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Global Gateway
Advancing European Capital at the Expense of People and Planet
Nicholas Hildyard

11 February 2026

Launched in 2021, the European Commission’s Global Gateway Programme is billed as the EU’s contribution to narrowing a purported annual $1.3 trillion “global investment gap” in infrastructure financing. In aiming to mobilise private sector funding for the “digital, energy and transport sectors,” the programme furthers the Trumpish doctrine that bigger powers have natural “spheres of influence” whose constituent countries are there to service the imperial centre and work to its rules.

La Economia de Carbono: Creditos de Carbono, Irregularidades e Impacto Social
The Carbon Credit Economy is a Criminal Economy
Andrea Echeverri, Camila Moreno, Jutta Kill, Ivonne Yanez, Emiliana Reinoso and Larry Lohmann

29 June 2025

Se tiende a denominar como economías criminales a aquellas vinculadas al narcotráfico o al tráfico de personas entre otras, sin embargo, existen también otro tipo de crímenes como algunos relacionados a la “economía verde”.La economía del carbono forma parte de estos. Las compensaciones de carbono se imponen en las comunidades en ocasiones con extrema violencia, con desalojos, hay fraudes que las sostienen y están en conexión con actividades ilegítimas e ilegales.

file iconECONOMIAS CRIMINALES - LA ECONOMIA DEL CARBONO.pdf

Reparations, Time and Struggle
Larry Lohmann

3 November 2023

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.

file iconReparations Time and Struggle.pdf

Neoliberalism, Law and Nature
Larry Lohmann

5 July 2017

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.

file iconNEOLIBERALISM, LAW AND NATURE.pdf
file iconNeoliberalism, Law and Nature -- version published 2019

Uncertainty Markets and Carbon Markets
Variations on Polanyian Themes
Larry Lohmann

16 July 2010

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.

file iconPolyanian Themes
file iconMercados de incertidumbres

Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold?
REDD with Carbon Trading
Larry Lohmann

30 September 2008

Many new schemes are afoot to allow the North to pay the South for conserving its forests in return for permission to continue using fossil fuels. But how would a market in pollution rights generated by Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) play out in reality?

file iconCHRONICLE.pdf

Offset Standard Is off Target
Kevin Smith

3 April 2008

Widely-publicized frauds in the carbon "offset" market have led to governmental and corporate proposals to apply standards. But no one has any standards that are working. And the more onerous any attempted regulation becomes, the more the market comes to be dominated by big corporate polluters with the money to work the system.

file iconOff Target

GATS, Privatisation and Health
Sarah Sexton

11 May 2003

The World Trade Organisation's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) could have a significant effect on human health, and health care services.

The Environment is too Important to be Left to the Market
Nicholas Hildyard

31 May 1998

A presentation looking at whose interests the free market serves and whose environment is protected by market instruments such as labelling and property rights which concludes that leaving the environment to the market is a recipe for social injustice, authoritarianism, neo-colonialism and ecological suicide.

Who Competes?
Changing Landscapes of Corporate Control
Nicholas Hildyard

1 July 1996

In the drive to become “competitive”, companies are restructuring their operations on a global scale. It is not companies which are competing, however, but workers and communities, pitted against each other as companies relocate from one country to another in search of new markets, the weakest trade unions, the most flexible rules on working conditions and the largest subsidies. It is time to question the notion that export-led growth and enhanced corporate competitiveness is the route to employment and to press instead for an economy that protects people and the commons rather than corporations.

The Globalizers’ Dilemma
Contention and Resistance in Intercultural Space
Larry Lohmann

1 September 1995

Different actors -- transnational corporations, political and technocratic elites, their opponents and others -- contend with and influence what is loosely called “globalization” in different ways. Constructive and engaged understanding of the power struggles between them all and their resources, motivations, dynamics, strategies, effectiveness, and capacities for alliances requires coming to grips with the ways in which they interpret and present their own struggles.

Maastricht: The Protectionism of Free Trade
Nicholas Hildyard

2 February 1993

In 1986, the 12 member states of the European Economic Community (EEC) signed the Single European Act, which committed them to dismantling all legislative barriers to the free movement of goods, services, capital and people between them by 31 December 1992. The resulting Single Market is designed to protect the multinational interests that have long lobbied for its creation and that are now the dominant economic and political force within Europe. The Treaty on European Union -- commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty -- gives those multinational interests the legal powers and administrative apparatus of a full-blown state.