{"id":1626,"date":"2010-12-14T09:27:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-14T14:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=1626"},"modified":"2010-12-14T09:30:48","modified_gmt":"2010-12-14T14:30:48","slug":"cancun-what-just-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/14\/cancun-what-just-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"Cancun: what just happened?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making sense of what happened at the COP 16 global climate change summit in Cancun is not easy, especially when environmental and climate justice activists seem so intensely divided among themselves (and when the mass media has paid so little attention to it all). Democracy Now yesterday<\/a> pitted Friends of the Earth’s policy analyst Kate Horner against Center for American Progress senior fellow (and fellow environmental philosopher) Andrew Light, and the two of them seemed to be speaking from different planets. Light’s extended take on the “Cancun compromise” is available here<\/a>, while FOE International chair Nnimmo Bassey laments the “hijacking of Africa” at the summit here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Part of my problem is that I’ve been getting Bolivia’s ongoing messaging about the conference (e.g., from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth<\/a> blog), and they’ve been sending a lot out. (There’s a nonlinear effect for you: subscribe to a handful of blog feeds on a certain topic and when one or two of them start burning their fuel well into the red, their message bleeds over into any sense of balance one might get from a more unfiltered scan of news sources.) Bolivia was the one official holdout to the “compromise” — its indigenous president Evo Morales has been championing<\/a> the notion of a global “climate debt” promoted by anti-poverty and indigenous organizations as well as the green left (including groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network <\/a>and La Via Campesina, and blogs including Ian Angus’s Climate and Capitalism<\/a> and Derek Wall’s Another Green World<\/a>) — and it has taken a lot of flak<\/a> for its intransigency. Bolivia plans to follow up by taking the summit’s agreement to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.<\/p>\n

Pragmatists, on the other hand, seem somewhat impressed with the way things came together late in the day: with Mexico’s leadership (hard to imagine from the footage of cops beating up climate activists <\/a>on Democracy Now), India’s suddenly playing a constructive role<\/a>, and other countries’ efforts, including Brazil’s and South Africa’s, into carving out the agreement that, while weak, is better than what came out of Copenhagen and provides the infrastructure for working out further details in future meetings.<\/p>\n

As always, Grist<\/a> has been a reliably informative source of news on the summit. Other useful perspectives include Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May’s<\/a> (I took my title from her) and Nature’s Jeff Tollefson<\/a>‘s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making sense of what happened at the COP 16 global climate change summit in Cancun is not easy, especially when environmental and climate justice activists seem so intensely divided among themselves (and when the mass media has paid so little attention to it all). Democracy Now yesterday pitted Friends of the Earth’s policy analyst Kate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[520594,196],"tags":[16939,4448],"class_list":["post-1626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-politics","category-ecoculture","tag-cancun","tag-ecopolitics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-qe","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1371,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/15\/slouching-toward-the-cancun-bar\/","url_meta":{"origin":1626,"position":0},"title":"slouching toward the Cancun bar","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Peaksurfer's Albert Bates has a very good article up called The Great Change: Slouching towards Cancun. A few tidbits: Because of the huge outpouring of non-profit energy, money and effort at Copenhagen last year, and the subsequent meltdown of the Copenhagen round, the approach to this year\u2019s COP (Conference of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1382,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/02\/gleanings\/","url_meta":{"origin":1626,"position":1},"title":"gleanings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Scientists found that Asian and American brains respond completely differently when faced with images of dominance and submission, and when evaluating character traits of themselves as opposed to other people. Asians and Americans gathered with other world leaders to fiddle at a Mexican resort while buildings burned. [. . .]\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1165,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/12\/17\/copenhagen-changing-the-climate-of-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1626,"position":2},"title":"Copenhagen: changing the climate of democracy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken\u2019s \u201clargest movement in the world,\u201d the movement of movements made up\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"cop-15-last-chance-2.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/12\/cop-15-last-chance-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7452,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/04\/10\/anthropocene-aesthetics\/","url_meta":{"origin":1626,"position":3},"title":"Anthropocene aesthetics","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Cross-posting this piece by Emil from A(s)cene. Taylor's coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway's \"String Figures\" lecture and Bruno Latour's 11 theses on capitalism.\u00a0 \u00a0 Last week, Lee led us through an\u00a0exercise\u00a0that helped to contextualize the minuteness of the period in which humans (and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/files\/2014\/04\/anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture-300x206.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8510,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/12\/04\/to-bother-with-protest-or-not\/","url_meta":{"origin":1626,"position":4},"title":"To bother (with protest), or not?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 4, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Writing in The Independent, \"Left accelerationists\" Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek make the case that we need not bother protesting the Paris climate summit. There are better things to do than that. They argue, first, that the negotiators won't change anything under pressure, and probably won't even notice that pressure\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"_86941541_rob_m_oil_age_z6","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2015\/12\/86941541_rob_m_oil_age_z6-275x155.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12236,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/10\/29\/youth-vs-apocalypse-or-optimism-of-the-will\/","url_meta":{"origin":1626,"position":5},"title":"Youth vs. Apocalypse: or, optimism of the will","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 29, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"It seems the world is coming to realize what Environmental Studies folks have been saying since I first became a Master's student in that field 34 years ago: that humanity risks careening off the rails into a species-wide, if not planet-wide, smash-up unless it profoundly reorients the way it functions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/10\/unnamed.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1626"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1634,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions\/1634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}