Carbon Pricing
A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance

by Tamra Gilbertson

first published 10 November 2017

Twenty years' experience has proved that carbon trading is making climate change worse. Rather than combating the continued use of fossil fuels, it is designed in a way that keeps them coming out of the ground. Faced with this reality, some environmentalists, states and corporations are advocating carbon taxes as an "alternative". But carbon taxes are no better equipped to address the roots of global warming than carbon trading.

Convinced that the ineffectiveness, injustices, racism and colonialism inherent in both kinds of carbon pricing demands a unified, international resistance, the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Climate Justice Alliance have produced this report, the first of an anticipated series. "We want to see 80 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves remain under the soil and beneath the ocean floor," the two groups conclude, "in conjunction with a ban on all new exploration and exploitation of oil, tar sands, oil/gas shale, coal, biofuels, uranium and natural gas, including for transportation infrastructures."