The Pink and Black Bloc

Come Sunday 6th and Monday 7th December 12-4pm for a working bee at the Climate Action Centre, Trades Hall to make props, banners, and plan for the bloc.

This year’s Walk against Warming coincides with the Copenhagen climate negotiations. It is clear that the Copenhagen talks will never provide real solution to climate change, and instead are pushing dangerous ‘false solutions’ like privatising and trading the atmosphere and offset projects which are detrimental to people in the majority world. The world’s Governments are inextricably tied to the interests of capital which means they are not just unwilling to act to address the problem of climate change but are structurally incapable of doing so. We stand in solidarity with the global movement for climate justice demonstrating outside the Copenhagen talks and resisting fossil fuels and false solutions around the world.

What’s wrong with walk against warming?
The popularity of Walk Against Warming demonstrates the number of people who are concerned about climate change and recognise the urgent need for real action now. However, we believe that Walk Against Warming’s positioning of climate change as a post-ideological issue has prevented it from actually confronting the dominating powers and interests responsible for climate change.

We want to widen the debate from a focus on simply managing exactly how much carbon is emitted into the air, to also address the underlying causes of climate change. We have to recognise that climate change is caused not just by short-sightedness or the fossil fuel lobby but our system of economic and social relations, namely capitalism. Capitalism is a system that depends on the exploitation of both labour and natural resources. Capitalism is a system of endless growth, this puts it immediately at odds with the planet’s finite resources. The solutions offered by the talks at Copenhagen, and Australian ‘solutions’ such as the CPRS are capital’s response to the climate crisis; solutions which are more about maintaining economic growth in the face of environmental crisis than addressing the needs of the planet. The people who will suffer most from climate chaos are only labour, surplus to requirements, unneeded by capital and thus expendable.

We stand in solidarity with the global south, and echo their concerns of ‘carbon colonialism’. We must resist the ongoing processes of colonialism and ensure that all climate solutions do not perpetuate further imperialism. We call for climate debt the global north owes the global south to be recognised. It is the industrialised nations who are responsible for the climate catastrophe though our current per capita emissions and our historical emissions. Our carbon debt to the global south must be repaid though support for real solutions to climate change adaptation and mitigation. We stand in solidarity with the peoples of the global south and the global movement for climate justice and push for a climate movement actively fights capitalist solutions to clime change and carbon colonialism.

So join the pink and black bloc for a flamboyant and direct intervention into the climate movement!