Eriel Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action group said the final agreement left her “sad, angry, empowered and scared”:
This year global Indigenous People represented the second largest civil society delegation in attendance, second only to oil and gas lobbyists. Last night as the final language was adopted I couldn’t help but see both our presence and the presence of oil and gas in the outcomes. The final text left me sad, angry, empowered and scared. While we succeeded in getting references to human rights and rights of Indigenous Peoples, it has fallen flat. These references mean little if they are also creating loopholes for dirty corporations and high polluting nations to “offset” their emissions by buying and trading the air and our lands and territories without our consent or participation.
It’s simply lip service in the name of business as usual if our people do not have power to make decisions for ourselves, participate in the processes or have mechanisms for grievances. It’s clear governments are unwilling to decouple themselves from corporate interests, that dominated negotiations this year, and that the rights of our communities are nothing more than bargaining chips. For our communities the real work begins when we get home and have to tell our people we didn’t succeed, and that the risks and threats to our people and land will continue, and increase, and that our fight for climate justice still wages on.
Tim Crosland, director with environmental charity Plan B which took the government to court over its plans to build a new runway at Heathrow, is pretty scathing about the outcome of Cop26.
“Despite the determined efforts of many to present COP26 as “important progress”, such claims are no more than propaganda and greenwash. In objective terms, COP26 has ended in absolute failure,” he said.
Crosland added that it was important for the media to “call this out” so “public and political attention can be turned to a) the causes of failure and b) what can be done about them.”
It’s not that our politicians are evil. They don’t want us all to die. But they are blinded by ideology to the real cause of the crisis, which is an economic model which depends on short-term profits and compound economic growth, which can only be maintained through the concentrated power of fossil fuels.
Tzeporah Berman
@Tzeporah
Historic. And insufficient. That is the dilemma of climate era. We are so stuck in our current systems & so heavily influenced by incumbents who stand to benefit from status quo that even the qualified acknowledgement in text of #COP26 of one fossil fuel, coal feels historic.
Tzeporah Berman
@Tzeporah
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@Tzeporah
Yet 86% emissions trapped in our atmosphere come from three products coal, oil & gas. Ten years ago 80% of global energy consumption came from those fossil fuels & today? 80%. That’s not because of lack of cheap renewables at scale. It’s because lack of political courage