The Black Hive @ M4BL 
COP DEMANDS

Countries must stop expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure and pipelines, and end new leases of fossil-fuel infrastructure on their public lands and waters.

All parties at COP have versions of these tools at their disposal and must commit to implementing them:

• Stop exploration, production, and exports via moratoria, bans, or quotas
• End development and permits for critical pieces of fossil-fuel infrastructure, such as pipelines, terminals, and ports.
• Enact comprehensive environmental review and community consent processes for new fossil-fuel supply projects.

The United States must swiftly lead on this front. President Biden has clear legal authority to rapidly phase out new federal oil, gas, and coal leases on public lands and waters. The U.S. Department of the Interior must use its authority to prevent all new lease sales of oil, gas, and coal.

The U.S. and Global North nations must take action to restrict international exports of coal, oil, and natural gas. President Biden has the unilateral power to lead on this front by reinstating the Crude Oil Export Ban through presidential declaration, publicly calling on Congress to craft permanent restrictions that include coal and liquid natural gas. He must also use his power and platform to build global cooperation for ending fossil-fuel exports from the world’s other major exporters.

Nations can start to take action by regulating fossil-fuel supply, limiting extraction, removing subsidies for production, dismantling unnecessary infrastructure, defending the rights of Black and Indigenous communities of color, and shifting to renewable energy. Wealthy countries and polluting, profit-driven corporations are the ones with the capacity to lead and support this managed phase-out of fossil fuels. They must commit to participation in the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Fossil Fuel Registry, and to compelling regulated industry within the U.S. to do the same to create an accurate roadmap for phasing out.

The Global Black Diaspora community will no longer serve any masters. It is essential for us to prioritize the planet and people over profit and proliferation. Every dollar thrown into building a just transition is undermined by the estimated $6 trillion wasted each year on global fossil-fuel subsidies and tax incentives. It is past time to stop subsidizing, financing, and insuring the fossil-fuel industry. The public-health costs of toxic fossil-fuel pollution and the casualties of climate damages disproportionately affect Black communities and economies across the globe. It is past time for the true cost of pollution to weigh on fossil-fuel executives rather than everyday people. Those responsible for prolonging the climate crisis must be held financially and criminally responsible.

The U.S. and other world leaders must hold fossil-fuel companies and their enabling industries accountable for misleading the public about the climate crisis, and for the costs of climate impacts across the nation. Actions that can be taken include:

• Reform bankruptcy laws to require fossil-fuel companies to fulfill their obligations to workers and communities. Put fossil-fuel companies facing bankruptcy under national receivership and require them to wind down their fossil-fuel production operations.
• Cease all coal, oil, and gas industry bailouts.
• Break up polluting industrial agricultural monopolies and institute a moratorium on large food and agribusiness mergers.
• Pass laws to end non-disclosure agreements for companies that have caused damage to vulnerable communities, in order to hold those who have created harm accountable across the entire fossil-fuel supply chain.
• Hold financial institutions and multinational corporations accountable for fossil-fuel projects at home and abroad.
  • Banks, insurance companies, universities/colleges, and asset-management companies must cease the financing and insuring of such activities.
  • Hold corporations accountable for ongoing price gouging in the midst of the current global energy crisis, especially in ever-increasing colder and hotter months.

Given the clear and present threat posed by climate disruption, the U.S. must make it a violation of national security to provide any form of assistance to corporations and foreign governments intending to: aid exploration and development of fossil-fuel resources; build infrastructures such as pipelines; or export and import terminals that lock in fossil-fuel extraction and use.

Furthermore, the Biden administration must swiftly eliminate existing subsidies that exist under the executive branch’s jurisdiction and work with Congress to pass legislation such as the End Polluter Welfare Act, to eliminate federal fossil-fuel subsidies, including tax breaks, bailouts, loan guarantees, below-market royalties, and public financing.

Governments must take individual and collective action to impose the true cost of pollution on fossil-fuel executives rather than everyday people. The U.S. and other governments can take action by strengthening polluter-pays requirements, such as bonding levels and fees on oil and gas wells and coal mines, to ensure that fossil-fuel corporations pay the full cost of remediation. The U.S. should also take steps to prevent these corporations from continuing to impose health and environmental damages, and implement fines that force polluting industries to pay for the public-health burdens caused by their damages.

Cease funding for all technologies that only serve to prolong the life of the fossil-fuel industry and have dubious pollution reduction potential at best, such as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), and blue and gray hydrogen. Nations and international bodies must also stop including these technologies within climate plans and modeling. Further, the EU must confirm its proposal to declassify biomass as a renewable energy source and end subsidies. Biomass is not a renewable energy source. It threatens vital carbon sinks by escalating deforestation, and it has fueled disproportionate public health and vulnerability to climate impacts, such as extreme heat in Black communities in the U.S. Southeast, where wood pellets are primarily sourced.

Prioritize renewable solutions that help communities build self-sufficiency and wealth, such as community solar. Ensure adequate, equitable access to funding and finance for justly sourced, non-polluting renewable energy in Black communities. Reform all national utility systems to provide sustainable energy access (from generation to transmission) to all who need it. We demand community control of local energy resources through a collectively governed, decentralized, climate-resilient, modernized grid with sufficient renewable energy storage

Six years ago, $100 billion in climate-finance funds was a barely sufficient minimum. The world’s wealthiest countries have repeatedly broken that promise and continued to escalate fossil proliferation. They must start investing on the scale of $trillions to build sufficient mitigation and adaptation funds to meet the needs of all frontline Global Black Diasporic communities.

The U.S. has a responsibility to move first on all of these fronts. Many countries followed the U.S.’s lead after the 45th President pulled the U.S. out of the Green Climate Fund. President Biden must make up for lost time by aggressively using the Defense Production Act, declaring a climate emergency, and passing climate investments through reconciliation. The U.S. should lead manufacturing in climate solutions such as heat pumps that can benefit Black communities in the U.S and across the world.

Global leaders must collectively and individually fund a just transition guided by the following principles:

• Self-determination: All peoples have the right to participate in decisions that impact their lives. This requires democratic governance in our workplaces and communities. Communities must have the power to shape their economies—as producers, as consumers, and in our relationships with each other. Further, workers and communities have the right to challenge any entity that commits economic and/or environmental injustices. These entities include governments, militaries, corporations, international bodies, and mechanisms for securing corporate accountability. In addition to protection from harm, a just transition must create inclusive spaces for all traditions and cultures, recognizing them as integral to a healthy and vibrant economy. This includes reparations for land that has been stolen and/or destroyed by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, genocide and slavery.
  Just transition fund stewardship must be centered and led by the Global Black Diaspora. This means funneling programs and funds through Black-led institutions wherever possible. In the absence of a Black-led institution, governments and international bodies must make public options available and distribute funds/implement policies in a manner that builds wealth and self-sufficiency for Black communities on the frontlines of climate change. A just transition must also foster and fund space for Black communities to engage in local and Indigenous innovation for energy and climate–resilient solutions.
• Regenerative ecological economics: A just transition must advance ecological resilience; reduce resource consumption; restore biodiversity and traditional ways of life; and undermine extractive economies, including capitalism, that erode the ecological basis of our collective well-being. This requires a re-localization and democratization of primary production and consumption by building up local food systems, local clean energy, and small-scale production that are economically and ecologically sustainable. Governments and industries can and must internalize the principle of Buen Vivir: That is, we can live well without living better at the expense of others if we operate with the well-being of communities in relation to their cultural and natural environments in mind.
  The costs of achieving sustainable development, a healthy economy, and clean environment should not be borne by current or future victims of environmental and economic injustices and unfair free-trade policies.
  Funding must be prioritized for Black communities—from the Global South to the U.S. South. These communities are disproportionately on the frontlines and fence lines of fossil-fuel infrastructure, and as a result, have led calls for fossil-fuel phase-outs to be paired with a just transition.
• Labor just transition: Policies must create meaningful work and allow for the full development of human potential. Job programs must provide a living wage and encourage support for local workers’ centers, unions, and Black-owned businesses, all of which will be accountable to the community. Care workers’ value must be recognized and resourced. The right to organize and collectivize as workers must be guaranteed and protected by all world governments.
  Funding must be prioritized for current and former fossil-fuel workers and other laborers reliant on industries that must be scaled down in order to address the climate crisis. A scale-up in the investment in care-economy jobs is required.
  Additional actions the U.S. can take:
  • Guarantee all coal, oil, and gas workers at least five years of wage and benefit support for displaced workers, housing assistance where applicable, job retraining opportunities, insurance coverage, pension support, early retirement offerings, and priority job placement for displaced workers. Enact legislation to ensure high-road labor standards for all workers, including: agreements to incentivize preferential hire for workers who have been displaced during the decline of the oil and gas industry; Davis Bacon prevailing wage requirements; and community benefit agreements. A new and more sustainable economy requires millions of secure jobs with healthcare benefits.
  • Require U.S. businesses and people, as well as foreign businesses offering goods or services in the U.S., to conduct human-rights and environmental due diligence in all of their global and domestic supply chains.
  • Support and create worker-led initiatives.
  • Equitably redistribute resources and power. Resource development of new systems that are good for all people, not just a few. A just transition must actively work against and transform current and historic social inequities based on race, class, gender, immigrant status, and other forms of oppression. A just transition must fight to reclaim capital and resources for the reparations and regeneration of geographies and sectors of the economy in which these inequities are most pervasive.

We are explicit that all actions called for within our demands must be governed by free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). We demand FPIC review processes before the approval or creation of any new fossil-fuel infrastructure and before undertaking any “green” projects, such as lithium mining, that require land or waters. Black communities have the right to give FPIC to legislation and development of their lands, natural resources, energy, climate change, cultural properties and heritage, and other interests, and to receive remedies of losses and damages of property taken without consent.

We also call for the immediate implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, without qualification.

We demand the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment. Access to environmental benefits must be equitably distributed. We believe individuals and peoples are interdependent with nature and form an inseparable whole with it. We demand the recognition and promotion of living well as a relationship of harmonious balance among people, nature, and the organization of society. We demand equitable and non-discriminatory access to quality and vital minimum levels of affordable and safe energy. We recognize the diverse climate zones across the country and that minimum vital energy must be determined by well-being standards across community and climate. Energy access and distribution should transparently share up-to-date information and allow citizens to participate openly in the decision-making process, among other obligations established by the law or new constitution.

Food sovereignty is directly tied to climate, as climate impacts and environmental-justice issues are curtailing access to agricultural practices that can sustain communities. Food sovereignty entails a shift away from the corporate agricultural system and toward our own governance of our own food systems. It is about our right to healthy food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, with the right to define and ultimately control our own food and agriculture systems. Shifting from an exclusively rights-based framework to one of governance puts the needs of those who work and consume  at all points of the food chain, rather than the demands of corporations and markets, at the center.

We demand divestment from anti-Black and discriminatory practices, and investment in policies that enable BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color)  capacity to create self-determining food economies. We also demand investment in alternative land-holding and tenure systems, such as community land trusts and conservation easements, that prioritize land transfer and holdings for BIPOC. We demand the support of Black-led, Black-serving, and Black-mandated food organizations to effectively serve and respond to community food insecurity through: access to sustained operating funds; service navigation; expert advice; capacity to lead long-term food system transformation; community learning; and the tracking of progress on outcomes.

The U.S. must withdraw its nearly 600 military bases that often produce unchecked pollution and unconstitutional violence around the world. It must also withdraw from its colonial holdings, such as Guam and Puerto Rico.

The U.S, China, Russia, the EU, and leading world powers must collaborate on funding green-energy transition rather than military confrontation/buildup. They must end all ongoing, unnecessary wars of aggression across the globe. These are often waged over further exploitation of fossil-fuel resources, create further disruption and migration across the world, and are an unchecked source of global emissions increase each year.

Global powers must responsibility for the full life cycle of pollution cleanup and remediation; provide comprehensive healthcare compensation for affected populations; shepherd a just transition of military bases and militarized communities into alternative healthy and resilient community use; and end development and testing of new nuclear weapons, which are disproportionately carried out on Indigenous land and communities of color in the U.S. and around the world.

We demand U.S. visas for people experiencing climate migration due to climate disasters. We demand asylum be granted to those crossing U.S. and international colonial borders due to acute or slow-moving climate disasters and impacts. Priority should be given to migrants from the Global South and countries with a history of low greenhouse-gas emissions.

Put military emissions on the table at COP27 and require mandatory reporting that not only includes energy and fuel use from equipment and base operations, but also military equipment procurement and supply chains, e.g., arms sales. Account for emissions after conflicts such as rebuilding. Data must be transparent, accessible, independently verifiable, and disaggregated from non-military emissions. Pledge military emission cuts that are clearly in line with the 1.5ºC target set by the Paris Agreement with clear action plans.

Nations must create alternative emergency response systems, divorced from police and military services, to respond to climate disasters. No one should fear physical violence or imprisonment while fleeing a hurricane or a fire. As long as prisons continue to exist, safe evacuation and medical care must be mandatory for incarcerated people during extreme climate events. End public funding for private-security contractors and enact legal accountability for violence they have committed in support of fossil-fuel interests and border control. The U.S. must cease its use of unpaid incarcerated labor to fight wildfires and remove all barriers for the formerly incarcerated to find meaningful work in fighting climate disasters, moving forward.

We demand an end to continued interference in and obstruction of a successful framework for an adequately financed facility to address loss and damage by stakeholders, especially Global North nations. The U.S. is a significant polluter and perpetrator of climate harms, and thus has an obligation to advocate and demonstrate support for the Global South’s demands for climate reparations. There is no authentic offer for change that includes delay. Dialogues, committees, open forums, and task forces are equivalent to inaction. Global governance must address loss and damage with tangible financing for communities in need now. Reparations must include making loss and damage a permanent agenda for all UNFCCC meetings, including its impacts in country Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs). They must also support the strengthening of all existing loss-and-damage facilities, such as the Santiago Network and the Warsaw International Mechanism. The Black Hive @ M4BL supports a total adoption of loss-and-damage funding into all climate-financing goals through all types of funding, including bilateral and multilateral.

Governments must take state-level and collective action to impose the true cost of pollution on fossil-fuel executives rather than people. Wealthy nations like the U.S.,  which provide economic safe harbor for fossil-fuel polluters who have contributed the most to global greenhouse-gas emissions, must pay their fair share of financing toward loss and damage. In addition to making commitments toward mitigation and adaptation financing, rich nations and polluting entities must begin to develop new individual finance commitments addressing loss and damage.

Climate damage is physical, and the losses that result are tangible. Therefore, reparations must be, too. The quality of funding provided is as important as the quantity. Loss-and-damage funds must be in the form of direct grants in tangible currency, not loans or insurance schemes. Parties must pledge financing for loss and damage that is additional to the current mitigation and adaptation commitments, and not redirected from or attached to other international and humanitarian aid. Funds from other unfulfilled pledges do not count. Parties must also explore innovative mechanisms to mobilize resources.

Far too many colonial/post-colonial Global Black Diaspora countries have suffered from the weight of unequal loans at the hands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and other institutions over which the colonial powers in the Global North maintain outsized influence. These unjustifiable debts prevent Global South economies from ever managing real investment in a just transition away from fossil fuels. We call for an immediate, unconditional cancellation of public external debt payments by all lenders for all countries in need for at least the next ten years. We also call for a clear program for the unconditional cancellation of outstanding debt; borrowing governments should have agency to stop making debt payments without suffering penalties for doing so.

Reparations would use international laws and resources to address inequities caused or exacerbated by the climate crisis; they would allow for a way out of the climate catastrophe by addressing climate adaptation, mitigation, and migration. The framework must  include elements of:

• Restitution, including restoration of a victim’s rights, property, and citizenship status
• Rehabilitation, including psychological and physical support
• Compensation
• Satisfaction, including acknowledgment of guilt, apologies followed by accountability, rematriation of our art and cultural heritage, construction of memorials, etc.
• Cessation and guarantees of non-repetition, including reformation of laws and civil and political structures that led to or fueled violence, and those that continue to do so

Reparations must advance and protect democratic control over how resources are preserved, used, and distributed, while honoring and respecting the rights of our Indigenous family. Financing to support climate mitigation and adaptation must move through existing Black banking institutions; resource the development of new institutions; and support embedded community banking structures empowered to build small businesses advancing the next generation of sustainable energy, labor, and natural-resource stewardship. Further, funds must be available to tribal communities and other entities that are able to care for their communities outside of solely governments, nonprofits, and business. Loss-and-damage funds must not go toward entities that are formerly or currently responsible for harm, pollution, or exploitation in BIPOC communities. Loss-and-damage funding must empower public green banks across the Global South.

Just as free and open data sharing of the COVID-19 genome enabled the rapid development of a vaccine in response to the pandemic, free and open access to patent-free green technology for developing countries in the Global South is imperative to adaptation efforts and to closing the digital divide in renewable energy.

It is crucial to recognize that global privatization of natural resources, such as land and watersheds on the continent, has led to food and water insecurity. World powers must acknowledge that environmental human-rights defenders in the Global South are the most killed, persecuted, incarcerated, and harmed activists and community organizers in the world. Therefore, they must protect them and prosecute the corporations that fuel, fund, and commit atrocities and human-rights abuses in the name of profit for the few. We stand in solidarity with all environmental human-rights defenders.