RTNA’s Position on Carbon Trading
Oct 29th, 2007
Rising Tide Opposes Carbon Trading
Carbon Trading is a scam. A disastrous distraction from real efforts to stop a climate meltdown.
Carbon Trading is the largest privatization scheme in modern history. It places our most precious shared global resource — the carbon cycling capacity of the planet – in the hands of two groups noteworthy for their lack of concern for the public good: financial brokers and the energy industry.
UNDERMINES SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES
Rather than promoting ecological solutions, the Clean Development Mechanism and other carbon-offset projects systematically undermine many self-sufficient, land-based economies that are already low-carbon cultures by nature. By forcing the privatization of local resources into the hands of foreign investors, offsets displace local communities from their land, consolidate the power of undemocratic governmental elites, and increase social inequity in many of the most vulnerable communities in the world.
SCIENTIFICALLY INDEFENSIBLE
What’s more, most offset projects are scientifically indefensible. The cycling of carbon, methane and other GHGs in the atmosphere, soil, forests, and oceans is a complex and delicate system that cannot be reduced to a linear balance sheet of carbon equivalencies. Trees simply are not upside-down smokestacks.
CORPORATE UNACCOUNTABILITY
There is a reason Enron felt that Kyoto would “do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative.” Carbon Trading invites massive accounting fraud and creates a market where seller and buyer have a shared interest in low quality products — aka things that are doing little or nothing to stop climate change, but are cheap to produce and look good on paper.
ECOLOGICAL CHARADE / GREENWASHING
Carbon Trading directs people, governments, and industry’s money and attention away from the real, systemic changes that are needed: addressing our hyper consumptive economic structure, household energy use, our deeply unsustainable transportation and food systems and people’s lack of consciousness about more sustainable living. Carbon Trading does little more than the selling of indulgences by the church in the 16th century. We need to stop beating around the bush and take serious actions to keep remaining fossil fuels in the ground.
We’ve got to do better for our children’s future.
Let’s start doing something real for the climate.
Read more about our Case Against Carbon Trading from Rising Tide UK
To learn more about Carbon Trading check out these links:
