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Hollywood stars join politicians at Bolivia’s ‘cool’ global warming summit
John Vidal, Guardian
Evo Morales says talks will give a voice to world’s poorest and encourage governments to be ambitious after Copenhagen
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In what is becoming the hippest environment meeting of the year, presidents, politicians, intellectuals, scientists and Hollywood stars will join more than 15,000 indigenous people and thousands of grass roots groups from more than 100 countries to debate climate change in one of the world’s poorest nations.
The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which opens next week in the small Bolivian town of Cochabamba, will have no direct bearing on the UN climate talks being conducted by 192 governments. But Bolivian President Evo Morales says it will give a voice to the poorest people of the world and encourage governments to be far more ambitious following the failure of the Copenhagen summit.
Morales will use the meeting to announce the world’s largest referendum, with up to 2 billion people being asked to vote on ways out of the climate crisis. Bolivia also wants to create a UN charter of rights and to draft an action plan to set up an international climate justice tribunal.
(13 April 2010)
Climate change and the rights of Mother Earth
Evo Morales, Indian Country Today
Dear indigenous sisters and brothers of the North:
It’s with the utmost pride and sincerity that the Plurinational State of Bolivia calls on the peoples of the world, defenders of Mother Earth, social movements, scientists, academics, lawyers and governments committed to their citizens to actively participate in the Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth from the 20th to 22nd of April in the city of Cochabamba.
We want to celebrate the International Day of Mother Earth with a massive statement in support of the restoration of the rights of mother earth and harmony with nature. Last year in Copenhagen, 192 countries met to reach an agreement to resolve the problems of climate change. The result was shame, anger, betrayal, uncertainty, opportunism, failure – those were the adjectives most used to describe the outcome of that summit.
I attended these meetings and told them that in the last century our ancestors, both blacks and Indians, were treated like slaves and their rights were not recognized. Likewise our Mother Earth was treated like a lifeless thing as if she had no rights.
That was the result of the capitalist system that only gives value to gold and everything that can be expressed in a corresponding monetary value. In this context, planet Earth has for a long time been exploited for its non-renewable recourses to favor elitist, looting and insatiable societies without taking into account that our planet has finite resources.
Mother Nature in her goodness has the ability to feed all of humanity today and much more, yet her collapse and death will be imminent if we pretend to satisfy the greed of irresponsible governments who tried, offering $100 million until the year 2020, to avoid reaching unilateral agreements in Copenhagen and consequently scheme ways to manipulate and disregard their commitments to the current Kyoto treaty.
Not only do we intend to capitalize on earth’s natural resources, but also take into consideration global warming and its effects on the ozone layer.
Evo Morales is the constitutional president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
(16 April 2010)
Bill McKibben on Cochabamba summit, “Eaarth”
Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now
Environmentalist, 350.org Founder Bill McKibben on “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”
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JUAN GONZALEZ: Bolivia is hosting a people’s summit on climate change next week that could draw up to 10,000 participants from 100 countries around the world. The conference will focus on those most affected by global warming—indigenous and poor communities, particularly in the Global South— and highlight their demands for climate justice in advance of the United Nations climate summit to be held in Mexico at the end of this year.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, the Senate is expected to unveil a climate change bill next week. Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman will reportedly release a specific plan by Earth Day on April 22nd. The proposed compromise legislation is expected to include caps on some greenhouse gas emissions, but also boost domestic oil and natural gas production and spur new nuclear power plants.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, today we’re joined by someone who sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming. Twenty years ago, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, but his warnings went largely unheeded. Now, as people are grappling with the unavoidable effects of climate change and confronting an earth that’s suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in unprecedented ways, Bill McKibben is out with a new book about what we have to do to survive this brave new world.
… BILL McKIBBEN: … We’re going to have to build a movement to put political pressure on to finally get some change out of this system. We haven’t done it in the past well enough. And that failure of Copenhagen was symbol of that.
At 350.org, we’ll have a bunch of folks in Cochabamba, and they’ll be spreading the word, telling people what happened last year with 350.org, when we pulled off the largest—what did CNN say?—the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history: 5,200 separate actions in 181 countries on a single day in October.
… And the horrible part is, of course, that the countries hit hardest and first are the ones that have done the least to cause this problem and the countries that are most unfairly going to have to change their economic development plans the most over the next decades. The easiest way for India or China or almost anybody else to pull people out of poverty would be to burn more of the cheap coal that they have at hand. But they can’t do it, because the West has filled up the atmosphere already.
The global inequity, that’s always been a sin, has become a great practical impediment to action on this. And if we can’t somehow square that circle, if we can’t figure out how to transfer some serious resources north to south in the form of technology to allow countries to develop without going through the fossil fuel age, then we have little to no chance of preventing the absolute worst outcomes.
AMY GOODMAN: And Bill McKibben, the question in this country is always, we are in a recession ourselves, why would you be sending money south?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, we’re going to have to—I mean, the trouble is that what we’re dealing with, Amy, is not a debate between China and the US or between Republicans and Democrats, fundamentally; it’s a debate between human beings and physics and chemistry.
(15 April 2010)
In Defense of Pachamama (Cochabamba climate comference)
Franz Chávez, Inter Press Service
LA PAZ – Through their ancestral knowledge and traditions, indigenous peoples will make a unique and invaluable contribution to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which begins Monday, Apr. 19 in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.
Julio Quette of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) told IPS that the 74 different indigenous groups who inhabit South America’s Amazon region “have traditionally coexisted with nature and the forests,” and that it is up to the industrialised countries to halt the pollution and destruction of the planet.
For her part, Jenny Gruenberger, executive director of the Environmental Defence League (LIDEMA), commented to IPS that “Bolivia could make an enormous contribution based on the traditional knowledge of the indigenous and aboriginal nations that make up this plurinational state.”
The country is officially known as the Plurinational State of Bolivia, in recognition of the fact that over 60 percent of Bolivians belong to one of its numerous indigenous ethnic groups.
(16 April 2010)
Also at Common Dreams.
