Climate activists decry ‘false solutions, fairy tales’ at COP26

While corporations promote the carbon trade, critics say it is a scheme to profit from simply burning dirty energy sources.

Glasgow, Scotland Activists criticized the plans of corporations and governments to solve the climate change emergency through opaque carbon-trading plans rather than immediately shutting down fossil fuel production, as many scientists recommend.

About 50 demonstrators rallied inside the COP26 venue on Tuesday as negotiators from around the world continued to hammer out deals to stop global warming to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) – a level that would be exceeded when all around the planet. would have a devastating effect.

the workers. promoting the concept of net zero carbon emissions It was “pure imagination” to prevent climate disasters from happening decades ago. The burning of fossil fuels now needs to stop, and “trading carbon“He doesn’t achieve that, he said.

“Corporations will be allowed to continue polluting and it is a fairy tale to think that trading in carbon gets us out of this crisis,” said Ozawa Bineshi Albert and Indigenous activist and member of the Climate Justice Network.

While corporations and governments in fossil-fuel-rich countries are promoting carbon trading – or swapping one’s gas emissions from others in exchange for carbon-reduction credits – critics say it is just dirty energy sources. There is a plan to earn profit by burning it.

For example, Bolivia has described carbon-trading as a method of making “business-climate millionaires”. The other main criticism of carbon-trading is its inability to monitor what carbon-reduction efforts are. are really real.

‘Feed us lies’

Pasco Sabido of the Corporate Europe Observatory noted that 500 oil and gas lobbyists were participating in COP26.

“What have they come here to do? Pollute the process. They have been brought here to feed us lies,” Sabido told the crowd.

Over the next 10 years, fossil fuel companies plan to ramp up production, he said, highlighting recent deals by large corporations to drill more than 800 new oil and gas wells around the world.

“They want to continue to make as much money as they can, but it ends up causing a climate disaster,” Sabido said.

Large hydrocarbon corporations and governments with vast fossil fuel resources say carbon-trading and net-zero emissions plans are needed to buy time for renewable energy sources to drive global economies fully online in the coming decades.

However, climate activists point out that Earth’s atmosphere cannot cope with any more greenhouse gases without catastrophic effects around the planet, such as devastating superstorms, uncontrollable wildfires, sea-level rises and large-scale But the flood

“We want the real zero” [emissions]’Not net zero,’ said Sabido. “I don’t think it will be achieved here [at COP26]. But where we are going to see real change is on the streets.”