G20 Summit was cringing more than cheering The Group of 20 summit could have been Australia’s moment, signaling its arrivals as global player, some argued. But in all the summit had Australians cringing more than cheering. Prime Minister Tony Abbott repealed the country’s carbon tax, standing out among Western nations the one willing to reverse progress on climate change- just days after the United States and China reached a landmark climate change deal. I reject the claim that the carbon trading will halt climate crisis. This has been caused more than anything more than else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of carbon to the ocean, air, soil and living things. This excessive burning of fossil fuel is now jeopardize Earth ability to maintain a liveable climate. Governments, export credit agencies, corporations and international financial institutions continue to support and finance fossil fuel exploration, extraction and other activities that worsen global warming, such as forest degradation and destruction on a massive scale, while dedicating only token scums to renewable energy. It is particularly disturbing that the World Bank has recently defied the recommendation of its own Extractive Industries Review which calls for the phasing out of the World Bank, financing for local coal, oil and gas extraction. We should denounce the further delays in ending fossil fuel extraction that are being caused by corporate, government and United Nations attempts to construct a “carbon market” including a market trading in carbon sink. History has seen attempts to commodity land, food, labour, forest and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history and the Earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in global market. Through this process of creating a new commodity carbon, the Earth’s ability and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate. People around the world need to be made aware of this commodification and privatization and actively intervene to ensure the protection of the Earth’s climate. Carbon trading will not contribute achieving this protection of the Earth’s climate. It is a false solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities in many ways. The carbon markets creates transferable right to dump carbon in the air, ocean, soil and vegetation far in excess of the capacity of these system to hold it. Billions of dollars’ worth of these rights are to be awarded free of charge to the biggest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases in the electric power, iron and steel, cement ,pulp and paper, and other sectors in industrialized nations who have caused the climate crisis and already exploit these the most. Costs of future reductions in fossil fuel uses are likely to fall disproportionately on the public sector communities, indigenous people and individuals’ taxpayers. The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as well as many private sectors trading scheme, encourage industrialized countries and their corporate to finance or create cheap carbon dumps such as large-scale tree plantations in the South as a lucrative alternative to reduce emissions in the North. These projects dwarf the tiny volume of renewable energy projects which constitute the CDM’s sustainable development window-dressing. In these injustice, the internal weakness and contradictions of carbon trading are in fact likely to make global warming worse rather than “mitigate” CDM projects for instance cannot verified to be neutralizing any given quality of fossil fuel extraction. Thanks Thabang Maseko EC Young Communist League SA Spokesperson
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 20:49:10 +0000
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