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I am nineteen years old and I am an environmental justice leader. I
have worked and organized on environmental and social justice
issues since I was fourteen years old. The most frustrating part of
being an environmental justice leader is that people think about
environmental or climate justice as protecting polar bears and
penguins. It frustrates me that there are laws to protect fish and
we have to fight for laws to protect our health and wellbeing.

I appeal to you to not pursue an international offset program. My
generation is going to live with the consequence of these
compromises that are being made to protect the interests of the
fossil fuel companies. I am submitting this letter to express my
opposition to your proposal to include international offsets as
part of California’s cap and trade program. 

I am challenging the normalization of low-income communities and
communities of color, such as mine in Southeast Los Angeles,
overburdened with toxicity creating dirty air, water, and soil.
Wilmington alone has three major oil refineries not including the
ones bordering the community. Los Angeles is also impacted by
pollution coming from the Harbor area. My community and surrounding
communities deal with diesel truck pollution, and one major source
is 710 freeway (which physically connects Wilmington to Southeast
Los Angeles) carrying commercial goods from the ports into our
neighborhoods. The fossil fuel industry has a heavy hand in our
communities. The climate crisis is urgent and life threating. 

Policies like REDD do absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions at the source- it only allows for carbon trading, which
is not ethical. REDD may even result in the biggest land grab of
the last 500 years. Folks are told false solutions like REDD
address climate change and are good for the people. This is 100%
false and our elected officials are pushing for a policy that grabs
land, clear-cuts forests, destroys biodiversity, abuses Mother
Earth, pimps Father Sky, and threatens the cultural survival of
indigenous peoples. This policy privatizes the air we breathe,
commodifies the clouds, and allows corporations to buy and sell the
atmosphere. It corrupts the sacred.

REDD is bad for the climate because it allows climate criminals
like Shell and Chevron off the hook. REDD gives companies like
these a legal and official way to call themselves green. This is
harmful to the climate, and to the heart of communities. REDD is
bad for the environment because it includes clear-cutting, logging,
and tree plantations that kill biodiversity. REDD is bad for
Californians because polluters expand sources of pollution and
cause more asthma, more cancer, more sickness, and more death. REDD
is bad for human rights. REDD-type projects are already resulting
in massive land grabs, violent evictions, forced relocation, and
carbon slavery of indigenous people. One clear example of this is
in Guaraqueçaba, Brazil, where Chevron has a REDD project with the
Nature Conservancy, which has a private army that shoots at people
for entering their own forest to use their own resources.  REDD
projects also turn the forests into a militarized zone – with
remote sensors, drones, etc to monitor the sites.

I am disturbed by how the fossil fuel industry and its supporters
are able to influence climate policies that directly affect my
community. I am even more disturbed that politicians care more
about corporate wealth and prioritize money and not health. I am
agitated that the voices of those in communities like mine are
overlooked and excluded in the decision making process. We seek
action and policies from you that ultimately reduces our reliance
on fossil fuels, coal and gas. Our lungs are simply not for sale.

Our negotiators have blinders on- scientists have said we need to
address the climate, Indigenous Peoples have known this for years.

Studies have shown that current governmental policies including the
Paris Accord (the overall text fails to mention human rights or the
rights of Indigenous Peoples) do not actually require action to
meet the goals of pursuing efforts to limit the temperature
increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. These policies
privatize the air through the scheme “carbon neutrality,” where
countries can buy carbon credits and a green pass to pollute. I am
asking you to take the political leadership necessary to
meaningfully and significantly halt the warming and protect the
people. We need system change not climate change, and that requires
us to reject the corporate driven, free trade investment
agreements.