An Exchange
Simon Pirani, Larry Lohmann and David Schwartzman
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
"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.
Sondeando el territorio
Larry Lohmann con Nicholas Hildyard y Sarah Sexton (traducido por Fernanda Olmedo y Martin Carbonell)
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
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?)
Surveying the Territory
Larry Lohmann with Nicholas Hildyard and Sarah Sexton
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?
Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization
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.
La neoliberalización del clima
Larry Lohmann
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.
Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton
"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
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)
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)
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.
How it works and why it is controversial
Jutta Kill, Saskia Ozinga, Steven Pavett and Richard Wainwright
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.
Cómo Funciona y por qué Fracasa
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.
The Political Economy of Offset Markets
Steffen Bohm and Siddhartha Dabhi
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.
How It Works and Why It Fails
Oscar Reyes and Tamara Gilbertston
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.
No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming
Gar Lipow
The obstacles to tackling the climate crisis are political, not technological, argues this book, which focuses on the most carbon-profligate country, the United States.
Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins
Kevin Smith
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.
A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
Larry Lohmann (editor)
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.
Chapter 2 of Carbon Trading:A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
Larry Lohmann (editor)
Chapter 2 of the book, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power, 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.
Chapter 1 of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
Larry Lohmann (editor)
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.
Chapter 4 of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
Larry Lohmann (editor)
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.
Chapter 3 of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
Larry Lohmann (editor)
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.
Chapter 5 of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power
Larry Lohmann (editor)
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.
Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere
Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada (editors)
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.
