Blog
Copenhagen Day Five
I arrived from Toronto at 9 am and went directly to the apartment of my hosts, a young couple from Colombia involved in studies and the NGO movement. Fortuitously, their home is in a complex directly adjacent to the Bella Centre which is the location of the governmental talks on climate change. We could see from the third floor the police who were sparse in number at about 10 am. There is a chain link fence around the huge conference centre. Terran Giacomini, an MA student from the University of Guelph, had arrive a day earlier and was at our hosts´place waiting for me. We all took the train one stop to the alternative forum´s building in the centre of the city. That massive conference centre had a huge sign on it saying ´Klimaforum09´. we found the room in which the Ecosocialist International Network had a session beginning at 1 pm. I was on the panel along with Michel Lowy and two others. The attendance was impressive with about 300 people in and around the much too small room. I spoke about the imperative of unity between waged and unwaged workers in the fight for system change, not climate change. I outlined the pattern of production and consumption strikes in the oil and fossil fuels sector. The more these kinds of refusals to allow corporations to produce fossil fuels, and refusals to consume them coincide, the more the corporations are denied their source of profit and will be disempowered. Michel Lowy described the ecosocialist programme which involves workers democratic control, along with the mobilization of unity amongst all the social forces opposing capital and fighting for a common alternative. Most speakers thought the current capitalist crisis to offer important opportunities for the advancement of the agenda of ecosocialism. The discussion was dynamic with wonderful interventions from the floor, including especially from young people. The events involving street demonstrations were explicitly discussed. For instance, the big demonstration for Dec 16 was described as the coming together of people at the alternative forum with people inside the official meeting who were disgusted with the lack of real progress towards a climate agreement.
On Wednesday 16 December the demonstration scheduled for that day will converge on the official meeting at the Bella Centre. We will try to break through police lines and breech the fence of chain link, much like the fence used to keep out protestors at the Quebec City April 2001 heads of state meeting about a free trade area of the Americas. Then we will pause in the large parking lot, and wait to meet those people who have badges allowing them to go inside the formal meeting. The action taken by people with official status to join us in the parking lot represents not only a breaking away from the capitalist male dealers but the creation of a new forum led by and in the interest of the grassroots. We will then have presentations including the reading of a peoples´program on climate change. A draft of the program was distributed on Friday am in the Climaforum. It is entitled ´System Change - not climate change: a People´s Declaration from Klimaforum0´and is on the web klimaforum09.org. Its main points include the complete abandoning of all fossil fuels within the next 30 years combined with a 40% emissions cut over 1990 by 2020. Further, it insists on the recognition, payment and compensation of climate debt, along with the complete rejection of purely market-oriented and technology-centred solutions such as nuclear energy, agro-fuels, carbon capture and storage, Clean Development Mechanisms and the like. Finally it calls for real solutions to climate crisis based on safe, clean, renewable and sustainable use of natural resources, as well as transitions to food, energy, land and water sovereignty.
As I was arriving at the Copenhagen airport on Friday a.m., (Dec. 11) several hundred participants in the peoples´ climate forum (the popular alternative to the official climate talks dominated by corporate lobbyists and government representatives) mounted a strong protest to challenge and shame the green capitalists who were making deals with government visitors from around the world. The running protests took place in front of corporate offices in downtown Copenhagen. Smaller groups of protestors of about 100 to 150 people targeted pre-arranged sites. The police began to attack and arrest protestors. Our source saw four youth being arrested. He then joined 150 protestors who were moving quickly away from the police, only to be trapped on a bridge with police on each side demanding to speak with the leaders. there were not leaders and for two hours a stand-off took place with some dialogue between the protestors and police, and finally the police allowed the protestors to leave the bridge without arrests.
We spent the whole day at the Klimaforum, attending scheduled meetings and talking to new and old friends. I immediately ran into Vandana Shiva, who was on the way to her session. She argued that GMOs are a false solution to the food and climate crisis. After our own ecosolcialist session, I ran into Nimmo Bassey of Nigeria´s Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth) that has done such wonderful work in the oilbelt of the Niger Delta. I met Wahu Kaara of Kenya and many friends from Greece. I, exhausted, went home with my hosts to sleep while Terran stayed for the videos and music which she remarked were a great way to connect with others in the movement.
This morning we are suited up in very warm clothes and off to the demonstration. More later. Terisa.
