Enough of the delaying tactics on climate. Now is the time to take action, to force states and industries to leave fossil fuels in the ground. This is the main message of a call to action from environmentalist group 350.org and anti-globalisation group Attac to stop what they call “climate crimes”. The call has been signed by 100 international figures ahead of COP 21, the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris from November 30th to December 11th, and is supported by Mediapart. You can read the full text of the call to action in English in the Club section or in French here.
The appeal marks the first time that numerous prominent intellectuals and militants have come together to denounce climate change as a “crime against humanity”, comparing it to the horrors of slavery and apartheid. These figures include South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, journalist and activist Naomi Klein, physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, climatologists Claude Lorius and Valérie Masson-Delmotte, writers Patrick Chamoiseau and Erri de Luca, farmer and ecologist Pierre Rabhi, gardener and botanist Gilles Clément, and Leonardo Boff, one of the leading liberation theologians.
They also include sociologists Dominique Méda and Saskia Sassen, anthropologists Philippe Descola, David Graeber and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, philosophers Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Michael Hardt, Clive Hamilton and Catherine Larrère, economists Joan Martinez Alier, Jean Gadrey, Gaël Giraud, and Serge Latouche, political scientist Susan George, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood as well as Pablo Solon and Yeb Saño, former climate negotiators for Bolivia and the Philippines respectively. The names of all 100 of the initial signatories are listed on the call for action, which remains open for signatures.
The text of the appeal resulted from a joint initiative between Christophe Bonneuil, a historian of science, Attac and 350.org. It states: “We know that global corporations and governments will not give up the profits they reap through the extraction of coal, gas and oil reserves, and through global fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture. Our continuing ability to act, think, love, care, work, create, produce, contemplate, struggle, however, demands that we force them to. To be able to continue to thrive as communities, individuals and citizens, we all must strive for change. Our common humanity and the Earth demand it.”
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Calling for an “uprising” similar to those that took place in the past to combat slavery, totalitarianism, colonialism or apartheid, the manifesto concludes: “On the eve of the UN Climate Conference to be held in Paris-Le Bourget, we declare our determination to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
What distinguishes this call from The People’s Test, published in mid-June by an unprecedented alliance of social movements and trade unions, is that this time the text explicitly targets the hydrocarbon industry, naming the coal, oil and gas industries as culprits. It also breaks with the traditional separation between governments on one side and the representatives of civil society on the other.
Given the likely failure of the Paris conference to limit the average global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the signatories call for people themselves to carry out the necessary transformation in terms of modes of production and of consumption. This represents a break with the dominant economic system and also marks a refusal to leave the issue in the hands of elected representatives and high-ranking officials, who have regularly failed to deliver on these questions.
“We will not wait for states to make it happen,” the call to action says. “Slavery and apartheid did not end because states decided to abolish them. Mass mobilisations left political leaders no other choice.”
Why is Mediapart supporting this particular call to action against climate crimes? Because Mediapart, too, believes that COP 21 will only be a sideshow when it comes to action against climate change. The targets for reducing greenhouse gases put forward so far by governments, for instance in the United States, China, Europe and Japan, are completely inadequate and leave the world on track for an average temperature rise well above 2°C. And even these modest national targets will probably not figure in the final text of the agreement to be hammered out in Paris. At best they may appear as an annex, with no obligation on countries to put them into practice.
On top of that, any agreement in Paris will not introduce measures aimed at the root causes of greenhouse gas emissions – transport, heating, fossil fuel extraction, deforestation, industrial agriculture and the globalisation of trade. At best it will claim to have an impact on their effects in the form of CO2 and methane emissions. Over the years, and after all the failures, climate negotiations have become toothless. In reality the battle against climate change takes place outside United Nations meeting rooms.
Given these circumstances, what is needed for real action to be taken against global warming is to pierce the bubble of indifference and to stop inertia. This requires changing the way the issue is represented and adjusting the very framework within which it is interpreted. It means breaking from the official agenda, getting closer to the grass roots, and never taking speeches and declarations of good intent at face value. The world needs to adopt a fairer historical perspective and start to listen to voices that dissent from the official line.
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- The original French version of this text can be found here.
English version by Sue Landau
Editing by Michael Streeter