Mobilization For Environmental Justice Protests Copenhagen

Note: AAEA is not a member of MCJ and AAEA supports cap and trade proposals.

The Mobilization for Climate Justice (MCJ) is an alliance of environmental justice, social justice, indigenous rights, forest protection and other groups that have united to address climate-change. MCJ is planning to confront what they consider to be false solutions at the December U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. MCJ is advancing alternatives that they believe will provide real and just solutions to the climate crisis: leaving fossil fuels in the ground; reasserting peoples’ and community control over resources; relocalising food production; reducing over-consumption, particularly in the North; recognizing ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of the South and making reparations; and respecting Indigenous and forest peoples’ rights,” the call to action states.

Member Organization in MCJ

Based in the United States, the movement is organizing opposition to false solutions to climate change that impede our ability to find the real solutions, including:

False solutions are those primarily directed at maintaining business as usual and increasing corporate profit, while doing little or nothing to truly address climate change.

False solutions include carbon offset projects, such as industrial timber plantations grown in developing countries, explicitly designed to allow industries in the North to continue polluting. This solution is false because there is no evidence these carbon offsets actually offset the emissions in question.

False so-called “clean” coal. The technology at the heart of “clean” coal is completely unproven and riddled with problems such as contamination of ground water. “Clean” coal is merely a PR scheme designed to allow coal companies to continue blowing up mountaintops, expanding strip mines onto indigenous peoples’ lands and pumping massive amounts of pollution into the air.

In Copenhagen, MCJ will come together from many different associates from many different nations, backgrounds and movements, experiences and struggles: indigenous peoples and farmers, workers and environmentalists, feminists and anti-capitalists. (BurlingtonFreePress.com, 11/29/09)