climate change
Tackling climate change: Is putting `a price on carbon' enough?
By Simon Butler
July 18, 2010 -- Pressure is now bearing down on the Australian climate movement because there has been so little forward progress in the federal government’s climate policy. The pressure is for the movement to accept, support and campaign for weak or inadequate climate policies on the grounds that something is better than nothing.
This is plain from looking at the new, media-driven “consensus” about the need for a “price on carbon”.
Putting a price on carbon is not the best way to deal with climate change, but a growing chorus of media commentators, NGOs and politicians are nonetheless plugging it as the key solution.
Many who advocate a price on carbon would agree that we face a dire climate emergency. The problem is that they are willing to let the emergency response be privatised.
Markets
Climate action now! Socialist Alliance releases latest Climate Change Charter
By the Socialist Alliance (Australia)
July 2010 -- For years, climate scientists have warned us that we need to act on climate change. Now, science is saying that climate change is taking place more rapidly than everyone previously thought.
The warning signs are obvious. April and May were the world’s hottest months since records began. This year’s Arctic ice sheet melt is taking place at a pace never seen before.
Scientists say carbon pollution has made the world’s oceans more acidic than they have been for at least 20 million years.
There is already too much carbon in the atmosphere. The warming already in the system risks the crossing of various natural “tipping points” that would raise temperatures further and faster.
If these points are crossed, it would bring average temperatures to levels that have not existed for millions of years, and to which today’s nature is simply not adapted.
Australia: Report shows how to reach 100% renewable stationary energy by 2020
To download the full Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy
Plan click HERE (8.4MB). You can also download a 16-page synopsis HERE.
Hard copies can be purchased from the Melbourne Energy Institute.
July 14, 2010 -- Don't miss out on this cutting-edge research, which shows how Australia can reach 100% renewable energy within a decade, using technology that is commercially available right now.
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By Pablo Brait and Leigh Ewbank
Beyond Zero Emissions -- In April, the Australian government abandoned the severely flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme [a carbon trading scheme], the centrepiece of its national climate policy agenda.
Bolivia's Pablo Solon: We need 'a global movement to defend Mother Earth'
In defence of the People's Agreement -- Tanuro and Invernizzi get Cochabamba wrong
[For more information about, documents from and discussion of the World People's Conference on Climate Change, click HERE.]
By Ben Courtice
June 28, 2010 -- In their article "World People's Conference on Climate Change: Some critical comments on the People's Agreement", the Fourth International's Daniel Tanuro and Sandra Invernizzi have missed the main usefulness of this document.
They note, “The words `coal' and `natural gas' are simply not mentioned. The expression `renewable energies' is also absent” and that the document “overlooks the struggle against the capitalist energy lobbies and the sectors linked to it (cars, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, the aeronautics industry, transport …), whereas this is obviously the key question in the framework of an anti-capitalist strategy of stabilisation of the climate.”
It is true the conference did not target the hydrocarbon industries. The Bolivian hydrocarbon ministry in fact had a stall at the conference.
World People's Conference on Climate Change: Some critical comments on the People's Agreement
[For full coverage of the World People's Conference on Climate Change, including the full text of the documents, click HERE.]
By Daniel Tanuro and Sandra Invernizzi
June 2010 -- International Viewpoint -- The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which met in Cochabamba (Bolivia) from April 20-22, 2010, at the invitation of Bolivia's President Evo Morales, was an enormous success. Thirty-thousand participants discussed for several days the various facets of the climate crisis and adopted a series of very interesting documents, from a resolutely anti-capitalist standpoint.
Comparision of the Cochabamba People’s Agreement and the Copenhagen Accord
The People's Agreement stems from an integral vision of climate change, incorporating the issue of the structural causes of the climate crisis, the rupture of harmony with nature, the need to recognise the rights of Mother Earth in order to guarantee human rights, the importance of creating a Tribunal of Climate and Environmental Justice, the development of global democracy so that the people can decide on this issue affecting and the planet and all of humanity.
On the other hand, the Copenhagen Accord represents a step backward with relation to the Kyoto Protocol by proposing a methodology of voluntary commitments for the industrialised countries that are principally responsible for climate change.
Capitalism is the cause of climate illness! Global movement begins the cure!
[For full coverage of the World People's Conference on Climate Change, including the full text of the documents, click HERE.]
By Ron Ridenour, Cochabamba
May 15, 2010 -- Presenting the People’s Agreement — “Mother Earth does not belong to us, we belong to it” — worldwide was the first act of the Global People’s Movement for Mother Earth. This was carried out in May by Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and representative activists from five continents.
Representing 35,000 people from 147 countries, they presented the conclusions of 17 workshops — held April 19-21 at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC) — to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to the Non-Alignment Movement (now 130 Third World countries) plus China (the world’s second greatest polluter), and then to leaders of the European Union.
Cochabamba People's Agreement must be heard in UNFCCC negotiations
This sign-on letter was circulated by the Bolivian government prior to the negotiations that began on May 28, 2010 in the UNFCCC to push for key proposals made in the Cochabamba People's Agreement to be included in negotiations.The People's Agreement was a key document of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Bolivia in April 2010.
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May 28, 2010 -- This is the pronouncement of the World People's Movement for Mother Earth, which demands that the United Nations climate change negotiations be inclusive, transparent and equitable, and incorporate the proposals presented by the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in order to find real solutions to the climate crisis and save humanity and our Mother Earth as we know it.
Australia: Tax billionaire companies to fund rapid transition to renewable energy
By Dick Nichols
May 24, 2010 -- Even as the Australian federal Labor government sticks its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme [carbon trading scheme] into the freezer the climate change crisis intensifies, demanding a response adequate to its enormity. The goal dictated by climate science is annual emissions reductions of 5% from now to 2020 -- the critical "transition decade".
Policies such as a carbon tax and feed-in tariffs have a role to play in reaching that target, but there is no way it will be remotely achieved without a vast increase in public investment in programs that strip back carbon emissions in the key problem sectors -- energy generation, transport, land use, buildings and carbon-intensive industry.
Public investment, planning and oversight is the irreplaceable centrepiece of adequate climate action.
Evo Morales: United, the developing countries can save Mother Earth
“The response to global warming is global democracy for life and for the Mother Earth.… we h
