The first phase of the 350 campaign has been a wild success. “350″ is now an international symbol of emergency climate stabilization. More importantly, the 350 target reflects a scientifically-grounded assessment of what global climate protection really means. But what would it actually take to bring the atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO2) concentration back to 350 parts per million? This memo provides a quick, up-to-date overview of the issues here - issues significant to any plausible emergency emissions reduction target. To that end, it focuses on the extremely limited size of the remaining global CO2 budget, and on the emissions pathways that would enable us to keep within it. And, by way of context, it compares 350 to the 2°C temperature target, and offers a very brief glimpse of the challenges that such emergency targets raise on this North / South divided world.

Carbon Trading, Carbon Offsets and REDD*

Reduction Emissions from Deforestation and Land Degradation

“The adoption of national and international mechanisms that allow for carbon pollution trading has turned the potential threat of climate change into an opportunity for profit. The trading of carbon (and greenhouse gases), including carbon offsets, and forest sinks, is a new form of colonialism. It is CO2lonialism.” – Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Executive Director, Indigenous Environmental Network, 2008

History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labor, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading (emissions trading) and carbon offsets follow in the footsteps of this history and turn Mother Earth’s carbon-cycling capacity into property to be bought or sold in a national and global market. Through this process of creating a new commodity – carbon (CO2) - 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. Promoters of carbon trading and carbon offset regimes support capitalism as the solution to drive environmental change and innovation to address climate change.

1. Carbon Trading: Capitalism of the Air
2. Conflicts with Indigenous Knowledge
3. Trading of Hot Air – Privatization of the Sky
4. CO2lonialism

The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) has consulted with indigenous spiritual people, from the North and South, about the proposals to put a price on air (carbon), to privatize the atmosphere (property rights of the air), and about a world that will have governments and corporations selling, bartering and trading carbon and other greenhouse gases. Once the idea of carbon trading and carbon offsets have been thoroughly explained (which has not been easy and rarely done adequately by pro-carbon trading/offset profiteers, brokers and political supporters), many Indigenous Peoples have said it is a “corruption of the sacred”. To participate in this carbon trading/offset schemes violates indigenous traditional knowledge and our Indigenous Original Instructions or spirituality (cosmovision) consciousness.

Many environmental justice groups, scientists and mainstream environmental organizations are starting to reject the claim that cap and trade and other forms of carbon trading will halt the climate crisis. This crisis has been caused more than anything else by the continued 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 jeopardizing Mother Earth’s ability to maintain a livable climate. While people of the world are being told by environmental and governmental elites that these cap and trade regimes are “real” solutions to global warming, it is business as usual within the territories and lands that sustain our Native/Indigenous Peoples. From the Arctic Circle to the Global South, the exploration for new sources of oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuels development is expanding – creating local toxic hot spots. Many of these developments are at the expense of Native/Indigenous rights to a safe, healthy and clean environment. Peak oil is now driving developers to look for unconventional sources of oil, such as offshore drilling leasing in the Chukchi Sea of Alaska, or the oil/tar sands expansion in northern Alberta Canada. Both developments jeopardize the traditional food system of Native/Indigenous Peoples and contaminate water, air and soils.

It is our hope that these pages on Carbon Trading, Carbon Offsets and RED/D’s will increase your knowledge on a topic that is very complex and often confusing. Negotiations surrounding the implementation of these carbon-emission trading regimes have been limited to only a few – nationally and globally.