2008-05-08

May 8th 2008 Hokkaido -- Climate Camp

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NO! G8 Action Japan Infotour Presentation

Hello,

No! G8 Action Japan have done info-tour all over the world and had presentation nearly 100 times in each cities. In our presentation, we introduced social movements in Japan or asian countries and preparation for G8 summit in Toyako.

Finally, we completed making presentation file for public use. You can download power point file and its description from the link below.

We love each of you to hold info-meeting of Anti-G8 movement 2008.

Even if you don’t use it for presentation, it is also useful information source. These files are helpful for people who have interest to come to Japan or who want to know about Japanese political situation.

* Download Presentation (4 MB, pdf): http://gipfelsoli.org/static/Media/NO_G8_Action_Presentation_080430.pdf
* Description Sheet (html): http://gipfelsoli.org/Hokkaido_2008/5037.html

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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@riseup.net

the preparatory group for the climate camp08 in Hamburg