-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[GP-Climate] Fwd: Climate Change, Dams and Conflict
Date: 	Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:41:13 +0000
From: 	eeva berglund <[log in to unmask]>
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References: 	<00df01c604b0$c0e6e370$2101a8c0@Aprilfool>





Begin forwarded message:

> *From: *[log in to unmask] 
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> *Date: *19 December 2005 15:27:36 GMT
> *To: *<[log in to unmask] 
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> *Subject: **Climate Change, Dams and Conflict*
> *Reply-To: *[log in to unmask] 
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
>
> -- PLEASE CIRCULATE TO YOUR NETWORKS -- 
> NEW documents on The Corner House website:
> Climate Change, and Dams and Conflict
>
>
> 1) "Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps:
> Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change 
> Mitigation"
> by Larry Lohmann
>
> http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/carbdump.pdf
>
> (This article appeared in Science as Culture, Volume 14, issue number 
> 3, September 2005, published by Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 
> http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09505431.asp)
>
>
> After Hurricane Katrina devastated the US city of New Orleans in 
> August this year, climate change became a hot talk show topic. It was 
> again in the news in December, following the latest round of 
> international climate negotiations in Montreal, attended by 10,000 people.
>
> Despite all the news coverage, however, there is little open public 
> discussion about the structure and prospects of the main current 
> international initiative for tackling climate change - the carbon 
> market created by the Kyoto Protocol.
>
> In 1992, the United Nations promulgated a Framework Convention on 
> Climate Change. Five years later, in December 1997, representatives of 
> more than 160 countries met in the Japanese city of Kyoto to negotiate 
> limits for developed countries on their emissions of greenhouse gases, 
> now generally acknowledged to be the major cause of global warming.
>
> The resulting Kyoto Protocol came into force on 16 February 2005. 
> Binding more than 30 industrialised countries to modest emission 
> reduction targets, it also instituted a worldwide trade in emissions 
> permits and credits. Although the Protocol has still failed to gain 
> the support of the United States, the country by whom and for whom it 
> was largely written, environmentalists, politicians and journalists 
> elsewhere generally hail the agreement as a crucial "first step" 
> toward more serious efforts to address global warming.
>
> Yet the Protocol and associated schemes such as the European Union 
> Emissions Trading Scheme are in fact not designed to do what any 
> constructive approach to global warming must do: check the upward flow 
> of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, oceans, soil and vegetation. 
> Instead, they grant lucrative rights to this global carbon dump to 
> heavy fossil fuel users while attempting, against the best scientific 
> wisdom, to develop speculative new carbon dumps -- also for elite use.
>
> This approach is confused, regressive and divisive, argues this 
> article. It is squandering science and technology on 
> scientifically-impossible programmes while taking the climate issue 
> out of the hands of the public and sowing the seeds of future social 
> conflict. Its incoherence can only be countered by a broad popular 
> movement.
>
> "Perhaps the best paper I have read on any aspect of climate change," 
> said UK environmenal journalist George Monbiot recently. "Anyone 
> reading it could not fail to be swayed by your arguments and your 
> examples. It has changed my thinking -- thank you."
>
>
> 2) "Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere"
> edited by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada, published by the Centre for 
> Civil Society (South Africa) and Transnational Institute (The Netherlands)
>
> http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/document/trouble.pdf
>
> This book, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and 
> edited by South African activists, provides more detail on the 
> practical threats to public well-being and climatic stability arising 
> from the growing fashion for carbon trading. It focuses in particular 
> on the disturbing record of South African "carbon-saving" projects and 
> their role in shoring up a destructive oil economy with a record of 
> harm to African people.
>
> The book supplies overviews of the problems with pollution trading and 
> South Africa's energy system and includes background about carbon 
> trading's US origins, its colonialist consequences, and its 
> ineffectiveness in contributing to climate change mitigation.
>
> In particular, the volume boasts rich empirical studies of the 
> fraudulence, injustice or failure of various carbon-trading projects 
> planned for South Africa under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development 
> Mechanism with the assistance of the World Bank and other agencies.
>
>
> 3) "What have dams got to do with peace? Conflict and the politics of 
> infrastructure development"
>
> by Nicholas Hildyard, The Corner House,
> presentation to The International Conference of Diyarbakir on "Peace 
> in the Middle East and People's Right to Peace".
>
> http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/summary.shtml?x=369028
>
> Nicholas Hildyard addresses the very real and damaging conflicts that 
> dams (and other large infrastructure projects such as oil pipelines 
> and mines) can cause and exacerbate.
>
> Infrastructure development is often at the junction where conflicts 
> over resources and decision-making meet, where future conflicts are 
> created and where past conflicts are perpetuated. It raises key 
> questions, therefore, about decision-making, and political and 
> economic power, about wider geo-politics and re-colonisation.
>
> This presentation illustrates these points with reference to several 
> projects proposed or being implemented in Turkey.
>
>
> We hope that you find these useful and interesting.
>
> best wishes from all at The Corner House for the holiday season and 
> the year ahead.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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