Resources: Green economy, Power Point

11 results
Larry Lohmann

14 October 2022

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.

Bienvenidos a la economía verde
Larry Lohmann

24 September 2021

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.

 

La ecología de la mecanización de la confianza
Larry Lohmann

20 May 2019

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.

Larry Lohmann

12 October 2017

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.

A Hypothesis
Larry Lohmann

24 June 2016

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?

Servicios Ambientales: Un Nuevo Tipo de Naturaleza Colonial
Larry Lohmann

20 October 2015

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.

Scarcity, Politics, Securitisation and the Green Economy
Nicholas Hildyard and Larry Lohmann

8 September 2015

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

Strategies for NGOs
Larry Lohmann

11 November 2012

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.

Is "Internalizing Externalities" Really a Way Forward?
Larry Lohmann

2 October 2012

"Let's internalize the externalities" has become an important slogan of the new "green economy". Its logic is evident in the Kyoto Protocol, the UK's plans for a "net zero" economy, countless regulatory projects advised by environmental economists, and even in financial markets' efforts to commodify radical uncertainty.

But is this a solution for the environmental and social problems thrown up by capital accumulation, or a perpetual motion machine that functions merely to create more problems and business opportunities? A presentation delivered at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague (available from The Corner House upon request) argues otherwise.

... in an Age of Financialization
Larry Lohmann

1 July 2012

Proposals for greening the economy necessarily involve the greening of finance as well. But how is a greener finance to be achieved? Activist strategies that fail to take stock of where finance is today in the wake of the 2007-08 breakdown -- and the struggles that are continuing to develop between neoliberalism and the commons -- are unlikely to succeed, and may actually do harm.

A powerpoint presentation setting out these arguments is available upon request to The Corner House.

Larry Lohmann

18 May 2012

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.