> Police raid activists sleeping quarters in the middle of the night
> Social & Climate Justice Caravan to arrive in Copenhagen at 6pm
>
> Last night at 3 am, around 200 police officers raided the Ragnhildgade centre in Northern Copenhagen where activists were staying during the Copenhagen climate talks. The police surrounded the building where the activists were sleeping and proceeded to confiscate a number of tools and materials, before leaving at around 4am.
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> Tannie Nyboe, of Climate Justice Action said,
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> “It’s completely disproportionate for the police to come in at three o’clock in the morning, surround the sleeping-spaces and intimidate a lot of sleeping guests. It’s really unacceptable for the police not to use the liaison process that we set up and very worrying that this is how Denmark is being portrayed to our international guests.”
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> Lars K. Kristiansen, who has been working in the last week securing windows, building fire doors and insulating empty buildings in the run up to the summit said,
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> “The Danish authorities have been criticised for failing to provide enough places for people who are coming to Copenhagen to sleep. We were trying to meet that need, but now the police have confiscated the tools that we were using to construct those sleeping spaces. ”
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> Isabelle LaChoix, who was sleeping in the centre at the time said,
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> “People from all over the world have come to Copenhagen to deal with climate change, just like the people staying at the Ragnhildgade centre. The ‘Danish text’ has already been a source of international embarrassment for the Danish government – and now it risks more criticism by treating climate activists like criminals.”
>
> Despite last night’s events, activists will be providing a warm welcome for the arrival of the Social & Climate Justice Caravan at 6.30 pm at the Klimaforum. The caravan has travelled from the 7th conference of ministers of the World Trade Organization in Geneva to COP15 in Copenhagen, with 60 activists from the global South drawing attention to the consequences that neoliberal globalization and climate change have had on their lives. Together with local activists in Copenhagen, they will be exploring alternatives to free trade and the privatisation of resources, and new means of cooperation between Northern and Southern activists.
>
> Contact Danish media: +45 41294994
> Contact international media: +45 50669028
> Email: media@climate-justice-action.org
> Follow us on Twitter: @actforclimate
>
> To contact the Climate & Social Justice Caravan press officer – +49 17685205260
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Technology transfer is one of the four key topics being discussed under negotiations on Long-Term Cooperative Actions in Copenhagen (the others are mitigation, adaptation and financing). The inter-governmental negotiating text that is under discussion contemplates various measures for accelerating the diffusion of technologies. It will most likely create an ?Action Plan? as well as a ?Technology Body? and various technical panels or innovation centres that will prove influential in the coming years in deciding which technologies get financial and political backing. We need to make sure the right technologies get the support they need and the wrong ones are discarded. That won?t happen without a comprehensive social and environmental assessment process.
We, civil society groups and social movements from around the world, understand the urgent need for real and lasting solutions to climate change. We recognise the deadly consequences that we all face if these are not achieved. We must urgently strengthen our resilience to meet the climate change challenge while dramatically reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.
Some corporations, individuals and even governments are fostering panic and helplessness to push for untested and unproven technologies, ‘as our only option’. However we do not wish to see a proliferation of unproven technologies without due consideration of their ecological and social consequences. Some technologies being promoted for their capacity to store carbon or to manipulate natural systems may have disastrous ecological or social consequences. Technologies that may be beneficial in certain contexts could be harmful in others.
In many cases, action to address climate change is within our reach already and does not involve complex new technologies but rather conscious decisions and public policies to reduce our ecological footprint. For example, many indigenous peoples and peasants have sound endogenous technologies that already help them cope with the impacts of climate change, and to overlook these existing practices in favour of new, proprietary technologies from elsewhere is senseless.
Technologies assessed as both environmentally and socially sound need to be exchanged. Intellectual property rules should not be allowed to stand in the way. But some technologies that are being promoted as ‘environmentally sound’ have foreseeable and serious negative social or environmental impacts. For example:
* Nuclear power carries known environmental and health dangers, as well as a strong potential for nuclear weapons proliferation.
* Crop and tree plantations for bioenergy and biofuels can lead to large-scale displacement of farmers and indigenous peoples, and destruction of existing carbon-dense ecosystems, thus accelerating climate change.
* Agricultural practices involving genetically modified crops and trees, use of agrochemicals and synthetic fertilisers, large-scale monocultures and industrial livestock-rearing, present dangers to climate, human health and biodiversity.
* Intentional, large-scale, technological interventions in the oceans, atmosphere, and land (geoengineering) could further destabilise the climate system and have devastating consequences for countries far away from those who will make the decisions.
* Ocean fertilisation could disturb the food chain.and disrupt marine ecosystems. Injecting sulphates into the stratosphere could cause widespread drought in equatorial zones, causing crop failures and worsening hunger.
* Biochar is unproven for sequestering carbon or improving soils, yet strongly promoted by certain commercial interests.
In Copenhagen, a new international body responsible for climate-related technologies is likely to be created and new funds will be made available to it. But so far, the negotiating texts make no mention of the need for this new body to assess the socio-economic and environmental impacts of these technologies (which are frequently trans-boundary), or to consider the perspectives of populations likely to be affected, including women, indigenous peoples, peasants, fisher folk and others.
Precaution demands the careful assessment of technologies before, not after, governments and inter-governmental bodies start funding their development and aiding their deployment around the globe. There is already a precedent in international law: the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, ratified by 157 countries, gives effect to this principle on genetically modified organisms. National and international programs of public consultation, with the participation of the people who are directly affected, are critical. People must have the ability to decide which technologies they want, and to reject technologies that are neither environmentally sound nor socially equitable.
We therefore demand that a clear and consistent approach be followed internationally for all new technologies on climate change: States at COP 15 must ensure that strict precautionary mechanisms for technology assessment are enacted and are made legally binding, so that the risks and likely impacts, and appropriateness, of these new technologies, can be properly and democratically evaluated before they are rolled out. Any new body dealing with technology assessment and transfer must have equitable gender and regional representation, in addition to facilitating the full consultation and participation of peasants, indigenous peoples and potentially affected local communities.
To add your organization’s signature, send email with subject line:
Look Before You Leap to Francesca@etcgroup.org
To view the list of signatories, download PDF2.
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Climate Chronicle is a climate justice newspaper produced every two days of the Copenhagen climate talks. The newspaper aims to report and decode what is going on inside the climate negotiations, to report on actions and outside events in Copenhagen, and to reflect climate justice struggles that are happening in the world beyond the Copenhagen talks bubble.
Protest and Non-Violent Civil Disobedience at Chevron, California’s worst climate polluter, on first day of United Nations climate change negotiations in Copenhagen
ACTION VIDEO by Ariel López
San Ramon, CA – As Chevron employees arrived to work early this morning, they were met by nearly 100 people who gathered in protest of Chevron’s global destruction of communities, the environment and the global climate. Protestors interrupted business as usual at Chevron, by blocking the main entrance to the corporation’s headquarters, as well as two additional entrances for several hours. 31 people were eventually arrested. By noon, most of those arrested were cited and released.
The protest and non-violent civil disobedience was organized by the Mobilization for Climate Justice West – a coalition representing more than 30 local social justice, environmental justice, and human rights groups – today to coincide with the first day of the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark. Similar protests are taking place nationally and globally.
As the largest and most polluting corporation in the state of California, Chevron was targeted locally for undermining efforts to combat global warming and expanding its operations into more environmentally destructive and polluting forms of crude oil like the Canadian tar sands. And, as the 3rd largest corporation in the U.S., Chevron is using its immense financial resources to influence federal environmental policy. In the first half of 2009, Chevron spent nearly $13 million lobbying the federal government, more than twice the amount it spent during the same period in 2008.
David O’Reilly, Chevron’s outgoing CEO, and John Watson, who will succeed O’Reilly on January 1, have sharply criticized domestic global warming legislation and robust long-term targets for reducing climate pollution. Their arguments, rooted in corporate self-preservation at the expense of the health and safety of people and the planet, fly in the face of a scientific consensus that calls for rapid, drastic action to reduce climate pollution.
“By working to derail effective climate change policy in the U.S., Chevron is undermining the UN climate negotiations where other nations are looking to the U.S. to make binding commitments to reduce emissions,” said Cathy Kunkel of Mobilization for Climate Justice. “Chevron’s opposition to significant action on climate change is in line with its history of environmental and human rights abuses in communities all over the world.
Chevron’s global operations, from Ecuador and Nigeria to Burma and the Philippines, have had disastrous impacts on local communities and ecosystems. Those impacts have also been felt closer to home. Last month, the California Air Resources Board ranked Chevron’s Richmond oil refinery as the state’s single largest climate polluter, emitting 4.8 million tons of greenhouse gasses in 2008 alone.
Local residents in Richmond have been fighting for decades to get Chevron to clean up its act. In addition to global warming pollution, the refinery emits toxic air pollution that has driven high rates of asthma and cancer in the surrounding community. Rather than address the effects of its operations on the health of the local community, Chevron recently attempted an expansion of its operations in Richmond that would have allowed the company to process heavier crude oil.
According to Jessica Tovar, community organizer with Communities for a Better Environment, “Chevron’s Richmond refinery is the number one greenhouse gas polluter in the state. Now is the time to make a green transition, rather then lock in dirtier crude refining in Richmond.”
“Chevron is a bad neighbor, and the community of Richmond has suffered as a result. We want Chevron to take responsibility for the environmental damage it has caused here in Richmond and abroad,” said Mari Rose Taruc, State Organizing Director for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. “We want green jobs for Richmond and a healthy community, neither of which Chevron has provided.”
“Chevron has to know that we’re not going away. We’re breathing and feeling the effects of Chevron’s pollution every day. While we go to the graveyard, Chevron goes to the bank. We’re determined let Chevron know that they’re killing us in the process of making money. This has to change,” said Reverend Kenneth Davis from North Richmond after being arrested this morning.
Mobilization for Climate Justice West and more than 20 allied groups signed a letter to incoming Chevron CEO John Watson, calling on him to take three immediate actions:
1. Support equitable, science-based emissions reduction targets and climate solutions in international climate change negotiations and domestically.
2. Pledge not to support fake “grassroots” campaigns against national climate change legislation.
3. Cap the crude and stop expanding into heavier, dirtier sources of crude oil.
Mobilization for Climate Justice West is taking action on the first day of the international climate negotiations in solidarity with allies in West Virginia who are also taking action on December 7 confronting the nation’s fourth-largest coal producer, Massey Energy to demand an end to destructive mountaintop removal coal mining (http://savecoalrivermountain.org).
