Archive for the ‘ Articles ’ Category

The South African government’s ‘talk left walk right’ climate policy

bu Patrick Bond Climate and Capitalism, 1 February 2011 The South Africa’s new National Climate Change Response Green Paper (http://www.climateresponse.co.za) gives a sense of the contradictions. Released in late 2010, it contains the kinds of contradictions that required extreme greenwashing to distract its citizens from concern about: more imminent multi-billion dollar financing decisions on Eskom [ READ MORE ]

Dethroning King Coal in 2011, from West Virginia to Durban

by Patrick Bond Znet, January 30, 2011 South Africa’s crust was drill-pocked with abandon since Kimberley diamonds were found in 1867 and then Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) gold was unearthed in 1886. But the world’s interest in how we trash our environment perked up again last week for two reasons: the shocking revelation that acid mine drainage is now seeping [ READ MORE ]

From renewed climate hope to unrealizable market expectations

  • December 31st, 2010
  • Posted in Articles

by Patrick Bond Business Day, 31 December 2010 The Cancun Agreements’ fatal flaw is simple: faith in fickle markets. A year from now in Durban, the apparently unifying strategy of combining ever-broader emissions trading with a modicum of North-South aid to resolve contradictions between national blocs will again become a destructive wedge. As world negotiators stared into the [ READ MORE ]

‘Climate capitalism’ won at Cancun – everyone else loses

  • December 12th, 2010
  • Posted in Articles

by Patrick Bond Links, ZNet, Counterpunch and numerous other ezines, 12 December 2010 CANCUN, MEXICO. The December 11 closure of the 16th Conference of the Parties – the global climate summit – in balmy Cancun was portrayed by most participants and mainstream journalists as a victory, a ‘step forward’. Bragged US State Department lead negotiator Todd Stern, [ READ MORE ]

Anatomies of environmental knowledge and resistance: Diverse climate justice movements and waning eco-neoliberalism

  • November 24th, 2010
  • Posted in Articles

by Patrick Bond with Michael K. Dorsey, November 2010, forthcoming in Australian Journal of Political Economy, 2011 ‘Climate Justice’ (CJ) is the name of the new movement that best fuses a variety of progressive political-economic and political-ecological currents in relation to the most serious threat humanity and most other species face in the 21st century. The time [ READ MORE ]

A climate conference, old and new oil curses, and ‘Good Samaritans’

  • November 22nd, 2010
  • Posted in Articles

by Patrick Bond CounterPunch, Links, ZNet, 22 November 2010 The stench of rotting blubber would hang for days over The Bluff in South Durban, thanks to Norwegian immigrants whose harpooning skills helped stock the town with cooking fat, margarine and soap, starting about a century ago. The fumes became unbearable, and a local uproar soon compelled the [ READ MORE ]

Community resistance to energy privatization in South Africa

  • September 24th, 2010
  • Posted in Articles

by Patrick Bond with Trevor Ngwane, in Kolya Abramsky (Ed), Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, Oakland, AK Press, September 2010 Introduction In spite of South Africa’s alleged ‘economic boom’,[1] the harsh socio-economic realities of daily life actually worsened for most when racial apartheid was replaced by class apartheid [ READ MORE ]

Emissions trading, new enclosures and eco-social contestation

by Patrick Bond August 2010, forthcoming in Antipode, 2011 ABSTRACT The central operating strategy within the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and most of the advanced capitalist world’s environmental policy is to address climate change through the market mechanism known as emissions trading. Based upon government issuance and private trading of emissions reductions credits and offsets, this approach quickly rose [ READ MORE ]

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