ABOUT US
The Climate Justice Collective (CJC) is a UK-wide network set up to engage in and support climate justice activism. It formed out of the Camp for Climate Action following its decision not to organise on a national level in 2011.
CJC is committed to continuing to take action against the root causes of catastrophic climate change, which is already killing 300,000 people a year and severely impacting many more lives. We think continuing the fight to protect the climate is ever more urgent in the light of unprecedented levels of environmental devastation, alongside widespread hunger and poverty fuelled and worsened by unjust debt and austerity measures. To us, climate justice means both environmental and social justice. We do not believe that climate change is merely a result of misguided energy policies. Instead, we see both climate change and poverty as being rooted in an economic system based on the ‘needs’ of the market, private profit and endless economic growth, as opposed to the genuine needs of people and our planet.
CJC believes that avoiding climate catastrophe requires radical social change and new models of political and economic organisation based on sustainability, participatory democracy and social justice. We recognise that the fundamental changes we believe are needed put us in opposition to those with powerful vested interests in maintaining the status quo: multi-national corporations and the governments in their pockets; so our focus is not on trying to persuade them to change their ways, but on challenging these power structures. To do this, we will employ a variety of tactics, including direct action. We organise in an ‘anti-hierarchical’ way, making decisions by consensus, and seeking to achieve both autonomy and accountability.
On this basis, people from all around England, Scotland and Wales have been getting together since early 2011 to discuss how we can work together to support and initiate climate justice activism in the UK.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
CJC has three principal aims for 2012:
1. To help to join together campaigns on different energy issues;
2. To invite people to join CJC and get more people involved in climate justice activism;
3. To participate in the anti-cuts and Occupy movements and make the case for climate
justice.
As fossil fuels are becoming more scarce, energy companies are turning to ever dirtier and more expensive and environmentally-destructive fuel sources and extraction methods to keep their profits soaring. These include: biofuels, deep sea oil drilling, fracking, new coal, new nuclear and tar sands. CJC works closely with groups focusing on these ‘extreme energy’ issues, to strengthen and inspire one another in our common cause of achieving climate and environmental justice.
As well as supporting existing struggles, we are initiating and developing our own projects. Fuel Poverty Action is a campaign group started by people from CJC. It is working on supporting community action against the greedy ‘Big Six’ energy companies and unaffordable energy bills that are a symptom of our profit-driven energy system and its addiction to expensive fossil fuels and other unsustainable energy sources.
There is an alternative: community-controlled renewable energy schemes and energy saving can lead the way to a sustainable, democratic and affordable energy future for all. To get there, we need daring and creative grassroots action to challenge the greed, corruption, environmental devastation and social injustice of our corporate-controlled economic and political systems.
Our campaigning against the Big Six energy companies – Centrica (British Gas), EDF Energy, E.On, Npower, Scottish Power and Scottish & Southern Energy – and for energy democracy is being stepped up with a mass direct action on May 3rd 2012: The Big Six Energy Bash.
By wrecking the climate, polluting the environment, stealing and squandering the planet’s resources, imposing unjust austerity measures and creating extreme poverty, the 1% elite controlling the world’s economy is destroying people’s hopes for a healthy planet and a decent standard of living for all. More and more people are choosing to stand up and resist. CJC wants to contribute to this fight, and we want you to join us!
