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
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 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 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 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 (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 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 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 The Corner House
news | published January 2005 | summary | full document
In December 2004, The Corner House began legal proceedings against the Export Credits Guarantee Department, claiming it had weakened its anti-corruption rules after consulting corporations only. It was awarded the first-ever full "protective costs order" to challenge the changed rules: The Corner House would not have to pay the Department's legal costs, even if it lost, because the challenge was in the public interest.
by Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite
briefing | published September 2004 | summary | full document | PDF
When TRIPS was signed in 1994, the United States, Europe and Japan dominated the world's software, pharmaceutical, chemical and entertainment industries. The rest of the world had little to gain by agreeing to these terms of trade for intellectual property. They did so because a failure of democratic processes nationally and internationally enabled a small group of men within the United States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process, to draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPS and to crush resistance through US trade power.
by Sarah Sexton
presentation | published 9-11 May 2003 | summary | full document
The World Trade Organisation's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) could have a significant effect on human health, and health care services.
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 Sarah Sexton
briefing | published July 2001 | summary | full document | PDF
by Nicholas Hildyard
talk | published 1998 | summary | full document
A presentation looking at whose interests the free market serves and whose environment is protected by market instruments such as labelling and property rights which concludes that leaving the environment to the market is a recipe for social injustice, authoritarianism, neo-colonialism and ecological suicide.
by Nicholas Hildyard
article | published July 1996 | summary | full document
by Nicholas Hildyard
article | published February 1993 | summary | full document