First Name: | Rossmery |
---|---|
Last Name: | Zayas |
Email Address: | rossmeryzayas@gmail.com |
Affiliation | ITR Delegate |
Subject | ARB proposal to include international sector-based offsets in cap and trade |
Comment |
I am nineteen years old and I am an environmental justice leader. I have worked and organized on environmental and social justice issues since I was fourteen years old. The most frustrating part of being an environmental justice leader is that people think about environmental or climate justice as protecting polar bears and penguins. It frustrates me that there are laws to protect fish and we have to fight for laws to protect our health and wellbeing. I appeal to you to not pursue an international offset program. My generation is going to live with the consequence of these compromises that are being made to protect the interests of the fossil fuel companies. I am submitting this letter to express my opposition to your proposal to include international offsets as part of California’s cap and trade program. I am challenging the normalization of low-income communities and communities of color, such as mine in Southeast Los Angeles, overburdened with toxicity creating dirty air, water, and soil. Wilmington alone has three major oil refineries not including the ones bordering the community. Los Angeles is also impacted by pollution coming from the Harbor area. My community and surrounding communities deal with diesel truck pollution, and one major source is 710 freeway (which physically connects Wilmington to Southeast Los Angeles) carrying commercial goods from the ports into our neighborhoods. The fossil fuel industry has a heavy hand in our communities. The climate crisis is urgent and life threating. Policies like REDD do absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the source- it only allows for carbon trading, which is not ethical. REDD may even result in the biggest land grab of the last 500 years. Folks are told false solutions like REDD address climate change and are good for the people. This is 100% false and our elected officials are pushing for a policy that grabs land, clear-cuts forests, destroys biodiversity, abuses Mother Earth, pimps Father Sky, and threatens the cultural survival of indigenous peoples. This policy privatizes the air we breathe, commodifies the clouds, and allows corporations to buy and sell the atmosphere. It corrupts the sacred. REDD is bad for the climate because it allows climate criminals like Shell and Chevron off the hook. REDD gives companies like these a legal and official way to call themselves green. This is harmful to the climate, and to the heart of communities. REDD is bad for the environment because it includes clear-cutting, logging, and tree plantations that kill biodiversity. REDD is bad for Californians because polluters expand sources of pollution and cause more asthma, more cancer, more sickness, and more death. REDD is bad for human rights. REDD-type projects are already resulting in massive land grabs, violent evictions, forced relocation, and carbon slavery of indigenous people. One clear example of this is in Guaraqueçaba, Brazil, where Chevron has a REDD project with the Nature Conservancy, which has a private army that shoots at people for entering their own forest to use their own resources. REDD projects also turn the forests into a militarized zone – with remote sensors, drones, etc to monitor the sites. I am disturbed by how the fossil fuel industry and its supporters are able to influence climate policies that directly affect my community. I am even more disturbed that politicians care more about corporate wealth and prioritize money and not health. I am agitated that the voices of those in communities like mine are overlooked and excluded in the decision making process. We seek action and policies from you that ultimately reduces our reliance on fossil fuels, coal and gas. Our lungs are simply not for sale. Our negotiators have blinders on- scientists have said we need to address the climate, Indigenous Peoples have known this for years. Studies have shown that current governmental policies including the Paris Accord (the overall text fails to mention human rights or the rights of Indigenous Peoples) do not actually require action to meet the goals of pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. These policies privatize the air through the scheme “carbon neutrality,” where countries can buy carbon credits and a green pass to pollute. I am asking you to take the political leadership necessary to meaningfully and significantly halt the warming and protect the people. We need system change not climate change, and that requires us to reject the corporate driven, free trade investment agreements. |
Attachment |
Original File Name:
Date and Time Comment Was Submitted: 2016-05-16 13:16:04 |
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