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 Larry Lohmann
editorial | published July 2008 | summary | PDF
The Kyoto Protocol and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme tend to substitute empty play with numbers for the hard thinking about historical pathways needed for planetary survival. This is dangerous for fossil fuel exporters and importers alike.
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 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 (forthcoming in 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 Larry Lohmann
talk | published February 2008 | full document
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 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 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 (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 (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 Richard Minns with Sarah Sexton
briefing | published May 2006 | summary | full document | PDF
This briefing outlines the different ways in which countries have financed both social security for older people and economic production. It describes the rise of the private model of pensions and the influence of pension funds on capital flows around the world. It then summarises and critiques the main justifications given for expanding private pension schemes, and analyses the motivations of the groups that perpetuate this model.
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 Larry Lohmann
paper | published September 2005 | summary | full document | PDF
Seeing social or technical change as the application of new "theory" to "practice" is one of the hazards of 21st-century middle-class life. Middle-class activists could take a leaf from both expert elites and grassroots movements, who both tend to know better.
by Larry Lohmann
article | published December 2005 | summary | full document | PDF
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.
by The Corner House
report | published 8-10 October 1999 | summary | full document
by Larry Lohmann
talk | published October 1998 | summary | full document
Overconsumption is possible only by dividing different groups of people from each other. A different, more democratic pattern of political action will be required to lower consumption.
by Larry Lohmann
briefing | published May 1998 | summary | full document
Opinion polls and cost-benefit analysis, like public relations, attempt to construct new, simplified “publics” which are friendly to bureaucracies, politicians and corporations. The success of these attempts is limited by popular resistance at many levels.
by Judith Richter
briefing | published March 1998 | summary | full document
Corporations use public relations techniques to limit campaigns against the socially-irresponsible or environmentally-destructive practices of transnational companies. Taking the infant food industry as a case study, this briefing discusses the risks of ‘dialogue’ with company or industry organizations.
by Larry Lohmann
presentation | published 1997 | summary | full document