Tripping Points on the Road to COP-15

[jack bradin]

QEWUN Folks and other friends following the run up to COP-15 in December will find the attached PDF file from known and trusted sources useful when trying to keep track of the competing interests.
jack

[David Millar]

The third round of UNFCCC climate talks at Bonn ended Aug 14. The reports are called "informal' but have pretty well determined what Copenhagen can deliver. I have not seen a final report that is readable, just the ISSD Earth Negotiations Bulletin in full bureaucratese, almost as difficult to follow as the UN docs.

Two highlights from Aug 14 Environment News Service interviews with participants: 1. US negotiator Dr Jonathan Pershing says a deal in Copenhagen depends on India and China being included in any agreement.. 2. A key stumbling block is still the level and the source of financial support [mitigation and tech transfer] for poor countries, said Kim Carstensen, the head of WWF Global Climate Initiative.

Climate talks are to continue 28 September-9 October in Bangkok and 2-6 November in Barcelona.

Friends may wish to read my one-page summaries in plain language, which I update regularly:
* environmental experts on the final Waxman-Markey bill, now known as ACES
* comparison of Waxman-Markey with other Copenhagen proposals

[David Millar]

Recommended reading. for those who want readable, reliable details of UNFCCC negotiations at Bonn --the ECO newsletters of the international Climate Action Network.

Here is an 8-page UK climate camp pamphlet that explains major climate issues at a popular level. Useful for your Meeting.

[David Millar]

Anthony Kelly and Tord Bjork discuss a post-Copenhagen climate movement - a valuable analysis of how and why, with lessons from earlier peace, eco-justice and environmental campaigns

[David Millar]

And this piece by veteran British climate campaigners Chris Rose et al, about how to appeal to the public's heart, as well as its head, on earthcare issues. Rose is one of the experts cited by Tord Bjork.

[David Millar]

An interfaith coalition -- Christian Aid, Caritas, Protestant churches and NGOs -- have just issued a brief but damning critique of European plans for cap-and-trade, the APRODEV / CIDSE report Sep 2009 (attached)

[David Millar]

A factsheet on loopholes in the Kyoto system Least Developed Countries and Offsetting under the CDM by Payal Parekh and Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth

[David Millar]

Excerpts from a 30 Sep 09 email by Lorna Salzman of NY Greens to Climate Justice Now! listserv:

"The policies and goals being proposed by the various governments [Bali to Copenhagen] are utterly useless and even counterproductive. We already know the goals are useless. We know that carbon trading is a scam and that it has not reduced energy use in Europe. We know that the goal of reaching 350 ppm is not possible without mandatory reductions in energy use, rationing, carbon tax, and efficiency standards. We know that the 80% reduction by 2020 is a bad joke. We know that combatting climate change will require LESS economic growth, not more. We know that the global south will suffer the most, and first. We know that redistribution of wealth and resources must accompany a zero growth society."

I agree. For details see my Copenhagen negotiations summary with updates.
and blog post on carbon trading.

[jack bradin]

This is the real issue, the northern hemispheric nations must stop developing, learn what not to buy, eat, and invest in.
It is not about GDP, it is about survival, and knowing our limits. There is no spare anywhere, just this beautiful blue wonder pebble we live with here in the backwaters of our universe.

[David Millar]

For strategies to reach the unconverted see The Psychology of Climate Change Communication: A Guide for Scientists, Journalists, Educators, Political Aides, and the Interested Public - free download here.

[David Millar]

More writings by Tord Bjork abour social movements and appropriate stratefies. http://www.folkrorelser.nu/inenglish/index.html

[jack bradin]

Thanks David for all the work you have done on CAP and Trade reporting. As all of you know i am as a financial principal dedicated to eradicating the illusion of money replacing conservation and efficiencies. Humans must bring from the grass roots of our civilizations an understanding of our responsibilities and an earth/human interaction that is benign to the biosphere.

Sustainable development is an oxymoron, as is clean coal, or less threatening extractive resources.

We QEW Friends, and all the organizations dedicated to an earth restored, protected, and wisely used must begin the actions necessary to bring a clean earth/human interaction into being NOW! Our collective leaders use the excuses of "shooting the messenger"as a cover for angering their real bosses; the extractive fossil fuel producers of a failed energy paradyme, that the earth as their prisoner is daily and systematically being tortured and put to death.

The Time is late the death of earths' NPP systems [Net primary productivity] that supply life for most of its inhabitants are approaching a terminal arch. It is time to come away from the unsustainable life styles that surround us, and take up the real work of the "Great Turning" our earth saint Thomas Berry asked of us...

David Millar said:

Climate Justice Now! The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading 2002

As representatives of people’s movements and independent organisations, we reject the claim that carbon trading will halt the climate crisis. This crisis has been caused more than anything else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the oceans, air, soil and living things. This excessive burning of fossil fuels is now jeopardising Earth’s ability to maintain a liveable climate. Governments, export credit agencies, corporations and international financial institutions continue to support and fi nance 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 sums 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 World Bank financing for coal, oil and gas extraction.

We 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 sinks”.

History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history and turns the earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in a 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 to achieving this protection of the Earth’s climate. It is a false solution which entrenches and magnifies social inequalities in many ways:

• The carbon market creates transferable rights to dump carbon in the air, oceans, soil and vegetation far in excess of the capacity of these systems 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 industrialised nations who have caused the climate crisis and already exploit these systems the most. Costs of future reductions in fossil fuel use are likely to fall disproportionately on the public sector, communities, indigenous peoples and individual taxpayers.
• The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), as well as many private sector trading schemes, encourage industrialized countries and their corporations to finance or create cheap carbon dumps such as large-scale tree plantations in the South as a lucrative alternative to reducing emissions in the North. Other CDM projects, such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC) reduction schemes, focus on end-of-pipe technologies and thus do nothing to reduce the impact of fossil fuel industries’ impacts on local communities. In addition, these projects dwarf the tiny volume of renewable energy projects which constitute the CDM’s sustainable development window-dressing.
• Impacts from fossil-fuel industries and other greenhouse-gas producing industries such as displacement, pollution, or climate change, are already disproportionately felt by small island states, coastal peoples, indigenous peoples, local communities, fisherfolk, women, youth, poor people, elderly and marginalized communities. CDM projects intensify these impacts in several ways. First, they sanction continued exploration for, and extraction refining and burning of fossil fuels. Second, by providing finance for private sector projects such as industrial tree plantations, they appropriate land, water and air already supporting the lives and livelihoods of local communities for new carbon dumps for Northern industries.
• The refusal to phase out the use of coal, oil and gas, which is further entrenched by carbon trading, is also causing more and more military conflicts around the world, magnifying social and environmental injustice. This in turn diverts vast resources to military budget which could otherwise be utilized to support economies based on renewable energies an energy efficiency.

In addition to these injustices, the internal weaknesses and contradictions of carbon trading are in fact likely to make global warming worse rather than “mitigate” it. CDM projects, for instance, cannot be verified to be “neutralizing” any given quantity of fossil fuel extraction and burning. Their claim to be able to do so is increasingly dangerous because it creates the illusion that consumption and production patterns, particularly in the North, can be maintained without harming the climate.

In addition, because of the verification problem, as well as a lack of credible regulation, no one in the CDM market is likely to be sure what they are buying. Without a viable commodity to trade, the CDM market and similar private sector trading schemes are a total waste of time when the world has a critical climate crisis to address.In an absurd contradiction the World Bank facilitates these false, market-based approaches to climate change through its Prototype Carbon Fund, the BioCarbon Fund and the Community Development Carbon Fund at the same time it is promoting, on a far greater scale, the continued exploration for, and extraction and burning of fossil fuels – many of which are to ensure increased emissions of the North.

In conclusion, ‘giving carbon a price’ will not prove to be any more eff ective, democratic, or conducive to human welfare, than giving genes, forests, biodiversity or clean rivers a price. We reaffirm that drastic reductions in emissions from fossil fuel use are a pre-requisite if we are to avert the climate crisis. We affirm our responsibility to coming generations to seek real solutions that are viable and truly sustainable and that do not sacrifi ce marginalized communities. We therefore commit ourselves to help build a global grassroots movement for climate justice, mobilize communities around the world and pledge our solidarity with people opposing carbon trading on the ground.

Signed 10 October 2004 Glenmore Centre, Durban, South Africa
See http://www.carbontradewatch.org/durban/whoarewe.html

Durban meeting signatories
Carbon Trade Watch
Indigenous Environmental Network
Climate & Development Initiatives, Uganda
Coecoceiba-Amigos de la Tierra, Costa Rica
CORE Centre for Organisation Research &
Education, Manipur, India
Delhi Forum, India
Earthlife Africa (ELA) eThekwini Branch, South
Africa
FERN, EU
FASE-ES/Green Desert Network Brazil 2
Global Justice Ecology Project, USA
groundwork, South Africa
National Forum of Forest People And Forest
Workers(NFFPFW), India
Patrick Bond, Professor, University of
KwaZulu Natal School of Development
Studies, South Africa
O le Siosiomaga Society, Samoa
South Durban Community Alliance (SDCEA),
South Africa
Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, USA
The Corner House, UK
Timberwatch Coalition, South Africa
World Rainforest Movement, Uruguay

and, at the time of printing (2004)
289 other organisations and individuals.

References:
Tamra Gilbertson and Oscar Reyes, Carbon Trading: how it works and why it fails (Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Nov 2009) (Critical Currents, no. 7) http://www.dhf.uu.se/critical_currents_no7.html update of Larry Lohmann’s 2006 study
http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD2006_48_carbon_trading/carbon_tradi...

Ricardo Carrere and Simone Lovera, Genetically Modified Trees: the ultimate threat to forests (World Rainforest Movement and Friends of the Earth, June 2004)
http://www.wrm.org.uy/subjects/GMTrees/text.pdf

Offsets Undermine Climate Legislation (Aug 2009) brief to US Congress signed by FCNL, FOE, and International Rivers http://www.internationalrivers.org/files/OffsetFactsheet.pdf

Michel Lepine et al., Friends of the Earth USA, A Dangerous Distraction (Nov 2009)
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/11120641/Dangerous-Distraction

Michelle Chan, Friends of the Earth, Subprime Carbon? Rethinking the world’s largest derivatives market (March 2009) http://www.foe.org/pdf/SubprimeCarbonReport.pdf