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In a rare visit to Toronto by Larry Lohmann, co-founding member of the Durban Group for climate justice, the Indigenous Environment Network, the Environmental Justice Organizing Initiative and OPIRG present a debate on carbon trading and carbon offsets:
Carbon trading or carbon cheating?
When: January 22, 2008 @ 7pm
Where: Koffler Institute, Room 108, University of Toronto (569 Spadina Ave, just north of College on the northeast quadrant of the circle.)
Cost: free.
Carbon trading was the regime forced on the rest of the world by the Clinton administration and its chief climate negotiator, Al Gore, as the price for US participation in the Kyoto Protocol — US participation that never happened. Recently, the Financial Times and other mainstream media outlets have documented how widespread and pervasive gaming of the carbon trading system is. Campaigners from the Durban Group and other groups based in the global south and Indigenous communities have shown how this market-based “solution” inflicts a heavy cost in human rights, health, and well-being on Indigenous people and the global poor.
Can carbon trading and offsets work? Are there such things as good carbon offsets? What are the alternatives? Join us for a lively debate between Larry Lohmann and How-Sen Chong.
Larry Lohmann: The editor of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power, an exhaustively-documented new book critiquing “carbon trading”. Mr. Lohmann, a founding member of the Durban Group, will share experiences of the failures of carbon trading in Europe, India, Brazil, Uganda and elsewhere.
How-Sen Chong: Founder of CarbonZero Offsets, one of Canada’s leading offset firms, which is widely used by ENGOs, businesses, and political parties to offset their carbon emissions. CarbonZero exclusively funds new renewable energy programs within Canada and does not use tree offsets or any offsets involving land under land claims.
Moderated by:
Clayton Thomas Muller: Tar Sands Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network and founding member of the National Environmental Justice Organizing Institute.
What the Durban Group says about carbon trading:
Carbon trading “dispossesses ordinary people in the South of their lands and futures without resulting in appreciable progress toward alternative energy systems,” says Lohmann. “Tradable rights to pollute are handed out to Northern industry, allowing them to continue to profit from business as usual. At the same time, Northern polluters are encouraged to invest in supposedly carbon-saving projects in the South, very few of which promote clean energy at all.”
Most of the carbon credits being sold to industrialized countries, Lohmann explains, come from polluting projects that do nothing to reduce fossil fuel use, such as schemes that burn methane from coal mines or waste dumps. The bulk of fossil fuels must be left in the ground if climate chaos is to be avoided.
Sponsored by the Indigenous Environment Network (IEN), the Environmental Justice Organizing Institute (EnJOI), and OPIRG. For more information, visit www.ienearth.org <http://www.ienearth.org/> or call Clayton Thomas Muller @ 218.760.6632 or Corvin Russell @ 416.788.7216
