A Nigerian environmental activist has declared at the first African Climate Summit that carbon markets are “bogus solutions."

The summit has sought to reframe the African continent, which has enormous amounts of clean energy minerals and renewable energy sources, as less of a victim of climate change driven by the world’s biggest economies and more of the solution.

But investment in the continent in exchange for the ability to keep polluting elsewhere has angered some in Africa who prefer to see China, the United States, India, the European Union and others rein in their emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

“We reject forced solutions on our land,” Priscilla Achakpa, founder of the Nigeria-based Women Environmental Programme, told summit participants on the event’s final day. She urged the so-called “Global North” to “remove yourself from the perspective of the colonial past.”

  • SCB@lemmy.world
    13·
    1 year ago

    Sweatshops, while terrible working conditions, are paid labor and people seek out those jobs because the money is so much better than what they were doing before.

    I am not pro sweatshop. International trade is so good for developing nations that even sweatshops are better than what they had. I’m all for treaties that straight up require investment capital to regulate that any foreign suppliers meet a certain level of safety and health regulations.

    The reason that foreign investment in labor is profitable is not because of sweatshops but because of comparative advantage. An easy example is Mexico where the US dollar is currently worth 18 pesos, meaning you can pay a Mexican laborer 1/5th of what you pay an American and still are actually paying them more relative to their cost of living than an American.

    This is true worldwide and is the essence of global trade, and it is impossible to call this a bad thing without just straight up saying you don’t give a shit about the livelihood of the Global South.

    Comparative advantage is the reason that standards of living are rising worldwide. This investment spurs local capital growth, grows institutions to be inclusive instead of extractive, and in the long term encourages democratic reforms.

    The US should, and does when our President isn’t a drooling imbecile, see global trade as a form of soft power and spreading of democracy.