climate justice forces on the record, on the eve of adoption of the next universal climate change treaty, which as currently unfolding promises to institute a neoliberal path toward global climate apartheid, defaunation, and ecocide at the hands of entrenched fossil fuel interests, both private corporations and state-owned oil, gas, and energy companies. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Special thanks to The Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, at the University of California, for their generous support from the earliest stages of this project; the staff at the Department of Sociology at the University of California, for their logistical support over the last four years, during which John Foran and Richard Widick have represented the University of California as Official Observer Delegates to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention Conferences of the Parties; and Robert Monroe, Communications Officer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, for his excellent yearly stewardship of the University of California’s official delegation of Observers to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties. COVER IMAGE: View from the Hilton International Hotel, Caracas, VZ. Richard Widick, 2006. Seattle, 1999 — Copenhagen, 2009 — Durban, 2011 Table of Contents Problem/Proposals 2 Appendix: Climate Justice Manifestos 66 John Foran and Richard Widick Compiled by Richard Widick and John Foran Introduction 5 The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, Richard Widick and John Foran Durban Group for Climate Justice, Durban (October 2004) Is the Climate Justice Movement 9 Ready to Scale-jump Our Politics? Founding Statement, Climate Justice Now! Bali (No, not yet – but we’ll need to, sooner (December 14, 2007) than later, with Latin American counterpower) What does Climate Justice Mean in Europe? Patrick Bond Climate Justice Alliance (February 2010) Fear and Loathing of Carbon Markets: 13 A Decade and Counting of Climate People’s Agreement, World People’s Justice Agitation Conference on Climate Change and the Rights Michael K. Dorsey of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia (April 2010) What Now for Climate Justice? 18 Re-Imagining Radical Climate Justice Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother John Foran Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia (April 27, 2010) Protecting Climate Policy from Dirty Energy Lobbying: A Working Strategy Document The Margarita Declaration on Climate Pascoe Sabido 36 Change, Margarita Island, Venezuela (July 18, 2014) New Movement Strategies 43 Jim Shultz A Zero Emissions Manifesto for the Climate Justice Movement Integrate and Escalate 53 (September 2014) Nathan Thanki Declaration of the Ecosocialist International On the Evolution of Climate Justice 56 Network before COP20 in Lima, Peru Brian Tokar (December 2014) Global Activism and Global 58 Negotiations: Stop Accepting Climate Contributors 113 Change, Get Active! Emily Williams Vision, Hope, and Power: 63 A Contribution to the Discussion Leehi Yona 1 Problem Proposals The unfolding climate crisis is defined by Develop a coordinated “inside/outside” constantly rising greenhouse gas emissions, strategy for climate justice politics and social accelerating climate change, and the ongoing movements in relation to the UN climate failure of international/UN and domestic/state talks, based, as we see it, on: climate policy to: 1) Encouraging and participating in globally- 1) raise the ambition of agreed climate policy oriented but locally-grounded scholarship, initiatives to the level that basic climate class and environmental politics, and social science indicates is required to limit average movement struggles linking organic, site- global temperature increase to 1.5° degrees specific, bottom-up resistance campaigns Celsius (the Cochabamba target), not +2°C against carbon mal-development, with simple (the current UNFCCC target), and not +3 °C messaging aimed at… (the implicit Obama-Jinping target) – while acknowledging business as usual is already 2) forcing developed, principal emitter states hurtling us toward a +4°C world (the number (namely, US, China and the European Union, associated with the 2012 World Bank report and increasingly Brazil, Russia, India, Canada, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4° World Must Be Australia, and South Africa) to put forward Avoided)1; strong domestic policy that enables and promotes higher ambition at the UN climate 2) establish an environmentally and socially talks, especially as these concern the next just and democratic international climate universal climate treaty, both in its substance policy process that garners sufficient popular and in the ratification struggles to follow. and civil society representation to reflect the true depth of long-term, inter-generational Concretely, 1 and 2 mean participating in public/common interest; and local struggles; being the voices in local struggles that push for linkage across 3) reflexively acknowledge the ongoing municipal, state, regional, and member state failure, over 20 years, of carbon trading climate justice constituencies; arguing that schemes to raise the price of greenhouse now is the time for direct action civil pollution to anywhere near the level disobedience against fossil fuel mal- necessary to incentivize the dramatic shift to development, and that the message of these 100% renewables required by the UNFCCC’s civil disobedience campaigns must be globally deep decarbonization mandate, and the focused, while explicitly aimed at developing related failure to adequately explore home-state domestic political will to: a) put a alternative approaches such as direct carbon global price on carbon (using regulation and taxation and public investment in renewable taxes, not markets); b) raise ambition at the energy. UN climate talks (i.e., raise the targets to indicate 50 percent collective reductions by 2025 and 95 percent by 2040); c) ramp up 1 http://www- “additional” (i.e. not already counted or wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WD committed) and democratically accountable SP/IB/2012/12/20/000356161_20121220072749/Rendered/ PDF/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf public financing of all the UNFCCC climate 2 funds (Green Climate Fund, Special sustainable development and the well-being Adaptation Fund, Loss and Damage of peoples. Mechanism), and d) transform intellectual property rights to drive sustainable 6) Ideological Struggle within the leadership technology transfers. of climate social movements in favor of neutralizing the forces of neoliberalism that 3) Creating a Global Public Council on are presently blocking domestic US climate Environmental Economic Truth and policy and in general inhibiting ambition Reconciliation (or some such-named entity) within the UN policy apparatus. charged with open and transparent evaluation of UNFCCC participation, Concretely this means, a) In the US, arguing publication, and public commentary for constant attack on Republican denialism produced by corporations, civil society and and the “climate lies” industry/funding social movements, and member state apparatus (again the Koch example); b) again, governments;2 developing a climate truth commission/court, wherein an independent body investigates 4) Mobilizing support for and increasing the the claims of the carbon capitalists and visibility of public scholarship in the service of traders, evaluating the carbon markets and climate justice politics, by means of critical market-based solutions already instituted and analysis of: or/planned by the UN; c) developing a left front within climate justice politics unified a) the power and politics of the one against false market-based solutions. percenters; i.e., elevation of class politics to the front of the environmental/climate 7) Continuing to develop climate justice justice agenda; philosophy, politics, and policy initiatives toward the horizon of global environmental b) carbon markets and state subsidies to and social justice, and away from global social fossil fuel corporations and state oil and environmental apartheid. companies; Basic principles of Climate Justice philosophy c) the climate skepticism industry; and politics: all people – poor and rich – have an equal right to participate in climate politics – for example, by raising the example of at every scale, and to share the social wealth the Koch brothers to yet higher and more and security afforded by sustainable transparent visibility and using the case to development, as dictated by the carbon publicize the political malevolence of the budget afforded by the natural limits of one percent. planet earth, as determined by agreed 5) Globalizing the university fossil fuel climate science. divestment movement in ways that recognize the need and right of the global South for 8) Further