Obama: Stop Obstructing a Real Climate Deal in Cancun!

Stop Obstructing a Real Climate Deal in Cancun!

Dear President Obama:

As community members and grassroots organizations from poor and working-class communities of color and indigenous communities across the United States, we are gravely concerned with the US’s obstructive role in the UN Climate Negotiations in Cancun.

The world urgently needs a strong climate deal that will keep warming to below 1 degree and ensure a fair and equitable transition. Our communities here and around the world can no longer be held hostage to the corporate-backed positions of Congress members who seek to uphold profit over the well-being of the world’s people.

We call on your Administration to stop standing in the way of progress. Progress requires a new climate agreement based on the Kyoto Protocol’s framework of holding the biggest polluters accountable to reducing emissions through binding targets, and drawn from the rights-based principles of the Cochabamba People’s Agreement and its guidelines for rapid emissions reduction. It must include corporate polluter pays public financing directed through a fund under the authority of the UN that is accessible to frontline communities and workers -- instead of carbon markets, REDD, and the financing of false solutions through the clean development mechanism.

We call on your Administration to:
• Drop the ineffective Copenhagen Accord with its trivial and non-binding targets, stop bribing and bullying poor nations to go along with it. Stop obstructing prospects for an effective and just global climate deal through the UN Climate Negotiations.
• Raise the US reduction target to 40% of 1990 levels by 2020, in line with scientific assessments.
• Carry out emissions reductions by: enacting corporate-polluter pays funding mechanisms to fund urban agriculture, regional family farming, local clean energy, and community water systems; moving funding from highway expansion to fully fund mass transit; and; enacting emissions caps for all extraction, production, energy, and waste practices.

[Your name]