At last someone in the eco-world is unraveling the mystery, confusion and blatant lies around CAP AND TRADE, the economic policy to solve the global climate crisis.
Annie Leonard, the creator of the fast paced STORY OF STUFF film (click here) is a wizard at demystifying eco-babble into easy to digest information…I am deeply beholden to Annie for making THE STORY OF STUFF because it unmasks the real culprit in our ecological crisis – namely over-consumption.
Like Dr. Seuss’s THE LORAX, Annie uses animation and a fun narrative to make us look at what is happening to our culture with all this consumption. Consumption far outweighs over-population, simply because it’s NOT how many people are on the planet but how and what we consume that is impacting the earth. Which is why America (5% of the worlds population) who consumes 24% of the world’s resources is the leading culprit in the environmental melt down. It’s been estimated that one American child is equal to 13 third world children in our ability to consume.
In Annie’s new film CAP AND TRADE, she gives a cogent, fact-based outline of the underlying potential for crime by the big business speculatators and her assessments are spot on.
I especially appreciated the humor in the piece – the list of things that our governments are considering for remedying the climate crisis:
1. Find a new planet
2. Act normal
3. Give up
4. Cap & Trade
5. Deny everything
6. Bribe someone
But her most serious points in a nutshell are:
1. The guys behind CAP AND TRADE are the Enron gang, the Wall Street Financiers like Goldman Sachs, and the subprime architects. These financial geniuses are about to develop a 3 trillion dollar bubble using carbon markets.
2. We need to reduce our emissions by 80% or more by 2050 and some are saying by 2020 but the fact is carbon could increase with the Cap and Trade system.
(Although many of the world’s leading climate experts, including James Hansen say we need reductions in carbon of 80% by 2020. Al Gore has thrown down the gauntlet saying we need to get 100% reneweables in 10 years!)
3. Yearly limits of emissions are good – that is the cap but how do they make sure they under the cap?
4. Annie identifies 3 Devils in the details: 1. Free permits (cap & giveaway) industrial polluters will get these permits for free. 2. Offset permits are created when they remove carbon but they can’t guarantee that there will be false offsets (example one company deforested a region in Indonesia and then planted palm trees and actually got carbon $/credit for this. 3. The biggest devil according to Annie – Distraction – instead of investing in the proven solutions, like a renewable economy, we will go off track and loose the tiny bit of time left to turn this titanic around.
As one of my cool planet partners said, “Another aspect of cap & trade is that the trading will contribute to the GDP. How weird is that? It’s like accounting for the cost of cancer treatment as a plus to the GDP, when the best solution for everyone is to avoid cancer in the first place.”
Check out the most vibrant short video on CAP AND TRADE and tell me what you think…