Originally published February 4 2006
Carbon trading becomes the buzz of Montreal climate conference
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Daphne Wysham, a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, talks about the emergence of carbon trading at the recent climate conference in Montreal.
Last week in Montreal, climate negotiators met to determine how the majority of the world's countries will move forward when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
It may warm past the "tipping point," the point of no return at which feedback loops build upon one another, and exponential increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane bring catastrophically altered weather patterns with devastating consequences, especially for the poorest.
He would have felt right at home in the Palais de Congress, where the 11th Conference of the Parties (COP-11) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change met: It felt more like a business convention than an environmental one.
Almost everyone, from the environmentalists to government representatives to the overwhelming majority of business groups, was talking in the new, mysterious lexicon of "carbon trading."
Tom Goldtooth, a Din� and Mdewakanton Dakota and director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said: "When I try to explain carbon trading to our elders, they tell me, 'Tom, if you can't make sense of it in our Native language, then there is something wrong with it.'
Many environmentalists doubt that carbon trading is the best way to slow or reverse global warming.
Around the world, ancient cultures such as the Din�, the Inuit and the Tibetans have evolved a way of constructing homes, communities and businesses with a respect for nature's fine line between scarcity and abundance.
Carbon emissions trading involves the trading of permits to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, calculated in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
A country (or group of countries) caps its carbon emissions at a certain level -- say, 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2010 --and then issues permits to industries that grant the firm the right to emit a stated amount of carbon dioxide over a time period.
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