Why markets won't work

Anne Peterman and Orin Langelle in Z magazine undertake give a vigorous poke to market-based approaches to climate change: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) once again failed to take concrete steps to avert the ever-worsening climate crisis at its 14th Conference of the Parties (COP-14), held December 1-12 in Poznan, Poland. This failure has been widely denounced by social movements, climate justice groups, and indigenous peoples organizations that have already begun to organize a mass mobilization around the next Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, scheduled for December 2009.

…Climate Justice Now! (CJN!), the climate justice alliance founded at the 2007 Climate Conference in Bali, released a statement that further denounced the UN climate process, stating, "The three main pillars of the Kyoto Protocol—the clean development mechanism, joint implementation and emissions trading schemes—have been completely ineffective in reducing emissions, yet they continue to be at the center of the negotiations."

…The impacts of climate change and false solutions to climate change on forests and indigenous peoples were highlighted by indigenous peoples organizations and climate justice groups, especially with regard to a mechanism called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries). Contrary to its presumed mission to protect forests, the emphasis of REDD is on how to best use the world's remaining forests as carbon offsets to enhance the profits of polluting industries and industrialized countries and ensure they do not have to reduce their carbon emissions by any significant amount.

…The most positive development that came out of the 2008 UN Climate Convention was both the strengthening of the CJN! alliance and the advancement of the mobilization against the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. In their final statement, CJN!, which has grown over the past year to include over 160 groups and indigenous peoples' organizations from across the globe, called for a "radical change" in the UN climate process. CJN! insists that radical change is needed due to the overwhelming infiltration of business interests, the marginalization of NGOs and indigenous peoples organizations, and the almost exclusive focus on market-based mechanisms to address climate change…