Resources: Climate

This evaluation of Clean Development Mechanism projects in the Philippines suggests that most projects will further exacerbate climate change, compromise sustainable development, and enrich large conglomerates expanding their extractive and fossil fuel-intensive activities.

The approach to climate change that came to grief in Copenhagen in December 2009 is based on fetishism about molecules, numbers and targets. By trying to stuff politics, uncertainty, and history into a black box that is then set to one side, it has ensured its own demise. Tackling global warming effectively requires facing, rather than evading, the realities of inequality, conflict, exploitation, context and uncertainty.

Overpopulation arguments in climate debates serve to delay making structural changes in North and South away from the extraction and use of fossil fuels; to justify increased and multiple interventions in the countries deemed to hold surplus people; and to excuse those interventions when they cause further environmental degradation, migration or conflict. Population numbers, in sum, offer no useful pointers toward policies that should be adopted to tackle climate change.

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.

40. Studying the financial crisis and the climate crisis together can provide useful tools for understanding how to tackle both. Overconfident commodification of uncertainty (in the form of a trade in new and complex derivatives) helped precipitate a global economic crash. Overconfident commodification of climate benefits (in the form of a trade in carbon) threatens to hasten an even worse catastrophe.

Carbon permit prices flashing on electronic screens in Wall Street trading rooms reflect a complex political movement to reorganize and redistribute power and knowledge. The carbon markets associated with the Kyoto Protocol, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the US's Waxman-Markey Act constitute perhaps the last great class project of a waning neoliberal regime -- the ill-fated attempt to privatize the climate itself.

Can the financial derivatives markets be regulated? Can the carbon markets be regulated? The questions are parallel. Both markets try to commodify new things: in the case of the financial markets an unprecedented range of uncertainties; in the carbon markets, the earth's carbon-cycling capacity. Regulation tends to assume that any problems with either market can be handled by "internalizing externalities"; this approach will fail. A more practical approach to these markets' problems looks to decommodification. Both approaches, however, have attracted supporters from across the political spectrum.

Merrill Lynch is a major Wall Street investor in carbon pollution permits. Here its Global Head of Carbon Markets debates The Corner House on whether carbon markets are effective.

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?

Carbon trading programmes such as the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Kyoto Protocol have helped mobilize neoclassical economics and development planning in new projects of dispossession, speculation, rent-seeking and the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich and from the future to the present. Part of this process is the creation of ignorance, argues this article published in the journal Development. (French version also available.)

This new magazine is aimed at returning the Indian dialogue about climate change and its solutions to the "public space", instead of allowing it to remain the "exclusive property of governments, profiteers and 'experts' of various shades and hues".

It's sometimes said that governments are failing to address climate change because they aren't taking the warnings of natural scientists seriously enough. In fact, as this draft chapter suggests, the failures may have more to do with lack of social science understanding -- in particular, with lack of appreciation of how the type of social change required actually takes place.

A discussion hosted by the Climate Justice Chicago Coalition at De Paul University examines how carbon trading creates transferable rights to dump carbon, slows social and technological change, promotes socially and ecologically destructive practices and is ineffective and unjust. This TV programme was produced by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV).

Al Gore and many other mainstream environmentalists suggest that calculating and internalizing 'externalities' is the solution to environmental problems. Some critics counter that the spread of market-like calculations into 'nonmarket' spheres is itself a cause of environmental problems. In the course of a study of two real-world examples, carbon accounting and cost-benefit analysis, this article (published in the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society) proposes a possible way of getting beyond this stalled debate.

The obstacles to tackling the climate crisis are political, not technological, argues this book, which focuses on the most carbon-profligate country, the United States.

A two-hour discussion on climate politics and carbon trading at the Unitarian Church, Montpelier, Vermont, on 28 January 2008, with Jutta Kill, Brian Tokar and Larry Lohmann, videoed by Orca Productions.

Sajida Khan, an environmental activist based in Durban, South Africa, who died in July 2007, dedicated her life to fighting international corporations and local municipalities over the pollution and environmental degradation of her community. An interview with Khan about her views on environmental justice and possible ways forward to create healthier livelihoods is included.

Carbon trading, its backers claim, reduces emissions and brings sustainable development in the global South. But in fact it may do neither, and is harming efforts to create a low-carbon economy. (A Chinese version is appended to the English version.)

Trading in carbon "offsets", which constitutes one part of carbon market arrangements such as the Kyoto Protocol, is ineffective and generally exacerbates local problems. This slide show offers some disturbing photographic evidence.

Under pressure to "tame" the threat of climate change to make it seem compatible with business as usual, many scientists have joined policymakers, economists and journalists in treating ignorance and uncertainty about climate as calculable "probabilities". Carbon traders, too, are forced to treat unknowns (and unknowables) as if they were calculable.

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This interview with a Brazilian science magazine touches on the nature of technical fixes for global warming, the US role in formulating the Kyoto Protocol, and how carbon trading is wasting time that could be better spent on other approaches to climate change. (A Portuguese version is appended to the English one.)

Corporations seeking a good image in an era of climate change will steer clear of "carbon offset" projects, which are mostly propping up polluting and oppressive industries in the South. Instead, they will push for structural, long-term social changes that can help keep coal, oil and gas in the ground.

The debate over how serious global warming is hides a more important conflict over who is to own the earth's ability to regulate its climate. From this perspective, George Bush and supporters of the Kyoto Protocol are on the same side. Both are working to entrench the rights and privileges of big polluters.

Chapter 2 of the book, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power, tells the extraordinary story of how corporations, academics, governments, United Nations agencies and environmentalists united around a neoliberal or 'market' approach to climate change emanating from North America. They made pollution trading -- a little-tested, highly-theoretical instrument designed merely to save industrial polluters money in the short-term -- the centrepiece of international efforts to tackle climate change.

Chapter 4 of the book, Carbon Trading, describes how supposedly carbon-'saving' projects set up in countries of the South to 'compensate' for continued fossil fuel use are helping to disposses ordinary people of their land, water, air -- and their futures. Projects to plant trees, burn methane from waste dumps, improve efficiency and promote renewable energy are described in ten countries, together with the tensions and conflicts created.

Chapter 5 of the book, Carbon Trading, dissects and sets aside the claim that "there is no alternative to carbon trading". It cites conventional regulation, public works, legal action, green taxes, popular movements against fossil fuel use, and the shifting of subsidies away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy. For a more democratic and effective climate politics, the debate over climate needs to be conducted not only by corporations, ministries, specialists and big NGOs but by a wider public as well.

Carbon markets are not helping to phase out fossil fuels and are thus not helping to tackle global warming, this article for Foreign Policy in Focus argues.

The Kyoto Protocol and kindred carbon trading measures are usually presented as a small but indispensable step forward to mitigate climate change. Are they? Or, as this article for the journal Science as Culture asks, do they amount to a stumble backwards and a block to the emergence of more constructive approaches?

International carbon trading systems are failing. They are both climatically ineffective and politically infeasible. The UK Parliament's Environment Audit Committee conducted an Inquiry into the International Challenge of Climate Change: UK Leadership in the G8 and EU in October-December 2004. This Memorandum was submitted as written evidence to the Inquiry by The Corner House, SinksWatch and Carbon Trade Watch.

In 2001, governments agreed that export credit agencies should support the transfer of climate-friendly technologies. Urgent institutional reform is needed if Britain is to fulfil its commitment, argues this presentation at an NGO Seminar on Export Credit Reform held in the House of Commons, London.

This submission outlines how and why the UK Department for International Development (DfiD), and the multilateral agencies and non-governmental agencies to which its contributes, should act to curb emissions of greenhouse gases in developed countries. It recommends that the UK should support: initiatives to keep fossil fuels in the ground; alternative sources of energy; and movements working towards these ends.

Tradeable carbon credits from forests cannot be scientifically quantified. NGOs interested in participating in markets for such credits need to be aware of the climatic damage they sanction as well as the damage they may do to communities affected by fossil fuel exploitation.

The intersections between international nature conservation and ethnic politics are of serious and growing concern to many social movements in Southeast Asia. This paper offers evidence that international environmentalist practices interact with local and national conditions to advance the structural work of ethnic discrimination and racism in Southeast Asia. The racist outcomes of these practices do not flow exclusively from unprofessionalism, faulty science, irrationality, immorality or incorrect beliefs -- and anti-racist strategy has to accommodate this insight.

A presentation at a seminar on "Environmental Justice in a Divided Society", Goldsmiths College, University of London, suggests that individual Western environmentalists are often pushed into supporting racist or discriminatory structures by their need to adhere to the rules of professional performance, including those of peer-reviewed science.

15. This briefing questions the view that tree plantations are a viable way of mitigating the climatic effects of industrial carbon-dioxide emissions. This “solution” to global warming is based on bad science, enlarges society’s ecological footprint, and reinforces neo-colonialist structures of power.