Ideas competition in Sweden: Climate Survival - Political Reform
An intriguing project, if not compelling, my attention was roused after a friend had alerted me to it last fall. There are around 12 000 registrations so far aiming for the September deadline that the Global Challenges Foundation has set, aside to 5 million $ US prize money.
Perhaps more Yukoners will participate, or just continue in informal ways of a forum, be it groups or individuals? There already is a lot of interest, to build on, in the theme of the competition's core challenge, climate crisis, really a crises cataclysm that is coming on.
At any rate, here are my two cents at this point working towards a 1000 word summary component for a submission document:
Break Climate Denial of Carbon Pricer – Flat Earther Symbiosis
(Whitehorse Star Coloumn 29 June 2017)
Imagine Winston Churchill levying on NAZI trade a 25% sales tax during the Battle of Britain. The self-directing market, right? Wrong, pending (or creeping) doom demanded active choices. Survival needed narrative change with new words, he created them.
Contemporary contrast to Ida Tarbell's and Teddy Roosevelt's dissolving of Standard Oil's criminal cartel:
Self-referential technocratic mandarins in neoliberal political, critically environmental NGO, areas respond to crises with a dulłed and dogma drilled oiligarchic chant mass: put a price on carbon.
In solidarity with climate scientists, activists from the Global South like Vandana Shiva, Arundhati Roy describes the scene as "NGO-ization", which resurrects/reenforces a racialized system, spearheaded by predatory carbon pricing design.
In its study's preface, Carbon Trading – How it Works and Why it Fails, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation speaks for all scientists and economists who have actually examined climate - energy policies, including carbon pricing:
“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.”
Under the headline Taxation:
“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes [initiating, leveraging, legitimizing, capitalizing organized crime carbon offset derivative fraud schemes, as Interpol warned already in 2013] have many of the same problems as carbon (off-set) trading.
Matt McGrath, BBC News Science & Environment page, reported on the COP 20 Lima, Dec. 13, 2014:
"A large group of developing nations known as the G77 objected [as they did in Copenhagen, Paris, Marrakesh]. "[Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the talks:] ... We stand behind the differentiation, we stand behind common but differentiated responsibilities, these are issues we hold very strong and these are definite red lines."
In Marrakesh Nnimmo Bassey (Friends of the Earth International, Environmental Rights Action) addressed Western NGOs, referencing the Paris agreement as vehicle for carbon price profiteering, it never mentioned fossil fuels (hard to believe, I fact checked). He reiterated the G77's charismatic speaker from Copenhagen, Lumumba Di-Aping:
"... and I will say this to our colleagues from Western civil society – you have definitely sided with a small group of industrialists and their representatives and your representative branches. Nothing more than that. You have become an instrument of your governments."
Mainstream portrays as climate villain a true global leader actually achieving GHG emission reductions, and not by eco-waffling Big Oil/Davos talking points.
Nicaragua is poised for 90 percent renewables in power generation by 2020, while adding much needed Socratic sting to the neocolonial Paris flirt with disaster.
Likewise in Denmark, China and Germany carbon pricing is intentionally, explicitly or de facto, in a non relevant role. Emission reductions follow renewable energy source legislation which recognizes that renewable cost parities are in the past, not the future as carbon pricing stipulates, as to never find it.
Unist'ot'en First Nation banner against new pipelines and against the carbon pricing that brings them: goo.gl/dcWLao .
Global South and Indigenous spheres overwhelmingly aim for the Kyoto principle of climate justice based leap frogging towards renewable energy critical mass thresholds, noted by few western observers.
John Ralston Saul at the 2010 Melbourne Writer's Festival marked an exception: "And unfortunately most of the environmentalist language is in fact not terribly different from its enemy, it's very much like a shadow of the enemy, ... Maybe we should actually do something as opposed to negotiate about doing something."
Gordon Laxer, veteran energy analyst, University of Alberta Parkland Institute, finished his Dec. 3, 2015 piece in the Edmonton Journal, “Opinion: Alberta’s climate plan stands in the way of Canada’s”, observing:
“Getting the NDP’s backing on expanding the oil sands lends more credibility than Big Oil could have got from a Conservative Alberta government. No wonder Big Oil is smiling" [Premier Notley repeatedly in plain text: Without carbon pricing there would be no pipeline expansion].
Justifiably subterfuge, aside to impoverishment, diminishing returns associated with unconventional extraction, angers people and many are herded to false populist demagogues because they are being lied to, even if some are confused as to the exact details of deception.
Carbon pricers efficiently facilitate full spectrum destruction, expanding unconventional fossil extraction faster than their climate denial brethren in more crudely styled conservative governments.
British Columbia Auditor General 2013 special report: carbon tax refunds specifically subsidize frackgas outfits, and emission increases.
More fossil subsidies inherent to the design of carbon pricing false language:
- No unified carbon product, intentionally hollow abstraction attracts toxic content.
- Distraction from outlawing criminal behaviours such as oil and gas fracking and from infrastructure initiative responsibilities/accountabilities, blaming folks by instead "putting the price on carbon".
- Falsely posing as fuel tax, energy pricing, risk addressing, pollution penalty instrument.
- Oil is politically/militarily influential, clean electron is market competitive, inexpensive, Carbon Pricers bury those facts (Peter Droege, Eurosolar).
- Slights of hand: swapping luxuries with basic needs, bastardizing "price elasticity for demand" market economics.
- Carbon pricing policy choice sold as part of climate science, weakening science impact.
- Carbon pricing inflates financialization towards 2008 levels, driving investment away from renewable industries (Chester & Rosewarne, University of Sydney).
- Capping emissions is OK, Whereas Offsetting caps reductions, including mathematically, and nullifies GHG accounting while expanding polluter rights.
From Johan Rockström, Bill McKibben, David Suzuki to Nicholas Stern, who promotes expanding the most climate destructive fossil extraction, gas fracking, by buying into an increase of natural gas power plants, carbon pricers back up their attack on climate justice with an attack on science.
Carbon pricing exclusively validates/navigates current emissions, whereas climate science is unequivocal: accumulated emissions cause the crisis, not levels at any given moment.
In wooden oblivion to non western voices, such as by stonewalling cross culturally vibrant G77 countries' global governance reform initiatives, western leaders in the climate forum have become corrupt intellectually, and isolated.
Elites that are reminiscent of a complicit pre 1914 intelligentsia, epitomized by Norman Angell with his 1910 bestseller "The Great Illusion", arguing the deception that war and destruction supposedly had become impossible through globalized free trade.
Reentering reform dialogue requires listening and delinking from World Bank/Exxon Mobile sponsored colonial structural adjustments, such as Carbon Pricing-Taxing-Trading, that pollute and exploit especially poor regions while frying the planet.
[decarbolonize -- notcarbonprice -- greenenergize]
