>
>Dear Friends,
>A quick reminder that tonight is the For the Wild benefit show in Eugene in
>honor of Jeff's 29th birthday.
>
>For the Wild: benefit show for Jeff and the Green Scare
>When: Thursday December 13 at 7:00pm
>Where: Cozmic Pizza, 199 W 8th Ave, Eugene, OR
>What: Live music (including Riot Folk collective, Blair Street Mugwumps, and
>The Spins); Jesus Sepulveda poetry reading; and Green Scare discussion by
>Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center (cldc.org).
>Donation: $5-20 sliding scale, no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
>All proceeds go to prisoner support.
>
>Jeff is very appreciative of the birthday wishes he received. Thank you to
>everyone for their support! Please continue to write to Jeff at:
>
>Jeffrey Luers # 1306729
>Lane County Adult Corrections
>101 West 5th Ave
>Eugene, OR 97401-2695
>
>We will continue to keep you updated on Jeff's resentencing status. Thank you
>all again for the tremendous support you continue to give Jeff. And of course,
>donations are still needed. Please go to http://freejeffluers.org/donate.html
>
>-Friends of Jeffrey Free Luers


--
The Civil Liberties Defense Center
Lauren C. Regan, Attorney at Law
Executive Director
259 East 5th Avenue, Suite 300A
Eugene, Oregon 97401
541.687.9180 phone
541.686.2137 fax
lregan@...

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save to call for the impeachment of the current
President.


"We want to destroy environmentalists by taking
their money and their members�No one was aware
that environmentalism was a problem until we came
along �Facts don't matter, in politics,
perception is reality."
Ron Arnold, Father of the Wise Use Movement and
Creator of the Term "Ecoterrorism"

"Terrorism is anything that stands in the face of
what we want to do�people's movements of
resistance against deprivation, against
unemployment, against the loss of natural
resources, all of that is termed 'terrorism.'"
	 Edward Said, Columbia Professor of English & Comparative Literature



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A special report airs tonight on ABC�s Nightline from BOS Nyaru Menteng:

The Plight of the Red Apes

ABC News Gets a Rare Glimpse at Borneo's Orangutan Rehab Project

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/729/37797

October 30, 2007


**For Immediate Release **


For more information contact:

Brian Sloan, Rising Tide North America

202-215-1720 / FalseSolutions@...


**Interviews with activists and experts available**

**Hi Resolution Photo and Video Available Online**


Protesters disrupt New York City Carbon Trading Expo

Action takes place as Carbon Trading legislation prepares to clear
Senate committee


New York City � Protesters with Rising Tide North America�s �Greenwash
Guerrillas� paid a surprise Halloween visit to the Carbon Market
Insights conference in New York City today. Posing as delegates, two
protesters took the stage at the exclusive event and presented the 700
attendees with a �Deed to the Atmosphere,� denouncing Carbon Trading as
a sham approach to the fossil fuels crisis. The action was the first in
the US to target the growing Carbon Trading industry.


�Carbon trading puts the most crucial decisions about the future of life
on this planet in the hands of fossil fuel industry,� said protester
Jessica Starr �the very industry that got us into this mess in the first
place.�


Though heavily criticized by environmental and human rights
organizations world-wide, Carbon Trading is the primary mechanism for
reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, as well as
in Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner�s (R-Va.) �America�s Climate
Security Act of 2007.� The Carbon Market Insights conference brings
together the leaders of the US financial, non-profit, and �eco
securities� industries backing a domestic US Carbon Trading market.


Lieberman and Warner�s bill, S. 2191, is expected to clear the Senate�s
Environment and Public Works Committee in November. If enacted, it would
create a system of tradable permits in greenhouse gas emissions, which
would be gifted to status quo polluters through 2036.


As these permits may be bought and sold for enormous profits on the
marketplace, the environmental group Friends of the Earth has stated
that the �Lieberman climate bill may contain the biggest corporate
giveaways in American history�, valued at 1.5 trillion dollars. The
European Emissions Trading System established under the Kyoto protocol
has generated hundreds of billions of dollars of additional profits for
the fossil fuel industry, yet most countries are failing to meet their
greenhouse gas emissions reductions.


�Gifting free, tradable property rights to the worst polluters does
little to ensure reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,� said David Lee,
another of the Greenwash Guerillas �Carbon Trading and the Lieberman
bill are a subsidy for big polluters disguised as a climate protection
measure.�


The Liebermen Bill allows the largest greenhouse gas emitters to
�offset� or nullify their emissions by financing carbon reductions
projects that take place in other locations, stalling implementations of
technologies that will reduce greenhouse gases here. These projects,
frequently initiated in developing countries, shift investment away from
emission-reducing technologies domestically, and have also been
criticized for not always delivering promised reductions. These projects
have led to the displacement of low-carbon use communities in favor of
large scale �clean development� projects including hydroelectric dams
and genetically modified tree plantations. In Uganda, villagers have
been arrested and even killed after being ousted from their land for
tree plantations which they dared to cut down.


�Carbon offsets do little more than the selling of indulgences by
Catholic churches in the 16th century,� said David Lee �it�s time to get
serious about stopping climate change and shut these false solutions down.�






###

BOS Founder Willie Smits - Finalist in BBC World Challenge

Steaming Ahead

A Sky News investigation has revealed that filling up with bio diesel containing palm oil is helping to destroy some of the world's most precious rainforests.

The UN says the entire rainforest will be gone in 15 years, and the native wild orang-utan extinct in just 10.

http://climateandcapitalism.blogspot.com/2007/09/carbon-pricing-problem-it-doesn\
t-work.html


       Carbon Pricing Problem: It Doesn�t Work

<http://climateandcapitalism.blogspot.com/2007/09/carbon-pricing-problem-it-does\
nt-work.html>


A mainstream media outlet reports the obvious � it makes no sense to use
markets to solve a problem that was caused by markets

It�s an article of faith among capitalist economists that the best
solution to �market failure� is �more markets.� Convert the problem into
a commodity, and the market will magically solve it. John Bellamy Foster
writes:

     �For orthodox economists, ecological degradation is evidence of
     market failure. The market is unable to guide firms in the efficient
     use of environmental assets if they are not already fully
     incorporated within the market system by means of a rational price
     structure. The first task of environmental economists therefore is
     to transform ecological assets into marketable goods. For example,
     if clean air is not a marketable good with a price, then the market
     places no value on it�. The answer to this, from the standpoint of
     neoclassical environmental economics, is to create markets in clean
     air, thereby internalizing such external costs within the market.
     The overall logic is one of bringing the earth within the balance
     sheet.� (Ecology Against Capitalism
     <http://monthlyreview.org/ecologyvcap.htm>, p.27)

Articles asserting that putting a price on carbon will cut emissions
appear frequently in the business press -- in last Friday's Financial
Times
<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b47d0180-6711-11dc-a218-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=4e612cc\
a-6707-11da-a650-0000779e2340,print=yes.html#>,

for example. Canada's liberal left agrees -- check out the environmental
programs of the New Democratic Party <http://www.ndp.ca/page/5703> ("A
cap and trade carbon market") and the Green Party
<http://www.greenparty.ca/en/platform2006/climate> ("Expand the proposed
National Emissions Trading System").

Let�s leave aside the ethical issues that arise when the earth�s
atmosphere is treated as a commodity for sale to the highest bidder. A
Reuters article published today
<http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSL2361952520070924>says
that �put a price it� policies simply don�t work.

The article, �Carbon price is poor weapon against climate change,� notes
that while lip service is paid to other approaches, efforts to reduce
CO2 emissions have focused overwhelmingly on setting a price for carbon.

     �the vital incentive is supposed to be provided by achieving a high
     price for carbon, from which all else would follow. Neither has
     happened and time is running out.�

There are two key components in the "price carbon� strategy, both
central to the Kyoto Accord: Emissions Trading (letting corporations buy
and sell �credits� for cutting emissions); and Clean Development
Mechanisms (letting polluters invest in emissions-cutting projects,
mainly in the Third World).

The climate change axis of evil (the U.S., Australia and Canada) have
refused to participate in either scheme, but European countries have
embraced them, and have won plaudits from some environmentalists for
doing so.

The problem is, says Jeremy Lovell of Reuters, that neither scheme is
actually doing what it was supposedly designed to do.

     �The European Union's carbon emissions trading scheme got off to a
     shaky start due to over-allocation of permits, but has now
     established a price of about 20 euros a tonne of carbon dioxide.

     �There is also the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol
     on cutting global carbon emissions, under which developing nations
     effectively get paid for emissions foregone.

     �Together, these two have generated a global carbon trade worth
     billions of dollars and handed vast profits to some key players, but
     had little measurable effect on carbon emissions. �.

     "�The price of carbon has had virtually no effect on the market so
     far and virtually no effect on climate change,� said Oxford
     University economics professor Dieter Helm.�

-- APOLOGIES for cross postings --

-- PLEASE circulate to your lists --


These days, everyone professes concern about climate change. And with the
advent of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and carbon
'offsets', it looks like governments and corporations are at last starting
to do something about the problem.

But are they? Or are these 'market approaches' merely delaying action and
diverting resources away from positive solutions? This year, more and more
front-page news stories and investigative TV documentaries have told us
that the neoliberal 'carbon trading' approach to climate change just isn't
working.

What's the problem? The Durban Group for Climate Justice's book, 'Carbon
Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and
Power'(http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=544225), provides
some answers.

For those who want something shorter, we've just posted on The Corner
House website a series of articles, interviews and slide shows exploring
the background:

Carbon Offsets Not Welcome Here
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556331

Carry on Polluting
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/item.shtml?x=546606

Kyoto: A False Consensus?
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556343

Pictures from the Emissions Market
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556339

Pictures from the Carbon 'Offset' Market
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556341

Aid, the Clean Development Mechanism, and Some Open Questions
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556330

Who are the Climate Leaders?
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556338

Interview in 'Com Ciencia' magazine
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556364

Relearning Humility in a Time of Climate Change
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556342

Trading Our Way into Trouble?
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556367

Carbon Trading and the World Rainforest Movement
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=556365

best wishes from all at The Corner House

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,,1700302,00.html


   It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both



Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only
response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change

Robert Newman
Thursday February 2, 2006
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social
change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at
the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems
within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on
infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production
in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central
organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so
it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green
initiative anybody cares to come up with.

Article continues
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,,1700302,00.html#article_continue>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the
fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of
environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private
ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force
in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny
law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It
therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to
tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing
it under social control will we be able to overcome the global
environmental crisis.

On these pages we have been called on to admire capital's ability to
take robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for
imposing a 20% reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is
that supermarkets are over. We cannot have such long supply lines
between us and our food. Not any more. The very model of the supermarket
is unsustainable, what with the packaging, food miles and destruction of
British farming. Small, independent suppliers, processors and retailers
or community-owned shops selling locally produced food provide a social
glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is true of food co-ops such
as Manchester's bulk-distribution scheme serving former "food deserts".

All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become
non-profit eco-networks supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the
Fortune 500 corporations that will save us all and ecologists are
denounced as anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an
anti-capitalist position is what's alienating the mainstream from their
irresistible arguments. But is it not more likely that people are
stunned into inaction by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the
crisis described and how insipid the solutions proposed? Go on a march
to the House of Commons. Write a letter to your MP. And what system does
your MP hold with? Name one that isn't pro-capitalist. Oh, all right
then, smartarse. But name five.

We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and
peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil
begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be
less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists
reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010.
It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world
war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least
because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel
energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.

Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our
species is the discovery of huge new reserves of oil, or even the
burning into the sky of all the oil that's already known about, because
the climate chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of
industrial society a sideshow bagatelle. Therefore, since we've got to
make the switch from oil anyway, why not do it now?

Solutions need to come from people themselves. But once set up, local
autonomous groups need to be supported by technology transfers from
state to community level. Otherwise it's too expensive to get solar
panels on your roof, let alone set up a local energy grid. Far from
utopian, this has a precedent: back in the 1920s the London boroughs of
Wandsworth and Battersea had their own electricity-generating grid for
their residents. So long as energy corporations exist, however, they
will fight tooth and nail to stop whole postal districts seceding from
the national grid. Nor will the banks and the CBI be neutral bystanders,
happy to observe the inroads participatory democracy makes in reducing
carbon emissions, or a trade union striking for carbon quotas.

There are many organisational projects we can learn from. The Just
Transition Alliance, for example, was set up by black and Latino groups
in the US working with labour unions to negotiate alliances between
"frontline workers and fenceline communities", that is to say between
union members who work in polluting industries and stand to lose their
jobs if the plant is shut down, and those who live next to the same
plant and stand to lose their health if it's not.

We have to start planning seriously not just a system of personal carbon
rationing but at what limit to set our national carbon ration. Given a
fixed UK carbon allowance, what do we spend it on? What kinds of
infrastructure do we wish to build, retool or demolish? What kinds of
organisational structures will work as climate change makes pretty much
all communities more or less "fenceline" and almost all jobs more or
less "frontline"? (Most of our carbon emissions come when we're at work).

To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of
what needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where
the debate is at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow
morning.

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all
of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We
have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and
never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum
interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led
us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern
industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer.
But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of
accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it's wise to
remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a
habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

� Robert Newman's History of Oil will be broadcast on More4 next month

Review: Ecology Against Capitalism by John Bellamy Foster
�It�s not that people value money more but that they value everything
else so much less�not that they are more greedy but that they have no
other values to keep greed in check.� � Dee Hock, former head of Visa
bank card

First off, with lucid logic and prosaic prose, Foster shows why and how
the very nature of capitalism, the �genetic code� of capitalism, is the
source and the cause of our current predicament, and most importantly,
that no amount of �tinkering� with the system will solve things and in
fact, �tinkering� will in all likelyhood, increase the speed of the
slide toward catastrophe through the simple expedient of delaying
dealing with the inevitable consequences of an economy that can only
survive by expanding its markets or as it�s euphemistically known, �growth�.

It�s the Capitalist Economy Stupid
There are several issues that need to be understood for anybody who
cares enough about what�s happening to our world, that Foster unpacks,
the first of which is the fundamental role that economics plays, for
without understanding the nature of the capitalist economy, it�s
impossible not only to realise just how perilous our situation really is
or, to take the necessary steps needed to transform our world.

Foster quotes from a confidential memo from Lawrence Summers, then chief
economist for the World Bank, written in 1991 and leaked to the
Economist and published in an article entitled �Let them eat pollution�,
which sums up the attitude of the class of capitalists and those who
serve them,

�Just between you and me, shouldn�t the World Bank be encouraging more
migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed
Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

�1) The costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone
earnings from increased morbidity [death] and mortality. From this point
of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in
the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the
lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic
waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to
that.

�2) � I�ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are
vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly
inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City��

�3) � The concern over an agent that causes a one-in-a-million change in
the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a
country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country
where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand .� While production is
mobile the consumption of pretty air is non-tradeable. The problem with
the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs
(intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral rights, social concerns, lack
of adequate markets, etc.) [is that they] could be turned around and
used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for
liberalization.� (pps. 60-61)

Full:

http://www.pacificfreepress.com/content/view/1618/81/

This article by one of the new breed of ``carbon neutral'' capitalists
and scamsters applauds the UN coming clean of how the rich West will be
allowed to go on polluting ...

*UN Environment Chief commits green heresy*

*Rich nations can buy themselves out of their emission abatement
obligations*

Opinion: James Emanuel � Head of Environmental Markets � CantorCO2e

Yvo de Boer, the newly appointed Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC
(United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), suggests that
industrialised nations ought to be able to achieve their Kyoto Protocol
emission abatement obligations entirely in the developing world. Such a
suggestion to environment campaigners is tantamount to heresy: that this
suggestion has been made by the chief of the UNFCCC, the United Nations
body responsible for administering the Kyoto Protocol, is analogous to a
catholic heresy being made by the Pope.

Green groups argue that �rich polluting nations ought not to be allowed
to pass their burden to clean up the environment on to the developing
world�. Pat Finnegan of Greenhouse Ireland Action Network has stated
that obliging rich countries to cut their own domestic emissions is a
basic provision of the Kyoto Protocol. The fact of the matter is that he
is correct. The Protocol currently requires �rich countries� to achieve
the majority of their emission abatement obligation domestically: in the
language of the treaty, imports of emission abatement must be
supplemental to domestic achievement.

Mr de Boer argues that the doctrine of supplementarity is wholly
illogical and only adds to the financial scale of the global warming
problem.

Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth has dismissed Mr de Boer�s argument,
stating that they do not make environmental, economic or political
sense. Doug Parr of Greenpeace echoed these sentiments. Generally, the
green campaigners make the argument that the global warming crisis
facing mankind is a direct consequence of the industrial revolution of
the past 150 years within industrialised nations, or in green-speak
�rich nations�, and as such these countries were under a moral
obligation to clean up domestically.

All other things being equal, the green argument is reasonable: the
problem is that all other things are not equal. When taking off the
blinkers and looking at the broader picture it soon becomes evident that
the environmental objective of industrialised nations is not the only
obligation being undertaken by the governments of those nations. It is
also incumbent upon these countries to safeguard their economies. The
objective then becomes more than simply reducing greenhouse gas
emissions. Instead, the task becomes one of procuring emission abatement
at the lowest cost to industry thereby achieving an environmental goal
with the lowest impact on the economy.

With this in mind, the sentiments of Mr de Boer begin to make far more
sense. He argues that the underlying premise of the Kyoto Protocol is to
tackle the �global� problem of climate change. The environment is
pervasive in nature and so it is entirely consistent with the objective
of the nations that drafted the Kyoto Protocol that the target emission
abatement may occur anywhere in the world so long as it does actually
occur. As a result the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was born. This
allowed for credits to be granted in respect of emission reductions
achieved in the developing world and those credits could be used for
compliance purposes under the emission trading legislation in the
developed world. It stands to reason that the low hanging fruit,
representing the lowest cost opportunities, ought to be picked first.
These low cost opportunities currently exist in the developing world and
Mr de Boer simply suggests that they ought to be taken.

Contrary to contentions of the green campaigners, this does not
represent rich nations buying themselves out of their emission abatement
obligations. Instead, the industrialised nations are simply achieving
their obligations at the lowest cost, which is something quite
different. As the low cost opportunities in the developing world become
exhausted those countries that have undertaken an emission abatement
obligation will slowly turn to the more expensive emission reduction
opportunities and in so doing will begin to mitigate domestic emissions.

It must not be forgotten that the legislation that introduces carbon
constraints on industry was always intended to utilise a capitalist
solution to solve an environmental problem. As such it ought to be
possible to balance the needs of the economy with the needs of the
environment. The benefit to industrialised nations is low cost
compliance; the benefit to the environment is global emission abatement
and the benefit to the developing world is a cash injection due to
exponential investment in this area. The CDM is a flying success: there
are currently 1,600 emission abatement projects in the pipeline which
have to date produced 55 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent
emission reductions, all of which has been officially certified by the
UNFCCC. Furthermore, as a result of this investment, the UNFCCC
currently forecast that between now and 2012 (the end of the Kyoto
commitment period) 1.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent
emissions will have been prevented from entering the atmosphere from
these CDM projects.

Surely it makes perfect sense to expand on this achievement by allowing
a greater level of investment in the developing world in order to
procure emission abatement? This would fully engage countries that are
not otherwise currently subject to carbon constraints in the fight
against climate change.

How then can the green lobby suggest that investing in emission
abatement in the developing world is tantamount to rich nations buying
themselves out of their environmental obligations?

It seems that at last we have a pragmatist at the helm of the carbon
constrained world. Long live Yvo de Boer!

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/43889/story.htm

Kyoto Gives Chemical Plants Windfall Profits - UNEP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
<http://www.planetark.com/mail_dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=43889>n
<http://www.planetark.com/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=43889>

UK: August 23, 2007


LONDON - Chemical plants in China can earn substantial windfall profits
by destroying powerful greenhouse gases, underlining the need for
changes to the rules of a Kyoto Protocol incentives scheme, a UN report
shows.


Western investors who trade carbon credits may also make windfall
profits from the scheme in its present form, Reuters data show.

China, with its fast-growing economy, has become crucial to the global
fight against climate change.

It is set to overtake the United States this year as the biggest emitter
of the commonest greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

But it has also become a big beneficiary of incentives to destroy more
powerful greenhouse gases, through a scheme set up under the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming.

Those incentives now appear very generous, the report by the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) showed.

Factories in China, and others in India, Mexico, Argentina and South
Korea, will earn up to 10 times more money than they actually need to
destroy the powerful greenhouse gases, the report found.

It suggested that "national levies are applied to limit the financial
gain of individual manufacturers," after the first cycle of project
funding ends in seven years.

Kyoto is meant to fight global warming, and allows rich countries to buy
carbon offsets, or carbon credits, which help them meet limits on their
emissions by paying for emissions cuts in developing nations.

The refrigerant industry in developing countries produces greenhouse
gases so powerful that destroying them earns factories and their
investors millions of such credits.

The projects, based especially in China, have proved controversial, both
because western speculators have profited, and because they may
inadvertently drive up output of the greenhouse gas, called HFC 23.

The scheme, called the clean development mechanism (CDM), is the best
available for now, the report said.

"The CDM itself is the only reliable mechanism available to prevent HFC
23 emissions in the short term," the report said.


HOT AIR

The scheme is so generous that chemical plants will earn more money
destroying the greenhouse gas, previously an unintended waste product,
than producing the refrigerant gas, it said.

They will earn up to $880 million a year from selling carbon credits,
compared with up to $510 million from selling the refrigerant gas.

Such distortions may make the resulting carbon credits mere "hot air",
because without the scheme factories would probably be more efficient,
adopting widely available technologies that cut production of the
greenhouse gas, said Stanford University's Michael Wara.

HFC projects account for more than half of all emissions cuts achieved
under the CDM so far.

Western investors, such as London-based Climate Change Capital and New
York-based Natsource, may also earn windfall profits from the scheme.

HFC projects will generate more than 600 million tonnes of carbon
credits in their first seven years -- the usual crediting period -- the
UNEP report says.

Investors based in London and New York have bought carbon credits from
chemical plants for as little as 6 euros per tonne, and can now sell
them at 16 euros per tonne, Reuters data show.

Governments that signed the Kyoto Protocol will discuss changes to the
rules of the carbon trading scheme at a meeting in December in Bali,
Indonesia.


Story by Gerard Wynn

Capitalism�s inherently anti-ecological nature results from its
subordination of the needs of society to the accumulation of profits,
regardless of the costs to society as a whole.

by Zoe Kenny

  From Green Left Weekly <http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/721/37403>,
August 22, 2007

Twenty years ago, a UN special commission produced a report, Our Common
Future, that predicted rising CO2 levels would lead to a mean
temperature increase of up to 4.5oC within 50 years, which would cause
catastrophic climate change. The report proposed that immediate action
be taken to counter global warming through massive investment in
renewable energy sources, with the onus upon wealthy industrialised
nations to take the lead.

Since that report was produced, little has been done to halt, let alone
reverse, global warming. Why? Hidden within the UN report was the
answer. It drew the conclusion that combating the predicted
climate-change catastrophe would require �profound structural changes in
socioeconomic and institutional arrangements� to enable decisions to be
made in the �common interest� of humanity rather than being subordinated
to �production for the market.�

Today, the business leaders and the politicians who serve them are
presenting market-mechanisms such as CO2 pollution trading between
corporations as the solution to the global warming problem.

Corporations are now competing to give themselves a �green� image. BP,
for example, has changed its name from British Petroleum to Beyond
Petroleum. Some airlines are offering �carbon offsetting� services, for
a fee, that promise to negate the carbon emissions of customers�
flights, regardless of the dubious environmental benefits of such
�offset� schemes.

Through such greenwashing, corporations hope to reassure customers that
they are part of the solution, while at the same time putting the onus
back onto the individual whose �consumer choices� are presented as a
major motor force for solving the global warming problem. Reinforcing
the idea that individual purchasing power can change the world fits
neatly into the framework of the capitalist political system in which
working people are politically atomised.

This drive to greenwash capitalism dovetails with the underlying
approach of most mainstream environmental groups and Green parties, and
feeds illusions that, with the right combination of carrots and sticks,
the corporate capitalism will abandon its massive investments in highly
profitable fossil fuel and rapidly switch over to renewable energy
technologies.

Capitalism�s inherently anti-ecological nature, however, is the result
of its subordination of the needs of society to the accumulation of
business profits through the production and sale of an ever-expanding
mass of goods and services, regardless of the costs to society as a whole.

Capitalist businesses try to turn every human activity into a commodity,
an article for sale for corporate profits.

Because capitalist businesses� interaction with nature is solely seen
through the prism of individual company profits, capitalist businesses
are incapable to making decisions according to the common interests of
humanity, including our need to protect the natural environment for
future generations.

Nature is regarded as an �externality� to capitalist business
operations, as a �free gift� at the start of the production process,
while during the process the natural environment is used as a giant sewer.

The negative impacts of this ruthless disregard for nature are also
externalised by capitalists � as communities are left to deal with the
costs of polluted air, rivers, oceans and land. When attempts are made
at forcing capitalist businesses to �internalise� the environmental
costs of their activities into the production processes, for example
through the imposition of �green� taxes, these are vigorously opposed,
watered down or simply passed on to consumers. Similarly, corporations
often make the calculation that fines for polluting are cheaper than
investing in the technologies to avoid the pollution in the first place.

Karl Marx wrote that capitalism creates a �metabolic rift� between
humans and nature through concentrating the population in gigantic urban
centres, leading to the consumption of vast amounts of nutrients sourced
from the countryside. Under capitalist agriculture, food production
becomes increasingly reliant on city-made artificial fertilisers
(sourced from fossil fuels).

Exacerbating the ever-more intensive and destructive profit-making cycle
is the drive by each capitalist business to dominate the market. This
produces the absurdity of multi-billionaires perpetually in pursuit of
their next corporate takeover.

The drive to maximise business profits is achieved through cutting
business costs. Workers� wages and conditions are constantly under
attack as a result.

Profit-oriented cost-cutting also leads to constant technological
innovation � though the big corporations seek to have the cost of
research and initial development borne by society through massive
taxpayer-funded subsidies. But the use of every new technology is
subjugated to one goal only - the maximisation of business profit,
regardless of the effects of those innovations on human health or the
environment.

For example, after World War II production methods underwent what US
environmentalist Barry Commoner called a �qualitative leap� in
pollutiveness, with the massive expansion in the production of synthetic
chemicals by the petrochemical industry.

Technologies such as solar and wind power, which would be beneficial for
all by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, have not been rolled out in
any extensive way because they threaten the profits of the corporations
that produce and use fossil fuels.

Capitalism condemns ordinary working people into its cycle of pollution
through the imposition of irrational consumption patterns. The
outstanding example of this is the forced reliance on private motor
vehicles as the overwhelming method of commuting in the First World,
with most Third World countries aspiring to the same levels of car
ownership. This situation has been consciously manufactured by the oil
and auto corporations in collusion with governments.

In the US in the 1930s, tram lines in most of the major cities were
bought up by the big automobile companies and subsequently removed to
make way for roads.

Designed obsolescence also forces working people into wasteful
consumption patterns. Many household items that previous generations
expected to last for decades now need to be replaced every few years.
Such waste is integral to the capitalist profit-making machine.

Capitalism divides the world into rich and poor nations. The economic
underdevelopment of the majority of countries is essential for
capitalist corporations that rely upon vast reserves of cheap labour to
produce raw materials and low-tech manufactures, as well as providing
dumping grounds for toxic waste.

The impoverished people of much of the Third World are driven to destroy
their natural environment, through slash-and-burn farming techniques for
example, in the daily struggle to survive on incomes of a only few
dollars a day.

Capitalism sows the seeds of ecological destruction by ignoring
humanity�s dependence on nature. In 1876, Marx�s co-thinker Frederick
Engels pointed out that the negative impacts on human welfare of
environmental destruction reminds �us that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists
in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being
able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.�

But, if we are to apply them correctly, this requires more than
scientific knowledge. It also requires, as Engels observed, �a complete
revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and
simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order�.

The historically necessary project of replacing capitalism with a
socialist system, in which the rule of the capitalist profit-makers is
replaced by the democratic self-rule of the working majority, will
enable society to subordinate economic activity to the common interest.

If decisions about economic activity could be made democratically by
society as a whole � because society as a whole owned the economic
resources (all the mines, mills and factories) � then the root causes of
global warming could be rationally and rapidly tackled.

Certainly the most obvious place to begin would be with the world�s
energy systems. Today pro-capitalist politicians like John Howard tell
us that any attempt to move rapidly to replace the use of fossil fuels
like coal with renewable energy sources will �wreck the economy�, by
which he means it�ll wreak business profits.

He�s absolutely right about this. But the consequence of not doing this
will be increasingly catastrophic climate events, which will wreck the
livelihoods of most working people.

If the big corporation won�t move rapidly to a renewables-based energy
economy, because it threatens their corporate profits, that�s not a
rational argument for continuing to rely on fossil fuels. It�s a
rational argument for replacing capitalist governments with governments
that will organise working people to bring about �profound structural
changes� in who owns industry, how it�s run and who it serves.

Society structurally organised to meet the common interest rather than
corporate profits would be free to simply weigh up the costs and
benefits involved in how it meets its energy needs, and then to allocate
through a massive and urgent program of public works to make the switch
from fossil fuels to renewables.

Similarly, why would a socialist world continue with reliance on
hundreds of millions of privately owned vehicles for daily commuting,
with all their associated problems. Far superior would be state of art,
integrated free public transport systems with frequent services. This
could dramatically reduce greenhouse pollution if rolled out in a
systematic way worldwide.

The human resources to do these things will be massively enhanced when
millions of workers can be transferred from highly profitable but
socially unproductive work, such as the advertising and public relations
industries or the military-industrial complex.

The obstacles to achieving an ecologically sustainable society do not
lie in the lack of alternatives to CO2-generating fossil fuel dependent
technologies, but in the power of the capitalist �market forces� system
to resist abandoning the latter for the former.

The mainstream political answer to getting the capitalist corporate
profit system to adopt renewable energy technologies is a reform policy
combination of carrots (huge taxpayer-funded subsidies to the
corporations) and sticks (CO2 emissions taxes, that will be passed on by
corporations to ordinary consumers) � both of which involve making
working people pay to fix a problem created by the corporate elite.

This approach is what the Swedish government�s Stockholm Environmental
Institute calls the �Policy Reform� scenario in its study on a �market
forces�-dominated transition to global sustainability � published in
2002 as Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead.

The authors of the study argued that �great strides toward a
sustainability transition are possible without positing either a social
revolution or the deus ex machina of a technological miracle� through
the application of government policy reforms to �market forces� (which
they ackowledge are dominated by the �special interests� of the big
�rich country�-based transnational corporations).

However, because solving the problem of global warming �requires a pace
and scale of technological and social change [that] is daunting�, the
�reform path to sustainability is like climbing up a down escalator.�

Furthermore, for �the reform path to succeed, an unprecedented and
unyielding governmental commitment to achieving sustainability goals
must arise. That commitment must be expressed through effective and
comprehensive economic, social and institutional initiatives. But the
necessary political will for a reform route to sustainability is today
nowhere in sight.

�To gain ascendancy, the Policy Reform vision must overcome the
resistance of special interests, the myopia of narrow outlooks and the
inertia of complacency. But the logic of sustainability and the logic of
the global market are in tension. The correlation between the
accumulation of wealth [in the form of capital] and the concentration of
power erodes the political basis for a transition.�

This surely points to the necessity for a social revolution � a
fundamental change in which social class, the capitalists or working
people, owns and manages society�s economic resources � as the only way
to remove the institutional obstacles to countering the gathering global
warming catastrophe. But the authors of Great Transition � myopically
wedded to their �market forces� narrow outlook � rule this out of
consideration.

Cuba has become the world�s undisputed leader in organic agriculture,
and has taken major steps toward developing energy efficiency and
replacing the use of fossil fuels with renewables.

Cuba was also the first country in the world to implement a universal
low-energy lighting program. In 2005, the Cuban government mobilised
social workers � many university students on study leave � to distribute
and install low-energy fluorescent light bulbs. By the end of the year,
five million people had been supplied. By mid 2006, this program had cut
electricity for lighting by a third.

Cuba remains the only country in the world to implement a universal
low-energy, low-polluting lighting policy. Since mid 2006, the
low-energy, low-polluting bulbs are the only ones sold in Cuban stores.

According to the World Wildlife Fund�s The Living Planet Report 2006,
the socialist island-nation of Cuba is the only country in the world
that enjoys sustainable development, assessed on the basis of countries�
commitments to improving the quality of life of their residents while
living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems. This,
despite Cuba being a relatively poor country subjected by Washington to
nearly five decades of punitive economic sanctions.

If the economic and political institutions of Australia and other rich
countries � with their massive scientific and technological resources �
were organised, via a social revolution, to serve the interests of
working people rather than corporate profit-making, then we�d be able to
get on the fast track in solving the global warming crisis, instead of
trying to �climb up in a down escalator."

  From Green Left Weekly <http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/721/37403>,
August 22, 2007