Raised Voices

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Hi, my name's Vanessa Black and I live in eThekwini in South Africa. I just want to say that I don't think that carbon trading is a way for us to solve climate problems which is one of the most serious problems we face at the moment. We can't just try to trade out way out of this. We all have to take this a lot more seriously and start thinking about how our economies are structured, how our lives are structured. It's not just about each individual trying to save energy alone. It's about us all working together to live in a completely different way, where we're not relying on goods that are sent all over the world. Where we're not trading all over for things we could be growing in our own gardens or our backyard. It's about the way we plan our settlements. So that we're working and living and communicating with people around us, not completely isolated and then trading with people on the other side of the planet.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Industry and government should start looking at moving us away from fossil fuels. We should be looking for a new energy sources for the world. We should realise that fossil fuels, all these oils and stuff, is a dying energy. It's not going to last long. We should start now looking for alternative energy. We should look for energy that is renewable and energy which is going to be leading us to the future.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Hi, my name is Siziwe Khanyile from South Africa. My position personally is that I don't believe that carbon trading is a solution for climate change. My opinion is that the World Bank should reduce funding to extractive industries and fossil fuel industries and focus on renewable energies to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the impact of climate change.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Hello my name is Muna Lakhani and I'm a black South African. I'd just like to share one or two thoughts about why many of us believe that nuclear power is no solution to climate change. Firstly it's a highly toxic environment that we would create for people for hundreds of thousands of years. And while it's true that the power plant doesn't generate much in the way of climate changing gases, the reality is that the life cycle of uranium actually generates an awful amount. Particularly mining, uranium enrichment and of course long-term disposal. It's also very expensive technology as far as energy is concerned. In the last fifty years of nuclear power in the USA shows that the energy generated by nuclear was only 20% of that which it consumed. It's overall a dead loss to the energy system. So we would rather go for our beautiful natural resources here in the warm South and use solar-thermal technologies, tidal waves, and all these human and development-benign technologies rather than the toxic wastes of nuclear development. Here's a clear message to everybody involved about sustainable development, about caring for people and planet, nuclear will never be the answer. Thank you.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

My name is Mpumelelo Mhlalisi. I'm from Capetown in South Africa from an organisation called Earthlife Africa and also part of the Environmental Justice Networking Forum – the energy task team. What I feel about the issue of climate change is the fact that until now this issue has mostly been discussed by the elites and the converted. People who know about it. And there has been less or little discussion with the people on the ground that is the grassroots people. People who are directly affected by the consequences of the issue of climate change. This issue of climate change directly affects the poor in terms of access to water, access to food, access to work. Because of climate change people are not able to have food, grow their own food, and harvest their own food at the time they used to get their food from. Because of climate change there's less rain and more winter. But ordinary people don't understand that this is the impact of climate change. You get the situation where the people who are the biggest polluter in this world are the people who have access to resources like energy, food, water, transport and all these basic necessities for human life. But the consequences of the whole issue of climate change affects directly the poorest of the poor. Those are the imbalances and the dynamics that we encounter because of the issue of climate change.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

I'm Prishani, I'm from South Africa. I work in the Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johannesburg basically struggling for free basic services. I think all of us in our different struggles are fighting against a common enemy – capitalism. I think for too long now we've been too separate in our struggles. We need to start seeing our common enemy and start coming together to fight in our different spaces and the different issues that face us directly.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Hi, my name's Norman Philip and I come from the town of Grangemouth in Scotland which is right next to BP Grangemouth one of the biggest oil refineries in Europe. Climate change has a number of dimensions but the dimension I'm concerned about is the people that have to live next to the fenceline. The people who have daily disturbance by noise and transport of the oil industry. And they don't see the benefits necessarily that the global corporations like BP are benefiting from at the community's expense. I think as oil becomes more and more scarce, the communities from where I come from will suffer more. Because the industry that's been built up to service the oil industry has a number of contaminated sites which the big companies will move away from and it'll be the community that will left to clear up these sites. BP in Grangemouth has already sold off their petroleum to a smaller company. And my fear is that in the next generation there will be no oil production in the town that I come from and we'll be left with an industrial wasteland.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

We don't have a say in how they exploit the planet, we don't have say in how it's done. And if we did I think things would happen in a very different way. But there is this attitude that basically we've got to find a way to make these corporate entities nice. Some of these people that are running these companies are probably very nice people. But it's not because they are nasty that they do these horrific things to the environment, it's because it is highly profitable. And they get subsidised by you and I to actually make that profit. It's called development. That's what the name of the game is. I think we have to be really hard to say look let's look at why this is happening and it's happening because it is a profitable enterprise for people to exploit natural resources. I think a good example of the kind of contradictions people get into is this whole debate about carbon trading. It's absurd. Imagine if you said well okay this year New York only had X number of murders and in Nairobi they had Y number of murders. So Nairobi has under-killed this year so it can sell off how many people can be killed somewhere else. I mean it's absurd. It's not a system we can accept and I think some really hard talking needs to be done about this.

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Hi I am Les. I live nearby the Grangemouth refinery so I live close to the petro-chemical industry. I've been an environmentalist for a few years now. And although I can say that yes I am genuinely concerned about the climate change issue, I'm even more concerned by the way that environmental groups and non -governmental organisations have become focused on it to such an extent that they don't really talk about anything else. I've noticed that if there's ever a problem it immediately becomes associated with climate change. As a sign of climate change. For instance if there's a flooding, that's put down to climate change resulting in extra rain. It's not attributed to bad flood management practices. I find it's difficult to have any decent debate on general environmental problems like habitat destruction, because there's so much focus put on climate change issues. Saying that “we've got to get climate change under control otherwise habitat conservation is a useless exercise

• watch the video

• listen to the audio

Hi, my name's Firoze. I'm from Kenya. You asked me what I thought was the main problem with the environmental movement. There's no doubt that they've done a huge amount to bring publicity around the major crises facing humanity in terms of the destruction of the planet, the destruction of communities and so on. But the real problem is that it's presented as if this is a problem for humanity to solve. This is something that we are responsible for creating. Over and over on the radio you will hear this is what humans have done to the planet. But it's not humans who have done it to the planet in that sense. Why is it that we take the blame? Why is it that we are held responsible for decisions that are made by corporate entities? I don't decide or benefit from the profits that these companies make. I don't have say in where they exploit and extract resources. I don't have a say in how communities lives will be affected by this exploitation. So it's not a question of saying it's humanity who is causing this problem, it is in fact corporate entities who are doing it.