People’s Summit against EGC

Our Conference has a new title. We, the organising team, have decided to change the title. In the following statement we would like to briefly explain why we are changing it and why we haven't considered doing so earlier.

Why?
When we got together as a team for last year's counter conference, we deliberately chose the title "Power to the People". The double-meaning of the title reflected our desire to link issues of energy supply with social issues of power distribution. We were aware of the history of the slogan. It was first introduced by the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights Movement. We wanted to take this origin into account by always being clear that the conference aims to be internationally oriented and strives to amplify voices from marginalized communities and regions.

An aspect that we did not take into account is that the slogan is currently being used in the Austrian and European climate justice movement in a way that is decoupled from its origins and its evolution. The explicit criticism of Black and BIPOC activists: A movement that is predominantly white in Austria, is using a slogan that has its roots in anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles in an inflationary way and without awareness of its history.

This criticism was voiced during last years actions in the context of BlockGas and our conference, and was expressed publicly once more after our announcement of this years edition of the conference with the title "Power to the People". We take this criticism seriously and see that our attempt to keep the slogan, while aiming to contextualise it accordingly did not succeed. We have therefore decided to change the title of our conference to "People's Summit Against EGC".

Why not earlier?
We, the organising team, have to admit that our feedback and reflection processes were not adequate and that we made mistakes. Both before and after the conference, we tried to take steps to include additional perspectives and open ourselves up to criticism. In the process of evaluating the feedback, we did not give sufficient weight and consideration to those voices that criticised the slogan being used as title of the conference. This was partly due to the fact that we did not consider the conference in the context of broader debates within the climate justice movement, but also due to a lack of awareness of the problem within a largely white -positioned organising team. We are sorry that it took public criticism for us to enter into in-depth discussions both internally and externally and ultimately decide to change the title. In the future, we want to build up a fundamental understanding of the criticism we have received at an earlier stage and be more proactive in doing so.