Letters to the UK national press that have gained broad international support.
View and co-sign our letter to the Guardian "Aiding, Trading or Evading"
View and co-sign our letter to the Independent - Climate, Debt, Equity and Survival.
Sign-on Letter to the Guardian - March 2000
Your leading article of the 13th of March fails to recognise that the connection between floods in Mozambique and the government's policy on climate change and emissions trading raises two very awkward questions.
The UK government committed itself under the Kyoto Protocol to reducing the country's greenhouse gas emissions to 12% below their 1990 level by 2010. It now expects to achieve a 20% reduction and has said that it will sell the 8% difference to the US on the international emissions trading market for '100 million pounds'. (Paul Brown, 9/3/2000)
So the first question is: - why did the government not match our 'EU bubble' partners, the Danes and the Germans who are both committed to 21% reductions? Those countries must now have cause to regret their commitments, as they also could have offered phoney targets in exchange for US cash. The UK creates a dreadful precedent with regard to negotiating future reduction targets globally as it creates yet another incentive for Parties to the UN Climate Convention to offer as little reduction as possible.
Second: - what does the British government intend to do with the revenues raised? It accepts the link between emissions and climate damages and now appears willing to 'profit' from this destruction. If the year past is anything to go by, there will be many more than two million deaths from climate change-related disasters worldwide in the next ten years, and the damages to property will be worth hundreds of billions of pounds. If these lives lost are valued at average UK values, we can easily add a trillion pounds to the total bill. Thus Mozambique's dead alone are worth a thousand times more than the 10 million odd pounds of aid we sent, or did we miss something? The UK's expectation of 100 million pounds through this trade - ten times this aid - is another dreadful precedent.
To answer both these questions, the government must now commit itself to the UN basis of retreating from fossil fuel dependency globally, while rationalising the global emissions market, known as "contraction, convergence, allocation and trade" (C-CAT). This framework is based on the Convention's global principles of precaution, equity and efficiency in that order, and it is already widely supported here and abroad (see http://www.gci.org.uk).
It is vital the government realise that, along with the governments of the other heavy fossil-fuel using economies, as climate change unfolds it is likely to face huge claims for compensation because of the damage its continued emissions are doing.
As presently proposed, the emissions trade envisaged between the US and the UK clearly amounts to a subsidy the two countries will jointly extract from the rest of the world. And the coinage in which it will really be paid is the damage and death that their continued heavy fossil fuel use brings about.
Under C-CAT, revenues from emissions trading will be directed into the global development and deployment of clean and renewable energy sources and compensation for the climate damage not avoided.
Aubrey Meyer - GCI
Richard Douthwaite - Author of the Ecology of Money
Guy Dauncey - Sustainable Communities Consultant
Jennie Sutton - "Baikal Environmental Wave", Irkutsk, Russia.
Sam Ferrer - Green Forum Philippines
Helen N. Mendoza - Haribon Foundation, Philippines
Oras Tynkkynen - climate campaigner Friends of the Earth Finland
Prof. Eduardo Viola - Dept of Int. Relations & Sust. Dev. Brasilia Uni
Brazil.
Dr David Cromwell - Oceanographer, Southampton UK
Reggie Norton - Artists for Guatemala, UK
Demetre Calimeris - SHIS QL 08, CJ 02, CS 10 71620-225 Brasilia DF
James Bruges - Bristol
Titus Alexander - Charter 99
J N von Glahn - Chairman Solar Hydrogen Energy Group
Prof Colin Price - Environmental and Forestry Economics, University of Wales
Prof D Kammen - Director Renewable and Appropriate Energy Berkeley, USA
Richard Sherman - Earthlife Africa
Ryan Fortune - Journalist, Cape Times, Cape Town, South Africa
Dr. Alberto Di Fazio - astrophysicist - President Global Dynamics Institute,
Rome
Daphne Thuvesson -Editor, Forests, Trees and People Newsletter, Sweden
Tammo Oegema - senior researcher on economics and sustainability
Dr Hans Taselaar - INZET Association for North-South Campaigns, Holland
Samantha Berry - Post-graduate student (PhD)
Karla Schoeters - Coordinator of Climate Network Europe
Marc van der Valk - Barataria Netherlands
John Devaney - International Co-ordinator Green Party of England and Wales
Rohan D'Souza - Yale University.
Victoria E. Long - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Tony Cooper - GCI
Independent sign-on letter - Climate, Debt, Equity and Survival.