The Cochabamba World People’s Conference on climate change ended last week in Bolivia, and most greeniacs agree it was a good boost  for the cause of environmental and climate justice and acknowledging peoples’ rights to their resources. The Copenhagen climate summit, by comparison, seemed mostly geared towards protecting corporations, economic systems, and preserving forms of governments,  and suggesting how much they should contribute to help those suffering from climate change,  that these big economic giants have mostly caused.    There was little serious talk of climate justice in Copenhagen among the big “capitalist” players (the U.S. and Europe), but it was very prevalent at the Cochabamba summit.

There is no doubt that most of those who will suffer the most from climate change are those with the least money.  They are also the people who will lose their way of life and even their land and resources first as climate change progresses.

What came out of the Cochabamba conference was not firm commitments from anyone, but it was a good starting point for environmental justice conversations and a framework to demand rights,  and it was a big push to a  movement based on ecosocialism,  instead of preserving capitalism (aka profits) for the richest corporations and countries who are doing most of the polluting. Exxon Mobile is just one example of what is wrong with capitalism butting heads with climate.  Exxon posted record profits again last year ($45.2 billion in profits) and paid no American taxes, so they aren’t even contributing to cleaning up the climate, or environmental disasters that the EPA needs to be involved in and pay for. That’s outrageous, but that will continue as long as corporations run our government and our govenrment worships capitalism.  (See below the declaration for more comments.)

Meanwhile, this Declaration came out of the People’s Climate summit. See more at Climate and Capitalism for their coverage of Cochabamba and related events. Also see the official website’s declaration here which starts out:

“Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.

If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from [...]