Trouble in the Air
Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere

This volume edited by South African activists outlines some of the practical threats to public well-being and climatic stability that arise from the growing fashion for carbon trading.

Starting with overviews of the problems with pollution trading and South Africa's energy system, the book passes on to a selection of articles about the country's current debate over carbon trading.

A third section provides rich empirical detail about the fraudulence and injustice of various projects planned for South Africa under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism with the assistance of the World Bank and other agencies.

The book's fourth section, including a conribution co-authored by The Corner House, puts the South African debate in a wider context, providing background about carbon trading's US origins, colonialist consequences, and ineffectiveness in contributing to climate change mitigation.

A fifth section shows how the oil industry benefits from carbon trading, to the detriment of the African people, while a final section contains key recent documents from the carbon trading debate.

The book is published by the Centre for Civil Society (South Africa) and the Transnational Institute (The Netherlands)

Related articles of interest:

• Carbon Trading How It Works and Why It Fails
• Toward a Different Debate in Environmental Accounting The Cases of Carbon and Cost-Benefit
• Privatization of the Air Turns Lethal Pay-to-Pollute Principle Kills South African Activist Sajida Khan
• A Death in Durban Capitalist Patriarchy, Global Warming Gimmickry and our Responsibility for Rubbish
• The CO2 Alibi (video)
• Climate as Investment
• Unregulatability in Financial and Carbon Markets
• Making and Marketing Carbon Dumps Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation
• Memorandum to the Inquiry into the International Challenge of Climate Change: UK Leadership in the G8 and EU
• Shopping for Carbon A New Plantation Economy
• The Kyoto Protocol Neocolonialism and Fraud
• The Dyson Effect Carbon ‘Offset’ Forestry and The Privatization of the Atmosphere
• The ECGD, Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Recommendations from Friends of the Earth to the ECGD
• Democracy or Carbocracy? Intellectual Corruption and the Future of the Climate Debate