They lied to you about climate change!

Well I am sending some arrows from the indigenous (non violently of course) to promote climate action blog day

The real swindle is that current international efforts to deal with climate change...are based on carbon trading.

The bad news is most environmentalists are doing nothing to expose the fact that the up coming Copenhagen conference will cement a system that sells off the worlds rainforests, makes bankers rich and does nothing to cut emissions.

You will hear a lot of noise about climate change but the sad fact is that current approach is failing and like a train heading towards the abyss, time is all too short.

Those who say they want to pull the breaks are actually putting in more fuel.


Although there is much noise, media coverage and contributions from the great and the good from CEOs to globe trotting celebrities the global framework for dealing with climate change, has failed. Solutions that involve challenging business interests are unacceptable, because in a world dominated by the market, business interests are in charge. Everywhere the criterion for climate policy is based on potential impact on profit rather than effectiveness in protecting the environment and humanity from likely catastrophe. Cuts in fossil fuel production would be problematic for oil companies, so we have the bizarre spectacle of a media blizzard of news about climate change and politicians insisting they are taking action, together with a mad scramble to extract as much oil as possible as quickly as possible. The current system could be reformed, for example, secondary trading in complex carbon instruments could be outlawed, emission permits could be tightened so as to reduce emissions and fraud stamped out. However even with these changes the system would be full of flaws, as Kevin Smith has noted, 'Such schemes allow us to sidestep the most fundamentally effective response to climate change that we can take, which is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. This is by no means an easy proposition for our heavily fossil fuel dependent society; however, we all know it is precisely what is needed.' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6132826.stm.


There are battles raging across every continent of the world to stop oil and coal being extracted. Indigenous people are often at the centre of these struggles, concerned that extraction will damage the health of local citizens and wreck the environment, while cash flows to distant shareholders. Indigenous people also work hard to protect the rainforests and other carbon sinks vital for the conservation of the global environment. Rather than the failed policy of emissions trading action on climate change should start with these struggles around land rights and preservation. Rather putting bankers in charge of climate change, it would be better to give indigenous people a major say in decision-making, however they have been excluded from international climate conferences. In December 2007 indigenous people from Asia, Africa and Latin America, demonstrated outside the Bali, climate conference in Indonesia,

Surrounded by demonstrators wearing paper gags reading UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), Marcial Arias, one of Panama's Kuna people, made a passionate plea for the world to listen.

"There are no name places for indigenous people, there are no seats for indigenous people," said Arias, referring to a UN conference in Bali, Indonesia on future plans for fighting climate change.

"They want us to beg on our knees to be given the floor, but we have the right to participate," he said.
(http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=116&set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=nw20071207195516785C556709)

Real Action
1. support the indigenous
2. support the climate camp
3. support the Vestas workers

so support the climate camp this weekend, cut carbon and put in renewables!