---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: hangup <hangup@???>
Date: May 8, 2008 1:17 AM
Subject: [g8-int] [Fwd: climate Camp08 in Hamburg - call for action -
please distribute widely]
To: g8-int@???
this is related to a follow up action after the anti-g8 protests in germany....
------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: [KC_2008] climate Camp08 in Hamburg - call for action -
please distribute widely
Datum: Thu, 08 May 2008 00:37:00 +0200
Von: Alexis J. Passadakis <passadakis@???>
Dear all,
this is the call for action for the climate camp in Hamburg - 15th-24th
august 2008!
Please distribute widely!
All the best,
Alexis
--------------------------
Let's change the climate!
Climate Camp in Hamburg, 15th-24th august 2008
It's too hot! - The climate is changing!
The atmosphere is getting hotter. Even the most sinister prognoses of
the World Climate Council of the United Nations of the year 2007 in
the meantime appear to have been too optimistic. Climate change is
more than melting polar caps, drowning polar bears and hurricans of up
to now unknown magnitudes. Climate change is a social catastrophe. The
global changes of the ecosystems are exacerbating social contrasts
world-wide. Because the effects of warming are unequally distributed
-- between North and South, but also within societies, between rich
and poor.
The warming of the atmosphere is not an accident, but the result of an
economic system relying on profit and growth. Due to this
higher-faster-forward logic, capitalism burns enormous amounts of
mineral ressources, for instance for the production and selling of
products with the help of a world-encompassing logistics network. And
even though almost everybody in the meantime wants to save the
climate, the use of mineral energies such as oil, gas and coal
continues to increase. Time to get involved!
Climate change is big business
The demand for energy rises ever more rapidly, and the prices of the
ressources increase as well. Even the International Energy Agency in
the meantime departs from the idea that the high point of oil
production will soon be passed. At the same time, hothouse gas
concentration and thence the global average temperature continue to
rise. What to do? In spite of contrary rhetoric, governments and
companies continue to put their stakes clearly on mineral energies.
Twenty new coal-fired power stations are supposed to be built in
Germany alone; the car industry, with the backing of the environmental
ministry, refuses any type of upper limits on the emission of carbon
dioxide. Airports are being extended merrily, and the constantly
growing energy companies are helped by military means to secure their
mineral ressources. No trace of an energy turn!
Instead it is pretended that with corresponding technical approaches
everything can continue as before: subterranean CO2 deposits,
emission-free coal-fired power stations and ticking time bombs in the
form of nuclear power stations.
Also in the area of transport, there is propagated a simple "Let's go
on!" with new technology. Because the fuel of the future will be won
from sugar cane, genetically modified soy or rapeseed. The
consequences: gigantic new monocultures for "energy plants" and the
loss of agricultural land for food production. While very few profit
from the business with biofuels, the effects of this politics on poor
population groups are already seen today: in Mexico, corn is getting
scarce; boundless width of CO2-storing eucalyptus forests are eroding
the soils in Brazil, and for the lucrative business with palm oil,
tropic peat forests were burnt down in Indonesia. Food prices are
rising world-wide and people starve so that the machinery of
globalised capitalism can continue to function.
At the same time, a lot of money may be earned with climate change --
without there being an ecological benefit; most airlines offer
"climate-neutral" flights; nuclear power stations are being presented
as "unpopular climate protectors" whose running times should be
extended for the sake of climate protection; governments and companies
propagate an "ecological market economy". Very few financial market
actors earn huge amounts by the trade in emission rights -- real CO2
savings up to now were not achieved. The present economy of growth
cannot stop climate change. The mineral ressources need to stay in the
ground -- a little energy efficieny here and there is not sufficient.
Ecological precarity and climatic frontiers
Poor population groups -- those who cause climate change the least --
are hit the hardest. The existing glaring social insecurities shall be
reinforced drastically by way of the effects of increased
temperatures. The daily struggle for survival for many people is
getting ever tougher. There will be additional climatic frontiers that
will make survival harder for many people. It is financial means that
decide on the possibility to linder the negative consequences of
climatic change. These are available mostly in the industrial
countries of the global North.
Already today migration is with reason the reaction of many people to
the massive gaps in living standards. They are not reconciled with the
fact that they are excluded from participation in wealth. They
therefore seize the initiative: they transgress borders, so as to
demand for themselves and their families a fair share of the wealth of
the earth. Instead of effectively fighting the causes of climate
change and of reducing by adaptive measures their effects on the
concerned, the well-to-do countries close off against the incoming
refugees. At the borders, they build up fences, boats with refugees
are prevented by all means from reaching the coastlines, and if people
manage to get here in spite of everything, they are forcibly deported.
On a daily basis, people are hurt by barbed-wire border fences, drown
in the sea or are deported to a country they were never at home in.
Not only on a global basis do the scissors open between well-to-do and
those without any property. Also within countries -- rich like poor --
the costs of climate change are unjustly distributed. People with low
incomes are hit the hardest by the effects of climate change. Their
residential areas are inundated the first, their soils erode, their
water sources dry up -- ecological precarity is exacerbated. And in
the North, it is the low-income people who need to bear an
above-proportional share of climatic protection costs. They spend
proportionally more of their incomes on energy than the rich and are
therefore more hardly-hit, for example, by the costs of the trade in
CO2 certificates. The about 1.6 billion people to whom the social
right of access to electricity is denied bear the socio-ecological
consequences of CO2-intensive life style the hardest. A completely
different climate is only possible if global rights such as the right
of all to an access to energy and a turn away from mineral
ressource-based industry are thought of together.
From Seattle by way of Heiligendamm to Copenhague -- a new weather front
When at the blockade of the WTO ministerial conference in Seattle in
1999, thousands of demonstrators got underway "the movement of
movements", it was a matter of protest against additional market
liberalisations, against privatisation, company rule, meaning a
neoliberal form of globalisation. Precisely these criticisms continue
to be important in the struggle against climate change. After all,
climatic protection happens if on a world-wide basis, small peasants
struggle for social land reforms and against an export-oriented
agroindustrial agriculture. For the cultivation of basic foods,
against the dispatch of Valentine's Day flours per airplane into the
whole world! Or if people fight against the privatisation of railroads
and the reduction in rail services. Commitment against climate change
is necessary, because the general framework of all other social
conflicts under the conditions of global warming worsens dramatically.
"There is enough for everybody!" or "Everything for everybody!" These
are just demands. Yet, "for everybody" is good, but what can be the
material basis for that in the light of ecological catastrophes? How
can there be social justice and climate justice? How do we want to
live and work and how is material wealth in society distributed? Who
owns the energy sources? How might solidarity-based, collective
solutions look like that do not lead to (new) social cold? And
redistribution from North to South is necessary. Only if the North
assumes its historical guilt as main perpetrator of climate change and
wealth is really massively redistributed can we expect that CO2 will
really obligatorily be saved in the South.
In December 2009, there will take place the ninth climate conference
in Copenhague. Still at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Angela Merkel
was able to pose almost without any challenge as the climate queen.
Even if international climate policy is only one terrain in the
confrontation for a climate of justice, it is after all a place, where
global relationships of power become visible. By way of the climate
camp, we shall start to shift these -- step by step.
The climate camp -- the cool breeze of resistance
The goal of slowing down climate change and of distributing the costs
of it in a just way won't be easy to reach, because we have today's
powerful people against us. The climate camp is the place where we may
inform each other and talk to each other about other relationships
between society and nature. It is a matter of spectre-overarching
strategies and positions for a climate movement. By way of the climate
camp, we go on in the search for forms of resistance against the CO2
economy -- also in daily life. In order to change climate, we need
decisive action. That includes larger and smaller acts of civil
disobedience. The climate camp is one of many of these and linked with
camps in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Great Britain and Sweden.
We shall set up our tents in Hamburg, the greatest port town in
Germany, the most-frequented logistics hub of maritime and road
traffic. In Hamburg, there is also located the largest coal harbour,
where supplies from Australia, Indoneasia and Columbia are landed for
domestic power stations and industry. In Hamburg, Archer Daniels
Midland operates one of the large agro-diesel factories. The energy
company Vattenfall manages nuclear and coal-fired power stations from
here. Moreover, there will be an anti-racist camp at the same time
that among other things will make the Hamburg Charter Deportation
Airport its action target. The preparatory processes of both camps
will be fine-tuned with each other in such a way that the potential of
mobilisation comes to bear in the best possible way.
For that reason: Go to the climate camp! Participate in the climate
actions. Dance, demonstrate -- and block. For alternative energy
forms. Against social and ecological precarisation -- world-wide! In
mood for solidarity! Everything for everybody -- but differently! See
you! In this sense -- for a completely different climate!
More information:
www.klimacamp08.net; klimacamp08-hh@???
the preparatory group for the climate camp08 in Hamburg
-
To subscribe/ unsubscribe, change your address on the list etc. you
can find help at:
http://help.riseup.net/lists/subscribers.
To defintely unsubscribe write an email to
g8-int-unsubscribe@??? from the subscribed adress.
If you have no success, write to g8-2007@???.
