COP15 System Change not Climate Change

Published October 26, 2011 - size: 800 × 532 in COP15 System Change not Climate Change

At COP17, Copenhagen, 2009, the global climate justice movement adopts a powerful slogan: System Change – Not Climate Change!

a film by IICAT scholar Richard Widick

On January 6, 2021 insurgent American white nationalism introduced itself to the world, again, first in storming the US Capitol and then in sustained political efforts to suppress the Black vote ahead of the 2022 elections — but this extension of conservatives' long-running Southern Strategy for locking down political power now threatens to determine much more than local control of Black lives by white majorities: today the lives of Black American voters, Black Lives Matter movements, poor peoples everywhere and Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly inextricably interwoven in the figure of the unfolding climate crisis.

UCSB Sociologist and Filmmaker Richard Widick takes the audience inside the global struggle to avert the crisis, tracking the corporations, climate social movements, and nations through ten years of international negotiations, street protests, and frustrated implementation of the so-called Paris Agreement on climate change.

Through firsthand participation and on the spot interviews at UN climate conferences in Durban, South Africa (2011), and then in Doha, Warsaw, Lima, Paris, Marrakech, Bonn, Katowice and Madrid (2012-2019), Widick exposes the complex intersection of corporate power, international relations, and racialized US politics in the failure of UN climate policies to put the brakes on the unfolding climate crisis.

Viewers will get an unvarnished, inside look at the people, places and powerful social forces currently at work preventing ambitious climate action — as well as the cacophony of mutinous, beautifully dangerous, and hope-driving faces of those who would put an end to the fossil fuel age, before it puts an end to all of us and all of our animal brothers and sisters, on whom we rely for so much and who now need us to succeed more than ever before.

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