Introduction: A new fossil fuel crisis
Chapter 1 of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
first published 9 October 2006
Chapter 1 of the book, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power, traces the growing climate crisis to the mining of coal, oil and gas. It outlines the dangers to survival and livelihoods, ranging from damage to agriculture, more severe storms, floods and droughts, rising sea levels, changes in ocean currents that could freeze Europe while bringing disastrous drought to parts of Asia, increased species extinctions, new threats of disease, and so forth.
The chapter then stresses that the climate crisis is igniting a political conflict over how the world's capacity to clean its atmosphere is to be used -- in other words, how the earth's 'carbon dump' is to be divided up. The reasonable solution to the crisis, it suggests, is to stop fossil carbon flowing out of the ground rather than trying to find new 'dumps' to put it in.