http://news.linktv.org Link TV News Videos (Filtered by topics: Earth Summit) en-us Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:03:00 -0700 Copyright 2011 Link Media, Inc. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-27-2012?start=3083 With extreme weather fueling wildfires in Colorado and record rainfall in Florida, the Obama administration moved closer to approving construction of the southern section of the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmentalist Bill McKibben discusses developments. Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:03:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-27-2012 Campaign finance, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Politics of the United States, Supreme Court of the United States, United States, Climate change, Citizens United, Keystone Pipeline, Montana, Clean Air Act With extreme weather fueling wildfires in Colorado and record rainfall in Florida, the Obama administration has moved closer to approving construction of the southern section of the Keystone XL pipeline. We're joined by environmentalist, educator and author Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org. "Today is one of those days when you understand what the early parts of the global warming era are going to look like," McKibben says. "For the first time in history, we managed to get the fourth tropical storm of the year before July. ... These are the most destructive fires in Colorado history, and they come after the warmest weather ever recorded there. ... This is what it looks like as the planet begins — and I underline 'begins' — to warm. Nothing that happened [at the United Nations Rio+20 summit] will even begin to slow down that trajectory." And we end today's show looking at corporate money in the environment, as Florida is lashed by drenching rains and the worst wildfires in Colorado's history continue to rage. We're joined by Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, author of the book Eaarth. He's just back from the Rio+20 summit in Brazil, where oil and gas giants successfully lobbied to continue subsidies for their multi-billion-dollar business. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the Obama administration has granted permission for part of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast. Bill, from Rio to the XL to the wildfires of Colorado, hold forth. Well, look, today is one of those days when you understand what the early parts of the global warming era are going to look like. We've got the first—for the first time in history, we managed to get the fourth tropical storm of the year before July. Debby is dropping absolutely record amounts of rain across much of Florida. The total may top two feet. Meanwhile, in Colorado, they've evacuated not only parts of the Air Force Academy, they just evacuated—and this is truly ironic—the headquarters of the National Center for Atmospheric Research outside Boulder, or at least part of it, because that's the place where the most important climate science in the world is going on. These are the most destructive fires in Colorado history, and they come after the warmest weather ever recorded there. You could do the same exercise all over the planet today. This is what it looks like as the planet begins — and I underline "begins" — to warm. And nothing that happened in Rio will even begin to slow down that trajectory. Rio was a failure. Young people did the only thing of interest there almost: they walked out of the conference, turned in their credentials with a day to go. I was proud to go with them, because, clearly, the thing had turned into a sham. The best proof of that probably, as you say, is the fact that even—even this most obvious of measures—ending the subsidies, the almost trillion dollars a year that the world pays to the fossil fuel industry—even that wasn't really on the table. We had a Twitter storm a week ago today all over the world. The number one trending topic on Twitter wasn't, you know, Justin Bieber's birthday or something like that, it was "end fossil fuel subsidies," people around the planet beginning to get really exercised. And yet, the Rio conference ended without any agreement on whether that might happen or when or how. Look, Amy, the absolute command of the fossil fuel industry over most of our political system is really evident. It's really evident when the president, who, under great pressure and with some courage blocked the northern part of the Keystone pipeline, yesterday with great fanfare said that he was approving the second southern half, the part that's in the U.S. Now, this doesn't connect up to the tar sands, so it probably isn't the same blow in terms of climate change, but it's sure a blow to people across Texas where that pipeline is going. If you go TarSandsBlockade.org, you'll see how we're going to try and fight back. There are brave people down there putting their bodies on the line, or soon will be, up against that tide of fossil fuel money. But this is going to be an awfully hard fight, 'til we build the movement strong enough to really, really counterbalance that weight of fossil fuel money. Bill, you say it doesn't hook up to tar sands, but isn't that the eventual goal? This is just the southern leg. That's definitely the eventual goal. That's what the—that's what all—that's what the Koch brothers and every other tar sands billionaire wants to do. For the moment, that's still under review, and the president has promised that it will finally get a serious review. We don't know how serious. The State Department has put out their initial guidelines for their next review last week, and they didn't even mention climate change. One's beginning to wonder whether the State Department isn't really a very weak link in any effort to deal with climate change. Secretary of State Clinton has unfortunately failed not only at Rio, but at Copenhagen, in terms of climate change diplomacy. And since it's the State Department that will review this pipeline crossing over from Canada, it will probably be our best chance to figure out whether they take global warming seriously at all. They should. It's clearly the great national security, diplomacy issue of the time ahead. We'll find out. And we'll keep fighting, not only on Keystone, but on these fossil fuel subsidies. At 350.org, we've got this remarkable electronic scoreboard that just went up that allows people all over the country to nail down their senators and congressmen on whether they think we should keep giving money every year to the fossil fuel industry. Senator Sanders, my senator here in Vermont, has introduced a bill along with Keith Ellison of Minnesota that would strip $113 billion in fossil fuel subsidies over the next decade. Even if—even if these guys weren't destroying the planet with this money, it's obnoxious that we're giving the richest industry on earth an endless taxpayer-funded gift, especially since there's nothing left to subsidize. For better and for worse, we've known how to burn coal and oil for a couple of hundred years. There's no point in underwriting it; we know how to do it. Bill McKibben, I want to ask you about our top headline today. A federal appeals court has upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's effort to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from the country's largest polluters. Also, the three-judge panel upheld the Obama administration's inaugural car and fuel economy standards, which aim to cut new car pollution in half and double fuel efficiency by 2025. Your response? We only have about 30 seconds. Those things are promising. Let's hope the Supreme Court doesn't get in the way. No wagers on that. But these are very long-term steps. The key steps right now are to keep that oil and coal in the ground, not to open the Arctic to drilling, not to build new coal ports on the West Coast, not to hook up that pipeline to the tar sands. Now, of course, in an election year, a lot of people hear you say "not, not, not," and they're concerned that this means that we will not have jobs. Well, the good news is that we're really figuring out how to do green technology. If you want a—if you want a real success story, last month, Germany—northern latitude country—managed one day to generate more than half the electricity it consumed from solar panels within its borders. There's no longer a technical problem to the job-rich transition to green energy. The problem is political, and it's tied up in the money that you've been talking about [inaudible]— Bill McKibben, we're going to leave it there. I thank you for being with us, founder of 350.org. His latest book is called Eaarth. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-25-2012?start=0 Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo is ousted in what he describes as a parliamentary coup. And, as the Rio+20 Earth Summit ends in disappointment, Democracy Now! is joined by leading environmentalist David Suzuki. Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:47:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-25-2012 Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, Federico Franco, Rio+20, Earth Summit, Coup d'état, Egyptian presidential election, 2012, Mohamed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, David Suzuki Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo has been ousted in what he has described as a parliamentary coup after the Paraguayan Senate voted to impeach him. And, as the Rio+20 Earth Summit ends in disappointment, Democracy Now! is joined by the leading Canadian scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki. Plus headlines, and more. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-25-2012?start=1411 As the Rio+20 Earth Summit ends in disappointment, Democracy Now! is joined by the leading Canadian scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki to discuss what did and didn't happen at the largest UN conference ever. Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:47:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-25-2012 Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, Federico Franco, Rio+20, Earth Summit, Coup d'état, Egyptian presidential election, 2012, Mohamed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, David Suzuki As the Rio+20 Earth Summit — the largest U.N. conference ever — ends in disappointment, we're joined by the leading Canadian scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki. As host of the long-running CBC program, "The Nature of Things," seen in more than 40 countries, Suzuki has helped educate millions about the rich biodiversity of the planet and the threats it faces from human-driven global warming. In 1990 he co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation which focuses on sustainable ecology and in 2009, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. Suzuki joins us from the summit in Rio de Janeiro to talk about the climate crisis, the student protests in Quebec, his childhood growing up in an internment camp, and his daughter Severn's historic speech at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when she was 12 years-old. "If we don't see that we are utterly embedded in the natural world and dependent on Mother Nature for our very well-being and survival ... then our priorities will continue to be driven by man-made constructs like national borders, economies, corporations, markets," Suzuki says. "Those are all human created things. They shouldn't dominate the way we live. It should be the biosphere, and the leaders in that should be indigenous people who still have that sense that the earth is truly our mother, that it gives birth to us. You don't treat your mother the way we treat the planet or the biosphere today." The U.N. conference on sustainable on sustainable development known as the Rio+20 Earth Summit has concluded with few successes to report. Negotiators unveiled an agreement that sets new development goals and lays the groundwork for future talks. Many groups working on environmental and poverty issues have criticized the agreement for being too weak. Greenpeace called it "An epic failure." Politicians such as Nick Clegg of Britain called "insipid," and some protesters protested final text by ripping it up and renaming the summit "Rio minus 20." The gathering came 20 years after the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio when leaders pledged to protect the planet by endorsing treaties on biodiversity and climate change. At that meeting, a 12-year-old Canadian girl named Severn Cullis-Suzuki made a riveting plea to world leaders. My dad always says, you are what you do, not what you say. Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words. Thank you. Severn Cullis-Suzuki, then the age of 12, delivering her famous address at the 1992 first Earth U.N. Earth Summit that took place in Rio. Two decades later, Severn was back in Rio, this time as a veteran international environmental campaigner and mother of two. Democracy Now! spoke to her from Rio on Friday and asked her about what progress had been made since 1992. 20 years have passed and everybody wants to know, what have we done? How have we progressed? Well, last week, scientists released a report in the academic journal, Nature, that suggested that we are pushing for a tipping point in the earth's biosphere, that we are attacking our ecosystems that sustain us and all life on this earth in so many ways and levels that we are pushing for a state shift like what was seen 12,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age, but this time it will be human-caused and it will be order of magnitude faster than the 1000-year transition that happened last time. I mean, that report released on the eve of this world summit is clear that we have not achieved the sustainable world we knew we needed 20 years ago. Severn Cullis-Suzuki, now mother of two. She delivered the famous Rio address in 1992 at the age of 12. Today we bring you our interview with Severn's father, David Suzuki, one of Canada's leading environmental lists. We spoke to him just after speaking with Severn. He is perhaps best known as host of the long-running CBC program, The nature of things, see in over 40 countries. In 2009 David Suzuki was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. His latest book is, "Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet." I began by asking David Suzuki if anything has changed since his daughter delivered that famous address 20 years ago. Absolutely not. We're going backwards. Certainly from the standpoint of my country, Canada, said that it was playing a leadership role at Rio '92. Here there's just been no question, Canada is a laggard. We are a global outlaw, renegade country. But, overall, the science is in, the planet is in terrible shape. The difficulty is that meetings like this are doomed to fail because we see ourselves at the center of everything. And our political and our economic priorities have to dominate over everything else. If we do not come to gather and say, look, let's start with the agreement that we are biological creatures, and if you do not have air for more than three or four minutes you are dead, if you don't have clean air you are sick, so surely, air, the atmosphere that provides us with the seasons, the weather, the climate, that has to be our highest priority before anything economic or political. That has to be the highest priority. But what you're getting is a huge gathering, as we saw in Copenhagen two years ago, a huge gathering of countries trying to negotiate something that does not belong to anyone to through the lenses of all of the political boundaries and economic priorities, and we try to shoehorn nature into our agenda. It simply is not going to work. A meeting like this is doomed to fail because we haven't left our vested interests outside the door and come together as a single species and agreed what the fundamental needs are for all of humanity. So we're going to sacrifice the air, the water, the biodiversity all in the sake of human political and economic interest. They're doomed to. David Suzuki, in 2008, you urged McGill University students to speak out against politicians who fail to act on climate change and said "What I would challenge you to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there is a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act." Do you still feel the same way today? What exactly are the crimes being committed? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think there are a number of — You can charge people who are at a scene, where someone is being murdered, and if you do not do anything to try to help that, you can be charged with criminal negligence. If something is going on that you should know about and you ignore it deliberately, then that is called willful blindness. That is a legal category for taking people to court. I think what we have to also find is a mechanism to judge people and to make them accountable for the implications of what they do or do not do for future generations. That is, there should be a category of intergenerational crime. You come here 20 years later, how many of the political leaders that were here in 1992 are now here again? Very, very few, if any. So, these guys come, they make a lot of nice words and they say, we care about this, we're going to do that. Nobody holds them accountable because they go out of office, they go on to become billionaires or whenever they do. But who is accountable for the lack of any kind of profound activity? When Democracy Now! was at the U.N. Climate Change conference in Durban this past December, I spoke with Marc Morano who published Climate Depot, a climate website run by climate denier group, Committee for Constructive Tomorrow. I asked him about President Obama's record on climate change. This is what he said. MARC MORANO: His nickname is George W. Obama. Obama's negotiator, Todd Stern, will be here today. They have kept the exact same principles and negotiating stance as President George Bush did for eight years. Obama has carried on Bush's legacy. So as skeptics, we tip our hat into President Obama in helping crush and continue to defeat the United Nations process. Obama has been a great friend of global warming skeptics at these conferences. Obama has problems for us because he is going through the EPA regulatory process, which is a grave threat. But, in terms of this, President Obama could not have turned out better when it came to his lack of interest in a congressional climate bill and his lack of interest in the United Nations Kyoto Protocol. So, a job well done for President Obama. That was Marc Morano of the climate denier group Committe for a Constructive Tomorrow saying President Obama is basically their best ally, calling him George W. Obama. Do you share that assessment, David Suzuki? You know, Obama was signaled sea-change in the American politics in the United States. Unfortunately, he's held hostage and he made some fundamental opponents right from the beginning that were fantastic, really top-notch scientists heading NOAA, heading the Energy Department. This was a sea-change. You think of a Nobel Prize winner being appointed the minister, or what ever you call him, secretary of energy. These are huge changes. The reality though, is he is held hostage by an absolutely dysfunctional congress. And he is held hostage by the corporate agenda, which is still a primary obligation that politicians have, even though has been very successful at getting that grassroots support. The fact is that corporations hold a huge hammer over the heads of our elected representatives and they are calling the shots. The economic system is the driving force that is destroying the planet, but now it is the corporations that are setting the direction and they're calling the shots. I think that it is not that Mr. Obama is like George Bush, because he is definitely not, but he is held hostage by the same system within which Bush operated. I want ask about the Canada Keystone XL pipeline. Just two months after President Obama rejected the project after mass protests where more than 1200 people were arrested around the White House last summer, he announced his support for TransCanada to build the southern leg of the pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas. In his remarks, President Obama said his administration has authorized enough gas pipelines to encircle the earth. PRESIDENT OBAMA: There is a bottleneck right here because we cannot get enough of the oil to our refineries fast enough. If we could, then we would be able to increase our oil supplies at a time when they are needed as much as possible. Right now, a company called TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to state-of-the-art refineries down in the Gulf coast. Today, I'm directing my Administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority to go ahead and get it done. TransCanada has reapplied for a permit to build a 1,200 mile segment from Alberta, Canada to Steel City, Nebraska, just this past Friday, the U.S. State Department said it would conduct a new environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL pipeline. Talk about the significance of the project, the role of activists in stopping it, then President Obama being slammed afterwards. Republicans in congress said it would pass legislation in Congress because he, in a very poor economy, was stopping people from getting jobs to build it. David Suzuki, your answer to jobs versus the environment. That has always been the dichotomy that's thrown up. But we have not looked at the real job opportunities that lie from taking a completely different direction. Obama's statement shows that he is captain of the oil industry as are most governments on this planet. He had an opportunity to really offer Americans the real job creator, which is in renewable, sustainable energy, greater energy efficiency, getting us off the oil addiction that we have. It is going to run out. It's going to run out. We are going to more and more extreme sources of energy. This is the moment that we should create the opportunity to go down a different path. I just came back from Japan where they had an absolute disaster that was an opportunity. They have shut down every single one of the 54 nuclear plants they have. They have an opportunity to take a totally different path. Japanese people cut their energy use by 25% immediately after Fukushima. They showed there was huge opportunity there. Instead, the government simply wants to get those plants up and running again. The nuclear industry, the fossil fuel industry have an enormous hammer over our elected representatives and it really is up to civil society. I think in the U.S., you're in deep trouble right now because of the huge support for parties that want to take us back to the past, the Tea Party and all of that are taking us away from having an opportunity for civil society to really contribute. I think we are really in a crisis when Sir Martin Rees, one of the leading scientists in Britain, the Royal Astronomer, was asked on BBC, what are the chances that human beings will survive to the end of this century? This is whether we will still be around. His answer was, 50/50. 50/50 that human beings will avoid extinction? I mean, surely to goodness we ought to be on an absolute crisis mode and getting off all of this rhetoric being fostered by the fossil fuel industry and nuclear industry and get on to a truly sustainable path. On Wednesday, French President Francois Hollande held a brief news conference and said he saw in green economy a path to overcome the economic crisis. FRANCOIS HOLLANDE: Some people say there's an economic and financial crisis and therefore the issues related to the environment and sustainable development may be set aside and may be treated separately, and that there would not be much pressure. This is not how I reason. I believe that the lasting development, the environment, which will also call green economy, is also a means of overcoming the crisis. That's the new French president, a Socialist, Francois Hollande, speaking at Rio+20. David Suzuki, to you feel there is a counterweight to the corporations and the climate change deniers? The green economy will simply allow the corporations to make a shift. You can see it in Exxon. Exxon, one of the companies that have spent tens of millions of dollars denying climate change, denying any responsibility, taking government subsidies on a massive scale, now their ads are all about, we want a clean future, we're looking at clean energy and all that stuff. Sure, the green economy is just about being more efficient, being less polluting, being less energy intensive, but still it's a system built on the need to continue to expand and grow. The true economy has got to come back into balance with the very biosphere that sustains us. I think a lot of people just see the green economy as a different way of allowing the corporate agenda to continue to flourish. We have got to change the economy and we have to do what we did in 1944 when governments came to Bretton Woods in Maine, and said we have got to develop an economic system for a post-war world. And they designed, they instituted GATT, the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade. They invented the World Bank, the IMF. They tied world currency to the American greenback. But they left out the environment. It's time for a Bretton Woods II. We have got to overhaul the economy. You cannot change nature, but you can change our inventions like corporations and the economy. They have got to change. So, greening the economy that is itself a totally destructive system because it is bent on exploiting resources unsustainably and growing forever, that is got to be overhauled, it doesn't work. Leading Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. We will continue our interview Canada's environmentalist just after our break. You can visit www.democracynow.org for in-depth coverage of Rio+20. The Rio+20 Earth Summit has concluded. We're returning to our conversation with Canada's leading environmentalist David Suzuki. I spoke to him about the largest U.N. conference ever and asked him about his own family background and how he became the renowned environmentalist he is today. I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1936. My mother and father were born in Vancouver in 1909 and 1911. I am what Japanese call a third generation Canadian. My mother and father had never been out of Canada. They were citizens all their lives. They could not vote until after World War II. When World War II happened, although we were full Canadians by birth, we were regarded as enemy aliens as were Japanese Americans. We were incarcerated in camps. And then as the war was coming to an end, we were told that we had two choices, we could sign up and get a one-way ticket to Japan, which for us was a foreign country, or get out of British Columbia and go east to the Rockies. Because we only knew Canada, we went east to the Rockies and I ended up in Ontario. After the war, my parents said the way out of our poverty was hard work and education. Fortunately, both of those things were possible for me. And then at very amazing thing happened. I was offered a scholarship from an American college that was worth more than my father earned in a year. In 1954, Amherst College in Massachusetts offered me a scholarship for $1,500 because Amherst believed that foreign students added to the education of American students, and they were willing to pay money to have a foreign student come and be part of that college. For me, Amherst College made me as a scholar and I'm ever grateful to the United States for that. In 1957 when I was entering my last year in college at Amherst, on October 4th, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. We had no idea there was a space program. In the months that followed, we saw the American rockets takeoff and explode either on the launching pad or once they got into the air they exploded. Meanwhile, the Soviets launched the first animal, a dog, Laika, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, the first team of cosmonauts, the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova. Americans realized, holy cow, the Soviets are very advanced in science and technology. They did not roll over and say, my God, they've got to big a lead, we can't afford to do this, it will destroy the economy. They simply said, we have got to go and beat these guys. Even though I was a Canadian, living in the states at the time, all you had to do was say, I love science, and Americans just supported you, threw you into universities, and I got a graduate education and training that I could never have gotten in Canada. Well, what happened, Kennedy declared a race to the moon. Americans are not only the first and only country to reach the moon, but think of all of the spinoffs, the unexpected spinoffs that came from that commitment to beat the Russians. I mean you've got 24-a-day newscasts. Well, maybe that is not such a great thing. But, you've got GPS, you've got cellphones, all of the things that came about simply because America said, we've got to make the commitment and we've got to beat the Russians to the moon. And it doesn't make sense to me that there is all this sense of, oh my God, we can't get off fossil fuels, it will destroy the economy. This is not the American way. The American way is to meet that challenge and realize huge things will happen once we make the commitment. We can't anticipate. Certainly in solar panels, certainly in geothermal energy, there are huge opportunities. The America that I knew and loved would have said, this is a challenge, American know-how will lead the world and create jobs at the same time. So, I'm astounded at the position the United States is in today compared to what it was like when I graduated from Amherst College. David Suzuki, I wanted to ask about the mass student protests that have been taking place in Quebec province. You wrote in a recent piece, governments all across Canada have no qualms about investing vast amounts of money to exploit natural resources yet they all but ignored the most precious — our children. In the U.S., there is very little written about or very little coverage of these mass student protests that have been taking place, some of the largest in Canada. Talk about what you see has to happen. Quebec is a very, very different society. I am very proud that they have remained in Canada. They reflect a great deal of value difference so that the environment, for example on Environment Day this year, attracted 300,000 people on the streets of Montreal for Earth day. They attracted over 100,000 people objecting to the student tuition increase. Now the English press in Canada has portrayed this as, these spoiled brats in Quebec, they don't realize they've got cheapest tuition in all of Canada and they are objecting to a few hundred dollars tuition raise. No, that is not what it is about. They're saying they'd like to look to countries like the Scandinavian countries, even France, where young people are regarded as the most precious commodity, where they are supported and their universities are free if they reach a certain level of ability. They're supported through the system, and that is what the Quebecois are trying to tell us. But no, we portray this as spoiled kids that don't want to spend any more money. I do not think that is what it is. But of course Charest, the Premier, who in some areas is quite progressive in the environment, for example, but Charest has brought in really very severe draconian legislation to suppress this kind of public dissent. And now that is what's attracting more kids to the streets to say, this is not a civil society any longer when you suppress us in that way. What underlies a student protest is a very profound question about, what are our values in our society? David Suzuki, your long-running show CBC show, called The Nature of Things, explores environmental diversity of the planet. Can you talk about some of the experiences and discoveries that have had the most impact on you? And in these last few minutes, because climate change is so little addressed while weather is increasingly on every channel and is as extreme weather, severe weather, the other two words, global warming, rarely flash, if ever, on the networks. Can you talk about what is at stake for people to even understand — since in the U.S., it's even a debate given the amount of money oil companies pour into the global warming denier groups — it's even a debate whether in fact this really is a concern. It's astonishing to me because I want to remind your viewers that in 1992, an American president had declared himself — well, in 1988, he said, if you vote for me, I promise I will be an environmental President. That was George H.W. Bush. There wasn't a green bone in his body but the American public had put the environment at the top of its agenda. He had to say that. Many people say, George Bush came to Rio in 1992 so he should be recognized for that. George Bush was not going to come to Rio unless they watered down the climate convention. They were aiming at the original plans, were for a 20% reduction in greenhouse emissions in 15 years. George Bush said, I am not going, until he got a much watered-down target of stabilization of 1990 levels by the year 2000, and he came down and signed that. But, his actions were predicated on American concern about the environment. Since then, of course, we have gone into recessions. But, I think we have not recognized that we've got people like the koch brothers, you got these right-wing think tanks, Competitive Enterprises Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Institute, that are all now pushing a radical right-wing agenda funded by fossil fuel industry and rich people to say, this is not true. Which is undermining scientific credibility. June 7, this year, Nature is filled with articles from scientists who have looked at the ecosystems of the planet. We are in deep trouble. We are facing an absolute crisis now. But countries like Canada and the United States, which are endowed with huge resources, can float by on the assumption everything is OK. We don't see the crunch coming as poor countries like [in] Europe are seeing. They do not have the kind of resource plenty that we have in North America. And so they are seeing it and leading the call for change. But, we have the illusion that the economy is the source of everything that matters and we have got to keep that growing at all costs. It's at all costs to the future for our children and grandchildren. Speaking of children and grandchildren, in 1992, David Suzuki, you were in Rio with your daughter Severn Cullis-Suzuki who was then 12, who gave this remarkable address to the Rio summit, the first Earth Summit. You don't know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal, now extinct. And you can't bring back the forest that once grew where there is now a desert. If you do not know how to fix it, please, stop breaking it. That was Severn Suzuki, David, that was your daughter. It is 20 years later and you are now back in Rio with Severn, who is now Severn Cullis-Suzuki, with your grandchildren her two sons. Can you talk about what it meant to you, for her to give that address 20 years ago and where you see we are now? Well, it was a remarkable speech, and at the end of her talk, she got a standing ovation. She went back to sit with us. Al Gore came up and said, that's the best speech anyone has given at this conference. The power of her speech — which, by the way, she and the other kids together wrote. Her mom and I didn't have any input. She said, dad, I know what I want to say, I want you to tell me how to say it. But, she wrote that speech, and a child speaks from the heart. You know that there is no hidden agenda. They just speak in that child-like way of innocence. That was the power — her words had power because they came from that kind of innocence. Now she's back. She's brought her youngest son. The only reason I'm here is because I said, Sev, I don't believe these conferences achieve anything but I will go as your baby sitter and I am here as the baby sitter. You just happened to corral me because I'm here looking after the baby — I've got to get back and take care of my grandson. But, I can tell you, she feels unbelievably desperate because she says the problem is that we have got to break down in-governance. Leaders came in 1992. They were moved by a child's plea, a child's request to do something for her future, and now those leaders aren't here and there is no one accountable for the fact they have failed fundamentally. Now there is a new set of leaders and they're making the same kind of promises without any understanding of the urgency of the crisis we face. So she comes to this with a — from a very dark place. By the disillusionment of her child-like belief that our leaders will truly lead and care about a future for her children. Now she has got an investment into the future in that makes her even more desperate about the lack of governance. David, talking about taking care of your grandson. If you were in charge, if he could have anything accomplished right now, what are the steps that you feel are most important to take right now? Well, the thing we hear over and over again is that we need a paradigm shift. It has become a cliche. But, I absolutely believe this is a critical change, that all of the stuff that goes on will not achieve anything unless we ultimately see the world in a different way. You see, our beliefs, our values shape the way we look out at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were here, placed here by God, that all of this creation is for us, it's for us to go and occupy, dominate, and exploit, then we will proceed to do that. That is the paradigm we now exist within. We're driven then by that sense that it's all there for us. We need to shift that to a better understanding that we are part of a vast web of interconnected species, that it is the biosphere, the zone of air, water, and land, where all life exists. It's a very thin layer around the planet. Carl Sagan told us that if you shrink the earth to the size of a basketball, the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land where all life exists, would be thinner than a layer of toward the center then a layer of Saran Wrap, and that's it. That's our home, but it's home to ten to thirty millions other species that keep the planet habitable. And if we don't see the that we are utterly imbedded in the natural world and dependent on nature, not technology, not economics, not science — we are dependent on Mother Nature for our very well being and survival. If we don't see that, then our priorities will continue to be driven by man-made constructs like national borders, economies, corporations, markets. Those are all human created things. They shouldn't dominate the way we live. It should be the biosphere. And the leaders in that should be the indigenous people who still have that sense, that the earth is truly are mother, that it gives birth to us. You don't treat your mother the way we treat the planet or the biosphere today. If we do not make that fundamental shift, then we will just go on, oh we got to be more efficient we got to have a green economy, and all that stuff, but we haven't fundamentally changed in our relationship with the biosphere. And if we do treat it in that way, what needs to happen? Well, I think then we have to reassess everything. I believe we have to start with the fundamental understanding that we are animals. Believe me, I have said that in many parts of the United States, and people get mighty pissed off when I tell children, don't forget we're animals. They say, don't call my daughter an animal, we're human beings. We don't even want to accept it our biological nature. But, as animals our absolutely highest need for survival and well being is clean air, clean water, clean soil that gives us our food, and energy from the sun that plants captured by photosynthesis. That's what we depend on. So, how could we, claiming to be intelligent, use air, water, and soil as a garbage can for our waist and the most toxic chemicals ever known on the planet as if somehow that's not going to have consequences. The minute you except that we are biological creatures, then our highest priorities become absolutely clear. That means stop all release of any kind of human created material into our surroundings until we learn ways to recycle that in mimic nature in how we create and then degrade those things. Then we have to say we are social animals; and as social animals, what is our most fundamental need? To me, this was shocking when I began to read the scientific literature. The most important thing we need is love. Children, to grow up to be fully formed and developed human beings, need love at very critical times in our development. If you look at children that grow up under very war torn conditions, in genocide or terrorism, and seeing children deprived of love, are fundamentally crippled physically and psychically. Well that means then that we need to work toward creating strong families and supportive communities. We need full employment, we need equity and justice and freedom from war, terror, and genocide. To me, those are my issues, because if you don't have that kind of society, you cannot have a sustainable environment. Hunger and poverty are my issues, because a starving person who finds an edible plant or animal, is not going to say, I wonder if this is an endangered species? They kill it and eat it. I would. And you probably you would too. So we've got to deal with these issues and then we say, we're spiritual beings and as spiritual animals, we need to understand that we're part of nature. That we emerge from nature and we return to it when we die. That there are forces out there that we will never understand or control. We need sacred places. To me, those are what we construct as a foundation of the way that we live. And then we say, how can we create an economy that will allow these fundamental needs that we have to be protected? How dow we construct a way of living as a species, protecting these values? But if we don't see what the primary needs are, then I just think that we're just playing at the edges and we're not being serious about reaching a truly sustainable future. That was David Suzuki, speaking from the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil just before it concluded on Friday. More than 120 world leaders attended. Greenpeace called the summit an epic failure. David Suzuki is a Canadian author and environmentalist, best known for the long-running CBC program, The nature of Things and his latest book is, Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet. Speaking of Canadian journalists and environmentalist, congratulations to Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis on the birth of their baby. Welcome to the world, Toma. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012?start=0 On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit. Plus headlines, and more. Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:17:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012 Rio+20, Earth Summit, United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, United Nations, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Brittany Trilford, Nnimmo Bassey, Plenary session, Julian Assange On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit. We also hear from Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International, and Severn Cullis-Suzuki who became known as "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes" after she addressed delegates in Rio de Janeiro as a 12-year-old in 1992. Plus headlines, and more. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012?start=797 On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 U.N. Earth Summit, the largest United Nations gathering ever. Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:17:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012 Rio+20, Earth Summit, United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, United Nations, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Brittany Trilford, Nnimmo Bassey, Plenary session, Julian Assange On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 U.N. Earth Summit, the largest United Nations gathering ever. "We are all aware that time is ticking, and we are quickly running out," Trilford said. "You have 72 hours to decide the fate of your children, my children, my children's children. And I start the clock now." Leaders from more than a hundred countries are gathered in Brazil for the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest United Nations conference ever. The gathering comes 20 years after the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when leaders pledged to protect the planet by endorsing treaties on biodiversity and climate change. Since then, few of the development goals have been reached in areas like food security, water, global warming and energy. On Wednesday, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff welcomed world leaders under a cloud of criticism that this new summit will fall far short of its promise to establish new goals. PRESIDENT DILMA ROUSSEFF: [translated] We know that the cost of not acting will be greater than taking the necessary actions, even though they may face resistance and may end up being politically complicated. A new report by Friends of the Earth International warns that multinational corporations such as oil giant Shell have an undue influence over the Rio+20 Earth Summit. Negotiators had already agreed on a draft before the heads of state arrived Wednesday. Many groups working on environmental and poverty issues have criticized the agreement for being too weak. This is Greenpeace political director Daniel Mittler. DANIEL MITTLER: Any progress that you hear about in press conferences is about progress to water down the text, to avoid commitment, and to—in reality, governments are clearly here to do nothing and to commit to doing nothing. Well, 20 years ago, a 12-year-old rocked the Earth Summit in Rio with a plea to world leaders to get serious about saving the planet. Her name was Severn Suzuki, and she'll join us later in the broadcast. She is back in Rio. But first we turn to another young environmentalist, 17-year-old Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand. On Wednesday, she addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 U.N. Earth Summit. Listen carefully; the audio has some technical imperfections. Thank you, Secretary-General and leaders, for the opportunity to address this plenary. Tena koutou from New Zealand. My name is Brittany Trilford. I'm 17 years old. I'm a child. Today, in this moment, I'm all children, your children, the world's three billion children. Think of me as half the world. I stand here with fire in my heart. I'm confused and angry at the state of the world, and I want us to work together now to change this. We are here today to solve the problems that we have caused as a collective, to ensure that we have a future. You and your governments have promised to reduce poverty and sustain our environment. You have already promised to combat climate change, to ensure clean water and food security. Multinational corporations have already pledged to respect the environment, green their production, compensate for their pollution. These promises have been made, and yet still our future is in danger. We are all aware that time is ticking, and we are quickly running out. You have 72 hours to decide the fate of your children, my children, my children's children. And I start the clock now. Tick, tick, tick. Let us think back 20 years ago, well before I was even an inkling in my parents' eyes. Think back here to Rio, where people met at the first Earth Summit in 1992. The people at the summit knew there needed to be change. All our systems were failing, collapsing all around us. And these people came together to acknowledge these challenges, to work for something better, to commit to something better. They made great promises, promises that, when I read them, still leave me feeling hopeful. These promises are left not broken, but empty. How can that be, when all around us there is knowledge that offers us solutions? Nature, as a design tool, offers insight into systems that are whole, complete, that give life, create value, allow progress, transformation and change. We, the next generation, demand change, demand action, so that we can have a future. We trust you, in the next 72 hours, to put our interests before all other interests and boldly do the right thing. I am here to fight for my future. That's why I'm here. And I would like to end today by asking you to consider why you're here and what you can do. Are you here to save face? Or are you here to save us? Thank you. That was 17-year-old Brittany Trilford, a young environmentalist from Wellington, New Zealand, addressing more than a hundred world leaders, business representatives, NGOs, during the opening plenary of the Rio+20 U.N. summit, the largest U.N. summit ever. She's joining us now from Rio de Janeiro, where the Rio+20 summit is taking place. Brittany, welcome to Democracy Now! Hi. What was it like to be up there? You're addressing the majority of the world's leaders. What do you expect to come from your speech and this summit? Well, it felt amazing. It was very nerve-racking, but very, very exciting. I hope that the world leaders can listen to my speech, that they feel what I was trying to say, that they understand the atmosphere and the ideas that I was trying to portray there, and that they're driven to fulfill the promises that I asked of them: to act now, to act urgently, and to act boldly. And, Brittany, can you tell us something of your—how you first became involved in environmental activism, what prompted you, and how you ended up being chosen to make this presentation? Oh, sure. Well, I've always been really into youth affairs and giving youth a voice. And I received an email from one of the networks that I'm part of about this Date with History competition. And it's run by TckTckTck, a collaboration of over 300 NGOs. And they asked me to give a two-minute speech to the world leaders about the future that I want. And I completely jumped at it, because I have a lot to say about the future that I want. I have a lot of demands. And so, I thought, "Well, this is perfect." This is the—this is the audience that needs to hear this. And how did you make your way from New Zealand to Rio? Were you a group of high school students? Who paid your way? Well, it was just me that went with the Date with History competition, and I joined the TckTckTck team over in Rio here. And I came along with my dad, as well, so he's here in Rio with me. And in terms of what you hope to see take place, the whole issue of climate change, how does climate change affect New Zealand, where you come from, Wellington, New Zealand? OK, well, climate change affects everywhere in the world very dramatically, and it will continue to progress and sink deeper and deeper, and more of our systems will fail and collapse. So I think that in terms of how it affects Wellington, I think it affects Wellington just as much as other places all over the world. I mean, every day when I'm in Wellington, I see the effects of climate change. I can—it's snowing in Wellington. It hasn't snowed in Wellington for the last 50 years. So that's—it's just little things like that that are going to build and build into something really big and really irreversible, and something really awful. After your presentation, did any of the delegates come up to you, talk to you directly or comment on your presentation and its impact, if any, on their work there? Yeah. I think—well, lots of the delegates and lots of people watching on TV and things like that responded really well. I think what I said, because it was so simplistic, because it was a 17-year-old's view of the moral truths of what is happening here, they could really relate to what I was saying, and I think it resonated with a lot of people. I think the delegates that did come up and comment to me, because it was so simple, they understood what I was trying to say, and they felt the passion, not just of me, but of all the youth that I was trying to share there. Finally, Brittany, you only got five minutes, but that was five minutes where you were addressing the world. Is there anything you didn't get to say in that address that you had to edit out for time, and especially as you address young people around the world, many of whom may feel whatever they do does not make a difference? OK, well, something I have said in the other speeches, but not—that I couldn't particularly portray in the U.N. plenary was that this power of youth, this absolute—it's such a powerful force. And sometimes I think they underestimate themselves. We have tools and technologies available to us, like social media, like radio and TV, where we can share ideas, where we can communicate, where we can educate. And it's such a valuable, powerful tool. The voice of youth is so strong, so clear, so truthful. And I think that they can really not only speak truth to power like I did at the U.N. plenary, but they can take power. And I think that's really important to look at, and I think that's really something that the youth should take on board, should get involved with, should engage with. And I think it's really something I wanted to share at the U.N. plenary, for sure. And I think I'll continue to share that message through media like yourselves. Well, Brittany Trilford, I want to thank you very much for being with us, from Wellington, New Zealand, now in Rio de Janeiro at the largest U.N. summit ever. Brittany was the winner of the Date with History competition, which is how she ended up giving this address to the world and the world's leaders. The competition asked young people to tell world leaders what they want for the future. I want to end up with a clip of those voices. CLAIRE: You, me and seven billion human beings on this planet, we're pushing the limits. Our future is in danger. ANDREW: We should be acting urgently, as if there is no tomorrow. ANNIE: The earth is the most treasured possession that we have. There is nothing more precious or worth caring for. FRANCISCO: We must do enwind the environment and the people, the same way the clownfish clings to the anemone for a support and survival of the two. CAROLINE: The evolving technology today has presented us with opportunities to turn situations around to our benefit. ALEXANDRA:* I see a world where we can better understand human nature, and not see the relationship as humans and nature or humans or nature, but just nature. ANNIE: A world where we don't take our resources or each other for granted. ELLIE: A world with biodiversity that is respected and protected. PRASHANTH: I envision a world where an environmentally conscious mindset has taken root. KHUSHALI: To see a future which sustains life. KOLAWOLE OREOLUWA: Where green jobs and green products are available for human consumption. KATHRYN: I want a future where no one goes to bed hungry at night, where everyone has access to education, and where there's no first world or a third world, there's just a world. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012?start=1740 On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit. Democracy Now! also hears from Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International, and Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who became known as "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes" after she addressed delegates in Rio de Janeiro as a 12-year-old in 1992. Plus headlines, and more. Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:17:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012 Rio+20, Earth Summit, United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, United Nations, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Brittany Trilford, Nnimmo Bassey, Plenary session, Julian Assange We're joined from the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio by Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, chair of Friends of the Earth International. "The leaders came to Rio with, clearly, very low ambitions, and probably with the desire to block agreements on any issue that would not be of particular benefit to them or their countries," Bassey says. "They've come out with a draft agreement which the presidents are looking at currently, a draft agreement that is shallow, that is hollow, that doesn't describe or deal with the root causes of the crisis, the multiple crises that the world is confronted with right now." Our broadcast is special, bringing you voices from the Rio summit. We continue our coverage of Rio+20, the largest United Nations conference ever. Some 15,000 soldiers and police are guarding about 130 heads of state and government as well as ministers and diplomats from 180 countries, and at least 50,000 others. For more on the summit, we're joined now by Nnimmo Bassey in Rio. He's executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International. He's the author of To Cook a Continent. Nnimmo Bassey, welcome to Democracy Now! Thank you very much. Can you tell us first your preliminary assessment of the gathering and what the rest of the world can expect from whatever the world leaders agree on there? Well, the leaders came to Rio with, clearly, very low ambitions, and probably with the desire to block agreements on any issue that would not be of particular benefit to them or their countries. So, coming to Rio to talk about the future that we want and also looking at sustainability on the basis of green economy was a bit problematic, to start with, because it's difficult to discuss a concept over which there is so no agreement. Many leaders don't really have the same understanding of what green economy is. And so, they've come out with a draft agreement which the presidents are looking at currently, a draft agreement that is shallow, that is hollow, that doesn't describe or deal with the root causes of the crisis, the multiple crises that the world is confronted with right now. And at the end of the day, it does appear that the success or the real outcome of this Rio+20 would be in what has not been said, what has not been expressed, rather than what has been said. We expected that they would come here to present their scorecard on what they've done with the agreements of 1992; but rather, what we've seen in the negotiation has been a very strong desire to review what was decided already, even to agree to mention the Rio Principles, such as common but differentiated responsibilities, such as precautionary principles, such as peculiar requirements of youth and women and the rest. These were very difficult indeed. At the end, the leaders struggled to include just a couple of these positions. And this already is presenting a lot of reasons for us to worry that the United Nations system has been captured by corporations who are driving policy from the background. This is really a very worrisome trend. Nnimmo Bassey, you talk about the scorecard, but the United Nations Environment Program tracked about 90 goals that were developed originally out of Rio 20 years ago and then by other international conferences, and it found that significant progress has been made on only four of them. That's reducing ozone depletion, removing lead from gasoline, improving access to water supplies, and boosting research for marine pollution. Four out of 96. That is a—that would be a failure on any scorecard. Your assessment of whether that's going to improve at all as a result of this summit? I agree with you completely that there's been a total failure by governments and policymakers over the decisions that were reached in 1992. And here, with attention being removed from those pillars, even the four—the three pillars of sustainability—economic prosperity, environmental protection, social equity and justice—have now been more or less supplanted by the emphasis on economy. And the green economy is opening up space for the whole sale of nature. And very troubling is the whole concept of payment for environmental services. You know, the whole thing is opening up for speculation, which is the very reason why we have financial crisis, the food crisis, and why the climate crisis is not being tackled. I'll give you one example. I've read the background papers produced by the United Nations Environment Program, and they talk—they have some case studies to show that a green economy can really work. And one of the case studies is on placing value on pollinators. The background to all this is that if financial value is not placed on anything, then people don't value such things. I mean, this is fundamentally flawed, to start with that kind of premise. But they said, in the report, that pollinators provided service worth $190 billion. And we challenge this. How do you begin to estimate how much the value of what butterflies and birds do? How can you put monetary value to that? So, with this kind of platform, we find a lot of space for certain kinds of economists, for scientists, for corporations, who would jump in to begin to commodify every aspect of nature, including the air. Already the air has been grabbed. The water has been grabbed. The forests have been grabbed. The soils have been grabbed. And what the world is facing now is a real crisis. And this conference is not providing the way out of the crisis. Nnimmo Bassey is speaking to us from Rio de Janeiro, from the largest U.N. global warming summit, the largest U.N. summit of any kind ever. More than 130 world leaders are there. President Obama is not there, though he was in Copenhagen. The U.S. is being represented by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Nnimmo, could you comment on that, that the U.S. president is not there? And then talk about what you plan to say to Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, tomorrow when you meet him. Well, it's really shocking that President Obama is not in Rio, because this conference is set to prepare the platform for the direction of development, sustainable development, that the world is going to take over the next decades. Twenty years from 1992, we have backtracked rather than make advances. And so, this was an opportunity for world leaders such as the president of the United States to come here and show leadership in terms of taking things forward in a way that is acceptable. But, you know, I'm also not so surprised, because the trend has been set right from Copenhagen in 2009, in Cancún and in Durban, that these gatherings are not really about real solutions. They are about how to open up business for corporations. And this is what I intend to tell the secretary-general of the United Nations tomorrow, as we will be presenting a petition from over 400 civil society organizations, that the United Nations must begin to pay more attention to what the people of the world are saying, what the people who are impacted by the multiple crises are experiencing, rather than listening so much on what corporations are saying. Yesterday, I was invited to be one of those who would sit on a roundtable meeting with the president, but it conflicted with the time that people were on the streets of Rio protesting and marching. I thought the best place to be is right on the street, because we have to stand with the people, because we must not glamorize seats. We have to look for a real solution. And the real solution in Rio—and I will emphasize this tomorrow—is found in the people's summit, the people's space, where people are not beating around the bush. People are going straight, that we have to stop corporate capture, we have to stop false solutions in terms of selling off of forests and cutting off communities from the resources that they need to live. We have to demand that there should be funding for technology transfer. And also, the sustainable development goals that have been proposed have to be unpacked. We need to know what these are and how they're going to be funded and made to happen. The Millennium Development Goals have not been attained. And by 2015, they will—the whole thing will expire. And it's mainly because finance is not being made available. And yet, rich nations are spending billions of dollars, without thinking, on a warfare and destructive activities, whereas what we need now is to rescue the planet. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012?start=2426 On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit. Democracy Now! also hears from Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International, and Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who became known as "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes" after she addressed delegates in Rio de Janeiro as a 12-year-old in 1992. Plus headlines, and more. Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:17:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-21-2012 Rio+20, Earth Summit, United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, United Nations, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Brittany Trilford, Nnimmo Bassey, Plenary session, Julian Assange In 1992, 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki became known as "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes" after she addressed delegates in Rio de Janeiro during the summit's plenary session. We air Cullis-Suzuki's historic address and speak to her from the Rio+20 summit, which she comes back to now as a veteran international environmental campaigner and mother of two. "Twenty years later, the world is still talking about a speech, a six-minute speech that a 12-year-old gave to world leaders," Cullis-Suzuki says. "Why? It is because the world is hungry to hear the truth, and it is nowhere articulated as well as from the mouths of those with everything at stake, which is youth." We continue with the largest U.N. summit ever. Juan? We continue our coverage of Rio+20 Earth Summit by turning now to an amazing speech given 20 years ago at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Twelve-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki became known as "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes" after she addressed the delegates in Rio during the summit's plenary session. Hello. I'm Severn Suzuki, speaking for ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization. We're a group of 12- and 13-year-olds trying to make a difference—Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We've raised all the money to come here ourselves, to come 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come. I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard. I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in our ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air, because I don't know what chemicals are in it. I used to go in—I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad, until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever. In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see. Did you have to worry of these things when you were my age? All this is happening before our eyes, and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I'm only a child, and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realize, neither do you. You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don't know how to bring the salmon back up a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can't bring back the forests that once grew where there is now a desert. If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it! Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organizers, reporters or politicians. But really, you're mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles. And all of you are someone's child. I'm only a child, yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong—in fact, 30 million species strong. And borders and governments will never change that. I'm only a child, yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal. In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid of telling the world how I feel. In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, buy and throw and away. And yet, northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to share, we are afraid to let go of some of our wealth. In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter. We have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets. The list could go on for two days. Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. This is what one child told us: "I wish I was rich. And if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicines, shelter, and love and affection." If a child on the streets who has nothing is willing to share, why are we who have everything still so greedy? I can't stop thinking that these are children my own age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the favelas of Rio, I could be a child starving in Somalia, or a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India. I am only a child, yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on finding environmental answers, ending poverty, and finding treaties, what a wonderful place this earth would be. At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us to not fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for: we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of a world we are growing up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying, "Everything's going to be all right," "It's not the end of the world," and "We're doing the best we can." But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My dad always says, "You are what you do, not what you say." Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us. But I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words. Thank you. Severn Cullis-Suzuki, then at the age of 12 delivering her famous address at the 1992 first U.N. Earth Summit that took place in Rio de Janeiro. The video of her address has more than 21 million views on YouTube. Well, now Severn is back in Rio, this time as a veteran international environmental campaigner and mother of two. We welcome you to Democracy Now! That was 1992. Can you talk about what has happened in the intervening 20 years? Do you feel that there has been real progress now at this summit, Severn? Good afternoon. It's an honor to be on the show. Twenty years have passed, and everybody wants to know what have we done, how have we progressed. Well, last week, scientists released a report in the academic journal Nature that suggested that we are pushing for a tipping point in the earth's biosphere, that we are attacking our ecosystems that sustain us and all life on this earth, in so many ways, on so many levels, that we are pushing for a state shift like what was seen 12,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. But this time it will be human-caused, and it will be orders of magnitude faster than the thousand-year transition that happened last time. I mean, that report, released on the eve of this world summit, is clear that we have not achieved the sustainable world we knew we needed 20 years ago. Well, Severn, yet the draft agreement that is being proposed at this summit, somebody did an analysis of the verbs in that agreement and found that the word "encourage" appeared 50 times, and the word "support" appeared 99 times, but "must" only three times and "we will" only five times. So, in the face of this looming crisis, does it give you much hope at all that the world leaders are couching this agreement in such weak terms? They called Rio+10 in Johannesburg "Rio-Minus-10" because already the world leaders were starting to backtrack on an agreement from Rio 1992 that now looks like this amazing, visionary success. And, I mean, I am ashamed to hear that the Canadian negotiating team was trying their best to omit the word "commit." So I wonder how many times that actually made it through in the draft that we have today. I think that this is indicative of what is happening in our world at large. There is so much shift right now. We have economic meltdown around the world. We have social unrest. We have revolution just boiling up all over the planet. And now we have our national leaders that are hunkering down more and more, defending their national interests, and less and less looking for the good of humanity. I believe we have a crisis in governance. This is showing that the world's leaders are not able to come together and lead for the sake of humanity. What does it mean when the world's elected leaders do not represent the good of the people that they're supposed to care for? Severn Cullis-Suzuki, especially for young people who are listening and watching right now all over the world — we have a room full of interns that we are celebrating today, the summer interns who have begun at Democracy Now! — talk about how it was you who ended up giving this speech 20 years ago at the age of 12. How did you end up addressing world leaders? Well, it was an incredibly grassroots initiatives. I had started a club, and this was really a group of girls who really wanted to do something for the planet in the broadest terms. And how we started was, well, we needed to educate ourselves. When I was nine, we started this club, called ourselves ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization. We built on very small projects like beach cleanups, basic support for other environmental groups. And finally, we heard about the Earth Summit, after a few years of this, and decided we wanted to go. It's a very long story. We galvanized support from our community, our parents, our teachers, our friends, fundraised the money, got here, and then, in a sea of 30,000 people here, we started getting our message out because we were young. And this is the key. Twenty years later, the world is still talking about a speech, a six-minute speech that a 12-year-old gave to world leaders. Why? It is because the world is hungry to hear the truth, and it is nowhere articulated as well as from the mouths of those with everything at stake, which is youth. Today's youth will spend their entire—the rest of their entire lives, their entire adult lives—my children will grow up in a time characterized by climate change, characterized by social unrest and refugees and all kinds of problems that that brings, because of the ecological crisis that we now find ourselves in. The economic crisis, that's what everybody's talking about, but really it is a subsystem within the ecological crisis of this planet earth that is our home. I want to ask you about the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline. Just two months after President rejected the project after large protests by environmental groups, he announced his support for TransCanada to build a southern leg of the pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas. In his remarks, President Obama said his administration has authorized enough gas pipelines to encircle the earth. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. Over—that's important to know. Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the earth, and then some. That was President Obama, who is not attending the summit, nor is David Cameron, the prime minister of England, or Angela Merkel. Now TransCanada has reapplied for a permit— Or Harper. —to build a 1,200-mile segment from Alberta, Canada, to Steel City, Nebraska. Just this past Friday, the United States State Department said it would conduct a new environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL pipeline. Talk about the significance of this project and the role of activists in stopping it. The British journalist George Monbiot said yesterday that it's just—it's quite staggering to see the president, Democrat leader, Obama, backtracking on commitments that George Bush Sr. made in 1992. It really points to the shift politically that we've come to in 20 years. The realm of what is politically possible is totally on the side of the right, and it's on the side of exploiting the natural resources of the planet as fast as it possibly can, and on a budget and on a scale that dwarfs its opposition. You know, I'm here in Rio, and there's so many people, so many young people, who are going through the tracks that have been presented to them to have their voices heard. And they've been lobbying, and they've been following all the negotiations, and they've been staying up 'til 2:00 a.m., and they put their heart and soul into the document and the declaration, because they have good faith that this process works and it matters. And we are seeing, from the lack of interest in this global summit from our world leaders, and in the inability to decide—to decide on anything, on saying anything, that this system is broken, it does not work. And I think the Keystone XL, as well as the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, which is proposed from Alberta to the coast—I think we can see, by all of the opposition to this, that our governments just want to ram it through at all cost, even at the cost of democracy. And that is what I am interested in talking about, is this crisis in democracy that we have in promoting what the people actually want and what actually will carry us forward into the future with dignity. What about the fact that your prime minister, that Harper, is not there, that the U.S. president, which—President Obama is not there? And I think it's particularly significant, since he weighs every day what he's going to do in this election year, what kind of message he wants to send. Instead, he sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet, more than 130 world leaders are there. This message is loud and clear. This is a message from Prime Minister Harper, President Obama. The message to the rest of the world is: We don't care about you; we do not care that your countries may be inundated, and huge social strife may be imminent—and is imminent. I was on a panel the other day with a minister from New Caledonia, a small island nation. I mean, for him, climate change is an issue of survival of his people, in—I mean, in direct terms. And what my country, what the American nation is saying is, "We do not care." It's very interesting, the Pentagon has reports on seeing climate change as one of the most serious threats to national security, because of vast migrations of people when their areas are desertified or flooded and they must move to other places. As we wrap up, Severn, can you talk about the effects of climate change? In the United States, it is not a common discussion in any way. It is just—it is staggering how we're not making the connection between climate change and what is already happening in the ground, not only in the Horn of Africa, not only in the Arctic north, but in the country of America. I mean, I remember in March seeing on the news reports about the hurricanes, the crazy storms that were hitting a huge portion of the continental U.S., and, you know, not to make the connection with what the world's leading experts are saying is exactly what happened in a situation where climate change was unfolding. You know, actually, we have to really ask, who's driving the ship here? I mean, really, when we—when the world's leaders do not listen to science, when they do not listen to the experts who study this, the ones that, you know, really can tell us what's going on, using facts and data and information, and when we actually have campaigns like in the Canadian current government— Five seconds. —that are actually trying to shut down science, you know, this really points to a huge question of governance and where are we going. Severn Cullis-Suzuki, we thank you for being with us, and for being there 20 years ago in Rio de Janeiro. It's the largest U.N. summit ever. http://news.linktv.org/videos/attacked-at-home-australias-carbon-tax-wins-important-fans-abroad?start=0 United Nations secretary Ban Ki-moon has lauded Prime Minister Julia Gillard's impending carbon tax at the G20 summit in Mexico, but this hasn't dampened opposition to the new regulations back in Australia. Thu, 21 Jun 2012 08:40:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/attacked-at-home-australias-carbon-tax-wins-important-fans-abroad Julia Gillard, Carbon tax, Rio+20, 2012 G20 Mexico summit, Tony Abbott, Australia, Ban Ki-moon, United Nations, Craig Emerson, Earth Summit United Nations secretary Ban Ki-moon has lauded Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's impending carbon tax at the G20 summit in Mexico, but this hasn't dampened opposition to the new regulations at home. http://news.linktv.org/videos/rio-20-loses-numbers-with-notable-no-shows?start=0 The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development convenes to create an environmental blueprint for the future, but some key leaders aren't there. Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:42:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/rio-20-loses-numbers-with-notable-no-shows United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, Rio de Janeiro, Earth Summit, Brazil, United Nations, Sustainable Development, Environment, CNN The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development convenes to create an environmental blueprint for the future, but some key leaders aren't there. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-20-2012?start=0 Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports from Egypt, where former President Hosni Mubarak is on life support, both candidates are claiming to have won last weekend's election, and the ruling military council has seized greater power. Plus headlines, and more. Wed, 20 Jun 2012 09:54:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-20-2012 Egyptian presidential election, 2012, Hosni Mubarak, Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, Ahmed Shafiq, Coma, People's Assembly of Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, Life support Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports from Egypt, where former President Hosni Mubarak is on life support, both candidates are claiming to have won last weekend's election, and the ruling military council has seized greater power. WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London and asked for asylum. And leaders from more than 100 countries are meeting today in Brazil for the start of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest United Nations conference ever. Plus headlines, and more. http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-20-2012?start=3062 Leaders from more than 100 countries are meeting in Brazil for the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest UN conference ever. However, there has been little progress since the last UN Earth Summit in Rio 20 years ago, and expectations for the meeting are low. Wed, 20 Jun 2012 09:54:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/democracy-now-june-20-2012 Egyptian presidential election, 2012, Hosni Mubarak, Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, Ahmed Shafiq, Coma, People's Assembly of Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, Life support Leaders from more than 100 countries are meeting today in Brazil for the start of the Rio-plus-20 Earth Summit, the largest United Nations conference ever. The conference comes twenty years after the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro pledged to protect the planet by endorsing treaties on biodiversity and climate change. Little has been done in the intervening years to reach development goals in areas like food security, water, global warming and energy. Although negotiators have already agreed on a draft document to be approved by world leaders, many groups working on environmental and poverty issues have criticized the draft agreement, saying it is far too weak. We go to Rio to speak with Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace. http://news.linktv.org/videos/millions-threatened-by-drought-in-brazil?start=0 Just two weeks ahead of the Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil's northeast region is going through its worst drought in more than 40 years. Nine hundred towns in the northeast part of the country have declared states of emergency. Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:20:00 -0700 http://news.linktv.org/videos/millions-threatened-by-drought-in-brazil Northeast Region, Brazil, Water resources management in Brazil, Brazil, Drought, Federal government of Brazil, State of emergency, Picos, Earth Summit, United Nations, Civil defense Just two weeks ahead of the Earth Summit in Rio, the UN issued a disturbing report on the environment. One of the top priorities that will be discussed at the summit is access to water. Brazil's northeast region is going through its worst drought in more than 40 years. Brazilians planted their crops but they simply will not grow. Nine hundred towns in the northeast part of the country have declared states of emergency. The government has released more than $3 billion to the region, but people say that their monthly government stipends are not enough. As rain is not expected until October or November, a civil defense official says the the federal government will have to think of a new strategy to save the livelihoods of millions who rely on agriculture to survive. Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo reports from Picos, Brazil.