US refusing to tackle climate change: Activist

Press TV has conducted an interview with Jody Grage, vice chair of the Green Party of Washington State from Seattle, on worldwide protests to call for global action on climate change as world leaders gather in Paris for the COP21 summit.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: The world leaders are meeting in Paris. What is at stake?

Grage: There is very much at stake. And it’s about time that we came to grips with it. Jill Stein, who’s running for the Green Party of Washington’s… [nomination for the United States president], it will be at COP21 as well as some of the global greens. They are calling for very specific guidelines for countries and for the developed countries who have contributed more than their share, to also pay more than their share of what it will take to reverse this trend.

Press TV: Many developing countries are at the forefront of the climate impact, yet many developed countries are still just doing what’s in their own interest. Can the summit ensure effective measures, will be taken or will it just be talk and no action?

Grage: I think that the people around the world are becoming more and more determined that something has to be done. I’m a retired teacher and I used to have a banner up in my room that said: “Good planets are hard to find.” And we’re not taking very good care of this one. We have been doing our part here in Seattle. The Gates Foundation last summer announced that they were divesting from fossil fuels and that they were doing a billion dollars toward climate change.And it was announced in the paper here this morning that there will be a multi-billion-dollar investment announced Monday at the beginning of COP21.

We have a somewhat different problem here because Washington State, the West Coast, should do pretty well during climate change, but we do expect we will have a lot of economic refugees from so many places that will be a lot worse.  

Press TV: Given that the pledges that COP21 is going to have will not even start until 2020 and they can’t even be fully checked until 2030, do you think a path to 2° Celsius is possible in the near future or will be too little too late?

Grage: I think more and more people are not relying on governments to do things. You can look at the Transition Town Movement that started in England and spread around the world, the Sustainability Movement, the voluntary Simplicity Movement.

People are really realizing that we have to take matters into our own hands on a community level and decide what we are going to do individually. And these communities to work on the climate change problem which so many of our leaders, particularly here in the United States in the two corporate parties, are refusing to deal with head-on because they are so invested in their narrow interests.

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