Last Updated on May 13, 2025
What happens when we manipulate markets to solve the climate crisis?” Discover the emerging “green-gold” multi-billion dollar carbon industry & the people most impacted.
Information
Release Date: Spring 2012
Studio: Wide Open Exposure
Directed By: Amy Miller
Produced By: Byron A Martin, Amy Miller
Synopsis
Hundreds of hydroelectric dams in Panama. Incinerators burning garbage in India. Biogas extracted from palm oil in Honduras. Eucalyptus forests harvested for charcoal in Brazil. What do these projects have in common? They are all receiving carbon credits for offsetting pollution created somewhere else. But what impact are these offsets having? Are they actually reducing emissions? And what about the people and the communities where these projects have been set up?
THE CARBON RUSH takes us around the world to meet the people most impacted. They are the least heard in the cacophony surrounding this emerging “green-gold” multi-billion dollar carbon industry.
From indigenous rain forest dwellers having their way of life completely threatened, to dozens of Campesinos assassinated, to the livelihood of waste pickers at landfills taken away, THE CARBON RUSH travels across four continents and brings us up close to projects working through the United Nations, Kyoto Protocol designed Clean Development Mechanism. This groundbreaking documentary feature asks the fundamental questions “What happens when we manipulate markets to solve the climate crisis? Who stands to gain and who stands to suffer?”
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