* History's lesson for climate action: no other choice 'but mass mobilization'

27/08/15
Author: 
Jon Queally
Link: 
Common Dreams
Pictured: Activists under the banner of 'Ende Gelände' in Germany shut down RWE's lignite mining operation on August 16. "For more than 20 years," a new joint statement by world civil society leaders declares, "governments have been meeting, yet greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased and the climate keeps changing. The forces of inertia and obstruction prevail, even as scientific warnings become ever more dire." (Image: 350.org/Paul Wagner/with overlay)

With less than 100 days until high-level UN climate talks take place in Paris, key leaders from the global climate justice movement have come together with a joint statement that affirms their belief that only mass popular mobilizations across the planet demanding a drastic reckoning with the world's fossil fuel paradigm will suffice when it comes to confronting the increasingly dire and intertwined threats of neoliberal capitalism and planetary climate change.

In a pair of "concretely" expressed demands aimed at world leaders, the signatories to the statement say governments must "end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry" and move swiftly to "freeze fossil fuel extraction by leaving untouched 80% of all existing fossil fuel reserves."

Category: 
Climate Change
Protest - Revolt
Global