Carbon Trading not working June 23, 2008

From The Corner House:

The world’s dominant approach to dealing with the climate crisis –- carbon trading, the
centrepiece of the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union Emissions Trading
Scheme –- isn’t working.

Yet, as if sleepwalking, international agencies and government authorities
around the world continue to squander millions of taxpayer dollars trying
to build or repair carbon markets.

As country after country undertakes its own complicated efforts to
partition the world’s carbon cycling capacity into saleable commodities,
and entrepreneurs flood news media with unverifiable claims that they are
increasing that capacity, fossil-fuelled industries are getting a new
lease on life.

As speculators seek quick profits in a fast-growing ‘wild west’
marketplace, the need to find reliable ways to promote the structural
change that would allow fossil fuels to be kept in the ground is being
ignored or forgotten.

Why is this happening? What lies behind the belief that carbon markets can
somehow be ‘fixed’ or ‘regulated’? What can be done to move climate
politics onto a saner path?

The Corner House has recently posted nearly a dozen new items on its
website that shed light on these and related questions. We hope you find
them useful and informative.

Best wishes from all at The Corner House

Beyond the Shopping Cart April 14, 2008

Messaging Consumption

By Betsy Hartmann

On the Oprah Winfrey Show two years ago, Al Gore’s upbeat message was
that we’re not helpless in the fight against global warming. The camera
rolls as he pushes a shopping cart down the aisles of a giant Lowe’s Home
Improvement Store “to show you the five things you can buy that will help
solve the climate crisis…and save you a few bucks!” The fabulous five
are compact fluorescent light bulbs, outdoor solar lighting, programmable
thermostats, air filters, and a blanket to insulate an electric hot water
heater.

The inconvenient truth is that while it’s a good thing to buy
energy-saving products, it’s hardly going to solve the climate crisis.
Green consumer capitalism just won’t cut it. The Bali climate conference
in December called for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40% below
1990 levels by the year 2020. Meeting this target would require dramatic
changes in economic and energy policy both in the U.S. and
internationally.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about the role of individual
consumption. This is a consumer society, after all. You have to start
where people are, not where you think they should be. In working for
climate justice, activists have an opportunity to frame consumption in
ways that move beyond Al Gore’s shopping cart to call into question some
fundamental tenets of capitalism, the “American way of life,” and
the militarism that undergirds them. After eight years of the
Bush-Cheney regime, people are hungry for loftier values, as evidenced by
the remarkable response to Obama’s candidacy.

Here are ten ways we could frame consumption simply and effectively:

Reproductive Justice, Climate Justice and Peace March 25, 2008

Working Paper
Issued: March 2008
Authors: Stephen Blake Figura, Betsy Hartmann, and Elizabeth Barajas-Roman

Reproductive Justice, Climate Justice and Peace:
A Call for Solidarity, not Population Control

As activists working for reproductive rights, environmental justice and peace, we are concerned about attempts to link birth control and abortion services to climate change debates. Access to safe, voluntary, high quality birth control and abortion services is a basic human right, not a tool to drive down birth rates in the name of saving the planet.

We reject any connection made between women’s health and the health of the environment based on targeting women’s fertility – particularly that of low-income women, women of color, and women of the Global South – as a root cause of environmental and social problems.

The so-called population explosion is over. Fears of overpopulation are not borne out by demographic statistics. While world population is projected to increase from 6.7 billion today to 9.2 billion in 2050, the rate of growth has slowed considerably. The average number of children per woman in the Global South is 2.75 children per woman, and the UN predicts this figure will drop to 2.05 by 2050. And per capita carbon emission rates are low in countries where birth rates remain relatively high, as in sub-Saharan Africa, thus population there has little effect on global warming.

The focus on population growth as a root cause of climate change prevents an effective collective response to the true driving forces behind global warming: war and militarism, environmental racism, and unsustainable and unjust systems of production, distribution and consumption.

Instead we support the making of connections between the struggle for climate justice – the just and equitable response to the global climate crisis, led by those communities most impacted and least responsible for climate change, reproductive justice – the economic, social, and political empowerment of all people to make healthy decisions about their bodies, sexuality and reproduction for themselves, their families and their communities, and movements for peace around the world.

We invite organizers and advocates for climate justice and reproductive justice to consider and explore contexts in which their struggles align, including: