The summit has sought to reframe the African continent, which has enormous amounts of clean energy minerals and renewable energy sources, as less of a victim of climate change driven by the world’s biggest economies and more of the solution.
But investment in the continent in exchange for the ability to keep polluting elsewhere has angered some in Africa who prefer to see China, the United States, India, the European Union and others rein in their emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
“We reject forced solutions on our land,” Priscilla Achakpa, founder of the Nigeria-based Women Environmental Programme, told summit participants on the event’s final day. She urged the so-called “Global North” to “remove yourself from the perspective of the colonial past.”
There should be no offsets. Either don’t pollute or pay a hefty tax proportional to the amount of pollution, those should be the options. If there are quotas, massively increased taxes past the quota, with no way of raising the quota.
Carbon storage should be an entirely separate matter, not something companies can buy into to excuse not optimizing what they’re doing.
Yeah we need net negative for a healthy planet
Rich countries/politicians only pay lip service to caring about the planet. The most important thing to them is being re-elected, and that won’t happen if they remove subsidies for Big Oil/fracking projects or really invest in green infrastructure.
We can change that. They focus on the re-election issues they do because that’s what their voters seem to press for. They can’t read our minds, they have to rely on talking to us and polls and shit. They don’t care about these things though, they only care about what we say we vote for.
They use propaganda. They don’t have to read minds. Just have to distort the picture enough to subvert the will of the people.
The democratic deficit, that’s the gap between what people want and what representatives do, is very high in the U.S.
It’s lobbyists that have the ear of politicians, not the people.
The democratic deficit, that’s the gap between what people want and what representatives do, is very high in the U.S.
As a climate lobbyist, this is 100% false.
The solution the African Climate Summit proposed is the ideal one - carbon taxes. Any politician pushing carbon taxes will get obliterated at the polls because Americans do not like paying taxes and especially do not like high fuels costs caused by paying taxes.
The free market isn’t going to solve this problem. It isn’t profitable to solve climate change.
This is where Governments are meant to step in, to serve the best interests of the people… instead they’re too busy bickering over bullshit, and giving themselves and their cronies handouts.
And corporations run the governments.
The free market is the only solution to climate change, and it is absolutely profitable to solve climate change.
The problem, as the article indicates, is that we currently subsidize fossil fuels and do not tax them to pay for their externalities, stacking the deck in favor of fossil fuels companies and away from green energy transitions.
Even with that in place, capital is flying toward green/renewable energy.
A carbon tax is 100% needed, and dividends can be handed out to bottom quintile earners to offset the cost for those who literally cannot survive the increases a carbon tax causes. Problem there is just that taxing fuel in the US almost guarantees you lose your next election.
The free market is the only solution to climate change, and it is absolutely profitable to solve climate change.
Problem there is just that taxing fuel in the US almost guarantees you lose your next election.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Capitalism trying to capitalism it’s way out of a capitalism caused crisis. Classic.
most polluting country is communist china.
