Nonviolence

We urgently need to rebuild a powerful climate justice movement for system change

Some news from mainstream media outlets from just a few days, and I wonder what we – the climate justice movement – are waiting for:

A week ago I took part in a civil disobedience action for climate justice in Lisbon. It was not my first civil disobedience action, nor will it be my last. However, in this action I realised that for me it is no longer the same.

I have been arrested several times in various countries during my activist life. My first arrest was in 1986 in Germany, in an action against a nuclear waste processing factory. The last one was probably a few years ago in England or Belgium. So, I know more or less well the process of an arrest in various countries. Although it is true that it is not pleasant, I have learned to manage the fear that always accompanies these situations. Or, so I thought, until last Saturday.

Not just another civil society statement on climate change, the Glasgow Agreement is a 'people’s climate commitment' to take decisive action on greenhouse gas emissions.

2019 closed with a COP25 without significant results. Four years after the "historic" Paris Agreement, we are still not committed enough to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. In fact, we are heading for a rise of more than 3°C, most likely surpassing several tipping points and triggering even greater and more catastrophic warming.

We have little time left to achieve a fundamental change in the policy of our states to halt and limit climate change. We are talking about a few years because in 2030 (in less than 12 years) we would have to have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 45% to limit global warming to 1.5º C. But neither politics nor social debate are up to this challenge. So, are we fucked?

A critique of the overvaluation of positive alternatives

Creating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation
than destroying the one we don’t want.”

Marianne Williamson.

Andreas Speck (La Transicionera), Moises Rubio Rosendo y Marcos Rivero Cuadrado (Solidaridad Internacional Andalucia)


“New technologies and approaches are merging the physical, digital, and biological worlds in ways that will fundamentally transform humankind.”, affirms Klaus Schwab, economist and founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos. In its extreme, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR) promises to amplify human capacities through new technologies, up to being able to “cure” ageing, leading us to a new and controversial “post-human” species. Leading this revolution into which we are entering rapidly are the nanotechnology, biotechnology, robots, artificial intelligence, energy storage systems, so-called clean energies, Big Data, drones, virtual and enhanced reality and 3D printing. Parallel to the announcement at the Davos Forum, the Spanish canal #0 provided a platform to José Luis Cordeiro in the Spanish speaking world, who they presented as professor and founder of the Singularity University, “to try to discover how many steps science is from achieving the utopia called immortality”: the death of death, the fabrication of organs, cyronics, the colonization of other planets, exocortex, telepathy, artificial food, quantum computing... A curious line-up of possibilities which appears to have stepped out from science fiction, especially The Tale of the Heechees by Frederik Pohl.

International delegation went to Diyarbakır and Cizre

 

London, 04.05.2016