Nigerian Environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey at Copenhagen: The Global North Owes a Climate Debt to Africa

Leave the oil in the soil. Leave the coal in the hole. Leave the tar sands in the land.

There are some great activist environmental speakers at Copenhagen, many I’ve never heard of until now.  One of Nigeria’s best-known environmental leaders, Nnimmo Bassey, is the founder of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, and he serves as the international chair of Friends of the Earth. He has campaigned against Shell Oil’s presence in the Niger Delta for nearly two decades. Last night he spoke at the opening of Klimaforum09. His forthcoming book is titled To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa. See DemocracyNow’s interview with him here.

“Offsetting is upsetting.”  To paraphrase some of what he said:  Resist, Mobilize, Transform — these three key words that capture what we are looking for. Do you care about land grabs?  Now we are seeing sky grabs. All this grabbing is enough. This grabbing has to stop.  The issues of climate change and climate justice are important.

Also at issue according to Bassey:  REDD is bringing misery.  All the deforestation must be stopped.  You cannot buy a forest somewhere and manage it.  We need to change the way we behave, change the way we consume things, and begin to realize we have just one planet.

Why are countries such as the United States so resistant to the idea of paying poorer countries for the effects of climate change, since they are obviously suffering the most and not to blame?

Because then we would be in debt for all the wars for oil and resources and land we have waged around the world.  When powerful and hugely polluting countries like the U.S. take things by force, things like oil, things like land for pipelines, and then use that stolen oil and land to further pollute the world, is the most massive and expensive of wrongs.

This is obvious to people from most other countries.  It’s obvious that developed highly-polluting countries have to make this right, both by ending our own pollution and then helping developing countries continue to develop without pollution.   That’s it in a nutshell, and why certain dishonest and frantic political factions in the U.S. are terribly resistant to action on climate change. It’s why dishonest politicians such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann continue to deceive the American public about climate change in every way they can.

Imagine what is being said in meetings at Exxon this week.

We have to fight back.  Climate change is going to be worse tomorrow than today.   “We need a real climate deal, and we need it now, not tomorrow.”

More on Nnimmo Bassey here and here (an interview).