Climate protests go global as activists slam summit as 'failure' / It’s time to shift from the ‘war on terror’ to a war on climate change / Groundtruthed
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets all over the world on Saturday to call on world leaders to do more to tackle the climate crisis during COP26. The global protests came after tens of thousands of young people rallied in Glasgow on Friday to denounce inaction and greenwashing at the global climate summit. Organisers said over 250 events were planned around the world, in addition to a digital global rally. "We are taking to the streets across the world this weekend to push governments from climate inaction to climate justice," said Asad Rehman, a spokesperson for the COP Coalition.
Follow the climate
strikes and other COP26 developments live on our blog:
It’s time to shift from the ‘war on terror’ to a war on climate change
As the COP26 UN
climate meetings start this week, it’s time for a recognition that climate
change is in fact a more expensive, more deadly, and more real threat to lives
and to the US economy than the threat of what we call terrorism.
The “War on Terror” –
a phrase born in the George W Bush administration – needs to be retired both as
an action and a concept. The word “terrorism” instills a sense of fear and
gives carte blanche for the US government to intervene around the globe. As a
response to the 9/11 attacks, the US military has waged wars that have directly
caused nearly 1 million
deaths and indirectly caused many times that. The footprint of DHS itself
has grown globally, as it is now the third largest US civilian agency overseas.
Dahl’s data show that foreign interventions by the US keep the fear of
Americans focused abroad, without any statistical evidence that groups in other
countries pose a significant source of threat to American safety…
Groundtruthed In some respects, preventing climate breakdown is highly complicated. But in another, it’s really simple: we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. All the bluster and grandstanding, the extravagant promises and detailed mechanisms discussed in Glasgow this week amount to nothing if this simple and obvious thing doesn’t happen.
A recent study in
the scientific journal Nature suggests that to stand a 50% chance of avoiding
more than 1.5C of global heating, we need to retire 89% of proven coal
reserves, 58% of oil reserves and 59% of fossil methane (“natural gas”)
reserves. If we want better odds than 50-50, we’ll need to leave almost all of
them untouched.
Yet most governments
with major reserves are determined to make the wrong choice. As the
latest production
gap report by the UN and academic researchers shows, over the next two
decades, unless there’s a rapid and drastic change in policy, coal is likely to
decline a little, but oil and gas production will keep growing. By 2030,
governments are planning to extract 110% more fossil fuels than their Paris agreement pledge (“limit the temperature
increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”) would permit.
Even nations that
claim to be leading the transition mean to keep drilling…
https://www.monbiot.com/2021/11/05/groundtruthed/
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Internationalism or Extinction
