There are many ways of how we can show our politicians that we need to get back to 350 ppm. One of our new partner organizations in Germany – The Compensators* – decided to delete 350 t of CO2 for October 24th. How could this possibly work?
Here’s a bit of an explanation: One of the instruments the European Union is using to reduce their CO2 Emissions is the EU Emission trading system (EU ETS). Each emitter gets a certain amount of emission allowances allocated by the state, and each allowance stands for one ton of CO2. If they want to emit more than they have allowances for, they have to buy more allowances on the market. The logic behind the EU ETS goes like this: the less allowances there are on the market, the more expensive each allowance gets, and the more likely is it that emitting industries will look into alternative sustainable modes of production.
There are still quite a few problems with the EU ETS – the system was not as efficient in reducing emissions as it could have been in its first test phase, and there are lots of discussions going on about how the system can be made better. But the great thing about the EU ETS is that thanks to the Compensators*, now people can buy emission allowances that can be deleted rather than being used by emitting industries to destroy our planet. Obviously we won’t be able to buy off all existing allowances and force the EU to totally decarbonize their economy, but we can still make s strong point to our European leaders.
Since the start of the “Delete 350 t of CO2” action on 24th of July already 63 t of CO2 have been bought up by supporters of the 350 movement, and the organizers are very hopeful that on October 24th we will be actually able to delete a lot more tons of CO2 than 350 – the only action where we will accept a higher number than 350. Here you can find out more about the action and how you can help deleting EU ETS allowances for October 24th.