Follow the Climate Reality Tour!
We’re pleased to unveil an exciting new project: the Climate Reality Tour.
You may have caught an earlier post, but in case you didn’t, let’s fill you in The Climate Reality Tour is a movement-building road trip to promote global economic policies that are fair for workers and shift away from the climate- and job-destroying status quo. The destination? The United Nations Climate Negotiations in Cancun in late November. And to bring home the sustainability point, we decided to go by bike. Yep, by bike!
With the world in the grips of overlapping global crises – food, economic/financial and climate – the stakes are high indeed. To save the planet requires confronting these crises simultaneously, and that means overcoming the false jobs vs. environment trade-off. In truth, corporations benefit from exploiting both while human beings and the earth suffer.
But this requires political will and resolve far beyond what we’ve seen from either political party, and even many leading civil society organizations. At Public Citizen, we’ve long believed our unsustainable global economic order, as etched in the tomes of the WTO and NAFTA-type trade deals, unfairly pits workers and ecosystems against one another. We’ve decried how the status quo sanctifies the rights or multinational corporations to exploit and destroy – even above the democratic rights of a people determine their own economic and eological futures.
What’s more, many of the minimum sorts of standards we need to apply to avert climate catastrophe, like requiring energy efficiency or low carbon production methods for goods coming to market, could potentially be struck down by extra-judicial trade tribunals. The only options on the table are free-market false-solutions like cap-and-trade, corporate polluter giveaways and a range of ecologically disruptive techno-fixes.
So the Climate Reality Tour is setting out to help connect the dots between our unfair global economy and the looming climate crises. I’m on partial leave through the U.N. Summit and will be reporting periodically about the progress of the tour.
You can find more on the Climate Reality Tour in our periodic Eyes on Trade posts, or by checking us out on Facebook or following the tour on Twitter. It’s more than 2,500 miles of connections – between globalization, climate change, jobs, immigration, fair food, energy, environmental justice and sustainable global development.
We hope you can join us for the ride.
Post by James Ploeser – Global Trade Watch’s Senior Field Organizer