We are trying to link together environmentalists, grassroots community activists and anyone concerned with social justice and our long term future as a species. This because we are worried about a scam, “carbon trading”. It is going to replace the work that has to be done to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
And that work is going to involve leaving resources in the ground. Mining resources i South Africa and petroleum across Africa and as far north as Norway, and everywhere in between. Taking the lead of the Ecuadorian government which is making a big commitment at the moment to leaving its oil in the ground.
The carbon trade distraction sets us back. Because it transfers pollution as a private property right, instead of applying “the polluter pays” principle.
In fact this system that has set up by the same people who gave us Enron.
Instead of applying “the polluter pays” principle this system tries to measure how much carbon is offset against continuing pollution, a continuing hedonistic behaviour as if there were some equivalent.
In fact all of the investments we have been looking at in “Clean Development Mechanism” are really quite destructive. We have not actually found any gold standard investments. The only one that could be so in South Africa, which is the retrofitting of houses with solar technology, can’t even be financed through the Clean Development Mechanism, it is a tiny proportion of what’s required.
As a result the Clean Developement Mechanism and indeed the whole carbon trading gimmickry is something that our Durban Group for Climate Justice says no to.
We have major networks involved in the Durban Group like Friends of the Earth International, and really important thinktanks and especially these grassroots groups in South Africa and India and Brasil and other places, and we say NO to carbon trading. We need Climate Justice, instead of making a right to pollute, instead of the big corporations in the North and the South benefiting from playing the game in which they have created private property rights, and giving themselves huge quotas of free pollutions rights.
We’ve got to make huge cuts, and at the same time expanding cheap and clean and minimal free basic electricity. It can be done but it requires political will and a complete rejection of this commodification of the air called carbon trading.
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