Carbon Pricing; A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance

The climate is changing faster today than it ever has before in human memory. Hurricanes are bigger, stronger, and more frequent, the sea level is rising, and agriculture is increasingly affected by changing rainfall patterns. Even small changes in the climate can have major effects. Ice ages, which recur around every 50,000 to 100,000 years, tend to happen when the Earth’s average temperatures gradually decrease to about 5°C (9° F) cooler than temperature averages in modern times. If the most threatening effects of climate change are to be addressed, research suggests, global temperatures should not rise more than 2°C (3.6° F) above pre-industrial levels (Pachauri et al. 2014). That means leaving in the ground just over 30% of the earth’s oil reserves, 50% of the gas reserves and more than 80% of the coal reserves (McGlade and Ekins 2015). The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), along with other US-based members of the social, environmental and climate justice communities and global alliances have platforms calling for leaving 80% of the current totality of fossil fuel reserves under the ground and ocean in order to avoid global temperatures rising to no more than 1.5°C. How will this transition away from fossil fuel extraction be organized within our respective communities? What will the consequences be for people, our communities, humanity, ecosystems, habitat and all life? Issues of climate and environmental injustice and equity cannot be avoided if such questions are to be addressed.