by Patrick Bond The Mercury, ZNet, Links, Counterpunch, 29 August 2011 Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, the COP17, clean up its act? Last Tuesday’s launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban [...]

by Patrick Bond ZNet, Counterpunch, Links, Pambazuka, The Mercury, 3 August 2011 There’s no way around it: to solve the worsening climate crisis requires we must accept both that the vast majority of fossil fuels must now be left underground, and that through democratic planning, we must colle[...]

by Patrick Bond with Khadija Sharife, The Mercury, 19 July 2011 When Julius Malema proposes mining industry partial nationalization – and last week asks, quite legitimately, ‘what is the alternative?’ to those in the SA Communist Party and Business Leadership South Africa who throw cold wa[...]

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, 5 July 2011 Think ahead five months, but first, back last month. For we’ve just witnessed a preview of critical differences between civilized society, trying its best to get into the COP17 summit in Durban to make some minor climate policy modifications at the edge[...]

by Patrick Bond ZNet, 21 June 2011 Judging by what transpired at last week’s global climate negotiations in the former West German capital, Bonn, it appears certain that in just over five months time, the South African port city of Durban will host a conference of procrastinators, the ‘COP 1[...]

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, 24 April 2011 South Africa’s most vocal neoliberal politician, Trevor Manuel, is apparently being seriously considered as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund. On April 28-29 in Mexico City, Manuel and other elites meet to design the world’s biggest-ever replenishi[...]

by Patrick Bond Southern Africa Report, 18 April 2011 Hosting the Durban COP17 – let’s rename it the ‘Conference of Polluters’ – starting in late November puts quite a burden on the African National Congress government in Pretoria: to pretend to be pro-green. Embarrassingly, la[...]

by Patrick Bond Sunday Independent, 8 February 2011 At the past two United Nations Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COPs) climate summits, Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancún in 2010, as well as at prior meetings such as Nairobi, how did South African leaders and negotiators perfor[...]

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 [...]

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 r[...]

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 natio[...]

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 ‘ste[...]

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 ser[...]

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[...]

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-econo[...]

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[...]

by Patrick Bond Human Geography, July 2010 Abstract After roughly two decades of growing activist interest in the climate problem, the deadlocked politics of formal climate change negotiations generated such divisions that a formal global network of radical proponents of ‘climate justi[...]

by Patrick Bond African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, June 2010 Abstract The ‘climate debt’ that the industries and over-consumers of the Global North owe Africans and other victims of climate change not responsible for causing the problem has accrued b[...]

Upping the Anti #10, May 2010 http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/10-climate-justice-climate-debt-and-anti-capitalism-an-interview-with-patri/ Patrick Bond is a political economist and activist living in Durban, South Africa, where he teaches political economy and eco-social policy a[...]

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, 13 April 2010 How dangerous is the World Bank and its neoconservative president, Robert Zoellick? Notwithstanding SA’s existing $75 billion foreign debt, last Thursday the Bank added a $3.75 billion loan to Eskom for the primary purpose of building the world’s [...]

by Patrick Bond with Desmond D’Sa, ZNet, 31 March 2010 Fierce debating about United States climate justice (CJ) strategies and tactics on ZNet over the past couple of months leave us ready to continue exploring comradely but sharp differences. In ZNet Commentaries on these pages, Robin Hahn[...]

by Patrick Bond Social Text, March 2010 The simple three steps required to escape the greenhouse-gas governance gridlock between global and especially US elites are easy to see, though United Nations officials and nearly all the world’s climate negotiators refuse to take them: Make dramati[...]

by Patrick Bond Capitalism Nature Socialism, March 2010 The Copenhagen Accord that U.S. President Barack Obama persuaded leaders of the BASIC countries—Brazil, South Africa, India and China—to sign at literally the climate summit’s last minute on December 18 is a telling reflection of the [...]

by Patrick Bond Counterpunch, 19 March 2010 There are two theories about Robert Zoellick, and they’ll be tested next month by a World Bank vote on a massive South African coal-fired generator loan. The 57-year old Bank president is a nerdy man who served as number two at the Bush State Depa[...]

THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: WOMEN ON THE MARCH Doing honour once again to Woman’s Day, thousands of peasant, working and unemployed women are on the march in Brazil. They are marching to express their rejection of the criminalization of social movements, against violence falling on women, against ag[...]

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, 3 February 2010 What we do with waste tells us a lot about how our society and economy have been organized – and it’s not pretty. Mercury and E.coli in our fish and seawater. Industrial and agrobusiness effluents leaking everywhere. Periodic fires and explosio[...]

by Patrick Bond Sunday Independent, 24 January 2010 Today’s meeting of the Brazil, South Africa, India and China (BASIC) environment ministers in New Delhi comes at a time the Copenhagen climate deal is dead in the water. No one disputes that an entirely new strategy is needed if the same fate[...]

by Patrick Bond with Alice Thomson, in The Mercury, 20 January 2010 Yesterday morning, anger against the rudderless parastatal Eskom was palpable in a large community protest outside the Luthuli International Convention Centre, and inside too, where the apparently useless National Energy Regulat[...]

by Patrick Bond ZNet, 19 January Robin Hahnel, ordinarily so persuasive when criticizing markets and constructing notional post-capitalist economic relations, makes serious strategic errors in his article ‘Has the Left Missed the Boat on Climate Change?’ (www.zmag.org/zspace/robinhahnel). In[...]

by Patrick Bond Counterpunch, 12 January Writing in CounterPunch, Tim Simons and Ali Tonak (hereafter S&T) have gone overboard in their critique of radical climate politics, offering an always-welcome warning against ineffectual reformism, but making enemies inappropriately due to their inadeq[...]

by Patrick Bond Women in Action, December 2009 “The climate crisis shows us the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. We cannot continue business as usual, but we must radically re-calibrate how we consume and commodify nature, given the limits to our capacity to sustain and rep[...]

by Patrick Bond with Khadija Sharife, in Women in Action, December 2009 The idea that carbon trading will save the world from global warming is not only foolish but also deadly, as Durban activists inspired by a feminist environmentalist learned. The struggle of Sajida Khan (1952-2007), a sel[...]

by Patrick Bond Muslim Views, December 2009 As MV went to press, two critical developments emerged in Copenhagen that ensure a disastrous climate deal will result on December 18, and that clarify why country blocs whose leaders include Presidents Barack Obama in Washington and Jacob Zuma in Pret[...]

by PAtrick Bond Znet, Climate and Capitalism, MRZine, Links and others, 23 December 2009 In Copenhagen, the world’s richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out. Instead of halting the hedonism, [...]

by Patrick Bond ZNet, Counterpunch, 15 December 2009 Eight million people viewed Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff video since December 2007, and her new nine-minute Story of Cap and Trade (http://www.zmag.org/zvideo/3310) received 400,000 hits in the two weeks after its December 1 launch. T[...]

Dear Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, We, the undersigned people’s organisations, social movements, trade unions and concerned citizens, submit this memorandum to the Government to draw your attention to the several urgent and so far unaddressed concerns about the climate crisis and the Indian[...]

by Patrick Bond ZNet, 30 November 2009 Preparations for the December 7-18 Copenhagen climate summit are going as expected, including a rare sighting of African elites’ stiffened spines. That’s a great development (maybe decisive), more about which below. While activists help raise the tem[...]

by Patrick Bond ZCommentaries, November 2009 The decade since the Seattle World Trade Organisation (WTO) fiasco taught civil society activists and African leaders two powerful lessons. First, working together, they have the power to disrupt a system of global governance that meets the Global Nor[...]

WRM Bulletin Nº 148 - November 2009. Also available in Spanish , Portuguese and French EDITORIAL The changes necessary to change the climate change negotiations REDD ALARM Greenwashing the green desert in Copenhagen THE COPENHAGUEN CIRCUS Let the show start! Pla[...]

Press Release - 9th November, 2009 Plans by oil company Eni to develop tar sands and oil palm in the Congo Basin risk irreversible damage to biodiversity, local communities and our climate, and break the company’s own guidelines, according to Congolese human rights organisations and their interna[...]

Written by NESPON, NFFPFW and Nagarik Mancha Mausam magazine is designed to "challenge the 'intellectual fiefdom' established by governments, profiteers, and 'experts' of various shades and hues on issues of global warming and its solutions by providing space to alternative view points and voice[...]

by Patrick Bond ZNet, 24 October 2009 On a day that 350.org and thousands of allies are valiantly trying to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe, we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people depart and the props are packed up. No matter today’s acti[...]

By Patrick Bond ZNet commentary, 24 October 2009 On a day that 350.org and thousands of allies are valiantly trying to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe, we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people depart and the props are packed up. No matter today�[...]

By Patrick Bond The decade since the Seattle World Trade Organisation (WTO) fiasco taught civil society activists and African leaders two powerful lessons. First, working together, they have the power to disrupt a system of global governance that meets the Global North’s short-term intere[...]

by Indigenous Environmental Network Indigenous Environmental Network calls for solutions that reduce emissions, protect forests and respect rights Bangkok – Carbon markets should be eliminated from any future plans to tackle global warming, says a leading group of Indigenous Peoples present[...]

by Patrick Bond ZCommentaries, September 2009 Here’s a fairly simple choice: the Global North would pay hard-hit Global South sites to deal with climate crisis either through complicated, corrupt, controversial ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM) projects with plenty of damaging side effec[...]

by Patrick Bond in S. Böhm and S. Dabhi (Eds), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets, London, MayFlyBooks, September 2009 The ‘ecological debt’ that the Global North owes the Global South for excessive use of the environmental space plus damages done to Third World[...]

By Patrick Bond http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3974 Here’s a fairly simple choice: the Global North would pay hard-hit Global South sites to deal with climate crisis either through complicated, corrupt, controversial ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM) projects with plen[...]

By Brian Tokar Tokar's ZSpace page The summer and fall of 2009 will surely be noted in the annals of environmental history. This period could be remembered as the time when the world's elites slowly began to crawl toward a meaningful solution to the threat of accelerating global climate di[...]

Corner House Briefing 40 by Larry Lohmann FIRST PUBLISHED 18TH SEPTEMBER 2009 | PDF Close parallels can be drawn between the financial innovations behind the current economic crisis and the marketing innovations associated with carbon trading -- the dominant official response to climate chan[...]

by Patrick Bond with Vanessa Black, Rehana Dada and Desmond D’Sa, The Mercury, 19 August 2009 Let’s be frank: the most important trend to affect our lives over the coming decades – climate change – is being ignored by our own people, by our municipal representatives, and by the companies[...]

by Larry Lohmann published by New Political Economy FIRST PUBLISHED AUGUST 2009 | PDF New markets in uncertainty and in carbon are advertised as making both finance and climate action more cost-effective. Both fail to do so, argues this article forthcoming in the journal New Political Econom[...]

By Patrick Bond School of Development Studies and Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa A version is forthcoming in Antipode, 2010 ABSTRACT There is a central strategy within the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and its follow-up treaty anticipated for negotia[...]

by Larry Lohmann published by Zed Books FIRST PUBLISHED JULY 2009 | PDF Carbon trading resembles other neoliberal movements of recent decades that have invented new possibilities of accumulation through the creation of fresh objects of calculation and intensified commodification. Such movem[...]

by Larry Lohmann FIRST PUBLISHED JULY 2009 | PDF Can the financial derivatives markets be regulated? Can the carbon markets be regulated? The questions are parallel, according to this article from the June 2009 issue of Carbon & Climate Law Review. Both markets have involved new attempts [...]

by Larry Lohmann FIRST PUBLISHED JUNE 2009 | PDF The civics-class formula 'no matter what the market, it will always be possible to regulate it' is not a useful principle for constructive social action in the real world. In markets that cannot distinguish between fraud and non-fraud, that und[...]

by Patrick Bond with Khadija Sharife, Muslim Views, May 2009 “We sometimes feed conflict by the way we award contracts, gain access to land, and deal with community representatives,” Shell Nigeria admitted in 2003. It was a modest confession from a corporate giant that has long collaborat[...]

Elementos para una propuesta política y económica para la Iniciativa de no explotación del crudo del ITT Alberto Acosta, Eduardo Gudynas, Esperanza Martínez, Joseph Vogel Amigas / amigos: El documento anexo, discutido y escrito en forma colectiva, apunta a revitalizar y promover una[...]

by Larry Lohmann published by Canadian Dimension FIRST PUBLISHED MAY 2009 | PDF As an activist in a high-consuming society, you can wind up either expending your imagination on fertile possibilities or devoting it to the endless development of sterile fantasies. Which way you go often depen[...]

by Huntingtonnews.net Alaska (HNN) -- Two weeks ago in the most southern region on Earth, an ice shelf the size of Jamaica broke free in Antarctica. This week, in one of the most northern regions on Earth, over 500 Indigenous Peoples are meeting at the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Cli[...]

Experiments with the market scheme favored by Schwarzenegger shows trading favors big polluters without curbing global warming gases. By Michael K. DorseyMICHAEL K. DORSEY, assistant professor on Dartmouth College's faculty of science, teaches in the environmental studies program. Economists, [...]

by The Corner House published by ClimateChangeCorp FIRST PUBLISHED APRIL 2009 | PDF In this short exchange from ClimateChangeCorp's website, The Corner House tackles claims from a Wall Street carbon trader that (1) the climate problem is a problem of quantity of emissions, (2) carbon tradin[...]

by Patrick Bond The Commoner, Winter 2009 Introduction “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.” - Al Gore speaking privately, August 2007[1] What is the state of the strategic debate[...]

by Patrick Bond New Internationalist, January 2009 Carbon trading is a charade that will do nothing to reduce global warming. Could it be doomed by the financial meltdown, or will Barack Obama help sustain it?In the year leading to the Copenhagen Summit, preventing climate change may now finally g[...]

FPIF Commentary The World Bank Takes the Money and Runs from Chad Daphne Wysham | September 15, 2008 Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org Now that the World Bank has announced its withdrawal of support for the $4.2 billion Chad-Cameroon pipeline, I can't he[...]

Mausam is a new magazine providing "basic information related to the climate crisis: for instance, how India's development and 'sustainable-market alternative' projects are hitting this country's people, and how people are fighting back." The inaugural issue includes articles on climate change in Ut[...]

Brian Tokar Complaining about the weather is about as American as apple pie, sitcoms and rock and roll. But while the rest of the world has been noticing for years that our increasingly unstable weather is an initial sign of potentially devastating global climate changes, our nation's collectiv[...]

Bali Protest Photo: Orin Langelle/GJEP With all the fanfare that usually accompanies such gatherings, delegates to the recent UN climate talks on the Indonesian island of Bali returned to their home countries declaring victory. Despite the continued obstructionism of the US delegation, negotiato[...]

M. K. Dorsey | June 19, 2007 Editor: John Feffer Foreign Policy In Focus On the opening panel of the Arctic Science Summit Week, Jeff Miotke announced, “Climate change policy must be based on sound silence.” It was a poignant and telling slip of the tongue. Miotke, the State Department�[...]

For Z Magazine, January 2007 -- Brian Tokar One of the most pressing issues facing us all, including the new Democratic-controlled Congress, is what to do about energy policy and climate change. With sweeping changes in the leadership of key congressional committees, and heightened public conc[...]

For Z Magazine, January 2007 -- Brian Tokar One of the most pressing issues facing us all, including the new Democratic-controlled Congress, is what to do about energy policy and climate change. With sweeping changes in the leadership of key congressional committees, and heightened public con[...]

"Green Energy" Panacea or Just the Latest Hype? by Brian Tokar, WW4 REPORT You can hardly open up a major newspaper or national magazine these days without encountering the latest hype about biofuels, and how they're going to save oil, reduce pollution and prevent climate change. Bill Gates, S[...]

by Professor Michael Dorsey In late April Ford Motor Company and TerraPass announced "Greener Miles", a program offering Ford vehicle owners the opportunity to offset the climate impact of their driving through the support of projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Fact is the average fuel e[...]

For Z Magazine, February 2006 – Brian Tokar Expectations were high in early December of last year, as 10,000 delegates, representing 189 countries, converged in Montreal to discuss the future of international measures to limit global climate change. A broad spectrum of international NGOs, fr[...]

The Climate Justice Convergence Centre was organised by the Durban Group with partners to run parallel to the COP11 talks in montreal in late 2005. The centre was a space where the voices of those struggling against oil and coal extraction, refineries, pollution 'offset' projects, a destabilized cli[...]

By Trusha Reddy Facing a double challenge on 16 February 2005, the day the Kyoto Protocol comes into force: Can activist Sajida Khan fight Apartheid's old demons, and repel a flawed new World Bank climate-change project? Sajida Khan is a soft-spoken, dignified but intense Durban reside[...]

By Daphne Wysham [published in Grist online magazine] As the Kyoto Protocol comes into force this month, a carbon rush is gaining steam in the financial industry. Investors predict that carbon could become one of the largest markets in the world, with a trading volume of $60 billion to $250 billio[...]

A Report from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil by Clare Davidson Unpredictable and extreme weather patterns, rising global temperatures, indigenous communities' livelihoods threatened and species facing extinction are all examples--if any more were needed--that the environmental [...]

[From Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash, Boston: South End Press, 1997] ". . . the IPUAIC was a creature of the smog, born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time[...]