Final Judgement of the Permanent People's Tribunal
Permanent People's Tribunal
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international organization established in 1979 to examine and pronounce independent judgements on severe violations of human and peoples’ rights that do not find a space in the procedures of established courts of international law, held public hearings on the continuing violence in West Papua at Queen Mary University of London between 27-29 June 2024, following an indictment prepared by international and Indonesian human and environmental rights organizations and associations.
Larry Lohmann
The colonialism inside today’s practices of energy transition becomes evident both from experiences of close listening to participants in grassroots struggles over extractivism and livelihood and from an engaged examination of the histories of energy and transition. In turn, greater awareness of the colonial nature of energy transition can fruitfully feed into movement-building around climate change.
The Contradictions of Cost-Benefit Analysis
Larry Lohmann
For many decades, the technique called "cost-benefit analysis" (CBA) has played a complex, conflict-provoking role in social and environmental politics worldwide. This draft chapter for a forthcoming book on the political economy of the environment argues that it may prove useful to popular movements to understand CBA as part of the longer history of business' use of machines in its war against labor.
Insights from Artificial Intelligence
Larry Lohmann
Larry Lohmann
For decades, students of environmental law were taught that global warming was a problem of unpriced externalities. Smart policy entailed sending price signals to market actors that nudge them to reduce emissions and push growth in a “green” direction. Thirty years later, as we barrel towards catastrophic warming, this lodestar of green capitalism increasingly looks to have led intellectuals down the wrong path. Nevertheless, many of the models and methods of 1990s environmental economics continue to circulate unquestioned in law school classrooms and beyond.
Court Judgment on European Oil Companies Found to be Incompatible with OECD Anti-Corruption Convention
HEDA (Nigeria), Re:Common (Italy) and The Corner House
Italy's recent acquittal of oil multinationals Shell and ENI for bribery in Nigeria has been severely criticised by the body that acts as guardian of one of the main international anti-bribery conventions. Details of this important case can be found in the attached press release.
A submission on the case co-authored by HEDA, a Nigerian human rights and anti-corruption group; Re:Common, an Italian non-governmental organization and The Corner House is also available above.
Larry Lohmann
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a growing role in surveilling nature, creating and organizing data about nature conservation, and lubricating the circulation of pollution rights and other ecosystem service tokens in the international extractivist economy.
But what exactly is AI? What are its politics? What is its ecology? A presentation for a recent forum organized by the POLLEN Political Ecology Network introduces these and other questions about a phenomenon of increasing significance in the 21st century, and is now available from The Corner House upon request.
A Mechanism Rotten at the Core
World Rainforest Movement
Since it was introduced in 2007, the scheme known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) has become a prominent part of forest policy around the world, affecting forest-dependent communities especially in countries possessing tropical forests.
An Exchange
Simon Pirani, Larry Lohmann and David Schwartzman
A pamphlet issued by People and Nature (www.peoplenature.org) brings together contributions from three authors to a recent forum on the role of fossil fuels and the meaning of "energy" in capitalist society. The discussion emphasizes the importance of analyzing commodities, commons, class, history and physics when talking about transitions away from fossil fuels and from capitalism.
Larry Lohmann
The new, “green” state/corporate system that was heralded by capitalist visionaries in the early 2020s (including Larry Fink of BlackRock, Mark Carney of the United Nations, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Elon Musk of Tesla) envisioned both an intensification and an extensification of ecological plunder and degradation. The types of centralization involved, argues this discussion paper, amounted to a great deal more than just “greenwashing,” extending to worldwide re-regulation of labour and land.
Soumitra Ghosh and Larry Lohmann
As part of a "Democracy Debate" hosted by the Global Working Group: Beyond Development, Indian activist and writer Soumitra Ghosh penned an intervention entitled "Revolutionary Immanence? Exploring the Political Idea of Social Movements". Among the commentators on Ghosh's article was Larry Lohmann of The Corner House. Ghosh's article and Lohmann's comment are reproduced together in the PDF above. Other interventions in the debate can be found at https://beyonddevelopment.net/category/democracy_debate/.
after Historic Legal Victory against Chevron
Union de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco
Despite suffering 50 years of some of the world's worst oil-related contamination at the hands of Chevron and winning an historic 28-year battle that promised to result in a cleanup of the company's toxic legacy, Ecuadorian Indigenous plaintiffs in the case are now under legal attack from their own government.
Larry Lohmann
The accounting procedures used by the programmes grouped under the heading "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus" (REDD+) are colonialist even when they are used by people with brown skins. And the more correctly these accounting procedures are carried out, the more colonialist REDD+ becomes.
Francesco Panie interviews Larry Lohmann
Francesco Panie of the Italian environmental magazine La Nuova Ecologia interviews Larry Lohmann about how carbon markets work and why, even after 20 years of making climate change worse, they continue to befuddle many environmentalists and professors.
International Groups Condemn Detention and Fanciful Charges
International anti-corruption and human rights groups have strongly condemned the detention of leading Nigerian anti-corruption activist Olanrewaju Suraju of HEDA, one of the first non-governmental groups to expose corruption allegations surrounding the acquisition of the OPL 245 oil field by oil multinationals Shell and Eni.
Joint Statement on the Shell/Eni Verdict from Global Witness, The Corner House, HEDA and Re:Common
Environmental and social justice groups have condemned Italy’s anti-corruption laws as unfit for purpose following the acquittal of oil multinationals Shell and Eni on international corruption charges in Milan. Thirteen other defendants were also found not guilty.
Landmark Judgment in Case of Okpabi and Others v Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDS) and Another
On Friday 12 February 2021, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Court of Appeal was wrong to refuse villagers from the Ogale and Bille communities in the Niger Delta permission to sue Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) in London for damages allegedly caused by numerous oil spills from Shell oil pipelines.
The Appeal Court had previously ruled that the English courts have no jurisdiction to hear the case because RDS was found not to exercise control over its Nigerian subsidiaries.
Calor, Tiempo y Colonialismo
Larry Lohmann
Climate movements and energy transition movements customarily ask how energy might be generated and distributed more justly or democratically. Or how it might be made “green” or “renewable”. But one thing they usually don’t talk about is whether energy itself is unjust and undemocratic. And whether energy itself is anti-ecological.
And if so, What Does that Mean for Left Strategy?
Larry Lohmann
In the 19th century, many new equivalences became embedded in the landscape among heat, mechanical force, muscle power, electricity, magnetism and so forth. At the same time, other relations also spread across some of the same spaces: wage labour relations, cotton slavery, new flows of waste and waste work and so on. These relations represent the hierarchies coded in thermodynamic or abstract energy. They are key to understanding today's energy as white, colonialist and patriarchal.
Larry Lohmann
This half-hour presentation suggests that worldwide climate movement-building can benefit by striving toward more critical and historically-informed understandings of climatology, thermodynamics, green energy theory and dominant types of apocalypse thinking.
None of these four currents of thought, it argues, can form part of a realistic basis for global climate movement-building until the whiteness of each is better understood and worked on, particularly by middle-class climate activists from the global North.
Larry Lohmann
This chapter from the free online peer-reviewed book Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities: Knowledge, Land, Labor, Biomass, Energy, and Politics, available at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-68944-5.pdf, argues that any serious study of bioenergy and global inequalities must take account of the oppression inherent in thermodynamic energy itself.
Contradictions of "Artificial Intelligence" in 21st-Century Capitalism
Larry Lohmann
What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so, argues this version of an essay published in Socialist Register 2021, is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.
Supply Chains, Logistics and Labour
Nicholas Hildyard
Logistics -- now a $4.7 trillion industry and said to be the world's largest employer -- is reshaping global production, distribution and consumption.
The implications for labour are profound. Automation in combination with just-in-time logistics regimes are subjecting workers to degrading just-in-time labour practices. More work is now contingent piece work; workers are increasingly subjected to electronic monitoring; work is increasingly degraded; and new forms of unpaid labour are proliferating, particularly online.
Larry Lohmann
Calls for reparations are resounding throughout the world today: for example, reparations for the injuries of centuries of white supremacy in the Anglo world of the US and the UK; reparations for centuries of colonialist extractivism in Latin America; payment for the immense “climate debt” owed to the global South; and reparations for the damages of male sexual predation, as exemplified in the Korean and Filipina comfort women struggles, the #MeToo movement, and many others in the Americas and elsewhere.
Resignifying Energy Transitions: Some Latin American Perspectives
Verónica Villa, Tatiana Roa Avendaño, Gabriela Cabaña, Cecilia Chérrez, Larry Lohmann
Este artículo resume y sintetiza un diálogo sobre la necesidad de resignificar las propuestas dominantes para una transición energética.1 Estas iniciativas, coincidieron los participantes, sólo están profundizando los problemas ambientales y los conflictos sociales en los territorios de América Latina.
Larry Lohmann
This exploratory working paper attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labor known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.
A Letter to the UK's Foreign Secretary
The Corner House and others have written to the UK's Foreign Secretary to urge immediate action to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in northern and eastern Syria where tens of thousands now lack water due to the actions of Turkey and its proxies following their military occupation of border areas in 2019.
Coming to Terms with Climate Change on the North Atlantic Left
Larry Lohmann
"System change, not climate change" has long been a rallying cry of climate justice movements in the global North, as elsewhere. But, argues this contribution to the Indian online magazine GroundXero, the slogan can have several different meanings, with markedly different consequences for practical action, depending on who gets to define what "climate change" is.
Bienvenidos a la economía verde
Larry Lohmann
The 2021 Mekong ASEAN Environment Week, organized around the theme of "Redesigning ASEAN: People's Voices in World Crisis" (https://maew2021.simdif.com/), featured a panel on "Sharing the World with ASEAN" (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations).
The Corner House contributed a presentation on the global "green economy". A PDF version is available upon request from The Corner House, in either Spanish or English.
Interview with Dr Jeff Miley
In a wide-ranging interview with activist academic Dr Jeff Miley of Peace in Kurdistan, Nicholas Hildyard discusses the climate crisis, solidarity, self-determination and the politics of environmentalism:
https://youtu.be/J7uh15mKBs4
Offworld Colonies, Racist Repression and ‘Nature-Based Solutions’
Larry Lohmann
For the world’s richest and most powerful men -- men like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates -- the global environmental crisis has finally arrived. But what it means for them is not what it means for most people.
The UK anti-corruption group Corner House has threatened legal action in response to a widely publicised Complaint sent on behalf of former Attorney General Mr Mohammed Bello Adoke SAN to Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police.
Adoke’s Complaint alleges “various acts of forgery” by “the parties responsible for the petition, investigations and commencement of the criminal trial at the court of Milan against the individuals/entities connected with the OPL 245 settlement agreement”.
European Development Bank Funding of Feronia-PHC Oil Palm Plantations in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Jutta Kill
Campaigners from across Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have published a new report chronicling one of the most scandalous failures of development bank investment in agriculture. The report details how Europe's largest development banks poured upwards of US$150 million into an oil palm plantation company in the DRC despite the company's land conflicts with communities and allegations of serious human rights violations and opaque financing made against it.
Twenty Years after "Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation"
Larry Lohmann
In 1999, a report called Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation was published. It resulted from a collaboration between the United Nations Intergovernmental Forum on Forests and a large group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the World Rainforest Movement (WRM). The aim of the process was to help policy makers better understand the underlying causes of deforestation and to suggest how they might address them.
A Time for Movement Reflection?
Larry Lohmann
Many climate activists from the global North are unfamiliar with the idea that today’s dominant concepts of climate and energy -- together with the disciplines of climatology and thermodynamics -- are white.
Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust
Larry Lohmann
The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.
Covid-19 et la fin du corps ouvrier moderne
Larry Lohmann
The vast territory of transnational capitalism is partly constituted by particular kinds of human bodies. One of those bodies is the body of the wage worker. The worker who is supposed to show up on time every day. The worker who gets only so many sick days each month. The worker who can be relied on to come in and make money for the boss, year in and year out.
Toward a Refreshed Agenda for Climate Activism?
Larry Lohmann
Climate movements need to be wary about thinking about climate in terms of carbon. It is more effective to think about it in terms of work.
This is hard because the idea that climate is about carbon remains embedded in much climate thinking on both the right and the left. An illustrated presentation -- which includes a special guest appearance by the Covid-19 virus -- discusses both the difficulties and the necessity of moving on.
Groups Call for Urgent Inquiry into Failure of Ministers to Act despite Whistleblower Warnings
Global Justice Now and The Corner House
The Corner House and Global Justice Now are calling for a parliamentary inquiry following a report from the BBC's award-winning Africa Eye team on concerns about alleged fraud, bribery and other highly-questionable business practices by two British managers appointed by a UK aid-backed private equity fund to run its investee Kenyan firm Spencon.
See the downloadable press release above.
A California Crime Caper
Larry Lohmann
The bestselling Los Angeles crime novelist James Ellroy is known for his entertaining re-imaginings of US history between 1940-1970. His novels reflect his dark vision of what police, politicians, bureaucrats, criminals, movie stars and intellectuals were really thinking and doing behind the scenes, but never appeared in the official record. Ellroy calls it the news that was “unfit to print.”
Trabajo, justicia y la mecanización de la interpretación
Larry Lohmann
The biggest frontier of mechanization of the past ten years has been the automation, broadly speaking, of that particular type of human labour known as interpretation.
Some Stretching Exercises
Larry Lohmann
This presentation at a recent conference at the University of Jena takes the view that contending with bioenergy development effectively will require social movements to respect – but also to update carefully – Marxian accounts of capital accumulation that tie together the labour theory of value, surplus accumulation, the “contradictory unity” of living and dead labour, mechanization, “vampirism,” class struggle, and the tendency toward falling profit rates.
Unacknowledged Struggle among Global Warming Movements
Larry Lohmann
What is it to be a climate movement? That depends on how climate change is defined. The tensions dividing today’s climate movements are also tensions among different conceptions of climate. Building better alliances around global warming action means first recognizing that there are ongoing conflicts over what climate is.
La ecología de la mecanización de la confianza
Larry Lohmann
The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes, artificial intellligence – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environmental issues.
Permanent People's Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change
Alberto Acosta Espinosa, Lilia América Albert Palacios, Andrés Barreda, Upendra Baxi, Gill H. Boehringer, Maria Fernanda Campa, Louis Kotzé, Larry Lohmann, Francesco Martone, and Antoni Pigrau Solé
In 2018, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal -- established in 1979 as a continuation of the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966-67) and Latin America (1973-76) -- was requested by community organizations and academic groups to formulate an Advisory Opinion on fracking and other unconventional oil and gas extraction techniques.
In writing their Opinion, the judges considered material from two years of investigations and regional tribunals in a number of countries. The final session heard summary testimonies via a virtual platform on 14-18 May 2018.
Nicholas Hildyard
This presentation to a meeting of Campaign Against Criminalisation of Communities (CAMPACC) asks: what “flashes of mutual recognition” might arise from deepening processes of mutual learning between communities criminalised by the “War on Terror” and those criminalised by “the Securitisation of Everything”.
Comments for the California Air Resources Board on the California Tropical Forest Standard and Draft Environmental Analysis
Larry Lohmann
California’s Air Resources Board has postponed until April 2019 any decision on whether to endorse a Tropical Forest Standard (TFS). The TFS purports to be a step toward ensuring the "environmental integrity" of schemes to use carbon-storing forests to generate greenhouse gas pollution rights for California industry. The postponement came after a 15 November 2018 public meeting featuring testimonies by academics and activists criticizing the TFS.
Nicholas Hildyard
The World Bank has invested almost a quarter of a billion dollars in Seven Energy, an oil and gas company operating in Nigeria. Months before the first investment was made, the then Governor of Nigeria's Central Bank alleged that the company's flagship contract involved operating a scheme that was looting billions of dollars in state revenues. A number of the people associated with the contract are now either on the run or charged with money laundering.
Larry Lohmann
Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”.
Larry Lohmann
Today, a capitalist organization of fire dominates the world. Biotic fires in the open -- which ordinary people have long used to nurture agriculture and forests -- tend to be denigrated, even criminalized. More intense fossil-fuelled fires in combustion chambers, boilers and turbines, meanwhile, are tacitly encouraged as a sign of progress and civilization.
What with climate change and worldwide struggles to defend livelihoods against fossil fuels, vernacular struggles against this perverse organization of fire are sure to intensify.
Nicholas Hildyard
Scarcity has a stranglehold grip on much of the discourse of polite society, to the point where it is simply taken for granted that just about every social “problem” is, at root, a problem that arises from scarcity. Numerous conflicts result. And the dominant perspective is constantly being challenged by unpolite society.
That Depends -- Who Are "We"?
Larry Lohmann
Putting a price on carbon isn't a serious strategy for addressing climate change. It can’t touch the roots of the problem, and isn't designed to. However, it continues to be embraced by business and the state because it's effective in delaying and diverting action on global warming.
An illustrated 13-page paper arguing these points -- based on a presentation at the University of Sheffield -- is available from The Corner House on request.
Sarah Sexton
The “delight and beauty” inherent in acts of sewing, banner-making and crafting stained glass helped propel early 20th-century suffragists’ political struggles in pursuit of women’s equality.
A commentary
Nicholas Hildyard
To what extent can – or should – social movements rely on the institutionalisation of rights to address issues of social injustice?
Presentation to Seminar on Ecological and Gender Dimensions of the Democratic Confederalist Approach in Kurdistan
Nicholas Hildyard
If taken seriously, the recognition that humans are part of nature, not separate from it – and that all forms of life have a right to existence – sets a revolutionary trajectory radically opposed to that of mainstream environmentalism.
A Critical Introduction to Infrastructure Mega-Corridors
Nicholas Hildyard and Xavier Sol
We live in an age of “extreme infrastructure”, the most visible manifestation of which are “mega-corridors”. This study examines the political and economic interests driving such “mega-corridors” and the engineering of new “tradescapes”.
A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance
Tamra Gilbertson
Twenty years' experience has proved that carbon trading is making climate change worse. Rather than combating the continued use of fossil fuels, it is designed in a way that keeps them coming out of the ground. Faced with this reality, some environmentalists, states and corporations are advocating carbon taxes as an "alternative". But carbon taxes are no better equipped to address the roots of global warming than carbon trading.
Some Lessons from Struggle
Larry Lohmann
One of the biggest buzzwords in forest and land conservation today is “rights”. Environmental NGOs, legal activists, corporate consultants, international institutions and many others are championing “rights-based approaches” as key to effective environmental policy. But, argues this short article from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, the “rights” discourse can be a source of confusion.
Larry Lohmann
In its never-ending struggles to get the upper hand over workers, business has often dreamed of perpetual motion machines: devices that could deliver work without workers or the fossil fuels needed to power the engines that discipline them. The dream can only ever be a dream, however. Not only are perpetual motion machines physically impossible. Even if they could be built, they would destroy capital itself. Business cannot do without the human and nonhuman activity that it coopts, degrades and exhausts in cycle after cycle, because it is the source of the value it seeks.
Nicholas Hildyard
A presentation to a workshop in Baghdad, Iraq, on "Water as a Tool for Peace-building" looks at how salinisation, reduced water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and dam construction upstream are triggering conflicts — and how these conflicts are rooted in the denial of democratic decision-making processes.
Larry Lohmann
Effective research and other action in the field of environment and law requires an understanding of how profoundly both have changed under neoliberalism. The growth of the neoliberal state amid productivity crisis and the move to a more financialized, rent-based global economy has been accompanied by sweeping legal innovations relating to property, trade, investment, rent and criminality as well as an expansion in the mass of written law and in the gaming of legislation.
An economy for whom?
Nicholas Hildyard
This presentation argues that extreme inequality worldwide has not come about by accident, outlines some of the causes and the best hopes of tackling them, particularly “commoning”: actions that assert the collective right of all, not just the few, to survival.
Infrastructure Corridors in Context
Nicholas Hildyard
“Extreme infrastructure” – the proposed construction of roads, railways and energy and water corridors worldwide on a vast scale – is reinforcing the divide between those who benefit from extraction, production and finance and those whose class interests are opposed to “just-in-time” delivery, cheap labour and the ravaging of the earth in pursuit of profit.
Trabajo, Desechos y Clima
Larry Lohmann
What are the effects of capital’s restless attempts to appropriate unpaid cleanup work done by humans and the rest of nature? Neglect of this question has led to repeated confusions about what waste is and how it might better be approached. A refreshed perspective is especially important in an era in which discussions about solid waste have come to focus largely on landfills and climate discussions to focus on real or imaginary carbon sinks.
Comercio de servicios ecosistémicos
Larry Lohmann
Today's trade in ecosystem services tokens (carbon, biodiversity and so forth) has evolved as one component of capital’s troubled struggles to seek new global arrangements following the collapse of the compromises into which it was forced during the 20th century -- compromises that included welfarism, developmentalism and conventional environmental regulation.
Conversations on "Commons" and "Commoning"
This webdoc captures conversations between activists from diverse social movements about obstacles to their work through the lens of the "commons".
Nicholas Hildyard
This presentation challenges the current rush towards mega infrastructure projects that are being planned the world over as a means of boosting economic recovery.
Institutionalised Corruption and Development Finance
Nicholas Hildyard
Many lawful, routine, accepted practices in today's economic system are regarded by the general public as corrupt. They have created a distorted, privatised vision of the “public interest” and represent a new trend of state capture by for-profit interests.
Nicholas Hildyard
This presentation explores the connections between injustices carried out as part of the 'War on Terror' and against those opposing fossil fuels.
NIcholas Hildyard
Understanding the processes whereby a shared understanding evolves of what constitutes a ‘good society’ is key to effective organising for social change.
An Exchange about Offset Markets
Larry Lohmann
All carbon offsets, biodiversity offsets, water offsets and so forth are premised on the idea that there can be criteria for distinguishing between “additional” and “nonadditional” projects. But there can be no such criteria.
Nicholas Hildyard
This article is drawn from the book Licensed Larceny.
La perte, la guérison et la lutte
Hendro Sangkoyo
Activists occasionally allow themselves to treat stories of suffering or healing as “proto-political”, or to bracket the space and time in which people experience loss as politically empty. Why dwell on endless horror stories, they tell themselves, when what is needed is comprehensive action on a higher, more political level? “Don’t mourn, organize!” goes the well-known movement slogan. In reality, argues this article from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, this "emptying out of the space of loss" can undermine political work.
Undemocratic, elitist and unstable
Nicholas Hildyard
This short blog highlights the financial guarantees underpinning today's boom in infrastructure spending.
Larry Lohmann
Mainstream scientific and political work on climate change tends to be organized around a binary division between adaptation and mitigation. Global warming – modelled as a nonhuman “nature” of molecular flows and heat exchanges – is seen to impact on an undifferentiated “society”, which returns the favour by, for example, limiting greenhouse gas emissions or re-engineering “nature” so that it can absorb more of them.
Infrastructure, Financial Extraction and the global South
Nicholas Hildyard
Inequality is as much a problem of wealth and the rich as it is of poverty and the poor. Licensed larceny is a proxy for how effectively elites have constructed institutions that extract value from the rest of society, for example, through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to build new infrastructure. How might social justice activists best respond? What oppositional strategies unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
A Hypothesis
Larry Lohmann
The rise of ecosystem services presents both the necessity and the opportunity to rethink issues of capital and nature. A presentation from a Cambridge University conference entitled “Rights to Nature: Tracing Alternative Political Ecologies against the Neoliberal Environmental Agenda”, organized by Elia Apostolopoulou and Jose Cortes-Vazquez, addresses two of these issues in particular. First, what, if any, role do the novel transactions in ecosystem services that have emerged since the 1970s play in capital accumulation, and why have they emerged now?
. . . talking climate in public space
India Climate Justice Collective
The sixth issue of the new Mausam, the India Climate Justice Collective's magazine connecting climate debates to local struggles over land, livelihood and food rights, highlights the acidification of the oceans caused by high emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; analyses the December 2015 Paris climate agreement; and reports on a WTO judgment against India’s solar power plans.
Expanding the Concept of Environmental Racism
Larry Lohmann
Classically, environmental racism is defined in terms of the racialized distribution of pollution. But it's also about the ways people, ethnic groups, nature and pollution are co-defined in the first place. This aspect of environmental racism is perhaps even more visible in forests than elsewhere, argues this piece from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin, available here in English, French and Portuguese.
A Spanish-language version of the article is also available from The Corner House upon request.
Larry Lohmann
"Green Growth" is not about solving ecological crises but rather about creating new opportunities that business can take advantage of while diffusing responsibility for the crises. It is full of contradictions and resistances to it are inevitable.
Some Questions from the Netherworld
Nicholas Hildyard
This public lecture raises questions about the direction of mainstream discussions on energy, technology, finance, accumulation, and organising.
Nicholas Hildyard
It is critical to recognise that energy is a labour issue if the shift away from fossil fuels is to do more than just help elites find new tools for exploiting the majority world.
El Cuestionamiento de la Transición Energética
Larry Lohmann
What is an energy transition? Usually the term signifies a shift away from fossil fuels and the technologies that require them. The question that naturally follows is: how is this shift to be financed? This short paper for the Spanish e-newsletter ECOS outines some of the pitfalls associated with this way of looking at climate and energy issues. It argues that it may be helpful to take a step back and begin with a different set of questions: What is energy? Is energy what we really want? Or do we perhaps want to open ourselves to different ways of organizing nature?
Movements, Action and Solidarity towards Climate Justice
Joanna Cabello and Tamra Gilbertson (eds)
The main focus of the December 2015 climate negotiations in Paris, as of previous climate summits, is on protecting and advancing the interests of large corporations and banks. This booklet aims at helping to build stronger, more diverse and radical movements that can not only take on the root causes of global warming, but also engage successfully against the counterproductive “solutions” advocated at such conferences.
A Proposal for the 2015 Paris Climate Summit
Oilwatch International
During 20 years of UN climate negotiations, countries classified according to the UN climate convention as Annex I and II have prevented specific and binding actions to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, the root of global warming. The international Oilwatch network is proposing a new Annex – Annex Zero – of the Indigenous Peoples and nations, provinces, states, sub-national regions and localities that actually are doing something to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and is collecting commitments from like-minded people who would like to be part of Annex Zero.
Larry Lohmann
In autumn 2015 California's Air Resources Board invited comments on its White Paper entitled “Scoping Next Steps for Evaluating the Potential Role of Sector-Based Offset Credits under the California Cap-and-Trade Program, Including from Jurisdictional 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' Programs ”.
Both the White Paper and The Corner House's submission on it are available here.
Nicholas Hildyard
A background paper (available on request) details the stark divide between rich and poor nationally, regionally and internationally, as value has been progressively extracted over the past few decades from ordinary people.
. . . talking climate in public space
India Climate Justice Collective
The fifth issue of Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice Collective that connects climate debates to local struggles over land, livelihood and food rights, has a multi-pronged critique of India's INDC – Intended Nationally Determined Contribution – submitted to the UNFCCC in anticipation of the December 2015 climate meeting in Paris.
Larry Lohmann
"Making common cause" -- what does it mean? Finding shared issues? Or also seeing your struggle as a metaphor for others'?
Servicios Ambientales: Un Nuevo Tipo de Naturaleza Colonial
Larry Lohmann
The new "nature" consisting of environmental services is being designed to serve existing industrial powers and perpetuate the destructive logic of capital, not to modify or overturn it. Like older capitalist natures of "resources" and militarized "conservation", this new nature is colonialist in numerous respects. A presentation from a workshop at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador offers visual illustrations of these points. The powerpoint is available from The Corner House on request in both Spanish and English.
Larry Lohmann
Just as what is regarded as labour, land, health and mobility have changed under neoliberalism, so too has what is regarded as climate. Under previous phases of capitalism, climate was construed as part of a nature external to, yet interfacing with, society – as a condition for accumulation; as a resource; as an object of conservation; as a computer-modellable system. The neoliberal state builds on these conceptions in reconstructing climate as rentable and marketable units – and climate change as something a separate, monolithic society must "adapt" to.
Scarcity, Politics, Securitisation and the Green Economy
Nicholas Hildyard and Larry Lohmann
Social justice, political organising and alliance-building were among the themes raised by The Corner House at a 2015 academic conference on resource politics.
Fact-Finding Mission report on the Sardar Sarovar dam
In May 2014, the Indian government authorised the height of the controversial Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river in central-western India to be raised. Thousands of people, villages and towns will be submerged. A Fact-Finding Mission report calls for construction work to be halted immediately until all those people affected have been appropriately resettled.
Climate Change as Labour Issue
Larry Lohmann
To make the alliances they may need, radical social movements can benefit from questioning not only the distribution and methods of production of energy, but also the 19th-century concept of energy itself -- a constitutive element of the very problems the term is commonly used to discuss. A presentation available from The Corner House upon request sketches some of the issues involved.
Las injusticias de la ciencia del clima
Larry Lohmann
People often talk about the unjust distribution of the effects of climate change, and analyze injustices committed in the name of climate change “mitigation” and “adaptation”. But, argues this brief piece in Paths beyond Paris: Movements, Action and Solidarity towards Climate Justice, edited by Joanna Cabello and Tamra Gilbertson, there are also injustices inherent in mainstream climate science, and in the ways that climate science shapes how we approach climate itself. How climate activists orient themselves with respect to these injustices has a great deal to do with how they build alliances.
¿Qué es naturaleza? ¿Tiene la naturaleza derechos?
Larry Lohmann
Much of environmental politics is concerned with the question of what nature is, and whether it has rights. This is one contribution to an exploratory blog on these issues being started up in Ecuador, with a Spanish translation by Ivonne Yanez of Accion Ecologica.
Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective
The fourth issue of the new Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice collective, aims to facilitate constructive and creative debate on climate issues, connecting them to local struggles over natural resources, fossil fuel extraction, and land, livelihood and food rights.
Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective
This third issue of Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice collective, aims to facilitate constructive and creative debate on climate issues, connecting them to local struggles over natural resources, fossil fuel extraction, and land, livelihood and food rights.
An interview with Larry Lohmann of The Corner House
The Global Environmental Justice Group at the University of East Anglia has produced a series of video interviews, Testimonies of Justice. Larry Lohmann outlines some of the work The Corner House does and its approach.
Larry Lohmann
The alternative to the demand “What's your alternative?” is to counter it with questions such as “alternative for whom?” “alternative to what?”, and to replace it wherever possible with the question “Whose side are you on?”