Leaked Agreement Rocks Copenhagen Emma Alberici, Australian Broadcasting Company The Copenhagen climate talks have been rocked by the leak of a draft final agreement which weakens the role of the United Nations in climate change negotiations and abandons the Kyoto Protocol. The "Danish text" draft agreement, published by the UK's Guardian newspaper, has been described as a dangerous document for developing countries.

Danish Police Issue Protests Warning Ahead of Copenhagen Climate Summit TheCatalystCell COPENHAGEN - Danish police this weekend spelt out a tough warning about any violent protests at the 12-day UN climate conference starting in Copenhagen on Monday. "We are ready," Mogens Lauridsen, head of operations at Copenhagen police, told AFP late Saturday. "We have mobilized enough force from the entire kingdom to handle the heaviest task the modern police has ever been called upon to assume," he said. "We have anticipated every contingency, including the worst. We are confident, but we expect excesses because there will surely be protesters looking for violence." Six thousand police -- more than half of all the police in Denmark -- are being deployed in the capital. They could be reinforced to 9,300 men if need be, he said.

Why Carbon Offsetting Will Not Save the Planet Mayfly Books Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures. Read the press release dated 1 December 2009. ‘This book is a very constructive and rigorous critique of CDM offset approaches to deal with carbon footprints. I recommend this book to any student, policy maker or administrator of climate change complexities in developed or developing countries.’ Professor Anil Gupta, Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad, India ‘If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom! But this book is far from resigned to that fate. After examining the case against carbon trading… the book turns to alternatives, to hope, to sanity, and to the future.’ Professor Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit Fears Green Christiania Squat Nearby Stefanie Marsh The Danish government will be cracking down on the Christiania squatter camp despite its green credentials Less than two weeks before the start of the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen, a counter-cultural enclave in the heart of the capital has again been attracting the attention of the Danish authorities. Christiania, the sprawling commune that clings limpet-like to 32 hectares of prime property in the centre of Copenhagen, has been an anarchist stronghold and municipal headache ever since a group of squatters seized a former military barracks there in the late 1960s. Since the squat is technically illegal, by rights this part of Christianshavn should long ago have been converted into apartments. Instead this is where a population of more than 700 bikers, hippies, skaters, drug dealers, artists, anarchists, punks, activists, strays and vagrants live in a kind of organised chaos, pariahs to the Danish People’s Party, an increasingly popular and influential far-Right group that says Christiania is dangerous and want to see it demolished. It is feared that the dilapidated “state within a state” will form a mecca for the thousands of anti-globalisation protesters who are expected to descend on Denmark in the second week of December.

End Times in Copenhagen Joel Kovel October 29th 2009 It's hard to overstate the importance of the upcoming December meetings at Copenhagen, Denmark, set up by the UN for the purpose of renegotiating the climate protocols set forth in Kyoto, in 1997 and due to expire in 2012. These latter were greeted with a certain modicum of hope and a small offsetting of skepticism. As Copenhagen looms, the skeptics have been proven right in spades, those who thought something good would come out of Kyoto stand revealed as fools or liars and charlatans. In the sober words of Nature from 2007, the Kyoto protocols, which demanded of wealthy countries that they reduce carbon emissions by 2012 to six-to-eight percent below 1990 levels, have "produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth."

Climate Change, Nuclear Power and Democracy Res0nance Monday saw Ed Milliband make public plans to overhaul the UK energy system. Whilst the plan includes an overhaul of renewables and coal fired power perhaps the most controversial aspect of this overhaul is the emphasis being placed on nuclear energy generation. A new generation of 10 nuclear plants has been proposed which could provide up to 40% of the UK’s energy by 2025. This will be “the most ambitious fleet of new nuclear reactors in Europe” according to the Guardian. This overhaul, according to Labour, has been designed to address the twin problems of climate change and energy security.

No Borders Groups Call to Action for Copenhagen Climate Change This is a call out to action to international no borders groups during the COP 15 in Copenhagen! Starting December 7, 2009 Climate change is now the ULTIMATE Shock and Awe. It encompasses all of life now, and is the new spectacle. The climate change spectacle is the complete reconstruction and revitalization of capitalism and all of its domination, hierarchies, exploitation, racism, sexism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, commodifications, privatizations, oppressions, repressions, murders, lies, and greed. Climate change will be used to terrorize us in every way we have been terrorized before, but encompassing all the single factors into one. In the name of security, Everything that living things depend is on its way to being commodified and privatized, to push us even further and possibly completely into pure Milton Friedman ´Chicago School´ of fundamental capitalist corporatism.

PRECARIOUS UNITED for CLIMATE ACTION Fighting for Social and Climate Justice. Because Climate Change Make All Precarious. The economic crisis has heavily hit the precariat – the sum of those working non-standard, temporary, part-time contracts in services and industry – worse than any other social class. Millions of precarious youth, women, immigrants are being made redundant by the Great Recession. Unemployment has skyrocketed from the US to the EU, from Iceland to Japan. Those responsible for the crisis – big banks, investment funds, free-market economists and policy-makers – whitewash and greenwash without shame as if nothing happened and go on with business as usual. Governments are giving trillions to the bankers and peanuts to the permatemps. Riots and protests are spreading as a result, also targeting a new wave of racism and xenophobia, but the pressure against political and economic power hasn't yet been enough, although an Autumn of Rage lies in store and this could change the equation. Yet on the horizon of this historic capitalist crisis, an even larger crisis looms: global heating and climate change due to fossil-burning capital accumulation. Humankind is in danger, and by mid-century millions and millions could be wiped out from Earth if overdeveloped economies don't cut emissions, i.e. if we don't bring into line the major carbon emitters (oil, coal, energy conglomerates, manufacturing corporations and their logistics, the aviation industry, fast food and agribusiness, luxury tourism etc.). Copenhagen in December is an excellent opportunity to do so. On Dec 7-18, the UN Climate Summit – COP15 – will take place in the Danish capital, a city with strong radical traditions and a current history of rebellious agitation. All the state and economic elites from all the countries of the world will convene at Bella Center in Copenhagen to seek a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, including those powers like the US, China, India who hadn't signed it.

“Our Bolivian Model is not Communist, but Community Based” Michelle Amaral da Silva Fernando Huanacuni, one of the most important Aymara intellectual references in Bolivia, defends that the foundation for the process of change in the country is structured around the return to their original culture. Fernando Huanacuni, uma das principais referências intelectuais dos aymara na Bolívia, sustenta que a base do processo de mudança no país está na retomada de culturas originárias The current Bolivian political process has undoubtedly attracted the attention of the Brazilian left. The high level of protagonism from popular movements in national politics and the fact that the country elected an indigenous President, the fierce confrontations with a racist elite – which renders a state coup a plausible possibility – their international struggles to assure sovereignty over their natural resources, the strong presence of the ethnic component as the motto for mobilizations, the changes in the Constitution of a country that now defines itself as a Plurinational State, among other elements, attract attention to Bolivia, giving it credentials as the main political laboratory now.

The Commoner N. 13 Released on Energy Crisis THERE’S AN ENERGY CRISIS (AMONG OTHERS) IN THE AIR… Edited by Kolya Abramsky and Massimo De Angelis There seems to be a general consensus, left and right, that we are in the midst of a new energy crisis. Either, “Peak Oil” is to blame, based on the argument that oil resources are about to peak bringing about serious constraints on future use of energy. Or, climate change is highlighted, warning that the sustained use of fossil fuel is heating up the planet and bringing about catastrophic changes in climate patterns. With this issue of The Commoner we have sought to create a space to discuss the current energy crisis from a perspective that considers technology and energy within the social relations that they are part of, both being shaped by these relations and also shaping them. The editors of this issue do not believe this crisis is simply one of finite resources (“peak oil”), or that there is a technological path out of these crises, despite the indisputable fact that both resource scarcity and technology are nonetheless important factors. Instead, we understand the use, production, and distribution of energy as moments of capitalist social relations of production. As such, energy and technology are both important sites of struggle, and are shaped by these struggles. Like all phenomena, the basis of the current energy crisis does not have one but many converging “causes”. A politically essential one is the many resistances against capital’s appropriation of natural resources, beginning with oil and gas but not limited to these.