by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published February 2010 | summary | PDF
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.
by Steffen Bohm and Siddhartha Dabhi
compilation | published January 2010 | summary | PDF
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.
by Oscar Reyes and Tamra Gilbertson
report | published December 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by The Corner House
article | published December 2009 | summary | full document | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton
article | published December 2009 | summary | full document | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published September 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by NESPON, NFFPFW and Nagarik Mancha
compilation | published September 2009 | summary | PDF
Here is the long-awaited latest issue of a 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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published August 2009 | summary | PDF
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: click on "summary".)
by Larry Lohmann
article | published July 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published July 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published July 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published June 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published May 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by The Corner House
note | published April 2009 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
note | published December 2008 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published August 2008 | summary | PDF
Will current plans to expand carbon trading in the US and elsewhere work? No. Carbon trading is aimed at the wrong objective, squanders resources on the wrong things, requires knowledge and institutions that do not exist, is antidemocratic, interferes with positive solutions, and puts ideology above experience.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published August 2008 | summary | PDF
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: click on "summary".)
by Zembla (The Netherlands)
presentation | published August 2008 | summary | full document
Exploring both ends of the carbon market through research and interviews in Uganda and The Netherlands, this video (available in Portuguese and English versions) brings new clarity to the debate over climate change solutions.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published July 2008 | summary | PDF
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.
by Chana activists and others
compilation | published August 2008 | summary | PDF
For many years, Southern Thai Muslim communities have been fighting a destructive gas development backed by Barclays and other foreign banks that has violated their human, religious, environmental and land rights alike. In words and pictures, this book (now in an updated and revised edition) recounts their struggle.
by Arlen Dilsizian and Larry Lohmann
talk | published July 2008 | summary | PDF
Climate change is not a new kind of social issue. It requires a re-examination of classic issues of power relations.
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published September 2008 | summary | PDF
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?
by Larry Lohmann
article | published May 2008 | summary | PDF
More and more commentators are now recognizing that carbon markets are failing to address the climate crisis. But more discussion is needed of why this is so, and how the way might be cleared for more effective approaches.
by Larry Lohmann
talk | published April 2008 | full document
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).
by Soumitra Ghosh and Subrat Kumar Sahu (editors)
news | published September 2008 | summary | PDF
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".
by Larry Lohmann
article | published February 2008 | summary | full document | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
talk | published March 2008 | summary | PDF
Carbon trading proponents often assert that trading is merely a way of finding the most cost-effective means of reaching an emissions goal and a source of funding that leaves everything else exactly as it is. In fact, carbon trading undermines a number of existing and proposed positive measures for tackling climate change
by Kevin Smith
article | published April 2008 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
talk | published February 2008 | full document
by Jutta Kill, Brian Tokar and Larry Lohmann
talk | published January 2008 | summary
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.
by Gar Lipow
report | published February 2008 | summary | PDF
The obstacles to tackling the climate crisis are political, not technological, argues this book, which focuses on the most carbon-profligate country, the US.
by Patrick Bond
article | published December 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada
article | published October 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published August 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Kevin Smith
report | published February 2007 | summary | PDF
Buying "carbon offsets" to "neutralize" your carbon emissions is all the rage in middle-class society in Europe and North America. This book, published by Carbon Trade Watch, explains why offsets are not a constructive approach to climate change.
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published September 2007 | summary | PDF
Featuring photographs by Tamra Gilbertson, Nishant Male and Franceso Zizola, this slide show continues the series portraying the practical, on-the-ground effects of the trade in carbon credits through the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism and the voluntary "offset" market.
by Kevin Smith
article | published September 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published March 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Christopher Cundy
article | published May 2007 | summary | PDF
For carbon trading advocates, the onward march of "cap and trade" schemes seems unstoppable. But a growing chorus of critics believes otherwise.
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published Spring 2007 | summary | PDF
Emissions trading constitutes one part of carbon trading schemes such as those associated with the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions trading delays structural transition away from fossil fuels, hands out large assets to the biggest polluters, and cannot be enforced globally.
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published Spring 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published July 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Kevin Smith
article | published May 2007 | summary | PDF
When will it be publicly admitted that the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is not working?
by Soumitra Ghosh
article | published May 2007 | summary | PDF
The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism is claimed to "promote sustainable development" in the South at the same time it gives Northern industries licenses to continue polluting. But the skepticism with which countries with colonial pasts have always viewed such "aid" is also warranted here.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published February 2007 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann (editor)
report | published October 2006 | summary | PDF
The globe is warming. The more carbon dioxide pours into the air, the less stable the climate becomes and the more urgent it becomes to leave remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Yet the dominant neoliberal approach to the crisis -- carbon trading -- is failing. It is slowing social and technological change; dispossessing ordinary people in the South of their lands and futures; undermining already-existing positive approaches; and prolonging industrialised societies' dependence on fossil fuels. This book lays out the case and describes what can be done.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published December 2006 | summary | full document | PDF
Far from being a solution to global warming, carbon trading is little more than licence for big polluters to carry on business as usual, says Larry Lohmann in this 'Comment and analysis' article in New Scientist magazine.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published November 2006 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann (editor)
report | published October 2006 | summary | PDF
Chapter 3 of the book, "Carbon Trading", explains why carbon trading -- one of the largest world markets ever created -- is ineffective in dealing with the climate crisis. It demonstrates that the experience of the United States in pollution trading is an argument against, rather than for, making carbon markets the centrepiece of action on global warming. It explores property rights and privatisation; emissions trading vs. structural change; and the special problems of carbon projects.
by Larry Lohmann (editor)
report | published October 2006 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann (editor)
report | published October 2006 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann (editor)
report | published October 2006 | summary | PDF
Chapter 1 of the book, "Carbon Trading", traces the growing climate crisis to the mining of coal, oil and gas, and describes the growing political conflict over how to divide up the world's capacity to clean its atmosphere. It outlines the dangers of the crisis to people's survival and livelihoods, explores the political nature and implications of the problem, and sketches reasonable and unreasonable solutions. The flow of fossil carbon out of the ground, it points out, has to be slowed and ultimately halted.
by Larry Lohmann (editor)
report | published October 2006 | summary | PDF
Chapter 2 of the book, "Carbon Trading", 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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published December 2005 | summary | PDF
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.
by The Corner House, Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland), WWF-UK
submission | published February 2006 | summary | PDF
Any ECGD support for the Anglo-Dutch petrochemical multinational Shell to develop two oil and gas fields off Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East would breach international guidelines and conflict with the UK's sustainable development commitments and its international environmental obligations.
by Brian Tokar
article | published February 2006 | summary | full document
An accessible article from "Z Magazine" describing the key issues of global climate change discussed at last year's climate negotiations in Montreal.
by Nicholas Hildyard and Greg Muttit
article | published February 2006 | summary | full document | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published January 2006 | summary | full document | PDF
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.
by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada (editors)
report | published October 2005 | summary | full document | PDF
This book, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, outlines some of the practical threats to public well-being and climatic stability that arise from the growing fashion for carbon trading. It focuses on the disturbing record of South African "carbon-saving" projects and their role in shoring up a destructive oil economy.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published September 2005 | summary | full document | PDF
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?
by The Corner House, SinksWatch and Carbon Trade Watch
paper | published October 2004 | summary | full document | PDF
International carbon trading systems are failing. They are both climatically ineffective and politically infeasible.
by Mike Davis
briefing | published December 2002 | summary | full document | PDF
A revised understanding of nineteenth cenutry famines illuminates many current challenges of 'development' and questions the wisdom of development policies still pursued today.
by Kate Hampton, Friends of the Earth
seminar | published May 2002 | summary | full document
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.
by Larry Lohmann
talk | published April 2002 | summary | full document
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.
by The Corner House
submission | published January 2002 | summary | full document
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published October 2001 | summary | full document | PDF
by Larry Lohmann
article | published May 2000 | summary | PDF
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.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published May 2000 | summary | full document
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published 7-9 April 2000 | summary | full document
by Stephen J. Pyne with Larry Lohmann
briefing | published February 2000 | summary | full document
by Larry Lohmann
talk | published February 2000 | summary | full document | PDF
by Larry Lohmann
article | published December 1999 | summary | full document
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published July 1999 | summary | full document
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.