PARIS, France – The most inspiring moment of December 12 was not the adoption of the United Nations Paris agreement but the sight of more than 20,000 people on the streets, building the power of the people, demanding climate justice and an end to dirty energy.
On December 12th, 2015, world governments meeting in Paris produced a landmark climate agreement. The deal followed two weeks of intense negotiations and waves of global mobilization by the climate movement.
If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new cabinet ministers needed any reminder of how difficult their jobs are going to be when it comes to rebuilding trust with First Nations, they got it last week.
Working the crowd, when the Liberal caucus gathered for its annual Christmas party, was Chief Roland Willson, a big man with a powerful voice and an intractable problem he wasn’t going to let anyone ignore.
After a years-long, hard-fought campaign against Line 9, which employed a diversity of tactics, from lobbying to legal battles to direct action, Line 9 transported crude to a refinery in Montreal on December 3, 2015.
On December 7, we shut it down. Literally. Most media reported that Enbridge shut down Line 9 as a “precautionary measure”, but we know better. We closed the valve manually. This is historic: to our
knowledge, this is the first time that activists have manually shut down a pipeline. Who would have thought that it be so simple?
Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanor changes.
As we finished sending this Daily, the Paris Agreement was adopted. This is our update from yesterday, but we promise more soon from this last day of negotiations! You can follow along live here.
Global leaders may be on the brink of approving a historic climate change agreement in Paris, but James Hansen, a former NASA scientist and pioneer of climate science, says it won’t matter.
Hansen told The Guardian that, absent a commitment to tax greenhouse gases, any accord is just a vehicle for empty promises.
As the COP21 climate negotiations go down to the wire in Paris tonight, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said the talks have been the most complicated and difficult he has ever been involved in.
As the diplomats and politicians from 200 nations fight over the text word by word and line by line, it is increasingly clear there are serious flaws to any agreement.
On Sunday, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced that Canada would support over 50 small island states and vulnerable nations calling for a new limit of 1.5C of warming to be enshrined in the Paris climate agreement.
