Larry Lohmann discusses Carbon Trading: Solution to Climate Change or Corporate Resource Grab?
Larry Lohmann, author and founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, discusses the pros and cons to carbon trading and its effects on the planet.
Bio
Larry Lohmann
Larry Lohmann, author and founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, is sharing experiences in the U.S. concerning the failure of carbon trading in Europe, India, Brazil, Uganda, and elsewhere, and is learning more about U.S.
carbon trading plans and climate politics.
In 2004, the Durban Group convened in Durban, South Africa, to question the central role of carbon trading in official responses to the climate crisis. Since 1997, Lohmann has worked with the Corner House, a research and solidarity organization based in the UK (http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk).
During the 1980s, he lived and worked in Thailand, teaching and working with local environmental groups. Over 350,000 copies of his latest book, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatization and Power (2006) have been downloaded from the Internet. He is co-author of Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Global Paper Economy (1996) and Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (1993) and co-editor of The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests (1993).
His articles on globalization, racism, environmental conflict in Southeast Asia, and the discourses of population and neoclassical economics have appeared in journals such as Science as Culture, New Scientist, Asian Survey, International Journal of Pollution and Environment, Development Dialogue, Red Pepper, and Watershed, as well as in numerous scholarly books. Lohmann has received degrees from Cornell and Princeton and has been a visiting fellow at Yale University.
Climate "justice" ? :-) Amazing ... (w/ all due respect).
If I were you, I would go to the NOAA paleo climate data base, pick up any climatic proxy data and do the number crunching: you will realize that "climate change" is not something that we can avoid.
Fossil fuels are just a (marginal) cofactor in all of this.
The point is that "climate change" is -like El Niņo was for a few years ago- just in fashion. And we get a lot of preachers all around, trumpeting for the Armagedon, trying to get "easy" research funds - and politicians who would do carrier on whatever (from death penalty to asteroids to CO2 quotas).
The fossil *oil* age is already gone. We will move towards natural gas and the nuclear-hydrogen tandem. And climate change will go on and on: there is no way you can excercise a "climatic justice" because resources are patchily distributed and competition is high.