Misc

Now published at Ceasefire Magazine.

In 2011 Anjali Appadurai gave a powerful speech at the UN climate talks on behalf of the youth of the world. She hounded negotiators for their lack of ambition, broken pledges and betrayal of future generations. In an exclusive interview with Ceasefire, she reflects on the incremental progress made in Warsaw in December, why a colonial attitude and corporate interests are holding us back, and on the solutions and strategies that can take us forward. Appadurai continues to track the negotiations with Third World Network and Earth in Brackets. You can view her 2013 TEDx talk and follow her on Twitter.

Phil England (PE): What’s at stake at the UN climate talks?

Anjali Appadurai (AA): With climate change I think we’ve really underestimated the gravity of the issue. The continued reports coming out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are slowly helping to cement the idea that this has more consequences for the global community than any other problem we’ve tried to solve at the UN. What’s at stake is a global agreement which would not solve climate change in itself but would provide a legal framework within which solutions could be created and implemented.

PE: What is your overall sense of the progress made at the latest round of talks in Warsaw in December?

Videos of all the presentations given at the Radical Emissions Reductions Conference in December at the Royal Society are now available here. Here are the framework-setting opening speeches by Corrine Le Quere and Kevin Anderson, followed by Naomi Klein‘s keynote speech.

Kevin Anderson – The emissions case for a radical plan from tyndallcentre on Vimeo.

Naomi Klein – Keynote address from tyndallcentre on Vimeo.

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Here’s our interview with Pierre Friedlingstein – one of the lead authors on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report – which we were unable to fit into our October programme on Solutions. Here he explains some of the key findings of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report on the physical science of climate change.

Transcript:

This afternoon (Thursday 21 November) an estimated 800 members of civil society organisations at the UN climate talks staged a walk out today to highlight the lack of action by rich countries who are captured by vested interests. The unprecedented alliance of groups involved in the walk out included Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, 350.org, International Trade Union Congress, Action Aid and the Philippines’ Peoples’ Movement on Climate Change.

IISD VIDEO: Philippines delegate Naderev Saño COP19 Warsaw from IISD Reporting Services on Vimeo.

The full transcript is here.

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I thought it was important to share these 15 minutes with you now as the UN climate talks start tomorrow, even though I recorded this interview for the next (18 Nov) show. This is Asad Rehman, head of the climate and energy programme at Friends of the Earth, speaking before he left for Warsaw. Here’s a transcript with some links:

This is such a good summary of the upcoming UN climate talks in Warsaw (11-22 November 2013) that I just had to post it. After the failure of COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009) it seemed like the UN climate talks were dead on their feet. But the latest IPCC report has given a renewed urgency to finding a global solution to this global problem. To do that we need to listen to the voice of civil society in the majority world (“Global South”) and move beyond the failed paradigms pushed by the rich world. This is their perspective in a press release from Climate Justice Info dated 4 November 2013.

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) would not provide a representative for interview for our February programme, but they did agree to answer a few questions in writing. These responses were received on 18th February.

In short, the government says that meeting predicted oil demand is more important than climate security; and that current policies are sufficient. Both these positions are untenable. As to why the government has been working to water down EU legislation to make Arctic drilling safer, the government avoids the question.