Climate change is a global issue which needs to be seriously addressed appositely through the recognition and inclusion of the basic sectors and marginalized groups in society being the most affected by the negative impacts brought on by the incessant exploitation of the environment and injustices inherent in the existing economic system.

Their economic privilege in mind, rich countries and corporations are thwarting hopes for a fair and progressive deal in Copenhagen. But outside the negotiation halls, people have moved far ahead with their solutions for the climate and visions for a just planet.

In December 2009, leaders from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark to determine the fate of the climate, the planet, and its six billion inhabitants. The summit is the 15th Conference of Parties (COP 15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Injustice lies at the root of the climate crisis.

A tiny minority of the world’s population based in the advanced capitalist countries is primarily responsible for causing climate change that is inflicting more suffering to millions of the world’s poor and disadvantaged. In their relentless pursuit of profits, Northern corporations have burned vast and increasing amounts of fossil fuels and to feed energy and inputs into production, dumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at levels that is now warming the planet and disrupting the climate. The global economic system involves the appropriation and lopsided use by a powerful global elite of the planet’s shared resources, and the disempowerment and dispossession of the majority of the world’s people. This basic social process is behind two centuries of profit-oriented capitalist growth. It bequeathed prosperity to the Global North and corporations, and forced poverty, colonialism, and underdevelopment upon millions of people, who now suffer the hardest impacts of climate change despite having no responsibility for it. In the last 30 years, under the banner of free market globalization, and with the help of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, Northern-based transnational corporations have expanded their power over Southern economies and resources, and intensified their pollution of the atmosphere and destruction of the environment.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the Multilateral Environmental Agreement adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit, in 1992. With 192 parties to the Convention, it sets the overall framework for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the problem posed by climate change.

Corporations and institutions are rushing to patent “climate-genes” that can withstand environmental stresses, with some of these genes originating from crops grown in Africa, thus igniting fears of potential “biopiracy” of the continent’s resources.

Since the Philippines ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2003, donors have conducted numerous capacity building (CB) initiatives to promote the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in the country.

Climate change finance is about social justice and people’s sovereignty.

The facts are beyond dispute: the dangerous build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is the effect of two centuries of unsustainable industrial production centered in the North. It is a process organized around profit-maximization and excessive consumption, fuelled by the unaccountable and imbalanced overuse of non-renewable energy and natural resources. Responsibility for emissions and the depletion of carbon sinks lies principally with developed countries, corporations, and their flawed industrial model. Constituting a minority of the global population, they grew their economies and profits generating two-thirds of all historic emissions, consuming more than their fair share of the common atmospheric space.

Approximately two -thirds of Ecuador’s population voted “yes” this autumn in a historic, national referendum – a result that reflects the vast majority’s hopeful expectations of political change. By an overwhelming margin, the Ecuadorians backed their President, Rafael Correa, in voting for a new progressive constitution - the first in the world to grant Nature the same inalienable rights as human beings.

Amid news that capitalist countries are on the road to recovery, real economic indicators show that developed economies are still struggling to rise above the ravages of the near-collapse of the global financial system.

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story
(2009, 123 minutes, Rated R)

There is no metaphor more fitting than love to get us a feel for our engagement with a system’s berserk display of passion for profit accumulation. King of shock docus, Michael Moore, once again, points a wrathful finger on the usual suspects who have enslaved and enchained our hearts and minds to a cruel relationship that neither fungible contracts nor boastings of recovery from Wall Street can assuage.