All posts tagged by: Moises

-by Moisés Flores Baca

In my History of Filmmaking class this past Fall term we got the opportunity to look at various films that are considered propagandistic, including a few by the famous german filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who worked during Hitler’s regime being one of his favorite people.

When we think of the Nazi regime normally nothing positive comes to mind. This is why it came as a big surprise, not only to me but also to many of my classmates, that there was something about Riefenstahl’s films, especially one that shows a big Nazi youth summit, that made Nazism look as something good, as something great to look up to. In retrospective I figure that the fact that we felt in such way while watching the film has nothing to do with Nazism being in anyway positive, but with Riefenstahl’s ability to show it as something good.

When I was there at the first plenary of the COP16, feeling that I was before something “irresistible” -to word it somehow-, feeling the power there is in watching the faces of the negotiators blown-up a hundred times on the three different projections shown, made me consider the possibility that we were just being brainwashed and that we would continue to be for the next two weeks. It made me think about the footage that will be shown in media after the conference is over, trying to make seem what happened as something incredibly positive: we would see the youth carrying out actions, promoting “green” values and practices, and they will be smiling, dancing, having fun, just like the youth shown in the Riefenstahl’s movie are shown playing, having friendly wrestling matches, loving it all throughout; we would see the faces of the negotiators whose statements would be considered to have been positive and change-seeking; we would see the faces of culturally and racially diverse politicians smiling at each other and shaking hands, and we would experience a feeling similar to the one produced by Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Nazi movies: that what we are seeing is great and that we should look up to it.

The fact that environmentally-aware people are trying to tell others how they should live makes many believe that the environmental struggle is a new kind of fascism that is looking to step over people’s freedom to do whatever they want in the way they want. In my view this perspective is completely wrong for one main reason, that can be illustrated by the following comparison: on the one hand behind the Nazi ideology there was the believe of the superiority of the so-called “aryan race”, that supposed superiority implied that they were the only ones that deserved to survive. Putting aside economic considerations(the Jewish population was concentrating a lot of wealth supposedly taking away what belonged to the ‘real Germans’) it is fair to argue that the defended superiority of the “aryan race” was the main reason why the Jewish population of Germany and other some other European countries was hunted down. On the other hand, behind the “environmental ideology”, if we can call it so, there is the believe that in order to prevent terrible disasters that would take the lives of millions of people around the world, it is imperative that we change the way everyone lives (the level of radicalism of that change varies from person to person, from country to country, from organization to organization, etc, but the idea of the necessity of change is there). Environmentally aware people, by and large (sorry for the generalization) do not consider other groups of people inferior, do not consider that others should perish, on the contrary, they want even those who oppose their views to not be vanished by climate change. Yes, at certain level they are telling other people how to behave, however, they do it because they care for those people. It is like when the mother tells the children not to do something that might hurt them.

I think we should really think about whether freedom should be put on top of everything else, even if doing so compromises the survival of many, and the acceptable or high standards of living of many others. This is for the readers of this blog to poder around, especially those who sympathize with the idea that the environmental movement is fascist.

-by Moisés Flores Baca

Today is the Youth and Future Generations day and the YOUNGO, or Youth Constituency, is organizing a big series of various events to make the youth’s voices be heard. One of these events will be the “Market of our Futures” at which the different NGO’s that form the constituency will present different items for sale that symbolize the fact that our future is being sold through carbon markets and other flexibility mechanisms. The event will be running from 1 to 3, when the break for the plenaries takes place and the majority of the negotiators will be having lunch at the Cancunmesse (the facilities where side-events are taking place). It will consist of the different NGOs symbolically selling things such as “endangered species” or “glaciers”. Since the COA delegation did not want to be left behind on such an important day we decided to put up a “shop” too: we will be selling ocean pH, thus representing the ongoing acidification of the world’s seas due to elevated levels of carbon in the atmosphere. This acidification puts at stake not only the lives of corals and other marine specimens, but also the survival of many fishing communities around the world.

To carry this action out we will have fake litmus papers (those used to measure pH) and hand them out, each of them representing a tenth of a unit of pH. As decorations for our booth we have prepared a banner with the legend “Ocean Decay” using a design similar to that of the juice brand “Ocean Spray”; also a pH scale that shows the ocean pH at pre-Industrial Revolution levels (8.19), the levels predicted for the end of the century (7.78!), and the levels at which all fish would be dead (4.2). To cause more of a visual impact we show a happy cartoonish whale on the basic side and a realistic whale skull (of course we had to have COA there somehow) with a big cross on its styrofoam eye and the legend “… and the whales too” complementing the “All fish dead” on the 4.2 of the scale.

Without the ocean playing the role of “carbon sink” that it has so far has the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been 55% higher than what it has been in the last 250 years. Continuously increasing emissions of green house gases put further pressure in an ocean that is already incapable of absorbing the 2.15 billion metric tons of CO2 it releases every year, capacity that it had previous to the Industrial Revolution. To reach, if not exactly this level of equilibrium, at least a close-enough level we have to substantially decrease not only the release of CO2 emissions, but the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere.

Stay tuned to our blog for an update on how the whole event turns out.

-by Moisés Flores Baca

"Cancun is the best example of ecosystems predation...mangroves were destroyed...its beaches were filled with hotels...the sand eroded away and they brought it from Cozumel...taking that sand away from Cozumel compromises the existence of its coral reefs...the fact that it is the place where the environmental summit meant to save the planet is happening there seems to be a joke. To bring seriousness back into this we should lynch the politicians who invented Cancun!... Gulp!

“Cancun is the best example of ecosystems predation…” reads the first line of the cartoon above, published today by the left-wing newspaper “LaJornada”, “The fact that it is the place where the environmental summit meant to save the planet is happening there seems to be a joke”, reads the line in the middle. It is fair to acknowledge that LaJornada normally goes way over the top in terms of its criticism of mainstream politics, more often than not making the reader feel that they are criticizing for the sake of criticizing, especially when it comes to its cartoons, however, it is undeniable that there is an enormous measure of truth in the message conveyed in the cartoon above.

Yesterday at one side event jointly organized by 350.org and the Biological Diversity Organization one of the panelist brought up the fact that holding the Climate Change negotiations in Cancun is very ironic. It is ironic because Cancun is one of those places that epitomizes unsustainable development: in order to build all the fancy Hotels that now cover that skinny line of land in between the ocean and the lake (La Zona Hotelera), mangroves, a hub of biological diversity, had to be destroyed. Because when erosion attacked its beaches, that are amongst the favorites of European and North American spring-breakers (especially American since the legal drinking age in Mexico is 18 years) to vacation, sand was brought from the island of Cozumel to keep the tourist business going. But if this was not enough, for some of the latest resort developments in La Zona Hotelera corals had to be dynamited in order to make the beaches swim-able.

I remember that once about 7 years ago, I was traveling with my family to Cancun, and on our way to the hotel from the airport the tour guide in the bus was explaining us how new was the hotel we were going to stay at: we were amongst the first to have the privilege of staying at the RIU hotel&resort -owned by Spaniards of course, like almost all the other hotels in the Riviera Maya area. The guide got quite excited about the RIU being so new that he revealed, by accident I guess, a piece of information that I am pretty sure he was not supposed to reveal: the developers of the hotel had to “clean the beach up” in order to make it tourist-friendly. They had to blow up some corals that were in the turists’ way to the bliss that it is to swim in the turquoise waters of the Mexican Caribbean. The poor guy got himself into a deadlock and could not do much against the suddenly very serious looks people were giving him. They did not find what he was saying amusing. He tried to laugh and turn  his revelation into a funny remark but it just did not work -in retrospect I figure that perhaps the guy was new in the job, probably as new as the RIU was back there. Then he got himself into even muckier waters by adding that when we got to the beach we would find that the sand was rather ‘rough’ on the feet for a couple of feet into the water, but that stepping beyond that into the water one could not feel the rocks anymore and the experience was quite pleasurable. He told us to be careful.

For the four days or so that I stayed in Cancun that time, I would be reminded every time I got into the sea for a relaxing swim of the horrible sin that was committed in that piece of paradise for the sake of the tourist industry: every time I stepped into the water the rocks that once formed a big coral hurt my feet -I think I even got a cut once- taking revenge on me for what some executive at some office in some part of Spain had decided, and some politician in Mexico -who most likely was completely unfamiliar with that spot of paradise- allowed to happen. I get a similar feeling every time I enter the Cancunmesse Conference Center, or the Moon Palace facilities, or even the busses that take people around, and the air-conditioning makes me shiver and suffer because it is way too cold. Not to mention how frustrating it is that the place where the climate negotiations are taking place, the luxurious resort called Moon Palace, is closer to Cancun downtown -where the hostel we are staying at is- than the Cancunmesse, the place where we have to go through security checks… in short, we have to go south all the way to the Cancunmesse and then go back north -the way we came- for about twenty minutes to get to the Moon Palace.

Everyone seems to acknowledge that the outcome of the Cancun negotiations is not going to be brilliant, and in all possibility, is going to be very disappointing. Well, to that we have to add the fact that everything will seem more frustrating at the end if we consider that, for that disappointing outcome to exists, we would have polluted incredibly contributing way more to the problem than to the solution.

-by Moisés Flores Baca

One of the side events that receives the most attention during Climate Change Conferences (since 1999) is the “Fossil of the Day” awards organized by the Climate Action Network (CAN). The award is given to the worst-performing country of the previous day. Yesterday Canada was the proud receiver of this award, not for its performing in the negotiations themselves since there were no negotiations on Sunday, but for its performing in recent months.

Normally three different countries are selected to receive awards but Canada’s performance in the Climate Change Arena prior to the start of the negotiations was so outstandingly bad that it received the three awards itself, something that is not new for Canada: it received the three awards in COP12(Bali) as well .
The first award was given to Canada because this November its federal Senate killed a progressive climate change bill without even debating it. The second award was to recognize the efforts of the Canadian conservative government to cut the only major renewable energy support program, its funding for a climate science foundation, amongst other would-be-helpful projects.
The third and final project was awarded to Canada because it decided to reduce its national target after Copenhagen and brought back environment minister John Baird, who was the last minister to oppose the science-based target range of 25-40% reductions below 1990 levels in 2020 during the Bali negotiations.

It will be interesting to follow closely the performance of Canada during the Cancun negotiations for it is in most perfect compliance with the US position of not accepting any legally binding ambitious agreements, thus epitomizing the attitude that other countries are taking of not proposing anything themselves, of not acting by themselves but waiting for what the US decides to do, that we know will not be very promising. The “if you don’t do anything I won’t do anything either” attitude that many national delegations display is going to be one of the biggest obstacles to overcome during these two weeks of negotiations.

On behalf of the COA COP16 delegation I would like to congratulate Canada on its three awards.