If The Climate Were A Bank, It Would Have Already Been Saved

Latin America Vs Imperialism At The Copenhagen Climate Summit

The 15th Conference of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change held in Copenhagen on December 7-20, 2009, made it starkly clear that the leaders of the world’s richest countries are unwilling to commit to what current science indicates we must do to avoid extremely damaging climate change.

The summit was a farcical, undemocratic process whereby a handful of rich countries sought to impose a deal, worked out by them in secret, that not only failed to meet the needs of humanity as dictated by science, but took a step backwards from already existing UN climate agreements.

However, the Copenhagen summit was also marked by powerful resistance, both from inside and outside. Outside, in the streets, mass demonstrations calling for climate justice were repressed by police. Inside the summit, African delegates chanted “We will not die quietly”, while representatives of the anti-imperialist bloc in Latin America, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), provided important world leadership and received deafening applause when they insisted that capitalism is incompatible with ecological sustainability and called for systemic change to save Mother Earth.

This pamphlet compiles some of the Latin American socialists’ speeches, interviews and articles about Copenhagen that so inspired everyone campaigning to save humanity and the planet.