fred first's List: 350 McKibben

The world must confine the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius or it will face an apocalyptic situation where climate change is no longer within our control. That was the message delivered this week by a group of Nobel laureates meeting in London.

How can this be accomplished? By ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2015 and then drop to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

For starters, developed countries would need to cut their emissions 25-40 percent by 2020.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 16th March 2009.

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

Urgent action is needed around the Copenhagen climate talks because this is where governments around the world plan to finalize the international climate regime that will take effect when the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement expires in 2012. So far it appears that the new climate agreement will be nothing more than business as usual-sacrificing real action on climate change in favor of market-based approaches that enhance corporate profits, while delaying urgent measures to forestall catastrophic global heating.

A Radical Change in Direction is Urgently Needed

The MCJ invites you to inspire and organize a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations.

Market-based approaches to climate change dominate the UN climate talks. Carbon-trading and carbon offset projects have allowed polluters to avoid cutting emissions and accelerated the corporate take-over of the natural world at the expense of local and Indigenous communities. Those most immediately threatened by climate change and its false solutions – Indigenous Peoples, people of color, women, peasant and family farmers, fisherfolk, forest dependent communities, youth, and marginalized communities have been systematically excluded from the negotiations.

The climate crisis is directly linked to the financial crisis, the food crisis and the extinction crisis, as well as to militarism and war. They are rooted in an economic system dedicated to economic growth at any cost. We are uniting to challenge this system that puts profits over people or the earth. Urgent action to solve the climate crisis must include a complete transformation away from the dominant economic model of incessant and unsustainable growth, oppression and injustice.

Some key solutions to climate change include:

o Drastically reducing emissions without resorting to carbon trading and offsetting or other false solutions such as nuclear energy, agrofuels, or “clean coal”, while protecting the rights of those affected by the transition;

o Keeping fossil fuels in the ground;

o Re-localization of production and consumption, prioritizing local markets and cooperative economies;

o Decentralized utility systems and community controlled clean renewable energy;

o Rights based resource conservation that enforces indigenous land rights and ends corporate control over energy, forests, seeds, land and water;

o Ending deforestation and its underlying causes, imposing international sanctions and wood tariffs, coupled with a massive forest restoration effort, managed primarily by indigenous forest-dwelling peoples;

o Ending excessive consumption in the North and by elites in the South;

o Repayment of ecological debts owed by northern governments and resource extracting corporations to peoples in the Global South

The goals of the Mobilization for Climate Justice are:

1) To build a global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to avoid catastrophic climate change, and which addresses the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward a total systemic transformation of our society.

2) To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and other affected peoples, (including workers in energy-intensive industries) in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

3) To expose the consequences of false and market-based climate “solutions” as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations, while advancing alternatives that can provide real and just solutions and which protect biodiversity.

The Stop Global Warming calculator shows you how much carbon
dioxide you can prevent from being released into the atmosphere and
how much money you can save by making some small changes in your daily
life. It’s our hope that the calculator will promote action,
awareness and empowerment by showing you that one person can make a
difference and help stop global warming.

There are many simple things you can do in your daily life — what you eat, what you drive, how you build your home — that can have an effect on your immediate surrounding, and on places as far away as Antactica. Here is a list of few things that you can do to make a difference.