One more nail in the coffin of ACESA

If anyone needed another reason to Kill the Bill, as Climate SOS has been advocating, this damming report released on September 10, 2009 from Friends of the Earth is it.  Offsets (described in the FofE report), which are allowed under the ACESA bill, are one of the many ways in which the current climate change legislation fails to accomplish its goal of addressing the climate crisis. In fact, ACESA does more harm than good.   Reasons to Kill the Bill are mounting daily, and cannot be ignored.  Join Climate SOS in putting the final nail in the coffin of the climate bill farce called ACESA.

Press release from Friends of the Earth:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The controversial practice of carbon offsetting, via which U.S. polluters send money overseas in exchange for promised—and often pretend—pollution reductions elsewhere, came under fire today in a new report published by Friends of the Earth.

Offsets are a centerpiece of the energy bill that passed the House of Representatives in June, and they may be included in soon-to-be-introduced legislation in the Senate. The report explains how offsets work and concludes that they are a flawed approach to combating global warming.

“It is suicide to base our future on offsets. Offsets provide the illusion of taking action to stop global warming when in fact they often allow emissions to rise,” said Michael Despines of Friends of the Earth, one of the authors of the report. “People need to realize how dangerous offsets can be—they provide a false sense of security because they often do not deliver as promised.”

“The offsets in the bill that recently passed the House could allow the United States to keep increasing emissions of heat-trapping gases until 2029, even though scientists say we need to reduce emissions now,” said Karen Orenstein, a climate finance campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

“A cap-and-trade system contaminated by offsets can open the door wide to what’s known as ‘subprime carbon,’” said Michelle Chan, author of Subprime Carbon, a report released by Friends of the Earth this spring. “When offset credits don’t deliver promised greenhouse gas reductions, they can collapse in financial value, harming broader financial markets. We need to reduce actual emissions, not create a new source of financial risk.”

The report can be viewed at: http://www.foe.org/dangerous-distraction.

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