SYDNEY—Climate activists from around the world will launch a hunger strike here on Friday, describing their protest as a “moral reaction to an immoral situation” in the face of environmental catastrophe.
Strike leader Paul Connor and seven other people in Australia, the United States, and Europe intend to refuse all food until the end of a meeting of world governments on climate change in Copenhagen, which runs from Dec. 7 to 18.
“It’s a global emergency,” Connor told AFP.
“We believe that making a moral, principled stand for what’s right, what’s just, can have a huge impact.”
The hunger strikers want world leaders at the Copenhagen meeting to commit to stabilzing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm).
In its benchmark 2007 report, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the key for preventing dangerous global warming was to keep CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm.
More than 70 other activists will join the core group in beginning a fast on Friday, although they intend to go on the hunger strike for shorter amounts of time.
The fast will begin in Australia at 11:00 pm (1200 GMT), kicking off similar action in the United States, Britain, India, France, Germany, Canada, South Africa, Belgium, Honduras, Bhutan, New Zealand, and the Philippines.
Connor, a 29-year-old psychology and philosophy student, said he would hold his hunger strike protest outside Parliament House in Canberra unless it was not physically possible.
“We may get to the point where we just can’t move around,” said Connor, who founded the Climate Justice Fast group that is organizing the strike.
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Comments
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Billhook Posted 12:26 pm
06 Nov 2009
In response he smiled and said easily,
"Well, I guess we'd just have to bomb Asia's power stations to stop their pollution."
Ethics, and world war, aside, this would indeed be one means of cutting CO2 output very substantially overnight.
So what are the means proposed by those arranging the Climate Justice Fast for the nations to achieve 350 ppmv ?
-- Do they hope to get Dr Hansen's proposal implemented, whereby the US writes a global plan, gets it endorsed by some western allies, and then coerces developing nations into compliance (for 40 years !) by threat of a trade war ?
-- Or do they seek a just framework for the allocation of national emission entitlements, converging over time from the status quo to per capita parity, under an annually contracting global emissions budget ?
-- Or do they just want to leave all that technical stuff to the politicians to sort out ?
If they want to earn public and media support, they'd do well to describe exactly what it is they're fasting for, what means they want implemented, for in this very long-term issue it seems clear that for whole generations the Means employed are the End experienced.
Regards,
Billhook
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swimgr11 Posted 12:25 pm
09 Nov 2009
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Ted Glick Posted 3:46 pm
09 Nov 2009
You might want to check out the reasons why I'm part of the Climate Justice Fast elsewhere on grist, http://www.grist.org/article/hungering-for-climate-justice/
The key to getting to 350 is not a technical issue AT ALL; it's an issue of political will.
Ted Glick
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Billhook Posted 6:59 pm
09 Nov 2009
thanks for your response - Having read the article you linked to I can say that I share your view of the stresses of longterm campaigning. Yet I'm unable to accept that 350.org as a will-builder can get anywhere useful without proposing a framework. The claim that getting to 350 ISN'T a technical issue and IS a will issue seems disingenuous - obviously it requires both of these, and neither can function in isolation.
Indeed, the absence of a framework is in reality the proposal 350.org is advancing - as Team Obama have urged, that there should be no legally binding commitments for any party to have to sign up to, but by some undeclared process all parties will comply with US preferences and the global GHG output will thereby fall by 50% by 2050.
(Which target is of course deficient in patently failing to grant an even chance of avoiding catastrophic destabilization, but that's ignored).
What is being proposed here is Guesswork, not Framework, and that was the core of the debilitating shortfall afflicting Kyoto - there was no agreed framework for allocating emissions entitlements among Annexe 1 parties under an agreed declining emissions budget. It was left to a pork-barrel haggle, with no common ceiling factor.
While calling for 350 may be quite a morale raiser now, I personally first helped do so as a fellow of Global Commons Institute at COP 2, as a necessary reference point for the UNFCCC process. The matter of will-building is of course ongoing, and my understanding of it is that governments have needed time to develop confidence in the equity, and efficiency, of the essential global climate policy framework that is titled Contraction & Convergence.
Sadly, for all that a good few of the US diplomats now perceive the inevitability of C&C (whose critical dates and numbers of course await negotiation) this cannot yet be said for their political masters.
Thus so long as 350.org refuses to declare the need of a framework, and to describe its ideas of that framework, it will in effect be serving those who deny that need. After all, if 350 as the street NGO is silent on the issue, why should Obama feel inclined to change course 180 and support a framework's adoption ?
Regards,
Billhook
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