| |
|
Tom Goldtooth
The climate bill, unfortunately, has been co-opted by the oil and coal
industry. It’s a situation where we again have politics over science.
And for our network and our constituency on the frontline of unsustainable energy policy, from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, to
the indigenous people in Nigeria, it’s business as usual. We don’t see
democracy in the process of decisions being made around climate policy,
whether it’s domestically, like the Waxman-Markey bill, or globally.
It’s business as usual. We had high hopes, and we still do, but it’s going to take the
political will of the people, [not] discussions behind closed doors.
That’s something that’s really a big concern for us here as American
Indian and Alaska natives. Our communities and many of the people in
America have been locked out of the process that’s happening between
the big environmental organizations and big industry.
We are part of the 350 million indigenous peoples throughout the world.
The [U.N. meetings concerning the Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples] mark the first time that 400 indigenous peoples
came together from every region in the world to discuss the impacts of
climate change.
We all agreed that we are at the frontlines with disproportionate
impacts. There has to be a human rights framework to address this
issue. We came out of this meeting in consensus: we’ve got to have
aggressive emission targets. We agreed that we need to push the
industrialized countries like America and Canada to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions by 45 percent by 2020 using 1990 levels, and 95 to 100
percent by 2050. We have the technology to do that.
A well-financed and very powerful oil and coal industry is [in
negotiations] with these large environmental organizations that don’t
have constituencies. I think [support for the current climate bill] is
a sellout position. I think the people of America are smarter than
that. But America needs to have more understanding of where we’re at
with climate change and what market-based solutions the government and
corporations are developing.
Tom Goldtooth is the co-director of the Indigenous Environmental
Network headquartered at Bemidji, Minnesota. This interview is
excerpted from a transcript courtesy of Democracy Now. Photo courtesy
of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
|
