Larry Lohmann

The Corner House

The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environment...

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself. It may be helpful to look at these developments -- which include Bitcoin and blockchain -- in the light of 19th-century mechanization. Although the...

The biggest frontier of mechanization of the past 10 years has been the automation, broadly speaking, of interpretation. This includes recognition (for example, image recognition technologies used by security services), translation (Google Translate), searching for information (search engines), understanding (‘predictive algorithms’ that learn what...

Calls for reparations are resounding throughout the world today: for example, reparations for the injuries of centuries of white supremacy in the Anglo world of the US and the UK; reparations for centuries of colonialist extractivism in Latin America; payment for the immense “climate debt” owed to the global South; and reparations for the damages o...

Este artículo resume y sintetiza un diálogo sobre la necesidad de resignificar las propuestas dominantes para una transición energética.1 Estas iniciativas, coincidieron los participantes, sólo están profundizando los problemas ambientales y los conflictos sociales en los territorios de América Latina.

One of Karl Marx’s most important insights was that, in the words of the Brazilian thinker Ricardo Antunes, the relationship between living human labour and the "dead" labour in machines and machine-like processes is the "condition upon which the capitalist system of production is maintained." This presentation for the 2023 conference of the World...

For many decades, the technique called "cost-benefit analysis" (CBA) has played a complex, conflict-provoking role in social and environmental politics worldwide. This draft chapter for a forthcoming book on the political economy of the environment argues that it may prove useful to popular movements to understand CBA as part of the longer history...

This exploratory shortened book manuscript attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labor known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.

For decades, students of environmental law were taught that global warming was a problem of unpriced externalities. Smart policy entailed sending price signals to market actors that nudge them to reduce emissions and direct growth in a “green” direction. Thirty years later, as we barrel towards catastrophic warming, the lodestar of green capitalism...

This article summarises and synthesises a recent dialogue on the need to re-signify dominant proposals for an energy transition. These initiatives, participants agreed, are only deepening environmental problems and social conflicts in Latin American territories.

The colonialism inside today’s practices of energy transition becomes evident both from experiences of close listening to participants in grassroots struggles over extractivism and livelihood and from an engaged examination of the histories of energy and transition. In turn, greater awareness of the colonial nature of energy transition can fruitful...

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 fro...

What ecological crisis means for figures like Mark Carney, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as far-right figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, is the effect it has on investment. Ecological crisis means popular rebellion, as livelihoods are ruined and workers get fed up. Rebellion means pressure on governments to regulate and repress. To...

Any serious study of bioenergy and global inequalities must take account of the oppression inherent in thermodynamic energy itself. Because this topic is widely neglected by academics and activists alike, the chapter first describes how the abstract nature that we now call energy was organized during the nineteenth century in conjunction with new w...

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so, argues this talk prepared for the Marxist Education Project, is to point to ec...

Climate movements and energy transition movements customarily ask how energy might be generated and distributed more justly or democratically. Or how it might be made “green” or “renewable”. But one thing they usually don’t talk about is whether energy itself is unjust and undemocratic. And whether energy itself is anti-green. These questions need...

In the 19th century, many new equivalences became embedded in the landscape among heat, mechanical force, muscle power, electricity, magnetism and so forth. At the same time, other relations also spread across some of the same spaces: wage labour relations, cotton slavery, new flows of waste and waste work and so on. These relations represent the h...

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself. It may be helpful to look at these developments -- which include Bitcoin and blockchain -- in the light of 19th-century mechanization. Although the n...

This half-hour presentation suggests that worldwide climate movement-building can benefit by striving toward more critical and historically-informed understandings of climatology, thermodynamics, green energy theory and dominant types of apocalypse thinking. None of these four currents of thought, it argues, can form part of a realistic basis for...

In 1999, a report called Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and Forest Degradation was published. It resulted from a collaboration between the United Nations Intergovernmental Forum on Forests and a large group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the World Rainforest Movement (WRM). The aim of the process was to help...

The bestselling Los Angeles crime novelist James Ellroy is known for his entertaining re-imaginings of US history between 1940-1970. His novels reflect his dark vision of what police, politicians, bureaucrats, criminals, movie stars and intellectuals were really thinking and doing behind the scenes, but never appeared in the official record. Ellroy...

Francesco Panie of the Italian environmental magazine La Nuova Ecologia interviews Larry Lohmann about how carbon markets work and why, even after 20 years of making climate change worse, they continue to befuddle many environmentalists.

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into? In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines." To do so is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and...

Climate movements need to be wary about thinking about climate in terms of carbon. It is more effective to think about it in terms of work. This is hard because the idea that climate is about carbon remains embedded in much climate thinking on both the right and the left. This presentation -- which includes a special guest appearance by the Covid-...

The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes, artificial intellligence – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also...

In the 1950s and 1960s, exhibitions such as the World’s Fair portrayed visions of the future in which technology, driven by boundless human ingenuity, opened up vistas ‘of limitless promise’ in a world seemingly emptied of political and ecological conflict. Today it’s easy to laugh at such portrayals, but many contemporary discussions about ‘energy...

This draft chapter takes the view that contending with bioenergy development effectively will require social movements to respect-but also to update carefully-Marxian accounts of capital accumulation that tie together the labour theory of value, surplus accumulation, the "contradictory unity" of living and dead labour, mechanization, "vampirism," c...

What is it to be a climate movement? That depends on how climate change is defined. The tensions dividing today's climate movements are also tensions among different conceptions of climate. Building better alliances around global warming action means first recognizing that there are ongoing conflicts over what climate is. When educated classes in...

Should we put a price on carbon? That depends on what our goals are and what we can expect prices to achieve. If we're looking for a solution to climate change, then putting a price on carbon isn't a serious strategy. It can't address the roots of the problem, and isn't designed to.

Capitalist fire is a historical pattern.

Mainstream scientific and political work on climate change tends to be organized around a binary division between adaptation and mitigation. Global warming – modelled as a nonhuman " nature " of molecular flows and heat exchanges – is seen to impact on an undifferentiated " society " , which returns the favour by, for example, limiting greenhouse g...

Around the world, official responses to environmental crisis increasingly revolve around systems of trading units of environmental benefit. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the 2005 EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the 2015 Paris Agreement, recent Chinese experiments in carbon trading – all claim to delineate cheap pathways for tackling climate change through...

Thermodynamics, energy, labour and finance.

Carbon markets are a particularly disastrous example of what can happen when the cluster of processes commonly associated with neo-liberalism is let loose on environmental crises. Over the last decade-and-a-half, the overwhelming contradictions of climate markets, while shape-shifting continually, have only grown more intense as new equations proli...

(larrylohmann@gn.apc.org) works with The Corner House, a UK-based advocacy organization. He co-authored Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations in the Global Paper Economy (1996) and has published articles in New Political Economy; Accounting, Organizations and Society; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars; Science as Culture and many other...

Enormous new markets in uncertainty and in carbon have been created recently, ostensibly to enhance the cost-effectiveness of both finance and climate action. In both cases, however, creating the abstract commodity framework necessary to make sense of the notion of 'cost-effectiveness' has entailed losing touch with what was supposedly being costed...

Cuando los mercados son veneno. Aprender sobre política climática de la crisis financiera. Larry Lohmann. THE CORNER HOUSE "Las formas de práctica social que han dado lugar a nuevos tipos de la calculabilidad, y que los cálculos intentan formar, también continuamente han convertido al mundo en más móvil, incierto e incalculable." Timothy Mitchell R...

“Billions wasted on UN climate programme” (Vidal 2008). "European Union’s efforts to tackle climate change a failure” (Snow 2007). “Effort to curtail emissions in turmoil” (Ball 2008a). “(…) may slow the changes needed to cope with global warming” (Kanter 2007). “It isn’t working” (Vencat 2007). “Not effective” (Wheelan 2007). “A charade” (Wall Str...

The climate crisis and the credit crisis have made the political issues surrounding investment and finance more critical than ever before. Proposals for ‘Green New Deals’ and the like — aimed at tackling both global warming and global recession — are streaming forth worldwide. Yet many such proposals are incoherent in that they overlook the need fo...

Many champions of environmental accounting suggest that calculating and internalizing 'externalities' is the solution to environmental problems. Many critics of neoliberalism counter that the spread of market-like calculations into 'non-market' spheres, is, on the contrary, itself at the root of such problems. This article proposes setting aside th...

The controversy about how financial derivatives markets are to be regulated that has been opened up by the credit crunch in many ways parallels and overlaps the widening debate over regulation of carbon markets. Both markets involve hitherto untried attempts at commodification: in the case of the financial markets, commodification of an unprecedent...

This is the Trans Thai-Malaysia project (TTM), an internationally-financed natural gas development scheme. Built to bring gas from offshore fields in the Gulf of Thailand to a separation plant from which it can be distributed to the region, the project is set to form the nucleus of further huge industrial installations, including electricity genera...

Larry Lohmann briefly sketches ten processes of ignorance-creation facilitated by the new carbon markets, focusing particularly on the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. He queries what the quest for climate justice becomes once it is incorporated into a development or carbon market framework. Development (2008) 51, 359...

Far from being a solution to global warming, carbon trading is little more than a licence for big polluters to carry on business as usual, says Larry Lohmann

For many of us wondering 'what next?' it has often seemed common sense to see a world of coherent global processes following a simi-lar logic everywhere in opposition to the diversity or chaos of local particularity. For the formally-educated middle classes in particular, something called 'capitalism' or 'globalisation' is usually seen (for bet-ter...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

From pages 1-2: "Traditionally, the earth's ability to keep greenhouse gas proportions within the atmosphere within a certain range has been what is known as 'open access'. Anybody has been free to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with no rules being applicable except ones incidentally relating to accompanying pollutants. Because nothing ha...

This paper examines the increasingly fashionable view that vast tree plantations are a viable way of mitigating the climatic effects of industrial carbon dioxide emissions. It argues that this approach to global warming is based on bad science, enlarges rather than reduces richer societies' ecological footprint, and reinforces neo-colonialist struc...

‘To place the South at the heart of our understanding of the global order’, as this book intends to do, can mean different things. One is to put the South in the centre of pictures Northerners sketch of the globed order. Another is to ask how various groups in the South themselves sketch such pictures.

The Earth Summit is criticized for failing to address the key issues of land distribution, rights and security. Examples are given of the gross maldistribution of land ownership, and of agricultural and forestry policies which hazard the future of small landholders, both by governments and outsiders. The harmful environmental effects of these polic...

This paper examines the social and political implications of deforestation and forest colonization in Thailand. After a brief history of forest colonization in the country, a study is made of the relationships between market economics and national development, and an assessment is made of the importance of these relationships for our understanding...

This collection of six essays offers a critique of the ways in which the subject of biodiversity conservation has been discussed and conceptualised in recent publications. In particular, they are concerned that the crisis of biodiversity erosion is presented as yet another problem which lies in the South, but can be "solved' by the superior knowled...

As swaths of the fast-growing Australian tree invade farmlands, common pastures, and community forests, affected farmers without formal title to their land frequently face a difficult choice: move out and clear new land in what few areas of unoccupied forest remain elsewhere, or stand and fight. In northeastern Thailand in the last 5yr, more and mo...

Emphasizing the market value of biodiversity gives short shrift to its most effective defenders, villagers whose livelihoods depend upon protecting their local environment from economic development. -from Author

For centuries rice-growing lowland villages in northern Thailand have depended on a type of locally-controlled water management adapted to a landscape dominated by forested highlands and swiftly-flowing streams. The system they have developed is now under threat from modern patterns of resource management promoted by international and state agencie...