Resources: lohmann

Is the phrase “a just transition to renewable energy” self-contradictory? That is, is the modern, abstract energy denoted in the phrase (and many others like it) inherently unjust and unrenewable?

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.

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.

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.

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/.

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.

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.

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.

A new Cambridge University Press book by University of Helsinki Professor Markus Kröger was recently launched at an event that featured commentary by The Corner House's Larry Lohmann. The launch can be viewed at 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjj17DzxYKY

and the book and Lohmann's commentary are available above in PDF format.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Social justice, political organising and alliance-building were among the themes raised by The Corner House at a 2015 academic conference on resource politics.

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.

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.

Climate change and other environmental campaigns often try to mobilize people around the idea of avoiding apocalypse. This short piece for Occupied Times explores some of the weaknesses of this approach.

This 124-page report aims to understand how energy and finance have been constructed and contested during stormy transformations in industry, livelihood and exploitation over the past two centuries. Its goal is to help effective movements seeking finance for a greener, more democratic, liveable energy future regard both energy and finance as political processes in motion and as continuing social struggles.

Capitalism, Marx taught, is all about getting something for nothing. Labour “produces” because workers give capitalists the free gift not only of part of their time, but also of part of their inheritance in the commons.

Too often, discussions about energy alternatives resemble a visit to a 1950s world's fair exhibition displaying exhibits of the wonderful technology of the future. Against one wall stand shiny replicas of new green machines – wind turbines, solar panels, fuel cells, hypercars, supergrids – alongside diagrams showing how environmentally benign they are. Against another are arrayed labeled bottles of new “substitutes” for oil, coal and gas – corn-based ethanol, rapeseed-based biodiesel, hydrogen cracked out of water, hydrocarbons extruded by algae.

The United Nations Environment Programme pretends to believe that the deepening global financial and economic crisis can be ignored in its plans for the "Green Economy". A PDF of a presentation for a meeting held in June 2012 by the Heinrich Boll Foundation on the occasion of the "Rio + 20" international environmental conference -- available from The Corner House upon request -- lists some reasons why NGOs would be ill-advised to share this insouciant attitude, and proposes more realistic lines of strategy in the face of the current crisis.

All processes of commodification are different, depending on what is being commodified, how it is commodified, the degree to which it is commodified, the resistances of the material and of the people affected and so on. For this reason, attempts to commodify some things may make headway, while attempts to commodify others fall down immediately. This chapter from Nature™ Inc: The New Frontiers of Environmental Conservation (edited by Robert Fletcher, Wolfram Dressler and Bram Büscher, 2014) proposes an analytical tool that can help explain why neoliberal efforts to commodify climate benefit are failing so disastrously. A drastically abridged version has been published by the online magazine Mute at http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/performative-equations-and-ne....

This essay, published in the March 2011 issue of the journal Development and Change, reviews five recent books, four of them on climate change and one addressing what’s needed to spark the transition away from dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. Included is a September 2012 reply by the authors of one of the books reviewed, Matthew Paterson and Peter Newell, and Larry Lohmann's rejoinder.

A recent paper on possible political scenarios in a greenhouse world, "Climate Leviathan" by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, is the subject of a debate organized by the journal Antipode, in which The Corner House participated. Further notes on, and responses to, the symposium are available at http://antipodefoundation.org/2012/07/19/symposium-on-geoff-mann-and-joe....

What does the "green economy" -- and the neoclassical economic thinking that gave rise to it -- look like from the perspective of the commons? A powerpoint presentation from a May 2012 workshop in Quito for activists, Indigenous leaders, students and the general public suggests some avenues for exploration. The powerpoint is available upon request to The Corner House in both English and Spanish.

This short article from the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin describes how villagers from a South Central Timorese community have attempted to defend local forest land from a variety of threats (English, Spanish, French and Portuguese versions).

Building more effective climate movements is, in part, a continuous process of interpretation and reinterpretation. This chapter from a forthcoming academic volume argues that climate activists can benefit from putting the current fashion for carbon trading into the context of the other market environmentalisms with which it has evolved; from exploring the insights of actor-network theory about the genesis and limitations of commodity-ready environmental objects; and from seeing carbon trading and other current defences of fossil fuel use in the context of accumulation cycles.

The distinction between industrial tree plantations and biodiverse landscapes organized in conjunction with commons regimes is not just a distinction between various vegetable assemblages, but also a social/technical/political distinction. The slave-worked plantations of the past and the industrial plantations of today do not merely prop up colonialism; they are constituted by colonialism. Today's industrial plantations are also intertwined with overaccumulation, overproduction, financialization, and many other so-called "social" things.

The carbon markets that constitute the default international approach to the climate crisis, argues this article in the latest Socialist Register, aim both at opening up new frontiers for profit-making and at securing the background conditions for accumulation that are currently threatened by calls for greenhouse gas emission cuts. But they are afflicted by valuation paradoxes that are far more intractable than those affecting markets in other commodities such as food, energy, consumer durables, or even complex financial derivatives. The article is supplemented with a short interview with New Left Project's Ed Lewis.

An article published in Mexican newspaper La Jornada on the eve of the UN climate summit in Cancun (English and Spanish).

Hoy, México, como muchos países del sur, tiene un nuevo producto de exportación: los derechos de contaminación. Este mercado es uno de los legados del neoliberalismo y del hábito de los países del norte de descargar sus problemas sobre el sur global.

One lesson the financial crisis teaches us is: beware of the new carbon markets that constitute today's main official response to climate change. These markets are startlingly similar to the financial derivatives markets that have thrown banking systems into a tailspin. (German version also available.)

Mercados de incertidumbres y mercados de carbono: variaciones en temas de Polanyi

Una de las lecciones que la crisis financiera nos enseña es a tener cuidado con los nuevos mercados de carbono que constituyen hoy la principal respuesta oficial al cambio climático. Este artículo de la revista New Political Economy argumenta que estos mercados son sorprendentemente similares a los mercados de derivados financieros que arrojaron a los sistemas bancarios al caos en 2008.

This book presents case studies and critiques of carbon offset markets from around the world, emphasizing how this pillar of current mainstream climate policy affects the lives of communities. The book also presents alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live low-carbon lives.

This streamlined sequel to the 2006 book Carbon Trading brings climate activists up to date with the disastrous record of carbon trading -- which in the wake of the debacle at the Copenhagen climate negotiations continues to be world elites' main response to climate change.