Incredible day. COP21 released the latest on the agreement, which still had over a thousand brackets and feels like they are no closer to an agreement than they were before. Yet, all their agreements spell an endorsed doomsday for indigenous peoples from the UN.

Today, I started out at the Our Power workshop which detailed the current exploitative extraction economy that we are currently under which isn’t sustainable. Our leader Yuki then illustrated the regenerative economy we need, one with a core value of sacredness and a governance of deep democracy.

People of color shared in the room how the structures of institutional and cultural racism keep their people in a cycle of poverty. This means people can’t simply move away when hazardous waste gets dumped on their land or a fracking well opens up underneath their homes.

Which prompted a French person to ask - oh, but isn’t it about white people too? The poor white person in the states?

Yuki acknowledged the need to build solidarity it’s working class whites. And I needed to chime in. Poor whites have always been offered and quite frequently used the excuse of race to make themselves superior. I, born in a trailer park, heard it myself: “At least we aren’t black.” This racism has been used to make sure the lowest classes never unify, and in the United States, whites on have 6 times the inheritance of people of color. Because whites have, generation after generation, exploited the land and labor of people of color. Even poor whites, who do it for their own survival. It’s high time that we as whites reject the poison pill of white supremacy to survive, as we’ll always be hobbled by our delusions of grandeur and empathy of the ruling class. The most exploited and endangered peoples have always been people of color.

The French woman acknowledged that perhaps racism in the states was a bit different. But since I get her question all the time in the states too, I have to wonder how different racism is here in France. Hopefully, the doors start opening in her mind.

After I finished I got snaps, but that was hardly the highlight of the day. For me, today’s revelation came as I listened to a panel was full of experts from around the world. As I heard of the dire need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, it dawned on me: my elementary school lied.

Well, of course they lie. I knew that. I graduated high school thinking the US had won the Vietnam war. But it’s always astonishing to discover a false cultural narrative. I grew up thinking that the problem my generation was going to solve was when we ran out of fossil fuels. It was an assumption we’d use them all up. Their complete depletion would mean we’d have to then, and only then, transition the energy economy to something else.

But during the System Change, not Climate Change panel I realized that if we use all the fossil fuels there are we’re dead.

Their emission would mean the end of the planet. There is no offset that can allow it.

What’s more, I learned about the climate change solutions being land grabs in disguise, which will devastate nations of people. So we must raise our collective voice to say, once again, those in power are wrong. They follow the guide of the polluters and profiteers, not the people.

This is why the message from native peoples, the first peoples, to keep it in the ground, is so strong. All other messages - green economy, renewable resource, etc - can be co-opted by corporations. They can say they’re doing that. But what they can’t say is that they’ll keep it in the ground. They can’t survive without some way of extracting fossil fuel. And unless 80% of that fuel is kept in the ground, we can’t stop climate change. There’s no negotiations on that - we must transition to a regenerative, sustainable economy for the people and the planet.

After that panel I went to the art space which is amazing in itself. Dozens of artists are pumping out hundreds of banners to use in protests all over the city. As a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, fellow member Derek Matthews and I made a “No WARming” banner and met up with artist & member Aaron Hughes. We teased him about being a rock star, as he just performed at the New York museum of modern art and in London, and is here part of his European tour. He’d spent the past week working 14 hour shifts, hunching his 6 foot 3 inch frame over a table to make banner after banner.

It is him, all the veterans like him, all the veterans who never made it out of the fog of war, all the people fighting against a conflict in a war of choice over oil, the indigenous people who survive assault after assault, that make life worth living. Whatever the agreements, we will survive it, we will triumph over it. Because we are the one with the power and the solutions for this planet. That may seem like an over statement, but it’s what I see here everyday that makes me believe - another world is possible - she has been here all along.