As we prepare to say farewell to 2024, we must pause to reflect on the state of our planet’s climate emergency and our responses to it.
While the planet burns: exposing the failure of the COPs and seeding glimmers of hope
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Kyoto
Africa’s Biggest Landfill Site: The Case Of Bisasar Road | by Patrick Bond and Khadija Sharife
Bisasar Road is Africa’s largest landfill site, and one of only three landfill sites in Durban with a full permit. It was opened for business in 1980 under South Africa’s apartheid regime. The Group Areas Act, a crucial pillar of the segregation agenda, meant that...
Q & A with Pablo Solon
‘COP 17 cannot be a global suicide pact: we need to end the apartheid against Nature’Pablo Solón is an international analyst and social activist. He served as chief negotiator for climate change and was ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to the UN from...
Durban COP17: failures in the making | by Patrick Bond
The failure of Durban’s COP17 – a veritable “Conference of Polluters” – is certain, but the nuance and spin are also important. Binding emissions-cut commitments under the Kyoto Protocol are impossible given Washington’s push for an alternate architecture that is also...
Carbon trading in Africa: Who will benefit? | by Wally Menne
History is littered with the fallout from failed financial schemes that have resulted in massive losses for ordinary people and private institutions, whose investments were plundered by unscrupulous consultants and bankers. Such economic crimes have commonly been...
Green Capitalism: One neoliberal response to crisis | by Larry Lohmann
‘Let’s put a value on Britain’s ecosystem services’ – the slogan has a nice ring to it. Perhaps we don’t fully understand the value of the wild plants, animals, and natural cycles around us, and if we did, we could appreciate and protect them better.But what is it...
Undertsanding Climate Change: A beginners Guide to the UN Framework Convention and its KYOTO Protocol
WHAT IS THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT?In the long term, the earth must shed energy into space at the same rate at which it absorbs energy from the sun. Solar energy arrives in the form of shortwavelength radiation. Some of this radiation is reflected away by the earth's...
Climate-crisis capitalism, global environmental governance and geopolitical competition in emissions laxity | by Patrick Bond
Presented to the International Labour Rights Information Group Globalization School on Capitalism and the Environment, 3 October 2011 AbstractThe recent rounds of world climate negotiations reveal severe flaws in the character of global capitalism, the role of leading...
Ten Key Questions on Climate Change
Climate change is a political and scientific conundrum. From the denialism of the George Bush era to the neo-liberal imperatives of carbon trading, the subject is confusing, and an activist agenda is sometimes a navigational minefield. David Fig helps Amandla! to...