How Can the Climate Movement Force the Billionaires and Corporations to Change Their Ways?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-can-climate-movement-force-billionaires-and-corporations-change-their-ways

The People’s Climate Summit, Lima, Peru, December 11, 2014 : Marching and chanting (“Change the System, not the Climate!”), an energetic and colorful corps of indigenous people, campesinos, students, union members, and climate activists make our way through the traffic-clogged streets of Lima, from the Campo de Marte to the Plaza San Martin. Today’s “Mega-March,” 15,000 strong, is both invigorating and frustrating. Invigorating to take to the streets with a growing international Movement. Frustrating to realize that we are still losing the battle.

The bad news from Lima this week is that our Movement is not yet large enough, or powerful enough, to force the billionaires and multinational corporations who run the world to change their ways. As thousands of us chant and march in the streets, the politicians and corporate elite meeting across town at COP 20, the official UN Climate Summit, are still arguing over who’s to blame and who will pay the bill.

Meanwhile back in the U.S., the corrupt and fossilized Congress has been completely hijacked by know-nothing politicians who deny there’s a climate crisis at all.

Here in Peru and the Andes, the high mountain glaciers—essential for crops and drinking water—are melting. South America’s magnificent Amazonian rainforests, the “lungs of the planet,” are rapidly being excavated for oil or minerals, or are being chopped down. The oceans, Atlantic and Pacific, rich in marine life, are heating up, acidifying and dying. The continent’s precious agricultural soils, grasslands and watersheds, some of the planet’s most important repositories (known as carbon sinks) for CO2 and greenhouse gases are steadily being destroyed by genetically engineered monocrops, toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

[RiverLover]

1. "Frustrating to realize that we are still losing the battle."

As evidenced even here at DU sometimes.

We're the only species on the planet that realizes our actions today can affect our tomorrow, but our own extinction is too big, requires too much collective action, & sacrifice I think.

And people deny it. Its hard to face.

[on point]

2. Mechanisms: taxes, tariffs regulation. More difficult public knowledge of need