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	U.S. will be ''rogue'' state if it ditches climate accord by Mary Robinson UN Special Envoy for Climate Change   It is "unconscionable" that the United States would walk away from its climate change commitments, says Mary Robinson.   The United States would become "a kind of rogue country" if it pulls out of an international agreement to combat global warming, leaving the world more vulnerable to droughts and other climate extremes, warned Mary Robinson, UN Special Envoy for Climate Change.   "It would be a tragedy for the United States and the people of the United States if the U.S. becomes a kind of rogue country, the only country in the world that is somehow not going to go ahead with the Paris Agreement," Robinson said in an interview with news agencies.   U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican, has promised to pull the United States out of that global climate accord, which was agreed last year by 193 countries and which came into effect earlier this month.   The deal aims to hold climate change to below 2 degrees Celsius of warming by moving the world economy away from fossil fuels.   The agreement provides for $100 billion a year in international funding from 2020 to help poorer countries develop cleanly and adapt to the already inevitable impacts of climate change.   Robinson, who now runs a foundation focused on seeking justice for people hit hard by climate impacts despite having contributed little to the problem, said she was confident other countries would continue their backing for the accord regardless of any action taken by the United States.   "I don''t think that the process itself will be affected if one country, however big and important that country is, decides not to go ahead," she said on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks in Marrakesh.   But a pullout could mean a "huge difference" to already difficult efforts to gather enough international finance to help poorer countries develop their economies without increasing their emissions, "which is what they want to do", she said.   "The moral obligation of the United States as a big emitter, and a historically big emitter that built its whole economy on fossil fuels that are now damaging the world - it''s unconscionable the United States would walk away from it," she said of the threat to withdraw from the Paris deal.   "The impact of that will be felt by poor communities and poor countries all over the world."   As a U.N. envoy for El Nino and climate change, she said she had been in dry regions of Honduras where women told her they no longer had water as a result of worsening drought.   "I saw the pain on the faces of those women. And one of the women said to me, and I''ll never forget, ''We have no water. How do you live without water?'' I''m hearing that all over the world," she said.   She urged Americans upset about the proposed changes in U.S. policy to make their voices heard. "People in the United States have to get up and make a big noise, and business in the United States has to make a big noise about this," she said. http://www.mrfcj.org/ Visit the related web page
	The magnitude of the crises we face demands system change by Karin Nansen The Ecologist, Friends of the Earth   We are facing deep-rooted climate, social and environmental crises. The current dominant economic system cannot provide solutions. It is time for system change.   For Friends of the Earth International this means creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic and gender justice. We must question and deconstruct the capitalist logic of accumulation.   The climate catastrophe is interwoven with many social and environmental crises, including oppression, corporate power, hunger, water depletion, biodiversity loss and deforestation. At its heart sits an unsustainable economic system, the sole aim of which is endless growth and profit. This system concentrates wealth, power and obscene privilege with the few. Corporations and national elites are empowered by that very system to exploit people and their livelihoods with impunity.   We must tackle climate change and the associated social and environmental crises by taking rapid and bold action to address the common root causes; privatization, financialization and commodification of nature and societies, and unsustainable production and consumption systems.   The magnitude of the crises we face demands system change.   That system change will result in the creation of sustainable societies and new relations between human beings, and between human beings and nature, based on equality and reciprocity. But we cannot create these societies and assert people’s rights without increasing people’s power. We need to reclaim politics. This means creating genuine, radical and just democracies centred around people’s sovereignty and participation. International law must put people above corporate profit, ensuring binding rules for business and mechanisms that guarantee access to justice for victims of transnational corporations.   System change calls for an articulation of the struggles against oppression; that is, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and class and capitalist exploitation. It demands commitment to the struggle against the exploitation of women’s bodies and work. We are witnessing how the expansion of capital over the territories leads to increased violence against women alongside the violation of their rights. Gender justice will only be possible when we recognize women as political subjects, stop violence against women, strengthen women’s autonomy, advance the principles of feminist economy, deconstruct the sexual division of labor and reorganize care work.   A transformation of the energy system is fundamental to system change. It entails democratic answers to the fundamental questions: for whom and what is energy produced? And a total departure from fossil fuel reliance and corporate control. This must be a just transition, founded on workers’ and community rights.   It is not only about changing technologies and renewable energy, but about public and community ownership and control, therefore addressing the root problems of a system that turns energy into a commodity and denies the right to energy for all. It requires equity and justice, especially for those already impacted by the changing climate in the global South.   Genuine system change would radically transform the food system towards food sovereignty and agroecology: valuing local knowledge, promoting social and economic justice and people’s control over their territories, guaranteeing the right to land, water and seeds, nurturing social relations founded on justice and solidarity, and recognizing the fundamental role of women in food production, to provide an effective way to feed the world and a counter to destructive industrial agriculture.   Biodiversity and forests are best protected by the communities who live in them. Protecting forests can address climate change by maintaining natural carbon stores and reducing the amount of carbon released through deforestation, while providing communities with food, fibres, shelter, medicines and water. Just eight per cent of the world’s forests are managed by communities; it is vital we secure community rights over forests and livelihoods.   System change must address people’s individual and collective needs and promote reciprocity, redistribution and sharing. Solutions include public services achieved through tax justice, social ownership and co-operativism, local markets and fair trade, community forest management, and valuing the wellbeing of people and the planet.   People all over the world are already living or implementing thousands of initiatives which embody justice and challenge the capitalist logic. Now we must expand them. And that requires commensurate international and national public policies that empower people to fight for a democratic state that ensures rights and provides environmentally and socially just public services, and active popular participation; a state that guarantees peoples’ rights to water, land and the territories, food, health, education, housing and decent jobs.   We all need to support local and international resistance, engage in popular mobilization, strive for policy change and upscale the real solutions, the solutions of the people. This is system change. Visit the related web page
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