Kumi Naidoo talking:
if forests are the lungs of the planet, the Arctic is the air conditioner and the refrigerator of the planet. When Hurricane Sandy happened here, for example, for the first time we started hearing mainstream American journalists talk about a polar vortex and Arctic freeze. And thankfully, people are understanding that what happens in the Arctic, unlike when Americans say, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. So, the meeting with the secretary-general was to ask him to call for a special summit of world leaders on the Arctic. Thankfully, he didn’t officially comment immediately, but he said he will consider and consult.
We also presented him with a declaration saying that the upper Arctic should be declared a global sanctuary, in the same way that the Antarctic is, where there’s no oil drilling, no industrial fishing and no commercial exploitation. Bear in mind that there are four million indigenous peoples that live in the Arctic. They have lived in a delicate balance with nature, and they have—and their livelihoods have already been impacted. So, from both a human rights and an environmental perspective, we believe that protecting the Arctic is now a critical imperative. And thankfully, the secretary-general completely supports us. The question is: How do we get powerful nations that feel that they have a claim on the Arctic to back down?
Finland is the first Arctic nation that supports our call. They’ve come out in saying that they will support the sanctuary. Sadly, the United States, Canada and Russia are the ones who are wanting to explore for oil and gas. I mean, President Obama is still considering giving Shell a license to explore in the Alaskan Arctic. We know that—you might remember the story of the Arctic 30 from last year. That oil now is actually coming out of the Russian Arctic. But the important thing is that there’s six million people already who have joined actively this campaign. And it was the strength of that support that Ban Ki-moon created a half an hour in his schedule to see us last week.
basically, that action opened up a struggle that’s very hard to communicate, because, you know, so many people live so far away from the Arctic, and they think it’s just another world. And I think last year, when we went back, and when the Russian state took a different approach—because when we were there, the Russian coast guard didn’t act on us, right
And then, when our colleagues went back last year and they spent, you know, almost three months in prison, charged with piracy and so on, but that was maybe the unintended consequence of President Putin’s action, which led to an explosion of solidarity around the world. People know now that the Arctic is a critical part of the solution to address climate change. And I’m pleased to say that the first sitting head of state has signed the declaration that we—and he signed it in the Arctic just before he came to the United Nations. He went with us on our ship.
the president of Kiribati. President Tong went with us to the Arctic, and he got out on the ice, and he signed it. And one of the amazing things, while he was signing it, a little polar bear appeared on a ridge, you know, far above. And we—I am, after the summit, going to write every head of state to actually ask them to support the declaration. I believe that this is now winnable, that after the “urgency” voices we’ve heard at the climate summit, we now want to see whether they were just words or just—or whether it’s backed by real commitment.
We’ve took a position not to sign the New York Declaration on Forests precisely because we do not believe that voluntary action on its own is going to deliver the solutions to protect our forests fast enough. We believe that there has to be strong governmental leadership, strong laws, and not only that should there be strong laws, but there needs to be implementation and compliance to the laws. There are some good laws that exist to protect forests all over the world, but our governments are not implementing it. However, when companies do take a step in a positive direction, we will push—you know, we will accept it, and we will encourage them to go further. But we do not have the faith that companies that have destroyed our forests, who have made billions of dollars from destroying our forests, are going to actually suddenly become, overnight, sort of good citizens, and to the extent where they will act with the scale of ambition and urgency that the situation calls for.
my one-line description of the climate summit outcome is that we got much more than many of us thought we would get in terms of stated commitments, but we got significantly less than what the world needs us to do. I have no doubt in my mind that the mobilization of people in New York and around the world in such large numbers was a wake-up call both to the U.S. political establishment, as well as to the others, as well as the corporate sector. I found CEOs of companies within the U.N. coming to me and saying, “Congratulations. You guys have now won the argument.” Right? “There’s no question about it. You’ve got the momentum.” And so on. The important message to individual citizens around the world: We cannot rest on our own laurels now. Four hundred thousand here in New York. We need, globally, not just hundreds of millions; We need billions of people to actually join. And I think we have the basis to build that movement.
in 2003, the CIA and the Pentagon commissioned a report which they presented to President Bush, and President Bush, as an agent of the oil, coal and gas industry, buried it. In that report, they said, in 2003, in the coming decades, two decades, the biggest threat to peace, security and stability will not come from conventional threats of terrorism, but will come from the impacts of climate change. Today there are sitting leaders of the U.S. military who are saying exactly the same.
Syria, for example, if you look at what was one of the major catalysts for people standing up to the dictatorship of Assad, was that in the last decade about 40 percent of fertile land, as a result of climate-induced drought, was wiped out. Now, I think that, you know, many people in the world are saying that ISIS is the U.S. and its allies’ creation, just as the Taliban was after the U.S. backed the Mujahideen and pulled out in ways. And so, right now to just continue to engage in addressing the conflicts that we have with more military intervention, without any sense of strategy, with putting so much of resource on the line, it really backfires, because actually what it shows is that life of people in the Middle East, whether you see it as Arab lives, Muslim lives or whatever, is dispensable because the number of civilians that have been killed in these conflict areas has just been completely, completely unacceptable.
So, yes, ISIS is a fundamental problem. For us to have allowed it to get to this point, I think the responsibility must rest with those that went in Iraq in an unjust, illegal war and created a situation which is now significantly worse than anything that we had with Saddam Hussein. Of course, Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but, you know, the U.S.—let’s be very clear: What people say around the world is that U.S. foreign policy is stuck in the old logic of, you know, when one of the presidents said, “Somoza might be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.” I mean, your previous guest, Abdullah, right? He is standing up against the very people, now, that are getting absolute support from the U.S. administration and other Western governments. And listen, if the U.S. government was serious about getting these journalists out of prison, and as well as the hundreds, actually thousands of others that have been put, they have the political and economic leverage to do it. And I find that the timidity of the U.S. government and its allies, who preach democracy, on the one end, but actually make deals with some of the most authoritarian governments, on the other, is completely, completely unacceptable.
the most important lesson from South Africa is that you don’t address a major injustice as if you’re at a Sunday morning picnic, that, in fact, whether it’s apartheid, whether it’s civil rights struggle in the United States, women’s right to vote, these struggles only move forward when decent men and women stand up and say, “Enough is enough, and no more. We’re prepared to put our lives on the line. We’re prepared to go to prison, if necessary.”
And so, right now, I would argue that climate change, as a global challenge, is more important than every other injustice we have faced in the world, because this is not about saving the planet. The planet doesn’t need saving, actually, because if we warm up the planet to a point that humanity cannot exist, the planet will still be here. It will be bruised, scarred and damaged by humanity’s actions on it. But, you know, if we cannot live here anymore, actually, the forests will replenish and so on. This struggle is about securing our children and grandchildren’s future. So, in that sense, I would say one main lesson is the power of civil disobedience, because all our political and business leaders seem to be suffering from the same medical condition, which is that they have a problem hearing the pleas of the people, and it is only civil disobedience and mass mobilization that actually sends a message for the urgency.
The second lesson is the power of alliance, that one of the things we succeeded in doing in South Africa is building an alliance of faith leaders, trade union leaders, women’s movement, youth organizations and so on. And that was the beauty of what we saw on Sunday, because, you know, for far too long climate change was seen as an environmental issue. Actually, it is much bigger. It’s a cross-cutting issue. It’s a issue of survival. And therefore, I am so, so—I’ll leave New York with such a wonderful feeling, that—you know, in the old days they used to talk about red-green tensions, for example, between labor and the environment. Now we can talk about red-green alliances.
We can talk about the indigenous peoples having their rightful leadership role in the struggle and so on, because one of the things I say very controversially, if you and I were the last two people on this planet, assuming we warm it up and go the way we’re going, and we were asked to write the history of this planet and put it in a capsule so that if life emerged again, we won’t make the same mistakes, it is quite likely—in fact, I know we will say—that actually those that were considered to be uncivilized, indigenous peoples, who needed the civilizing of the Western world, if you want, were actually the most civilized, and in fact those that sought to do the civilizing were the most uncivilized, because indigenous peoples, if we go to their wisdom of the critical importance of humanity being able to live in a mutually dependent relationship with nature, it’s critically important if we’re going to have live continue on this planet.
on the day of the summit, what we’re seeing is this cheap and very dangerous coal coming out of Russia and is going to U.K. power plants. We had a polar bear, a puppet, stop a train, with no risk to anybody. And then our activists basically got onto the train, and they had bags which said “return to sender, to President Putin,” and they were loading all the coal to actually send back. And basically, people need to understand that coal, oil and gas kills, and coal, in particular, is one of the biggest threats we have with regard to climate change. And, of course, there are different kinds of coal, but all coal is bad. The kind of coal that was involved here is particularly bad. And I think that that’s the kind of resistance that we need to see around the world, where every coal, oil and gas company is meeting resistance on a daily basis.
One of the things people ask, “What are you trying to do with Chevron and Shell and so on? Are you trying to shut them down?” Actually, these are energy companies, and they deliver energy at the moment through dirty energy means. We say to them, if you make the change fast and quick, as an energy company, to clean energy output and you wean yourself off dirty, addictive energy—oil, coal and gas—then you can exist. But if you think you’re going to continue with dirty energy, then we will do everything in our power to shut you down. It’s not our core agenda to shut them down. We would rather make them make the transition and make it quickly.
And coal is something that is having huge impact on people’s health, apart from climate change and emissions. In China, for example, communities around China are actually standing up. Or in Turkey, for example, people are standing up because their children’s lives are being attacked. The cancer rates are going up and so on. And people need to understand that the true cost of coal, when you factor in the health impacts and so on—leave climate change aside for a second—is far too expensive. And when you put that, then you’ll actually see that solar and wind and so on is actually much cheaper than the so-called market tells us.
in terms of the formal timeline, the best that Peru can do in December is deliver a clear framework for the agreement, with some commitments locked in. All governments are supposed to, by March next year, put the cards on the table to say what are their emission targets and what actions they are prepared to take. And then there will be multiple negotiations with the idea that there will be a deal in Paris.
I was in meetings yesterday all day with Asad and a coalition of organizations that are working together. And our assessment is that we would be foolish, as activists, to put faith in the formal process to deliver what the world needs to have, and therefore we are going to now intensify as much as we can on the resistance and mobilization, as well as go after those companies that are holding us back, because, see, the problem is, you know, President Obama can stand up and give all these nice words, but the bottom line is, you know, the U.S. democracy—like many other countries, but the U.S. is the most obscene in this way—is the best democracy money can buy today, and if you look at which money buys that democracy or buys that power, it’s oil, coal, gas, nuclear, military and a few other polluting industries. For every member of Congress, there are three—a minimum of three and a maximum of eight full-time lobbyists paid by the oil, coal and gas industry to make sure that no progressive climate legislation goes through.
And, you know, we must remind President Obama, he invoked Martin Luther King in this presentation when he talked about the fierce urgency of now, which was one of the things he said repeatedly in his first presidential bid. But there was another phrase that he use, apart from “Yes, we can,” and that was “a planet in peril.” If you go back and look at his first—he got it, right? “A planet in peril” was about climate change. And if we look at the timidity with which he has stood up to the fossil fuel industry, as a whole, it’s extremely disappointing.
So, we cannot take our political and business leaders solely on their words. We are saying we need to see actions, and we need to see them between now and Paris. And what we are saying to people: We must prepare for the long-haul fight. Yes, we will try everything in our power to put as much pressure to get the best possible outcome in Paris, but if we think that our political and business leaders are going to deliver what we need in Paris, then we are actually fooling ourselves.
And I think Sunday provides—the People’s Climate March on Sunday, provides has provided a base of support that we’ve never seen before, not just here in the U.S., but globally. And now we need to build on that base every week, every month, and so on, so that the power of the voices of ordinary people around the world, like the poet from the Marshall Islands—which, I have to say, completely drives me to tears up to now to just think about, because, you know—and we have to tell stories. And let me make a self-criticism of activism around climate. I think that we are partly to blame, because we did not focus enough on storytelling, letting people who are impacted, because the climate question is so complicated—emissions, targets, parts per million and so on—and we actually sometimes become as bad as the governments in the way we talk about it. We have to talk about this in more accessible ways and enable ordinary people who are affected by this to be able to actually engage in the conversation and get involved. We have to talk. We have to throw out the jargon. We have to talk with simplicity—and I’m not saying being simplistic, right? It’s very different. I mean, we have to be able to—I mean, that’s one of the things I learned from South Africa, that if you go there and you talked about constitutional provisions and so on, it just didn’t resonate. And ever since I came to Greenpeace, you know, I don’t talk about saving the climate or saving the environment. I say this about securing our children and grandchildren’s future. Just that phrase. Anybody who’s a parent, anybody who is a grandparent, hopefully, will sit up and say, “Well, this conversation is about me.” Right? And we have to make this conversation about everybody, whether you’re a worker, whether you’re a professional, whether you’re a CEO of a fossil fuel company. I say—when I meet with the CEOs of companies, I say, “Tell me something. How are you going to look your children and grandchildren in the eye and answer the question when they ask you 10 years from now, ‘When the writing was on the wall that we had to act, how did you not put my interests, as your child or grandchild, and act?'”
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the biggest scientific enterprise probably in the history of humanity, has said in their last report that at least 80 percent of known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, if we are to have a chance to keep warming below, as far below, two degrees.
It shouldn’t be touched. If we touch it, we’re gone. Right? It won’t happen tomorrow, but it will happen very rapidly. And let’s be very clear: The climate impacts are happening now. Right? We are seeing lives being lost now.
And, you know, Archbishop Desmond Tutu recorded a message, which was not shown at the General Assembly. He offered it. Because why? He said four things we need to do. Simple. One, no further fresh investments in fossil fuel exploration, because it’s senseless. Even what we know, we shouldn’t be touching. And he said all that money should go to renewables. Divest from fossil fuels, so anybody today who has a bank account, who has any investments, should be asking, if you care about your children’s future, “Are you investing in oil, coal and gas companies?” and try and get that—and rather invest it in renewable energies. The third he’s saying, we have to have a sense of justice. The Marshall Islands and these small island states, they’re almost zero carbon in terms of—it’s so unfair that people who have been least responsible for emissions are paying the first and most brutal price. And the fourth thing he said was, there has to be a climate liability, that those that have profited, those fossil fuel companies, must be held accountable to provide that support.
The thing I would say also to people of faith—and maybe I’ll put it in a light way. I was in Rome on a nuclear referendum, which we won, where the Italian people voted against nuclear a couple years ago. And I was in a studio sort of show on TV, and I said to the journalist, “You know, the pope”—because the Vatican was just around the corner, I said, “The pope and all our other religious leaders should come before us and ask us a simple question. They should ask, ‘To those of you who believe that God exists, do you really think God is so cruel?'” Because if you accept that God—for those who believe that God exists, God presumably knew humanity will need energy to survive on this planet. So did God scratch his head and say, “Oh, these people are going to need energy, so let me take the coal, put it deep in the ground, take the oil, put it deep in the ocean, and so on, so people will kill themselves trying to get to it and destroy things that actually humanity needs for its existence?” So, clearly, humanity has been looking—our religious leaders need to step forward now. And I’ll say that, yes, they are talking more now, but for far too long our religious leaders, their silence has been deafening on climate, right? I welcome the increased voices of the religious community now, because if you go with a religious philosophy, everything on this planet was created by God—our rivers, our oceans, our mountains and so on. So, clearly, our religious leaders should come and say, “Folks, you all have been looking primarily in the wrong direction. Rather than looking down for oil, coal and gas, you should look up and see that God gave you wind and sun to actually meet your needs.” You just have to be careful with that analogy, because some clever person is going to tell you geothermal also comes from below. So you should say, primarily we should be looking up rather than looking down.
And that’s what I mean about changing the narrative, right? We need to—and that’s why I’m so impressed with the trade union movement, globally and as well as in the United States. When Sharan Burrow, the first woman to lead the international trade union movement—in a meeting with Ban Ki-moon in Rio, she said, “Secretary-General, you might be surprised why me, as a trade unionist, where my main job is to fight for jobs and decent work, that I am so passionate about climate change, because, Secretary-General, I realize there are no jobs on a dead planet.” You know, I mean, fundamentally, short-term economic interest, which will kill the long-term interests of working people and so on.
And let’s be very clear: As Hurricane Katrina showed, when there is a major environmental disaster, it is the poor that suffer the most. Often—of course, I’m not saying that the rich are completely sanitized from it, but the rich have more options. They can jump in their cars and drive away, you know. The poor are stuck. And I still remember the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and when I saw that on television, while I was in Ghana when that happened. And I was sitting with a friend, who’s now dead, a Nigerian friend, Justice Egware in the anti-poverty movement, and we were both sitting there, and he said to me, “You know, in Africa, we might live with extreme poverty, but when our people die, we actually offer them dignity in the way we let them go. Look at those bodies, you know, wrapped around lamp poles, just hanging and floating there.” So, you know, what’s being challenged is our very sense of humanity. How do we think? How do we care?
And we must very clear: At the center of all of this is an acceptance that we have come—and when I say “acceptance,” not just the rich, but the poor, as well. We have accepted unacceptable levels of inequality. Part of what’s driving this, driving us to the cliff is overconsumption, overconsumption by the rich, and a total underconsumption by the poor. And we have to recognize, if rich people in the world care about their children’s future, they have to ask themselves the question: What level of wealth is acceptable, and what level of poverty is acceptable? Because everybody in the world says, “Oh, poverty is a bad thing. We shouldn’t have poverty.” But understand that poverty is there partly because those of us at the top want to have such a high level of income and such a high level of consumption without any real, meaningful care for those that are completely shut out of even the basic economic necessities.
I think many of the governments in Latin America, those that were more environmentally concerned, concerned about climate, and also wanted to address the historical injustices that were done to indigenous peoples—and let’s be very clear, that redress has not even really started within the United States or elsewhere, but that’s another conversation which has to be addressed. But the reality is, you can get elected with those promises, and then you find yourself with the power of the fossil fuel industry, the power of developed governments who sometimes you might have reliance on aid, and those governments are saying to you, “If you don’t let X, Y and Z oil company from my country come here and so on, we’re going to cut your aid package and so on.” So, sometimes once you are in power, the amount of actual space you have to advance your agenda is very limited. Having said that, I’m not wanting to let those leaders off the hook for some of the things that they’ve actually done.
I should say Latin America also is a very tragic situation right now. Global Witness, a think tank out of London, just released a study a month ago, or six weeks ago, showing that every week two environmental activists are being killed. Just think about that—every week. Some of these folks might not self-describe themselves as environmentalists, but they are certainly engaged in defending forests. I spoke at the U.N. on forests with an indigenous leader from Brazil. I was very sad to hear him say—he said, you know, “Our people are literally dying to protect the forests.” Right? And most of these deaths, by the way, of this two-per-week average is in Latin America. It’s in Brazil, other Latin America countries, of course also Africa and Asia. And therefore—you know, there’s a new book, or not-so-new book now, that’s come out, I guess, called Green is the New Red, you know, where we are seeing that environmental activists are facing increasing repression.
But as I say, whenever—you know, like when our folks were in prison in Russia last year, the Arctic 30, and people were taken aback, I said, “You know, the one thing we should take comfort from is what Mahatma Gandhi once said. He said, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight with you, and then you win.'” The fact that they’re not ignoring and laughing at us, the fact that they are fighting us so hard, I take a little comfort from that, because if Gandhi was right, let’s hope that we are just one step away from winning.
— source democracynow.org
Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International.