The Paris Agreement differs from the Kyoto Protocol in several respects. It not only weakens the gap between developed and developing countries, but also abandons collective emission reduction targets and timetables, in favor of a more flexible “Nationally Determined Contribution” (NDC) approach.
As we all know, the result is that everyone is on board, but the ship is sinking: even with the implementation of the NDC, the temperature is expected to rise by 3°C or 4°C this century.
this Series of articles Published in collaboration with Dalia Gebrial and Harpreet Kaur Paul and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in London.It first appeared in a Global Green New Deal Outlook.
Kyoto
One area where the Paris Agreement does imitate the Kyoto Protocol is the use of market-based methods to mitigate climate change.
The so-called “clean development mechanism” of the Kyoto Protocol has been questioned about its effectiveness and many cases of human rights violations and land grabbing—especially cases affecting indigenous people and forest communities.
Emissions trading schemes clearly failed to reduce emissions. However, the Paris Agreement-especially Article 6-insisted on relying on these policy approaches that have proved to be a failure.
Article 6 is expressed in the language of “voluntary cooperation”, but it is the same logical code that supports the indulgence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages: those who can afford to pay are pardoned of their sins. The poor carry heavy burdens.
Beijing Chamber of Commerce
The basic premise of this “cooperation” is that countries can use the “mitigation results of international transfers” to include their nationally determined contributions.
Therefore, if a developed country wishes, it can increase its own carbon-intensive activities and simply purchase the right to offset this pollution by reducing emissions in another country.
One of the technologies touted to provide these offsets is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
In theory, BECCS would involve planting trees to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, cutting down these trees and burning biomass to use energy, and then somehow capture the carbon and store it underground.
There are many problems. Bioenergy is not actually carbon neutral. The technology does not yet have a scale, and a large amount of land will be needed to expand the scale. Whose land? You can easily guess.
solution
Climate justice does not insist on an almost fanatical promise of market-based wrong solutions, but requires real solutions, people-oriented and fair, and appreciation of the intrinsic value of nature, rather than reducing it to a commodity.
Some solutions include, but are not limited to, drastically limiting the excessive consumption of enterprises and wealthy elites, especially energy consumption; removing barriers to affordable and accessible environmentally sound technologies such as intellectual property; ending the promotion of fossil fuels and other 77 carbon-intensive industries Producer subsidies.
We can also protect biodiversity by not damaging the ecological integrity of natural ecosystems and expanding ecological restoration; transform industrialized agriculture into agro-ecological practices, and invest in electrified, free or subsidized public transportation.
There are more real solutions than fake solutions.
This author
NathanThanki is the co-coordinator of the global movement for climate justice, based in London, UK.
