A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

Chapter 4Offsets – The fossil economy’snew arena of conflictIn which it is shown how projects designed to ‘compensate’ for continued fossilfuel use are helping to dispossess ordinary people of their land, water, air– and futures.IntroductionAgain and again, this special report has returned to the difficult truththat there is only one way of addressing the climate crisis: to keepmost remaining coal, oil and gas in the ground.To find a democratic way of doing so quickly seems a tall order in aworld whose industrial societies are ever more dependent on fossil energy.As has been detailed in previous chapters, political and businessleaders, experts and even many NGOs, while increasingly alarmed,even despairing, about climate change, have so far shown few signs offacing up to the end of the fossil era.But, as this report has also stressed, there is at least one group – and avery large one – for whom the idea of leaving coal, oil and gas in theground is not necessarily a revolutionary concept. These are peoplewhose lives, livelihoods and land have already been damaged or devastatedby fossil fuel exploration, extraction, refining, transport, useand all the institutions that surround them.For this group, the struggle to stabilise climate – to stop the world’sabove-ground carbon dump from overflowing – is likely to look likeonly one chapter in a much longer and broader history. When indigenouspeoples who have lost their lands through oil drilling meetothers whose Arctic hunting grounds are falling victim to climatechange, when communities battling the construction of gas pipelinesthat would pass over their common lands encounter fenceline communitieswhose children’s health is ruined by air pollution from refineriesor power plants, when opponents of airport expansion meetimpoverished city dwellers who have lost their neighbourhoods toa hurricane strengthened by warming subtropical waters, awarenesscannot but grow that, despite their differences, all such communitiesare facing a common struggle.