Who benefits from carbon trading? Wall street??? De ja vu…

Annie Leonard, my favourite “make it simple and tie a bow around it” chick, reveals the “devils in the details”:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA6FSy6EKrM[/youtube]

Three problems:

1. Free permits to big polluters

2. Fake offsets

3. A massive distraction

It’s like going on a diet to lose weight. We all know in the long term, diet’s don’t work!

If you wanna reduce carbon there’s a very simple solution (which works for losing weight too): REDUCE YOUR CONSUMPTION.

We need to redesign our lifestyles in a way that reconnects us with the beautiful planet from which we came from and from which we cannot live without. We don’t need carbon to live the good life.

We can get over our addiction to burning carbon in a similar process as getting rid of an addiction to McDonalds. When you come to realise the grotesque nature of consuming McDonalds hamburgers and fries, and you wean yourself off the fat and sugar, you don’t miss it one little bit.

When we start using clean energies, breathing clean ear, enjoying healthier ways of being, working jobs we enjoy that are making our world a better place, we will look back at our lives today in amazement and say:

– how did we ever work so many hours doing jobs we hated?

– how did we allow industry to pump such gross amounts of pollution into our air?

– how did we allow so much destruction to our very source of life?

And (hopefully) we will look back with relief that eventually we did something, we used our creativity to find solution, and to design a better world for ourselves and our children.

I highly doubt we will look back at our politicians debating over carbon tax or carbon trading, with an ounce of honour. It is the ones who decide to tackle the real problems with real solutions, those who make a real difference, that will go down in history.