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Copenhagen Day Seven
13 December 2009—Sunday was the day of taking over the docks at Copenhagen´s internationally important port. However, the demonstrators who gathered at 10 am were confronted as they approached the dock area by flanks of police who charged, arresting about 200 protestors and scattering the rest. Meanwhile, the formal meetings at the Bella Centre were closed for Sunday while many delegates attended a day´long conference on forests and climate change. This conference focused on how to conflate the concepts of plantation and natural forest, refusing a definition of each. The delegates were mainly concerned about using forests (read - plantations of trees) as opportunities for polluters to pollute more through claiming to offset emissions by ownership claims to the forests. While the European Union countries do not allow trade of emission credits for so´called forests inside Europe because the EU governments recognize the impossibility of calculating carbon absorption by these tree plantations, amazingly, these governments do allow such trading to occur between EU parties and those outside the EU. The US in contrast has no such limitations nationally and favors all trade anywhere. As Vandana Shiva pointed out in her session on Sunday am at the popular Klimaforum, these forest policies are totally incoherent in part because they refuse to define forests versus monocrop plantations on the one hand, and on the other, they refuse to recognize that there is no way to calculate the amount of carbon produced or absorbed by the expansion of tree plantations.
At the Klimaforum Maude Barlow reported that she and others in the Council of Canadians delegation along with other friends did stay with the demonstrators who were being attacked by police at the tail end of the huge march on Saturday. She pointed out that it was cruel to force hundreds of ordinary people of all ages to sit on the cold pavement on a very cold day for many hours, then arrest them with no charge under the special new law introduced by the Danish government as a repression measure just before the climate talks, and then hold them for some hours in detention. This attack on freedom of expression, she and other speakers said, was the context in which governments and armies of corporate lobbyists were trying to craft and impose a form of green capitalism that guarantees the further destruction of the climate and indeed of all life. We learned too that some 900 demonstrators were arrested on Saturday and that almost all of them were released by Sunday am. Some ten to twenty of those arrested Saturday remained in jail as of Sunday noon. But of course there were the 200 more jailed by that time resulting from the Sunday am dock demonstration.
At the first session we attended at the Klimaforum on Sunday am, we heard from several European scientists and activists who are seeking to expand no´go zones for GMO crops while promoting food sovereignty. There are now several dozen municipal regions in Europe that are declared GMO free. Very sophisticated planning for local supplies of food that is organic were presented. This work is especially advanced in Tuscany, Italy. Shiva, who consults for some European governments on GMOs and small farming, explained in her characteristically clear fashion, the problems with GMOs. Amongst these are the claims of Monsanto and other corporations that are profiting from GMOs. These firms espouse a false ´science´ that claims to produce drought resistant crops (or seed with other desirable features such as being salt resistant) whereas the truth is that the small farmers and indigenous peoples have selected seed over the centuries that have these special features and through biopiracy, the big corporations have acquired and, in many instances, privatized these seeds. Genetic engineering, Shiva explained, has not produced drought or salt resistance but has only inserted for instance, a Roundup ready, patent-ready gene.
In the next session George Monbiot rather humorously explained the total irrationality of the mathematical logic behind the favored emissions targets of the North (especially the EU and the USA) and what this means for the South. He pointed out that this irrationality placed a huge burden on the South while requiring very little change in the North. He then proposed that two additional planets be brought into the calculations, to correct the irrationality of the delegates at the climate talks. In the same session the brilliant Larry Lohman explained why carbon trade is an absurdity with profit and not emissions reductions as its objective. He attributed the formal conference delegates preoccuption with molecules of carbon to fetishism and obsession. This fit well with the popular forum stance that ‘we demand system change not climate change’! It further damned the formal negotiators reductionist methodology and mindset that seeks to isolate carbon molecules and quantify them for commodification purposes (leading to profits for speculators in the climate disasters that are upon us). Earlier this positivism was roundly critiqued by Vandana Shiva who proposed instead an integrated, holistic approach to the indivisible issues of emissions, water, soil, fuel, food and community.
Wahu Kaara of Drop the Debt from Kenya made a powerful intervention from the floor in this session on carbon trade. She condemned the industrial North for centuries of exploitation of Africa. She pointed out that the current carbon colonialism was part and parcel of the historical relationship of corporate power to African peoples and resources. She invited Northern activists to stand up to their governments and corporations that are trying through force and deceit to impose further enclosures on Africans. The panelists agreed fully with her and the media mobbed her after her rousing intervention, seeking interviews.
The speakers in the carbon trade panel also insisted on the need to shut down the Canadian tar sands exploitation, to loud applause.
The Via Campesina carried out their own demonstration against agribusiness around noon. Then back at the Klimaforum centre there was a cultural extravaganza with a young woman hip-hop artist of South Asian descent from the US and Nnimmo Bassey from Nigeria featuring his poetry. Bassey got audience participation with his mobilizing poem that has a call and response quality whereby says ´we thought it was oil’ and the audience responds, ´but it was blood´. Contributors from all over the world entertained and informed hundreds of us. Meanwhile, other hundreds carried on activities of a more informal nature in the great facilities that are available in the centre, which is built around a huge, round, beautiful indoor swimming pool. I was especially struck by the very many fathers who were there on the Sunday with their infants and small children, happily caring for them. Often one would see two or three fathers together each with their baby. African women with whom I spoke also marveled at this display of fatherhood and the extent to which dads seemed comfortable and happy with the opportunities they enjoyed to care for their children in this direct way. The social spaces of the Klimaforum were full of youth sitting in circles on the floor, talking, eating and presenting skits, performances of all kinds or just sleeping, propped against each other or the walls. Everywhere people were participating in teach-ins or plugging in their laptops, doing emails, blogging, producing press reports and planning new activities.
Then we got text messages indicating that a key planning meeting for the shut down on Wednesday the 16th of the formal meeting at the Bella Centre, would take place at 7 pm. We attended. The meeting was not videoed or recorded and was semi-confidential, with the recognition that it was impossible to have real confidentiality. The general point of the meeting was to identify five working groups responsible for aspects of the attempt to first, shut down the formal meeting at least for the day and second, to hold a peoples assembly on or near the formal Bella Centre parking lot with delegates from inside and a number of participants from the Klimaforum. The idea of this peoples assembly is to quickly generate statements about problems, solutions and actions with respect to climate change and propose these as the outcome of the popular global will with respect to addressing system change not climate change. The planning meeting participants received a flyer that invited formal meeting delegates to walk out at noon on the 16th to show their disgust with the no action formal talks. At this planning meeting about half the participants have passes to the Bella Cnetre and were reporting on the numbers and logistics likely to be involved in the walkout. It was clear that the security for Wednesday was much stricter in the Bella Centre than in the earlier days of the formal meetings. This is in part because the heads of state are arriving on the 16th. We expect that at least two delegations from governments in Latin America will walk out. As of Sunday, the list of speakers at the Bella Centre for the 16th to 18th ´high level’ segment of the post Kyoto negotiations included about 20 heads of state scheduled to speak to the press inside the restricted area on the afternoon of the 16th. Amongst these is Hugo Chavez, who, it is hoped by the peoples assembly organizers, will also walk out of the formal talks and join us, thereby providing legitimacy and protection from the Danish forces of repression. Let us see.
That is all for now as I hasten to the 10 am demonstration against Stephen Harper who has just arrived in Copenhagen. Indigenous activists have traveled to Copenhagen to expose Canada’s role in trying to systematically kill the climate negotiations because of the tar sands, the most destructive fossil fuel project on the planet. Students from the University of Guelph and the communities of Guelph and Fergus prepared a number of posters and banners for this demonstration, and we intend to mount them on available walls, fences and the like prior to the demonstration at the Embassy.
Also, see the now ratified People’s Declaration from Klimaforum09 ‘System Change—Not Climate Change’ at http://www.klimaforum09.org/Declaration?lang=da
More soon
Terisa Turner and Terran Giacomini
