From June 20-22, the eyes of the world will be on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Those gathered there at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (aka "Rio+20") will decide whether and how to deal with a broad range of issues that affect the environment.
Rio+20 is a historic chance to move away from business-as-usual and end environmental destruction, reduce poverty, jumpstart the green economy and chart a course to a sustainable future. But the outlook is bleak.
The road to Rio+20 is littered with broken promises: According to a recently-released United Nations Environment Program report, more than 95% of global treaties dealing with everything from climate change to biodiversity protection are on life support.
Many key heads of state, including those of Great Britain, Canada and Australia, are refusing to attend Rio+20 -- a move that could effectively sink the whole summit, not to mention squander the opportunity to stake out their countries' leadership roles in the new green economy. Although, the most noticeable and consequential absence will be that of President Obama.
Twenty years ago, at the first Earth Summit in Rio, world leaders, including George H.W. Bush, agreed to a bold agenda, including a climate change treaty, which charted a new course to sustainability. There was real optimism and a consensus that together we could simultaneously solve major environmental issues, foster development, and grow the economy in the U.S. and around the world.
Since then, not much has happened. And now, on the eve of the next Earth Summit in Rio, we're in much the same place as -- and in many cases worse off than -- we were back in 1992. Global climate change talks are totally stalled, and the pressures of unlimited and irresponsible growth have eclipsed the notion that in an overcrowded world we will be able to grow and thrive without robust, binding, international environmental protections.
Negotiators from almost every country on the planet have been attempting to create some sort of consensus on major issues. But as is so often the case with these big international efforts, the negotiations have mostly resulted in watering down past commitments. There are only weak hints of cooperation. Everyone is hunkering down.
For most of us in the real world, however, were we convinced that we could do something to alter the fast-degrading status quo -- especially on an issue that affects our children's future -- we would. And in fact, at the grassroots, we are and we do. Multiple efforts to create small and large commitments dealing with forestry, oceans, biodiversity and more are being made outside of the formal international process. But very few at the leadership level have the guts to take a stand and act.
Our current environmental stalemate notwithstanding, there is a sense of inevitability that we will progress steadily toward an environmentally sustainable society. Humans, after all, have a genetically programmed and highly honed sense of self preservation. But climate change, population growth and other rapidly accelerating environmental conditions make it the case that a slow-and-steady progression won't win this race. We need bold, swift action to accelerate us to an environmentally sustainable future.
The participation of key world leaders at Rio+20 is also important because it builds and renews our collective consciousness and underscores the responsibility to the planet we all share. And that would be significant in itself, even if Rio+20 accomplished only modest results.
Nevertheless, at a minimum, Rio+20 must produce a few critical commitments:
This is a pivotal year. Key elections are happening all over the world while governments, businesses and NGOs are scrambling to reinvent and revive the economy. The Rio+20 process stands as a major-league venue to do just that.
If nothing of consequence happens there, the era of broken promises will continue for a long time.
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"charged that the 1997 climate treaty not only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert climate catastrophe, but also steals from the poor to give to the rich.
What's more, the carbon trading promoted by the Protocol hands Northern governments and corporations lucrative tradable rights to use the earth's natural carbon-cycling capacity, effectively stealing a public good away from most of the planet's inhabitants.
Danish power utility Energi E2 sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of the rights it had been granted free by its government to Shell after mild temperatures kept the utility's carbon emissions below expected levels. No such free rights have been granted to ordinary citizens.
The Kyoto Protocol's attempt to create "carbon dioxide-saving" projects in poorer countries is meanwhile stirring protests from Brazil to South Africa. Such projects – which include industrial tree plantations and schemes to burn off landfill gas – are designed to license big emitters in the rich North to go on using fossil fuels. But they usurp land or water ordinary people need for other purposes.
"We're creating a sort of 'climate apartheid,' wherein the poorest and darkest-skinned pay the highest price—with their health, their land, and, in some cases, with their lives—for continued carbon profligacy by the rich," said Soumitra Ghosh of the National Forum of Forest Peoples and Forest Workers .."
The "strange markets" are those dealing in high-yield financial products such as credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and currency derivatives that were created in the 1980s and 1990s – and that ultimately triggered the financial crisis of 2008. But "ecosystem service markets", including carbon pollution rights markets, have been developed over the past few decades as well and can also be considered "strange".
It might at first glance seem just a coincidence that two ambitious and novel markets were created at roughly the same time by some of the same people in the same country (USA). What could a project spearheaded by Wall Street investment banks have to do with the Kyoto Protocol? Aren't pollution markets about saving the world and uncertainty markets about making money?
Despite appearances, however, the new uncertainty market of financial products and the new carbon pollution market are not only cut from the same cloth, but also interact closely with each other and pose many similar dangers.
The carbon market that now plays such a dominant role in international climate policy is often presented as an environmentalist strategy that should be embraced by all who support pollution control, forest conservation and indigenous rights. But consideration of the origins, development and politics of this and other "strange markets" of recent years suggests that it should be treated as part of the history of commodification, capital accumulation and capitalist crisis rather than of environmentalism.
Carbon trading lies at the centre of global climate policy and is projected to become one of the world’s largest commodities markets, yet it has a disastrous track record since its adoption as part of the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon Trading: how it works and why it fails outlines the limitations of an approach to tackling climate change which redefines the problem to fit the assumptions of neoliberal economics. It demonstrates that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the world’s largest carbon market, has consistently failed to ´cap´ emissions, while the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) routinely favours environmentally ineffective and socially unjust projects. This is illustrated with case studies of CDM projects in Brazil, Indonesia, India and Thailand.
http://www.carbontradewatch.org/publications/carbon-trading-how-it-works-and-why-it-fails.html
R .... Reaping Profits from
E... .Evictions, land grabs
D..... Deforestation and
D... .Destructionof biodiversity
What is REDD?
According to the publication, “The Little REDD Book”, the basic idea behind Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) is simple:
Developing countries that are willing and able to reduce emissions from deforestation should be financially compensated for doing so.5 However, according to many Indigenous Peoples, REDD is CO2lonialism of Forests because it allows Northern polluters to buy permits to pollute or “carbon credits” by promising not to cut down forests and plantations in the South.
The newspaper The Australian calls REDD a ““cllassic 21st C scam emerging from the global climate change industry."
Carbon Markets buy and sell permits to pollute called “allowances” and “carbon credits”. Carbon markets have two parts: emissions trading (also called “cap and trade”) and offsets. They are false solutions to climate change because they do not bring about the changes needed to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They claim to solve the climate crisis but really allow polluters to buy their way out of reducing their emissions. These multi-billion dollar trading mechanisms privatize and commodify the earth’s ability to keep its atmosphere balanced.
see: Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
http://www.ienearth.org/REDD/index.html
http://www.ienearth.org/news/HoodwinkedV2ENG.pdf#search=%22cap%20trade%22
http://www.ienearth.org/docs/pops_unep_14bwto.html
&
http://www.ienearth.org/docs/IEN_4_Principles_of_Climate_Justice.pdf
http://zoltansustainableecon.blogspot.com/2012/06/rio-20-part-5-future-we-want-but-no.html
they promised not to fly in this time using all that jet fuel..
that produces all that ghg!