To our knowledge, the 2 new Greenpeace reports below are the most urgent pronouncements by an international NGO to date that only EMERGENCY GLOBAL ACTION can avoid runaway “climate chaos”.
Intended to be brief and accessible (each only 8 pages with a lot of pictures), they understandably exclude a lot of detail.
The first report, Final Warning, is strong, effective and pulls few punches. The second, Copenhagen Demands, states and summarizes many complex and important things, but we feel it lacks certain key information and fails to make a number of essential demands.
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FINAL WARNING: THE WORLD’S DESCENT INTO RUNAWAY CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate Science Update (8-page PDF w a lot of pictures)
Steps you can take (Climate Emergency!)
Greenpeace Australia Pacific
General Demands:
– Situation a climate emergency
– Current levels of warming already having serious impacts
– Present impacts tracking ahead of worse-case IPCC forecasts
– Dangerously close to irreversible tipping points/brink of runaway climate change
– Methane ‘time bomb’ could escape from melting permafrost/accelerate warming
– Ocean acidification threatens entire ocean food chain
– Emissions must be brought back down to zero as soon as possible
– Must limit total warming as far below +1.5 C as possible
– Must pursue long term goal to reduce warming far below current levels
– Must replace coal with 100% renewables within 10 years
– Obstacles to change not technical or economic, but political
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COPENHAGEN CLIMATE SUMMIT: GREENPEACE DEMANDS (8-page PDF w a lot of pictures) Greenpeace International
General Demands:
– Urgent emergency plan necessary to avoid climate chaos
– 1.5 C could lead to irreversible impacts
– Emissions to peak by 2015, decline rapidly to as near to zero as possible by 2050
– Developed countries 40% below 1990 levels by 2020
– Developing countries 15-30% deviation from business as usual growth by 2020
– Funding mechanism to end gross deforestation in developing countries by 2020
– Legally binding, timely, equitable, based on responsibility, capability, potential to mitigate
– Must be global, gradually widen and deepen (principle of graduation)
– Massive increased and re-directed public/private funding for mitigation/adaptation
– Capping of international aviation and marine fuels
Not Addressed/Insufficient:
– Report says runaway climate change is imminent, but offers nothing that could avoid it
– No statement declaring a present state of dangerous interference with the climate system
– No statement demanding post-IPCC science be tabled for reference as soon as possible
– ‘Politically satisfactory’ annex 1, 2020 targets, but suggest nothing that would get us there
– Nothing specific about China, the top GHG (greenhouse gas) source
– Nothing that leads to the end of the fossil fuel energy industry
– No mention where deca-trillions of public deficit $ taken on as debt must go
– Zero delayed to 2050 = too late, global suicide
– No development of artificial carbon sinks = global suicide
– Nothing on correcting market failure by applying RIO agreements/polluter pays full costing
– No carbon pricing/carbon tax – Nothing on taxing top 15% of money makers responsible for 80% of emissions
– No ban on fossil fuel subsidies
– No proposed phase out of coal
– No proposed ban on tar sands, shale oil
– Nothing on biofuels
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