Climate change mitigation a sham, says Indian thinker

TriplePundit: Those that have been instrumental in building the institutional edifice to mitigate climate change and facilitate greenhouse gas emissions reductions come in for a severe and thorough verbal lashing in Down to Earth, a publication put out by New Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment.

As climate change, environmental degradation and economic development have gained currency the resulting international processes and organizational structures have been hijacked by the international political, media and corporate jet set, CSE claims. Worse, the resulting measures taken to date are not only ineffectual but serve only to further enrich those that are primarily responsible for these problems in the first place, i.e. the captains of multinational business, industry, political leaders and the media.

“The Centre for Science and Environment, in its 1999 publication on global environmental governance, Green Politics, clearly showed all global environmental conventions were designed to secure northern business in the future and had little to do with environment or sustainability,” argues Sunita Narain, the CSE’s director. “This has sharpened; industries and developed nations are looking at a new business opportunity in the time of climate change. The results are showing.

“Without any noteworthy emissions cut, the rush for biofuel to manage emissions has already created a food crisis. All technofixes—biofuel, GM crop or nuclear power—will create the next generation of crisis, because they ignore the fundamental problems of capitalism as a system that ignores justice and promotes inequity.”…