Resources: Climate

To date, the principal official international response to climate change has been a neoliberal instrument: carbon pricing. This includes both carbon trading and carbon taxes. This response is being contested by many popular movements throughout the world. Indeed, it must be contested if more effective actions are to become possible.

Results 1 - @to of 155
Larry Lohmann

4 February 2024

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.

Larry Lohmann

5 June 2023

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 direct growth in a “green” direction. Thirty years later, as we barrel towards catastrophic warming, the lodestar of green capitalism looks more like an illusion. Nevertheless, many of the models and methods of 1990s environmental economics continue to circulate unquestioned, in law school classrooms and beyond.

A Mechanism Rotten at the Core
World Rainforest Movement

3 May 2022

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

17 February 2022

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

1 February 2022

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.

after Historic Legal Victory against Chevron
Union de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco

25 September 2021

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

14 September 2021

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

13 September 2021

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.

Calor, Tiempo y Colonialismo
Larry Lohmann

23 February 2021

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

22 January 2021

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

21 October 2020

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

15 October 2020

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

13 July 2020

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

28 February 2020

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.

Resignifying Energy Transitions: Some Latin American Perspectives
Verónica Villa, Tatiana Roa Avendaño, Gabriela Cabaña, Cecilia Chérrez, Larry Lohmann

1 June 2023

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

24 August 2022

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.

Coming to Terms with Climate Change on the North Atlantic Left
Larry Lohmann

7 October 2021

"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

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.

 

Interview with Dr Jeff Miley

21 August 2021


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

 

A Time for Movement Reflection?
Larry Lohmann

30 August 2020

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

15 August 2020

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.

Toward a Refreshed Agenda for Climate Activism?
Larry Lohmann

13 April 2020

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.

A California Crime Caper
Larry Lohmann

30 August 2019

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

3 August 2019

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

30 June 2019

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

9 June 2019

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

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.

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

12 April 2019

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.

Comments for the California Air Resources Board on the California Tropical Forest Standard and Draft Environmental Analysis
Larry Lohmann

24 November 2018

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.

Larry Lohmann

24 September 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”.

Larry Lohmann

11 July 2018

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.

That Depends -- Who Are "We"?
Larry Lohmann

28 May 2018

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.

 

A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance
Tamra Gilbertson

10 November 2017

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.

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.

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.

Trabajo, Desechos y Clima
Larry Lohmann

3 February 2017

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

10 January 2017

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.

An Exchange about Offset Markets
Larry Lohmann

18 October 2016

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.

Larry Lohmann

25 July 2016

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.

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?

. . . talking climate in public space
India Climate Justice Collective

6 June 2016

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

6 May 2016

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

20 April 2016

"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.

El Cuestionamiento de la Transición Energética
Larry Lohmann

5 December 2015

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)

1 December 2015

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

24 November 2015

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

23 November 2015

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.

. . . talking climate in public space
India Climate Justice Collective

5 November 2015

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.

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.

Larry Lohmann

1 October 2015

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.

Climate Change as Labour Issue
Larry Lohmann

24 July 2015

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

31 May 2015

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.

Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective

30 April 2015

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

19 March 2015

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.

Larry Lohmann

20 September 2014

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.

Sondeando el territorio
Larry Lohmann con Nicholas Hildyard y Sarah Sexton (traducido por Fernanda Olmedo y Martin Carbonell)

30 June 2014

Una creciente crisis climática y el aumento de la incertidumbre sobre el futuro de los combustibles fósiles hace que la pregunta, planteada con frecuencia,¿cuál es la alternativa a los sistemas actuales de la energía? no sea una sorpresa . Y no ha habido escasez de respuestas que compiten por espacio y atención. En la política energética actual, el principal conflicto no es entre los negocios habituales y "La Alternativa", sino entre las diferentes alternativas propuestas. ¿Cómo se deben evaluar estas alternativas, unas frente a las otras? (Spanish translation of The Corner House report Energy Alternatives: Surveying the Territory)

¿Para Quién y Para Qué?
The Corner House

23 June 2014

La expresión "seguridad energética" está llena de problemas, tanto como en lo político y en la retórica. Otros conceptos deben encontrarse para discutir sobre la energía y para buscar un futuro que sea democrático y libre de combustibles fósiles. (Spanish translation of The Corner House report Energy Security: For Whom? For What?)

Talking Climate in Public Space
India Climate Justice Collective

31 May 2014

The second issue of Mausam, a magazine published by the India Climate Justice collective, aims to facilitate constructive and creative debate on climate issues.

Larry Lohmann and Nicholas Hildyard

31 March 2014

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.

Vol 1, Issue 1, Oct-Dec 2013
India Climate Justice

31 December 2013

The relaunched magazine Mausam, produced by the India Climate Justice network and collective.

Surveying the Territory
Larry Lohmann with Nicholas Hildyard and Sarah Sexton

20 May 2013

What with a growing climate crisis and increasing uncertainty over the future of fossil fuels, it can be no surprise that the question “what's the alternative to current energy systems?” is in the air. And there has been no shortage of answers competing for space and attention. In energy policy today, the main conflict is not between business as usual and “The Alternative”, but among the different proposed alternatives themselves. How are these alternatives to be evaluated against each other?

The Case of Climate
Larry Lohmann

15 September 2012

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....

Strategic Reflections on Climate Change and the "Green Economy"
Larry Lohmann

2 September 2012

A discussion paper published in Development Dialogue No. 61 (September 2012) sets out some lessons for political strategy suggested by the experience of climate change campaigning over the past quarter-century. It outlines the dangers faced by advocacy NGOs of becoming "patzers" (blunderers) and clients of more sophisticated political actors. A longer version is also available here.

A Review and a Debate
Larry Lohmann

1 September 2012

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.

Joel Wainwright, Geoff Mann, Joshua Barker, Patrick Bigger, Mazen Labban, Larry Lohmann, Ben Wisner, etc.

19 July 2012

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....

The EU ETS Failure as a Model for the “Green Economy”
Ricardo Coelho

15 June 2012

At a time when the "green economy" is being widely trumpted, it is prudent to review the comprehensive failure of one of its first avatars, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, to achieve its own objectives. The EU ETS has not reduced greenhouse gas emissions while consistently giving generous allocations of free permits to industrial polluters. It has allowed offset credits to be used and has created a broad range of questionable financial products.
The Spanish State, Public Funds and the EU ETS
Beatriz Martínez and Tamra Gilbertson

31 May 2012

This report from Carbon Trade Watch demonstrates how, in Spain, public funds supporting increased fossil fuel use are interacting synergistically with the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme to worsen global warming. (Also available in Spanish.)

Large-Scale Biomass Subsidies in the UK and the Role of the EU ETS
Joseph Zacune

31 May 2012

UK-based power companies are using the myth that biomass is 'carbon neutral' to continue their climate-damaging activities unabated. A British biomass boom is set to benefit polluters and cause widespread environmental destruction through land grabs and deforestation.

Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization

12 May 2012

The contributions collected in this special issue of ephemera question the underlying ideologies and assumptions of carbon markets, and bring to light many of the contradictions and antagonisms that are currently at the heart of ‘climate capitalism’. They offer a critical assessment of the political economy of carbon trading and a detailed understanding of how these newly created markets are designed, how they (don’t) work, the various actors that are involved, and how these actors function together to create and contest the ‘atmosphere business’. In six articles, five notes, three book reviews, and an interview (with The Corner House's Larry Lohmann), some of the most prominent critical voices in debates about the atmosphere business are brought together.

A Critical Look at Desertec
Oscar Reyes

31 March 2012

Challenges have been repeatedly raised about the economic viability and development benefits of Desertec, a plan to build concentrated solar power plants in the Middle East and North Africa and export the electricity generated to the EU. Promoting exaggerated claims of solar mega-projects and embedding them within a neo-liberal model of energy market liberalisation undermines and discredits efforts to move rapidly away from fossil fuels. 

La neoliberalización del clima
Larry Lohmann

10 March 2012

Mientras la vorágine neoliberal aceleraba la destruccion del planeta, los gobiernos del Norte auparon un festín para los grandes contaminadores transformando la contaminación en otra mercancia globalizada. Su gran descubrimiento fueron los mercados de carbono. En este libro, Larry Lohmann desmonta la lógica y dinámica de los mercados de carbono que promueven la corrupción, empeoran la contaminación y excluyen todo esfuerzo por abandonar la dependencia de los combustibles fósiles.

Larry Lohmann

1 March 2012

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.

Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton

16 February 2012

"Energy security" is full of pitfalls, both as policy and as rhetoric. Other ways are urgently needed of discussing and organising for a democratic, fossil-free future.

Volume One

24 November 2011

Current proposals to address global warming by financing projects to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) constitute a “threat to Indigenous Peoples, local communities, forests, our climate and your future”, contends this book, which lists some of “the worst REDD-type projects” in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru and Uganda.

Subsidizing and Legitimizing Corporate Pollution
Soumitra Ghosh and Subrat Kumar Sahu (edtiors)

1 November 2011

This book concludes that the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, as implemented in India, serves mainly to augment the profits of polluting corporations and addresses neither climate change nor the needs of local people. Some three dozen case studies are presented.

A critical review
Trusha Reddy (editor)

1 November 2011

This critical review of carbon trading in Africa includes analyses of the context and trends in the carbon market in Africa; offset projects in Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa; and carbon finance and regulation. It shows how carbon trading provides new and different ways of profiting at the expense of a deteriorating climate.

Larry Lohmann

28 October 2011

This article explains how today's carbon markets construct a tradable product by postulating a series of false equations – between reducing carbon dioxide and tackling fossil fuel dependence, between different greenhouse gases, between different places and times, between hypothetical and real emissions reductions, between biotic carbon and fossil carbon, and so forth. Competition to exploit cascades of ever more fanciful equations to increase profits ensures that the carbon markets become ever more damaging to the cause of combating global warming.


Un álgebra interminable: las contradicciones de los mercados climáticos

Los mercados de carbono, que constituyen el enfoque principal de los gobiernos del mundo frente a la crisis climática, construyen un producto comercializable postulando una serie de ecuaciones falsas. Estos mercados equiparan la reducción de dióxido de carbono con la lucha contra la dependencia de combustibles fósiles; equiparan los distintos gases de efecto invernadero, así como lugares y tiempos diferentes. Estos mercados dicen que las emisiones hipotéticas y reales son las mismas y que el carbono biótico y el carbono fósil también son los mismos. Estas ecuaciones tienen la función de proteger o incrementar los beneficios empresariales, y los intereses capitalistas están siempre dispuestos a inventar más ecuaciones. El resultado es que los mercados de carbono son cada vez más perjudiciales para la lucha contra el calentamiento global.

The Contradictions of Neoliberal Climate Policy
Larry Lohmann

1 October 2011

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.

Talking Climate in Public Space (Vol 3, Issue 1)
NESPON, NFFPFW and Nagarik Mancha

1 September 2011

This issue of the Indian magazine, Mausam, devoted to climate justice has articles on adaptation, the Climate Development Mechanism (CDM) and REDD projects.

Larry Lohmann

6 June 2011

The growing trend toward constructing environmental service markets is a response not just to ecological crisis but also to business crisis – in particular the prolonged profitability crisis that set in during the 1970s.

Failing at the Third Attempt
Carbon Trade Watch and Corporate Europe Observatory

7 April 2011

Carbon emissions in the European Union are rising, despite the Emissions Trading System, the EU's flagship measure for tackling climate change. The third phase of the scheme, beginning in 2013, is supposed to rectify the “teething problems” that have rewarded major polluters with windfall profits and undermined efforts to reduce pollution and achieve a more equitable and sustainable economy. In practice, it will continue to subsidise polluters and help them avoid taking meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Larry Lohmann

25 November 2010

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.

Pambazuka News

7 October 2010

The electronic Pambazuka News, which disseminates analysis and debate on the struggle for freedom and justice through the voices of the peoples of Africa and the global South, published a special issue on "New technologies and the threat to sovereignty in Africa", including articles on plantation projects that come under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the UN’s Kyoto protocol.

Larry Lohmann

25 September 2010

This book chapter explores the interacting origins, development and politics of the “strange markets” in finance and climate developed in recent years and exposes the similar dangers they pose.


Los “mercados extraños” y la crisis climática

Este capítulo del libro explora los orígenes, el desarrollo y la política de los “mercados extraños” que han aparecido en las décadas recientes en el sector financiero y en la política climática internacional, y expone los peligros que presentan.

How it works and why it is controversial
Jutta Kill, Saskia Ozinga, Steven Pavett and Richard Wainwright

17 August 2010

Discussions of carbon trading are usually full of jargon, abstract concepts, mathematical formulae and technical detail, making it hard for many people to understand its implications and join in debates. This guide unravels the complexity, explains key concepts and terms, and describes how new interest groups and complex financial arrangements have become involved and transformed the practices.

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.

Costly, Dirty, Money-making Schemes
Herbert Docena, Focus on the Global South

25 June 2010

An 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.

Cómo Funciona y por qué Fracasa

30 April 2010

Esta versión resumida del libro Carbon Trading, publicado por primera vez en 2006, pone a los activistas al día del desastroso historial del comercio de emisiones que, tras la debacle de las negociaciones sobre el clima de Copenhague, sigue siendo la principal respuesta de las elites de todo el mundo al cambio climático.

In Which Various Men with Beards are Enlisted to Help Explain Why Official Efforts to Address Climate Change Have Reached an Impasse
Larry Lohmann

25 February 2010

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.

The Political Economy of Offset Markets
Steffen Bohm and Siddhartha Dabhi

10 January 2010

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.

The Policy Reality
Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton

5 December 2009

This short contribution to a Forum discussion on climate change in the journal Global Social Policy outlines how and why the climate solution requires turning away from fossil fuel dependence and how the main official approach to the climate crisis worldwide -- building a single, liquid global carbon market worth trillions of dollars -- is likely to make climate change worse, not only exacerbating its social impacts but also generating negative impacts of its own.

Some reflections
The Corner House

5 December 2009

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.

How It Works and Why It Fails
Oscar Reyes and Tamara Gilbertston

2 November 2009

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.

Larry Lohmann

1 November 2009

These days, being a climate activist can easily get you arrested -- or worse. But the bigger danger -- especially for activists in industrialized countries -- may be that of being seduced into expending all your energies promoting "solutions" that turn out to be bogus.

Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis
Larry Lohmann

18 September 2009

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.


Cuando los mercados son veneno: Aprender sobre política climática de la crisis financiera

El estudio simultáneo de la crisis financiera y la crisis climática puede proporcionar herramientas útiles para hacer frente a las dos. Los intentos imprudentes de mercantilizar incertidumbres (en la forma de un mercado de derivados complejos) ayudaron a provocar una crisis económica mundial. Los intentos irresponsables de comercializar el clima amenazan con contribuir a una catástrofe aún peor.

Talking Climate in Public Space
NESPON, NFFPFW and Nagarik Mancha

1 September 2009

Here is an issue of an Indian magazine aimed at returning the dialogue about climate change and its solutions to the "public space." Featured are pathbreaking articles uncovering the reality of UN-sanctioned "carbon saving" projects in the metals, hydroelectric, wind power, chemicals, waste management and electricity generating sectors, as well as analyses of the political economy of the scientific controversies over the monsoon and over Asia's so-called "brown cloud" of pollution.

Larry Lohmann

22 July 2009

Proposals for Green New Deals aimed at tackling both global warming and global recession are streaming forth worldwide. Unfortunately, many give short shrift to the need to phase out both fossil fuels and fossil fuel substitutes. Many also rely on obsolete conceptions of technology transfer. Future climate movements will have to focus increasingly on the democratization of research, planning and finance.

The Rise of Carbon Trading
Larry Lohmann

22 July 2009

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.


El neoliberalismo y el mundo calculable: El ascenso del comercio de carbono

Los precios de los derechos de emisión de dióxido de carbono que aparecen en las pantallas de las computadoras de Wall Street reflejan un movimiento político complejo para reorganizar y redistribuir el poder y el conocimiento. Los mercados de carbono del Protocolo de Kioto y el Esquema del Comercio de Emisiones de la Unión Europea son uno de los últimos grandes proyectos del neoliberalismo – un intento malhadado de privatizar el clima. Este capítulo del libro, "El neoliberalismo y el mundo calculable: El ascenso del comercio de carbono", describe las contradicciones del intento de formar una mercancía con el clima.

Larry Lohmann

21 July 2009

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.


La imposibilidad de regular los mercados derivados financieros y de carbono

¿Es posible regular los mercados derivados financieros? ¿Es posible regular los mercados de carbono? Estas preguntas son parecidas. Ambos mercados tratan de comercializar nuevas cosas. Los nuevos mercados financieros tratan de comercializar una serie de incertidumbres sin precendentes; los mercados de carbono tratan de comercializar la capacidad del mundo natural para absorber dióxido de carbono. Muchos funcionarios gubernamentales y académicos asumen que cualquier problema de estos mercados puede ser manejado con "internalizar externalidades". Esto no es cierto. Un enfoque más práctico a los problemas de estos mercados es la desmercantilización.

Cowboys and Choirboys United
Larry Lohmann

8 June 2009

Not all markets can be regulated effectively. Two examples are the markets for advanced credit derivatives – largely responsible for the current economic crisis -- and the growing carbon markets that are claimed to be capable of addressing global warming and that are the particular subject of this draft chapter. The attempt to regulate such markets does little more than create an illusion of governance where none actually exists. That only allows the dangers to grow larger.


Cuando la regulación se convierte en corrupción: El caso de los mercados de compensación de carbono

No todos los mercados se pueden regular con eficacia. Un ejemplo son los mercados de derivados de crédito que son una de las causas de la crisis financiera. Otro ejemplo son los mercados de carbono que constituyen la "solución" al calentamiento global, favorecida por la mayoría de los gobiernos del mundo. El intento de regular estos mercados no hace más que crear una ilusión de una gobernabilidad que en realidad no existe. Esta ilusión sólo permite que los peligros crezcan más.