*Press Statement*
** November 28, 2011 *YCL statement on the commencing of COP 17* ** The Young Communist League of South Africa [uFasimba] would like to offer its best wishes to the delegates, the host city of Durban, the Ministry of Water and Environmental Affairs, the department of International Relations and Cooperation and all role players at the 17th Conference of Parties (COP 17); the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change as it gets underway today. It is the view of the YCL that climate change is not only an environmental issue but a class and ideological warfare. It is our view that the class which is always on the receiving end of bad consequences of climate change is the working class and therefore resolved to fully participate in the coming conference in order to ensure that we not only build consciousness and awareness among the working class and poor youth around climate change and its consequences, but ensure that we influence decisions to be adopted by the conference in order to ensure that they are in favour of the working class and the poor. We hope that this conference will not be reduced to yet another talk shop and that it will come up with cutting edge solutions in combating global warming and its effects. The commencing of the conference comes on the wake of research and findings that make a clarion call for immediate action to decisively deal with global warming. A warning has been made by scientist that any delay would make restricting warming to an average global increase of two degrees Celsius, or less, extremely difficult if not impossible and that anything higher than two degrees is likely to cause extreme changes to the world's weather patterns. We appeal to more countries to commit themselves to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases as currently a study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) shows that we are falling short in this regard. We plead with the United States of America [USA] and the United Kingdom [UK] who both has stated they are not agreeing on any carbon reduction agreement to desist from doing so. They are the two biggest polluters and they refuse to cooperate because they are concerned about maximizing profits. We pledge our support to the Department of Environmental Affairs to ensure that we marshall young people, we turn young reds into green brigades that will ensure that “Working together, we save tomorrow today”. As the YCL we wish all those stakeholders a productive conference and hope that it will yield the desired results. Issued by the YCL Head Office For more information contact: Khaya Xaba YCL Media Liaison Officer Cell: 074 5 204 204 Landline: 011 339 3621 E-mail: [email protected] -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
