Where does BRANDING come from? Straight out of slavery.
The term “branding” comes straight out of slavery. A red hot cattle brand was burned into an enslaved people’s back, hand or face to identify them as private property.
BRAND – Origin: Old English- brand ‘burning’; of Germanic origin; related to German Brand, also to burn. The verb sense ‘mark with a hot iron’ dates from late Middle English, giving rise to the noun sense ‘a mark of ownership made by branding’ (mid-17th century), whence brand (early 19th century).
As recently as the 1970s, the Indigenous Huni Kui People of the Brazilian Amazon were branded by cattle ranchers as slaves. Now the State of California wants to use the territory of the Huni Kui for carbon trading and offsets instead of reducing pollution at source. Chief Ninawa condemned the carbon trading scheme called REDD at the United Nations as a continuity of the historic colonization and slavery his people have suffered and resisted. He also noted that Nature, including the air we breathe, must not be privatized.
Historically, when peoples’ resistance to slavery and colonialism became widespread, the easiest way to keep enslaving peoples and grabbing their land was to invent new names for slavery and colonialism. For example, rebranding slavery as “share cropping” or “indentured labor” provided a cover for slavery to continue.
Now carbon trading is doing the exact same thing. Worldwide peoples’ resistance to false solutions to climate change like carbon trading has skyrocketed. So now carbon trading is being rebranded, so big polluters can keep doing carbon trading under different names such as carbon pricing or a carbon tax.
Carbon pricing and a carbon tax are just the latest in the constant rebranding of carbon trading to confuse and divide communities. Don’t fall for it! According to the World Bank vii and the oil industry, carbon trading includes carbon pricing and a carbon tax. Carbon pricing and a carbon tax are NOT alternatives to carbon markets. Carbon pricing and a carbon tax are building blocks for carbon trading as Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Australia have shown.
Where does CARBON SLAVERY come from? Straight out of slavery
A carbon trading project in Mozambique, Envirotrade’s N’hambita Community Carbon Project, constitutes multi-generational carbon slavery. For seven years, farmers receive an annual payment for as little as $63 per family to plant and tend trees to offset pollution in Europe and the US, but the contract stipulates that they must continue to do so for 99 years. In the event that the farmers die, their children and their children’s children have to continue to take care of the trees for free. The Africa Report calls the N’hambita project “a clear case of carbon slavery.”
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