Why We Need
“System Change
Not Climate Change”
by Andrea Harden-Donahue
As the effects of climate change ravage our planet, the Council of Canadians is offering
a new tool in the fight for a better, more environmentally sustainable future.
The popular slogan “system change not climate change” has become central to a growing and vibrant global movement for climate justice. But what does system change mean?
And what does it have to do with the climate crisis? Inspired by this slogan, the Council of
Canadians has launched an exciting new project that will help spread the word that there
are other ways – better ways – to address climate change, and that the time to act is now.
Systemchange.ca is a multimedia website that brings together the voices of academics,
scientists, climate justice and community activists, and others to talk about why we need
system change – fundamental changes in our economic and governance models – and to
provide examples of new ways forward.
Systemchange.ca features more than
20 videos – from economist Peter
Victor discussing no-growth economics, to author and activist Naomi Klein
on climate justice, to Malik Yakini of
the Detroit Black Community Food
Security Network on local food production, to Council of Canadians
Chairperson Maude Barlow on the
rights of nature.
workplaces, classrooms, community centres, conference meeting rooms and even
your living room. To find out more about
organizing a teach-in, visit the “organize
a teach-in” section on systemchange.ca.
The following texts are excerpts from videos available at www.systemchange.ca:
The Council of Canadians is encouraging our chapters, members and others to
organize community-based teach-ins using
videos featured on the website before and
after the next round of UN climate talks,
which will be held in Durban, South Africa,
November 28 to December 9.
Teach-ins allow people to share knowledge and information, have discussions
and plan actions to address the growing
effects of climate change. They can be
held in a variety of settings, including
10 Canadian Perspectives Autumn 2011
Bill McKibben, Environmentalist
and founder of the 350.org
movement
“The kind of heat [generated by climate change] obviously causes big
things to start to happen. For instance,
the Arctic is melting at an enormously
rapid rate. But it’s also things very
close to home. Place after place after
place now is seeing enormous swings
in extreme weather and the reason for
that is this extra heat that we put into
the atmosphere. . . .
“Doing something about this is hard.
Getting off coal, gas, and oil is hard. It’s
hard because we’re all used to using
it, it’s hard because it’s the easiest
route out of poverty for poor nations.
It’s hard most of all because it is welldefended by the most profitable enterprise on Earth, the fossil fuel industry,
whose lobby so far has been able to
block any real change. We’re never
going to have as much money as the
fossil fuel industry, so we’re going to
have to find another currency to work
in, and that currency is bodies and
spirit and creativity.”
The Council of Canadians | www.canadians.org
Cathy Wilander, Wave Against
the Pave campaign and DeltaRichmond Council of Canadians
chapter contact
“The [South Fraser Perimeter Road]
freeway issue is quite a big issue in the
community [of Delta-Richmond, B.C.].
We consider it a climate crime and we
actually want to stop the construction
of this freeway. We decided we needed
to do an occupation [of the area] so on
Mother Earth Day on April 22, we had a
march and then we occupied a site where
the freeway was to go and we held it for
two weeks. We had people from all over
the lower mainland, all sorts of different
groups. We generated a lot of media and
we were the top story several nights. .
. . As someone who is now not only a
climate justice activist, but [also] doing
direct action, I just have to say how great
it feels to go out there and do things
and really stand up for the environment;
stand up for the land, and stand up for
the community. It’s really an empowering thing to do and at this point in time,
I think we all have to look at what are we
going to do to stop this craziness, to stop
this corporate agenda.”
the costs had gone through the roof. He
offered a package to the owners of coming in and retrofitting the building and
not costing the owner a penny, but rather
taking the savings in utility costs for a
number of years, and at the end of it he
would walk away. The owner would then
realize the savings of energy costs, which
in some cases were as high as $1 million
a year.
“That program – we took the concept of
that and went to the City of Toronto. We
asked the City of Toronto to help create a
publicly-run program that would put that
concept into place in both public and private sector buildings. And in doing that,
not only were they able to continue their
trade or finish their apprenticeship, but
we resulted in saving hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2emissions into the
atmosphere.
“It taught us as a labour movement that
we needed to explore the opportunities
in a green jobs agenda.”
Patrick Bond, Director of
the Centre for Civil Society,
University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Durban, South Africa
“There will be a strong unity call [in
Durban] that says ‘keep the oil in the
soil, and the coal in the hole, and the tar
sand in the land.’
“The big question is will governments
like Canada send delegates – the officials
and the delegates that come to these
things who will invariably sabotage it –
Canada especially for its role in the Kyoto
Protocol and dropping out. And that
means that the question many people
in South Africa will ask to Canadians is:
should those delegates come to South
Africa where they will simply make it
a conference of polluters? Or will we
be able to ask Canadians and South
Africans and all of the world’s peoples to
work together to ensure that the kind of
people doing climate deals are those that
are really committed to the planet, not to
continuing the emissions.”
The Council of Canadians will be in
Durban for COP17, the UN climate
negotiations. The conference will bring
together representatives of the world’s
governments, international organizations and civil society. We will be there to
monitor and report back on the talks and
to organize and participate in climate justice movement activities.
The Canadian government has played
a negative and obstructionist role at
the last two rounds of climate talks. We
know that the Canadian government is
also failing to address climate change
at home. In the lead-up to the Durban
talks, we will send a clear message to
the Harper government to “stay home.”
These talks should be about global action
to equitably reduce carbon emissions. If
our government isn’t willing to contribute positively, it should stay out of the
way of other nations moving forward.
Andrea Harden-Donahue is the Climate Justice
Campaigner for the Council of Canadians.
The Harper government has:
John Cartwright, President,
Toronto and York Region
Labour Council
“One day we had a conversation with an
engineer who talked about new work he
was doing providing retrofit programs
for existing highrise commercial buildings where they would go in and offer
an energy retrofit for buildings that were
built and designed in the 50s and 60s
when energy costs were irrelevant. Those
buildings were really energy pigs and
www.canadians.org | The Council of Canadians
• f ailed to invest in a green economy
and cut funding to an important
program for renewable energy, while
subsidizing the oil and gas industry by
$1.4 billion a year.
• f ailed to meaningfully regulate the
fastest-growing source of emissions
in Canada – the tar sands in Alberta –
while actively lobbying against
climate policies in the U.S. and
Europe that would penalize the tar
sands as a high-carbon fuel.
• c ut hundreds of Environment Canada
jobs.
•w
alked away from our commitments
to the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement on climate change
that will expire in 2012.
Autumn 2011 Canadian Perspectives 11