Derek Wall in Birmingham for Climate Event

glad to have this invite, see you all in Birmingham on tuesday!


Socialist Resistence Forum: Copenhagen and Beyond

Speakers: Derek Wall – of the Green Left and Roy Wilkes – Secretary of the Campaign against Climate Change, Trade Union Committee

Tuesday 15th December 7.30pm, Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre




Sink or Swim in 2010
World leaders, aided and abetted by the media, are doing their best to dampen expectations of a binding climate treaty emerging from the UN talks in Copenhagen this December. For any treaty to be meaningful it would have to include the United States, and Obama has all but given up hope of getting a climate bill through Congress in time. Therefore the most likely outcome of the UN talks is some sort of fudge, a woolly British section of the Fourth International statement of political agreement and a vague commitment to continue working towards a treaty.

Even if a treaty were to be agreed, it would fall far short of what is needed. The best case scenario of the Copenhagen talks would be a treaty based on carbon trading, just as the Kyoto protocol was. Creating a world market for CO2 emissions will undoubtedly make some people very rich, but one thing it won’t do is prevent catastrophic climate change.

We need to be very clear that climate change is a crime. It is a crime of the rich against the poor, of capital against humanity. Thousands of people in East Africa and South Asia are dying now because of this crime and, unless serious action is taken very soon, the death toll will run into millions. Carbon trading allows killers to carry on killing, as long as they pay others to kill a little less on their behalf. It is morally indefensible, it hasn’t worked up to now, and it won’t work in the future.

The real solution to climate change is far simpler. We need to leave fossil fuels in the ground and organise rational, sustainable production based on creating millions of jobs in construction (in particular mass insulation of housing), renewable energy, public transport and other related sectors. Solving the climate crisis could therefore be a central part of solving the economic crisis. Business as usual, even if it is supplemented with carbon trading, will only lead to more of the same and worse.

But if world leaders and the corporations they represent can’t see beyond business as usual, millions of ordinary people can. They too will be represented at Copenhagen, not by official delegations in the UN negotiating rooms, but by tens of thousands of protestors on the streets. And it will be this mass movement, of ordinary people who are tired of waiting for world leaders to solve this severest of all problems, that will mark the real turning point in world history this December.

More here/leer mas