Posted by John, December 22nd, 2009 - under The Greens.

Tags: Civil disobedience, Climate change, Copenhagen, Copenhagen climate summit, Global Warming, Green energy, Green jobs

We can make their polluting society unworkable and unprofitable.

We can win real action to address climate change. We have the power.

Mass civil disobedience by a significant minority can stop the wheels of business, at least temporarily.

After the failure of Copenhagen, blocking coal trains on the way to port in Newcastle was a great symbolic action showing the bosses and their politicians what may lay ahead.

It will not be enough. The task is to turn the symbolic into the everyday.

We must turn the world upside down until the polluters and their politicians back down and begin the urgent task of moving to a renewable energy economy and creating hundreds of thousands of high wage green jobs for those displaced by the end of killer coal and other changes needed.

This is not about limiting temperature rises to 2 degrees centigrade. It is about returning to 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere from the current 390, a figure growing by almost two parts per million a year.

We stand in a grand tradition – Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. It was the mass democratic and radical wings of their movements which took the struggle forward.

The task is urgent. As James Hansen argues we are approaching tipping points in climate change which will produce feedback effects whose catastrophic impacts can only be guessed at.

The Greens in Australia have an historic opportunity and duty to lead and build this movement. I doubt their politics and their marriage to parliamentary niceties will see them do so.

The key to successful action is as always the class that produces the bosses’ wealth. The entrenched conservative trade union leadership around the Australian Council of Trade Unions is an impediment to any struggle for real action on climate change.

We must appeal to the rank and file unionists to force their unions to take action to save the planet before the bosses destroy us. Stopping their profits concentrates the bosses’ mind like nothing else and what before seemed impossible becomes a manageable task.

This is not just an appeal to workers in the polluting industries. It is an appeal to all workers to save our planet from the pollution that profit produces.

At the moment i Australia postal workers, Qantas workers and others are striking over pay and conditions. Let’s support those fighting for economic justice and link their fight with ours – for a future world where we will still have jobs and an environment.

Industrial action over climate change will be illegal. Defy their laws to save our planet.

This movement has to be a world-wide one. While the fight begins here it has to spread across the globe if we are to be successful.

We in Australia must begin to build our forces, just as those in Europe and America and across the developed and developing world will and must do. We are for a mass democratic and radical movement to stop the polluters destroying our home.

It will be no easy task taking on the political and economic dictatorship in China and the economic dictatorship in the United States. Only a strong working class movement can do that.

The task appears daunting. But to do nothing is to consign the planet to possible oblivion.

In the past ordinary working people have through extraordinary struggles re-made the world for their own benefit. We can do so again.

We have a world to win. Today.