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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.

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.

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.

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.

The UK Government is using emergency powers to amend the Export and Investment Guarantees Act 1991 governing the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), so that exporting companies can apply for insurance after they have started constructing their overseas projects (such as oil and gas pipelines, hydroelectric dams and power plants). The amendments would enable companies to circumvent the Department's human rights, environment and sustainable development safeguards.

On 12-13 March 2009, development, environment and human rights groups from Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK, and local residents of the island of Jersey organised a seminar to discuss the necessity for tax haven reform and to exchange views on how governments and civil society can work towards achieving a "just transition" for tax havens that would not impact on poorer residents.

The European Union claims that it is "on track" to meet its modest Kyoto Protocol emissions targets. It is not. Much more importantly, it is not "on track" to wean itself off fossil fuels -- which is the real point of climate change mitigation efforts.

This presentation at the 13th International Anti-Corruption Conference highlights the contrast between the UK government's stated commitments to tackling bribery and corruption and its actions in practice. Far from having a "lack of political will", it is argued that the government has immense political will to protect powerful companies from prosecution for bribery, and has thereby created a hostile political environment for fraud investigators and prosecutors.

This presentation raises some concerns about the term "energy security". presentation at PLATFORM's "Unravelling the Carbon Web".

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.)

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.

Slowing and halting new fossil fuel developments has moved to the top of the global climate change agenda. But what are the obstacles to, and resources for, such a project? The 10-year struggle against a gas development project in one corner of Southeast Asia, described in this forthcoming article for the journal Race & Class, offers lessons in some of the complexities.

The Merowe/Hamadab Dam on the River Nile in Sudan, which was completed in 2009, is the largest hydroproject in Africa. The major contracts were awarded to three European companies: Lahmeyer International, Alstom and ABB. Implementation to date has been characterised by human rights abuses, forced resettlement, illegality and a failure to abide by international standards. The companies consistently failed to use their influence to halt the dam's implementation until issues surrounding its impacts were resolved.

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.

The death of Durban environmentalist Sajida Khan calls attention to the life-and-death consequences of the climate justice struggle. If South Africans are to be at the cutting edge of progressive climate activism, not partners in the privatization of the atmosphere, three citizens' networks -- environmentalists, community groups, and trade unions -- must join forces to identify the contradictions within both South African and global energy sector policies and practices and help synthesize modes of resistance.

On 23 September 2007, activist comedian Mark Thomas organised a comedy benefit night of Britain's top comedians to raise public awareness of the UK's Serious Fraud Office decision to drop its investigation into bribery allegations involving BAE Systems in Saudi Arabia and to support the legal challenge to this decision. This "secret file" programme was given to all those who attended.

The European Union, the US and big business are vying with each other to be recognized as taking serious action on climate change. But some of the most important leaders on climate change are groups fighting fossil fuel projects at the grassroots in places such as southern Thailand.

This article summarises the main issues arising from the BTC oil pipeline runing from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Tbilisi in Georgia to a new marine terminal at Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast that has been developed by a consortium of companies led by the British oil multinational BP. These include the project agreements between the consortium and the three countries; safety concerns; and concerns over due diligence and monitoring.

When will it be publicly admitted that the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is not working?,p>

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.)

This Bloomberg Markets article describes the allegations by BP consultant Derek Mortimore that the engineering company contracted to monitor the BTC oil pipeline has no experience in pipeline corrosion work.

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.

The OECD Working Group on Bribery's reviews of how countries are implementing the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention are an invaluable source of information about practice in different countries in combating bribery. This paper pulls together all the Group's comments and recommendations about public procurement, and summarises the procedures countries have developed to exclude companies convicted of bribery from public procurement.

Many corporations now rely on bilateral and regional treaties to get what they want in other countries. Some companies are using Host Government Agreements to set up a specific legal framework giving them effective control over national legislation and regulations affecting their activities. Oil and gas companies are using Production Sharing Agreements to gain almost complete control over natural resources in the countries of the former Soviet Union and West Africa and in Iraq.

International finance institutions promise that the projects they back will comply with international environmental and social standards -- but these standards are frequently flouted. NGOs can document such violations so as to bring concerns to decision-makers, the wider public and the courts.

This book chapter explores the connections between the dark, often racist, scare stories of Malthusianism over the past 200 years, and the reliance of the stories on a particular economic model about how society must be analysed and organised.

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?

"Scarcity" -- not enough food or water or land and so on -- does not explain what it says it explains. Hunger, for example, is rarely the result of no food at all, but of not enough food in a certain place for certain people because those with more power deny them access to it. This may be conceded, but the claim that there will not be enough food in future because of future population growth still seems plausible. Future resources crises, however, will caused by the same imbalances of power as they are today.

By analysing who is considered 2too many" as Malthus's theory of population has been put to different uses, the presentation shows that population theory is in practice a political strategy employed to obscure relationships of power between different groups in societies. These relationships are critical to the use of "resources" as they determine how people are managed and in whose interests.

The new export market in biological carbon-cycling capacity is likely to have effects similar to export markets in soya, paper pulp, petroleum, timber, palm oil, maize, bananas, coffee or tourism. What are the best ways of encouraging discussion among affected communities about this new form of globalisation? asks this article for the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin.

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

In July 2000, 19 corporations and individuals were being prosecuted in the Lesotho courts for bribing a top official in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (a scheme intended to divert water from Lesotho to South Africa). This presentation explores the daily institutional practices that actively encourage the flouting of guidelines and anti-corruption regulations. It sheds light on the institutionalised racism that assumes the Third World to be inherently corrupt and corruptible, a view that underwrites bribery.

Since October 2000, the UK Export Credits Guarantees Department (ECGD) has been bound by the UK Human Rights Act. But many of the ECGD's procedures potentially conflict with this Act.

Publicly-traded companies involved in resource exploitation should be required to publish a breakdown of all payments which they make for the products of every country in which they operate.

Arms sales currently take up a disproportionate amount of official export credit support. The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) and other Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) should end support for military goods.

The ECGD's support for defence-related exports has lost money every year for the past 12 years. This strongly suggests that arms sales are being deliberately subsidised.

The Kyoto Protocol is not a step forward in the struggle to stabilise climate, but a stumble sideways into spurious science and the privatization of the atmosphere, contends this talk given at the "Resistance is Fertile" gathering in The Hague, The Netherlands

This analysis of the changing language used in discussions of human embryo cloning was presented at a conference addressing "Techniques of Reproduction: Media, Life, Discourse" at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

In January 2001, the UK parliament voted to allow research on embryo stem cells. Media reporting suggested this was an easy decision with which the majority of people agreed. Yet other examples suggest unease among the general public and parliamentarians in Britain about several issues involving life and death; sickness and health; and doctors and scientists. In anticipation of such unease and growing public distrust in scientists and government, many discussions and debates about embryo research have been channelled in certain directions so as to ‘engineer consent’ to such research.

When Dolly the cloned sheep was announced in early 1997, the government in the UK stated that cloning techniques must never be applied to humans. Yet in August 2000, it recommended that the law be amended to allow the first stages of embryo cloning and related research to go ahead. This article provides a brief resume of some government, institutional and media responses to human cloning, interspersed with reflections on these trends and omissions.

International groups campaigning against the controversial Ilisu Dam in Turkey obtained a copy of an assessment, commissioned by the export credit agencies considering financial support for the project, of the Turkish Government’s proposed resettlement plan. The assessment highlights serious problems with resettlement and reveals that two to three times more people may be affected than previously estimated -- possibly as many as 70,000 people, mainly ethnic Kurds.

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.

This presentation challenges four myths about large dams: they provide a cheap and economic source of energy;  are an environmentally-benign source of energy; are uncontroversial in Europe; and result from impartial decision-making processes. It poses several detailed questions for the World Commission on Dams.

Violence over and against forests cannot be explained by population increase nor by other linear, office-bound models of change which pit abstracted “humans” against an abstracted “nature”. This book chapter uses examples from England hundreds of years ago and from Viet Nam during the US war there to show that local people’s struggle for their rights to use the forests were continually threatened and partly defined by interests operating outside the forests.

A summary of the ecological risks of genetic engineering in agriculture and suggestions for resisting its introduction.

This talk is a reflection on the operations of power in decision-making. It raises questions about environmental degradation in the European Union: whose environment is being protected through European Monetary Union and the Single European Market -- and whose environment is being degraded, rubbished and trashed by it?

There are at least 10 good reasons why the widespread adoption of genetic engineering in agriculture will lead to more hungry people, not fewer.

All development projects follow a three-act dramatic plotline, as development agencies try to impose plans, meet local opposition, and improvise freely in an attempt to overcome resistance.