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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001Kyoto treaty scandal
Last month the world's nation-states finally agreed on rules to implement the
1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming. While their Marrakech, Morocco, conference
was busy turning the budding disaster into a business opportunity, opposition
came from within and without the conference hall. A new category of
"climate justice" has emerged from the convergence of environmental
justice, indigenous and solidarity groups, who link the problems of climate
change to racial justice, workers' rights and social transformation.Kyoto's great scandal is its transformation into opposite from an instrument
to control global warming, into the basis for a new "carbon trade"
industry. Over the last four years, the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand won unfettered trading in greenhouse-gas emission rights, plus
massive credits for scientifically discredited and unverifiable "carbon
sinks" forest and farm practices that theoretically withdraw carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere. As a result, few countries will have to take action to
reduce emissions. Instead of being cut, emissions will keep growing. As Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network declared, "With
emissions trading, corporations have found a new way of continuing their
ruthless commodification of nature....We need real solutions that address the
root causes of climate change and environmental racism, not corporate solutions
like carbon trading that will not do anything to stop greenhouse gases in the
U.S." The "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM), originally meant to help
transfer renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies to poor countries,
has been turned into its opposite to provide credits for environmentally
damaging industries nuclear power, giant dams and "clean" coal to make
a killing through mega-projects in those countries. Even environmental groups
that accept this "first step" vow to fight such projects. Last year's Declaration of Indigenous Peoples on Climate Change denounced the
CDM for reducing forests to their carbon sequestration capacity, resulting in
"projects which adversely impact upon our natural, sensitive and fragile
eco-systems, contaminating our soils, forests and waters"; and the
"intervention of oil, gas, nuclear and large hydroelectric power station,
logging and mining companies, in their exploitation of natural resources in
indigenous territories." Not only did the declaration attack the policies and mechanisms that exclude participation of indigenous peoples and "permit developed countries to avoid their responsibility to reduce emissions at source, promote the expansion of global capital, and deepen our marginalization." It pointed to new concepts and practices of development, as opposed to current practices in both industrialized and Third World countries. Franklin Dmitryev |
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