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URP leaderboard January 2025

Web Exclusive: Bolivia’s Call From Cancun

Environment

Dear Friends, servants of the public, elected officers and lobbyists:

We the undersigned want delegates to show some humility and responsibility or pay the consequences in causing widespread and accelerating death.

We worked on a global democratic basis to produce the Cochabamba Accord that not only shows much of the way, not all, to a post-fossil fuel future and it did so in the context of making polluters pay, not with money but with disempowerment, with ending incorporation and ending impunity. No more climate crimes, violations and rapes of Mother Earth by big oil and the fossil fuel capitalism that is killing us all.

What needs to be recognized is that there is no impunity for those who do nothing when without question, they are fully informed of the dangers we all face from climate change rooted in a death-tripping system of profit and ‘growth’ at any cost to the basis of life for the world’s 7 billion people and all other life and nature in its fullness.

No one can say that she or he did not know.

The agreement we, the world’s popular organizations, worked out in Cochabamba enshrines rights for nature, for mother earth. It outlines a kind of climate criminal court. It insists on justice, restitution, reparations, the payment of the climate debt and an end to impunity. Today we see that Ecuador’s constitution provides for the rights of nature and a group of people from around the world have, on 26 November 2010, put before the Ecuador courts the case of BP and its spill in the Gulf of Mexico this year (see www.oilwatchsudamerica.org). Halliburton is under legal challenge in several locales including Nigeria where the government is charging Dick Cheney of water boarding fame with very serious crimes. The legitimacy of those in power is eroding as they babble while the world burns. The era of impunity is over.

We the undersigned would like you delegates and your government superiors to consider the popular solutions devised by self-organized peoples and developing apace in the social spaces such as Cancun’s La Via Campesina camp, the Climate Dialogue Camp, and even in the corporate-sponsored climate village that is notably empty.

Let us open up to a new direction such as the one laid out in the Cochabamba agreement.

Stop covering for corporate crime. Stop playing with all our lives. Think about our common humanity and our common air, our common world. Think about facing down power. Think about saving lives and life on earth. Think about the end of impunity.

  • Terisa E. Turner
  • Terran Giacomini
  • Adabu Brownhill
  • Sarah Kim
  • International Oil Working Group
  • First Woman

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