“The Copenhagen climate summit was pretty much summed up in the high-level segment yesterday when [Australian climate minister] Penny Wong’s speech was interrupted by whistles and chanting and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez got a standing ovation”, Lenore Taylor wrote in the December 17 Australian.
Taylor said that before Wong “rose to speak the conference proceedings were interrupted by people with whistles and sirens chanting ‘stop green capitalism’ — a sign of the anger in the developing world …”
“Then President Chavez brought the house down.”
Taylor reported that when Chavez said “there was a ‘silent and terrible ghost in the room’ and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening”.
Taylor said when Chavez insisted that “capitalism is the road to hell … let’s fight against capitalism”, he “won a standing ovation”.
In the article below, Kiraz Janicke, who is a member of the Green Left Weekly Caracas bureau, reports on Chavez’s speech to the United Nations climate summit at Copenhagen. The article was first published at Venezuelanalysis.com. The full text of Chavez’s speech can be read here.
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During his speech to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez slammed the “lack of political will” of the most powerful nations to take serious action to avert climate change, and called for systemic change to save the planet.
Chavez, who received a standing ovation for his speech, said the process in Copenhagen is “not democratic; it is not inclusive.”
In particular, he criticised an attempt by rich countries to overturn the Kyoto Protocol. Doing so would eliminate differentiation between the obligations of rich and poor countries, treating countries from the Global North and South as equally responsible for climate change.
“There is a group of countries that believe they are superior to those of us from the South, to those of us from the Third Word”, Chavez said.
“This does not surprise us … we are again faced with powerful evidence of global imperial dictatorship.”
The Venezuelan president also applauded the initiative of the protesters outside the summit calling for serious measures to stop catastrophic climate change.
“There are many people outside … I’ve read in the news that there were some arrests, some intense protests there in the streets of Copenhagen, and I salute all those people out there, the majority of them youth … They are young people concerned for the world’s future.
“I have been reading some of the slogans painted in the streets … One said, ‘Don’t Change the Climate, Change the System!’ And I bring that on board for us.
“Let’s not change the climate. Let’s change the system!
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