Carbon offset sounds promising but the Green Party is critical of how it works in practice. We would echo many of the criticisms of the Durban group, which suggest that the framework within which present policy works is both ineffective and biased toward the interests of elite groups.
First, some schemes are simply fraudulent and are at best based on dubious accounting. For example, if you fly carbon is emitted today but by planting a tree is absorbed over decades (and released if the tree dies). Strong legislation is needed to make sure that carbon is actually off set, often it is not.
Second, some schemes involving taking land out of the hands of local people in developing countries who often practice a low carbon and ecologically sensitive lifestyle. Plantar SA in Brazil have received and Chris Lang has produced evidence of abuse of local people for carbon offset in Uganda.
Third, it allows the relatively prosperous to continue polluting while shifting the burden on to poorer citizens. It reduces guilt without tackling the fundamental problem of moving to a low carbon economy.
Using carbon offset as part of the calculations for carbon reduction nationally is particularly problematic. We need to cut carbon not continue producing it. Carbon offset can be related to the weakness inherent in the Stern approach which while based on good intentions, fails to look at the need for structural change and tends to ignore the political context necessary for meaningful action.
The Democrats are in an awful bind. They have been complicit in this war from the beginning--up to their necks in the death and destruction every bit as much as W. That provides an opening for a new start in American politics. But this means that the Greens and the Libertarians must seize the moment, overcome their dysfunctionality and pose a serious challenge to the two War Parties. The Democrats are on the run; will we go get 'em? Will we live up to the challenge?
"It's disingenuous for them to say they don't have time to vote on the resolution when just today the House listened to a member read two poems and then honor a school sports team," said Boots Wardinski, a landscaper from Newbury.[...] You are breaking down a cornerstone of democracy," one woman accused Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, and House Speaker Gaye Symington, D-Jericho, during a meeting in the Cedar Creek Room at the State House.
"If the Democratic Party won't listen to us, maybe we should just leave the party," yelled one man during the meeting.
I would have rather we rushed the podium and declared ourselves the true and only captains of the ship for a moment or two. At least we would have made the nasty spirited cops hanging around the place actually do something other than look surly. And all those lingering media types would have had something to do other than camping out at the doors of power.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Green Party leaders strongly criticized a proposed Democratic resolution in the U.S. calling for withdrawal by September 2008, and demanded that Congress take action to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq with legislation that would effect an immediate withdrawal.
The Green Party of the United States has opposed the U.S. war on Iraq since late 2002, when President Bush announced plans for an invasion, and has called for impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for a list of high crimes and misdemeanors, including lying to the American people to justify going to war.
When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them. We who protest the war are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.
Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite - provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence - they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home. . .
We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do.
Elaine Brown to Seek
Green Party Presidential Ticket
Former Black Panther Party leader, noted author, community and prison justice activist Elaine Brown announced this week that she intends to seek the Green Party¹s nomination for a presidential bid in 2008.
"The 2006 elections signified a mass rejection of Bush¹s
policies--not a shift to the Democrats. We have arrived at a powerful
moment when the majority of the country is seeking a political
alternative, toward embracing progressive values and realizing a
progressive agenda. I haven¹t seen this potential since the 1960s."
Brown, who ran as a Green in the 2005 Brunswick, Georgia, mayoral
election where Republicans succeeded in illegally removing her name from both the ballot and the voter roll, intends to run on a platform that addresses the interests of poor and working families, in terms of living wages, free healthcare, decent housing and increased funding for public education and higher education; ending the war in Iraq; restoring the environment and bringing about economic parity. Strategically, she intends to target non-voters, specifically women under 30 and African Americans, constituencies she believes are not represented by the nearly identical agendas of the Democrat and Republican parties, stating these crucial constituencies "have the power to build up an alternative party to truly challenge the status quo."
"I believe I have the ability to raise consciousness among disaffected
and disenfranchised poor and working people, women and blacks, to
galvanize them to vote for a real second party. Such a broadening of the Green Party base will allow us to start winning big time, at the state level and nationally, so that we can overturn some of the most egregious policies and laws (like the three strikes crime bill which has so devastated black communities) and introduce progressive legislation.
There are a lot of great community organizations working for change,
performing Sisyphean tasks that cannot address the fundamental problems. I believe the time is right to use the ballot to make the kinds of changes we know must be made to serve the people we represent."
Brown stated she is running as a Green because: "Not only does the Green Party support reparations for slavery, but the party¹s ten key values represent the values and interests of poor and working people. Only the Green Party offers clear positions on the needs of the people, in terms of a living wage, decent housing, food, education, and medical care. The Democrats and Republicans offer black and poor people nothing."
When asked what she hopes to achieve with her run, Brown said: "I know the party can earn a significant increase in votes and membership, which will increase our viability to take congressional seats, state house seats, and local offices; so that we can really start changing the way government operates."
One of the reasons why they are late deciders in campaigns is because...frankly a lot of them think both candidates are liars and you couldn't believe a single thing either one of them said if they told you that the sun was coming up the next morning, and a lot of them, in the final analysis, don't vote.
Independent voters in this state tend to be moderate to conservative on the fiscal side, and on the social side they tend to be liberal to libertarian.
Independents are not the only citizen voters unaffiliated with the two major parties. Why didn't you talk about members of the third parties? Haven't you ever heard of the Green Party?
