Campaigners pick up on damning video
Portugal’s Climáximo movement has declared the United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP29, which begins today, to be “a fraud” – citing the release of a video of the chief executive of the summit allegedly discussing potential agreements for the expansion of fossil fuels exploration.
“No solution will come from these conferences, which are designed to fail: every year global leaders sit around the negotiating table with thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists to decide how they will continue to expand the burning of oil, gas and coal and enrich themselves at the expense of the devastation of the entire world,” the organisation, which campaigns for action against climate change, said in a statement today.
The movement’s spokesperson, Inês Teles, has described the 29th COP as yet another episode “in the soap opera of civilisational collapse” that in recent weeks has included a draft state budget in Portugal that she said “practically ignores the climate crisis” as well as the election of “a climate denier in the US” in the form of Donald Trump.
“When we consider the options that the current system presents us with – aiming for hell or an even worse hell – it seems that there is no way out of the catastrophe,” she says.
The group argues that it is possible to “design alternative plans, giving as an example initiatives such as the anti-COP, which took place between November 4 and 9 in Mexico, and where Climáximo was present, along with 250 activists from all continents.
“After several days of work, the final declaration of the event affirms the ‘unity’ of peoples around the world to stop the war that governments and companies have declared on peoples and the planet, reaffirming links between the movement for climate justice, indigenous, peasant, migrant, national liberation and anti-colonial movements,” says Climáximo.
The movement has come up with its statement today ahead of a new demonstration, scheduled for Lisbon on November 23, dubbed Parar Enquanto Podemos (Stop While We Can).
The protest is to set off from the city’s Praça Paiva Couceiro square, before ending downtown at Praça do Chile.
COP29, the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, kicks off on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is to run until November 22. The initiative is lauded as ‘crucial to achieving emission reduction commitments by 2030 and increasing climate finance’, but this is just the ‘PR’ angle. Few see it as anything that will change anything…
The 29th COP in a world that is still heating up in spite of the 28 previous events comes as clear-up operations after storms that caused more than 220 deaths in Spain are still ongoing – clear examples of the worsening of extreme climatic and meteorological phenomena.
The latest UN report on greenhouse gas emissions (UN Emissions Gap Report 2024) predicts global warming of 3.1ºC by the end of the century if current policies are maintained and governments do not make more ambitious commitments to reduce emissions.
Source: LUSA
