The California Environmental Justice Movement, a coalition that includes Fresno Metro Ministry and San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advance Project, today announced it opposes carbon trading as a way to slow global warming.

The method benefits benefits big corporations but harms the poor, representatives said. The group said it will fight the method in California.

Carbon trading is considered a way to improve the environment without damaging business. The approach is used in Europe, but environmental justice representatives say it encourages a status quo that is not working.

Here's how the exhanges work: Governments set an emission limit or "cap" for pollution sources. Businesses can earn credits for producing less emissions than the limit. A portion of the credits can then be sold to other businesses that can't achieve the limit.

But environmental justice representatives said the method has been "documented as giving billions of dollars worth of these rights -- free of charge -- to the biggest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases who are responsible for causing the global warming crisis."

Environmental justice representatives say the approach "stands in the way of the transition to clean renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency strategies that are critically necessary to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

The activists said Asian, African-American, Latino, and native American communities in the United States and poor people around the world suffer economic, environmental, and health problems of the fossil fuel economy.