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When Markets Are Poison
Learning about Climate Policy from the Financial Crisis
Larry Lohmann

18 September 2009

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.

Cuando los mercados son veneno: Aprender sobre política climática de la crisis financiera

El estudio simultáneo de la crisis financiera y la crisis climática puede proporcionar herramientas útiles para hacer frente a las dos. Los intentos imprudentes de mercantilizar incertidumbres (en la forma de un mercado de derivados complejos) ayudaron a provocar una crisis económica mundial. Los intentos irresponsables de comercializar el clima amenazan con contribuir a una catástrofe aún peor.

file iconPoison Markets
file iconCuando los mercados son veneno

The Origins of the Third World
Markets, States and Climate
Mike Davis

30 December 2002

A revised understanding of nineteenth cenutry famines illuminates many current challenges of 'development' and questions the wisdom of development policies still pursued today.

file icon27.Origins

Democracy or Carbocracy?
Intellectual Corruption and the Future of the Climate Debate
Larry Lohmann

30 October 2001

The “carbon market” approach of international agreements to tackle climate change is incoherent. No one knows how to value the goods in this market, nor to whom they belong. As a result, the market, backed by a growing, well-funded, global climate technocracy, will subsidise further climate change. Democratic challenges to this “carbocracy” will be crucial in opening up the climate debate and combating the scientific fraudulence now rife in mainstream discussions.

file icon24.Carbocracy

Fire Planet
The Politics and Culture of Combustion
Stephen J. Pyne with Larry Lohmann

28 February 2000

Sensational images of wildfires often prompt calls for sweeping, high-tech measures to control fire in the open. Yet fire in the open is a planetary necessity. The problem is too little controlled open burning in the North, and too much wildfire in the South -- and too many catastrophic, destructive blazes and not enough cleansing, fertilizing ones. Constructive debate about climate change, agriculture or forestry requires a careful look at the culture, ecology and politics of global fire.

The Dyson Effect
Carbon ‘Offset’ Forestry and The Privatization of the Atmosphere
Larry Lohmann

31 July 1999

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.

Climate and Equity after Kyoto
Aubrey Meyer and Nicholas Hildyard

2 December 1997

Most scientists agree that human-made emissions of greenhouse gases have to be reduced signifiantly. The North is the main emitter of these gases and should make the most cuts. Many Southern countries argue that emission targets should be set on a per capita basis within a framework of “contraction and convergence”: per capita emissions should converge globally to an agreed ceiling, allowing emissions of developing countries to increase and those of developed countries to contract.