Mobilization for Climate Justice

Posts Tagged ‘greenwash’

Following closely on the heels of the failed UN Copenhagen climate conference, , the Second Annual Carbon Trade Summit will be convened on January 12-13th in New York City, bringing together representatives of some of the most polluting industries, industry associations, carbon financiers, banks, government officials and corporate “big greens.” Participants will include executives from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Duke Energy, and many more. (See http://www.iglobalforum.com/conference_live.php?r=22&p=home.)
Here they will discuss how to take advantage of the emerging carbon markets. Under a veneer of greenwash, they will be determining ways to ensure that marketable allowances for greenhouse gases (a.k.a., “cap-and-trade” schemes) remain the centerpiece of global climate policy.

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video directed by Sara Taigher. Medley of songs from DJ Rupture & Matt Shadetek

December, 23 2009
By Bond, Patrick

In Copenhagen, the world’s richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out.

Instead of halting the hedonism, Barack Obama and the Euro elites cracked open the mansion door to add a few nouveau riche guests: South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, China’s Jiabao Wen (reportedly the most obnoxious of the lot), Brazil’s Lula Inacio da Silva and India’s Manmohan Singh. By Saturday morning, still punch-drunk with power over the planet, these wild and crazy party animals had stumbled back onto their jets and headed home.

The rest of us now have a killer hangover, because on behalf mainly of white capitalists (who are having the most fun of all), the world’s rulers stuck the poor and future generations with vast clean-up charges – and worse: certain death for millions.
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http://counterpunch.org/tokar12232009.html

– Brian Tokar

Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still coming in, but a few things are already quite clear, even as countries step up the blame game in response to the summit’s disappointing conclusion.

First, the 2 1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to “take note” of are completely self-contradictory, and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn’t even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to “take note” of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.
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By Bond, Patrick
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Eight million people viewed Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff video since December 2007, and her new nine-minute Story of Cap and Trade (http://www.zcommunications.org/zvideo/3310) received 400,000 hits in the two weeks after its December 1 launch.

The film, produced by Free Range Studios, was developed in collaboration with the Durban Group for Climate Justice and Climate Justice Now! networks, which  joined Climate Justice Action and other networks to put tens of thousands of activists on the streets of Copenhagen, London and dozens of other cities in recent days, demanding large emissions cuts, the payment of ecological debt to climate victims, and the decommissioning of carbon markets.

But critics abound, so what trends can we discern from the sometimes venomous feedback to Story of Cap and Trade, and what do these tell us about US and global climate politics? Consider three categories:

• libertarian climate change denialists;
• Big Green groups and other carbon trading supporters; and
• self-interested green capitalists.

To start, rightwing extremists are easiest to dismiss because they deny that climate change is a product of human/economic activity – but there’s a schizophrenic double agenda. For although they’re pro-business, libertarians like Fox tv’s Glenn Beck oppose market-based cap-and-trade schemes.

The most dangerous, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, denies ‘that we’re going to pass a cap-and-trade or we’re going to do something on emissions reduction,’ as he told the rightwing NewsMax agency on Sunday.

Australian climate denialists now control the official opposition party, having overthrown its leader last month due to his cap-and-trade endorsement, in the process halting the state’s proposed emissions trading scheme (http://agmates.ning.com/forum/topics/canberra-protest-rally-live?commentId=3535428%3AComment%3A9579).

Those of us fighting carbon markets certainly *don’t* want alliances with cretins like Inhofe or intrepid videoblogger Lee Doran. After a clumsy rebuttal to The Story of Stuff, Doran offered another zany video-attack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWjGZNDEH-A), in which he first agrees with the demolition of cap-and-trade, but then replies to Annie’s charge that rich-world overconsumption victimizes those least responsible for global warming:

Annie: ‘Did you know that in the next century, because of the changing climate, whole island nations could end up underwater?’

Lee: ‘Yes, and islands will emerge from the water too, it’s part of the natural cycle of the planet.’ (minute 6)

Enough said about flat-earth libertarian ideologues.

In the second group we find both pro-market ‘green’ ideologues Read the rest of this entry »

[the below is from Indymedia Denmark: http://indymedia.dk/ ]

Saturday 12th began with the NOAH Flood for Climate Justice Demonstration which started at 10am and marched, danced and waved to Højbro Plads [photo report]. The 12dec Demo started at Christiansborg Slotsplads / Parliament Square [google route map], including a CJA group, and it was soon clear that it was massive, with estimates quickly reaching 100,000 protestors. This was also part of a Global Day of Action on climate change.  People were also meeting at Hojbro Plads in the same area for another action in the city.

Police Make Indiscriminate Mass Arrests

At around 3.15pm the police charged into the march near to where the CJA System Change not Climate Change group had joined the march, as well as people from the Ntac called demonstration. They cut off hundreds of people including many who were marching as part of Libertarian Socialist bloc [Pics 1> 2 | report | video]. By 5pm several hundred had been handcuffed and made to sit on the floor, where they remain in the cold for hours. The police’s press office reports that those arrested today are between 700-900 people – See AerialTwitpic.

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Wanna watch the whole thing, click HERE!

What is The Story of Cap & Trade?

The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the “devils in the details” in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what’s really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you’ve heard about cap and trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

By Patrick Bond

It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible position on climate than that of South Africa’s environment minister, Buyelwa Sonjica, who spoke to parliament in early November about SA’s posture for the Copenhagen Summit.

Sonjica announced, ‘South Africa is a developing country with huge developmental challenges, and needs carbon space in order to meet our developmental needs. We cannot afford to take on any binding emission reduction targets. Expectations for the outcome of the conference in Copenhagen are informed by our national interests and our strategic priorities.’

The ‘interests and priorities’ are clear: the SA government wants to continue supplying the world’s cheapest electricity to the world’s biggest companies in the destructive mining/smelting sectors, firms which are rapidly mechanizing and shedding jobs, and which send such large profit/dividend outflows to London and Melbourne headquarters, that SA has one of the world’s worst balance of payments problems (for which The Economist rated SA as the world’s riskiest emerging market last year).

As for energy costs to poor South Africans, they are rising by the world’s fastest amount, so that Eskom can raise funds for building hundreds of billions of rands worth of dangerous coal/nuclear-fired electricity, putting SA at the top of the world’s rankings in per person output of electricity per unit of GDP.

This minister is a maniac, but luckily as she showed in August 2008 during the Xolobeni titanium mining controversy, she can swing a U-turn as wildly as Julius Malema, once social protest plays a role.

More such protest is needed against Pretoria, Washington, Brussels, Beijing and other major pollution-lobby centres in coming weeks. In the run-up to the Copenhagen Summit from 7-18 December, the October-November Bangkok and Barcelona negotiations of Kyoto Protocol Conference of Parties functionaries confirmed that Northern states and their corporations couldn’t get their act together. Nor will Southern elites in high-emitting countries, especially South Africa.
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article from grist:
by TOM PHILPOTT
What do industrially produced meat and corn-based ethanol have in common?

Well, they both thrive on the assumption that it’s good idea to devote vast swaths of land to an incredibly resource-intensive crop—corn—and then run that crop through an energy-sucking process to create a product of dubious value.

And .. they both got tagged as major drivers of climate change this past week.

Ethanol took the harder blow of the two, I think. It came wrapped in the Oct. 23 issue of Science. In a concise and devastating “policy forum” piece, a team of authors led by University of Minnesota researcher Tim Searchinger fingered a gaping defect in existing European and pending U.S. climate policy: biofuel gets treated as carbon-neutral, ignoring carbon emissions from land-use change. According to the paper ($ub req’d),  the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union’s cap-and-trade law, and the final version of Waxman-Markey (the House climate bill that passed over the summer) all contain the a “far-reaching but fixable flaw”:

[They] does not count CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

Or, as Searchinger put it to a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy.”
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Rising Tide North America, with Carbon Trade Watch and the Camp for Climate Action would like you to join us on the October 24th day of global climate action to spread the word about the biggest financial scam in history – Carbon Trading.

In order to stabilize the climate before billions of people around the world suffer the consequences, it is imperative that carbon-trading schemes are stopped and real, democratically determined solutions are implemented.

www.350Reasons.org

We cannot afford to waste any more valuable time and resources relying on such market-driven strategies to deliver science-based goals (such as 350 ppm of CO2) when so many lives and livelihoods are at stake. If we truly wish to protect people and planet, then we must put climate justice before corporate profits.  However, first and foremost, we need to dispel the misguided notion that carbon trading has anything at all to do with climate change mitigation, or the present and future wellbeing of our communities.

We are proud to announce the launch of www.350reasons.org – a website presenting 350 reasons why carbon trading will not serve to stabilize the climate. A staggering amount of reasons sent in by site visitors was pored over, organized, and consolidated into an upcoming on-site gallery– 35 exemplary ones  are included in the 350 Reasons ‘zine (downloadable below).  Visit 350reasons.org for printable format versions

Online Reading version

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This week both The Washington Post and Greenpeace reported on the failure of the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This decade old “carbon offset” forest project in Bolivia demonstrates that “carbon trading” and other market mechanisms (CDM, REDD, cap and trade, so forth) will not effectively slow the burning of fossil fuels. These financial instruments are scams, frauds, and human rights violations.

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In ancient times some places we now know as vast arid deserts, or desert-like plains, were deeply forested and thrived with abundant wildlife. What happened? Human populations pushed the envelope too far. The human race has a distressing penchant for clear-cutting great stretches of forest to feed fires, build cities, sail fleets, graze herds, or do whatever. Making matters worse, we seem to have had little interest in replanting, or better yet, intelligently managing such forests. Some gruesome examples include the once “Fertile Crescent” in the Mideast; the ancient Mediterranean;Haiti in the Caribbean, but also in the more recent past, giant swaths of the Amazon.

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(New York) Climate justice activists from Rising Tide North America and Climate SOS in New York took to the streets on the final day of the UN Climate summit, making housecalls to the New York offices of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and the Nature Conservancy. NRDC’s street-level banner was festooned with a 14 foot mock “Climate Bill” in the form of $2 trillion bank note (the approximate value of a U.S. carbon market). Imagery on the giant spoof bill critiques roles of many large environmental groups in their push for passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), chiefly for its advocacy of an carbon market. Following NRDC, the offices of EDF and The Nature Conservancy received delivery visits where activists desperately tried to present organizational representatives with their version of the “green”.

These organizations are leading members of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), which has united them with highly polluting corporations such as Dow, DuPont, General Electric and Alcoa Aluminum under the auspices of lobbying Congress to reduce emissions. This unsavory alliance played a major role in crafting the Waxman-Markey ACESA bill (HR 2454) passed by the US House of Representatives in July, and expected to make its way for a Senate vote imminently. Read the rest of this entry »