The Violence of Climate ‘Markets’: Insuring ‘Our Way of Living’

Abstract

Larry Lohman (2008: 364) has persuasively questioned the belief that climate justice is all about ‘ re-energizing or reforming development and investment in the global South to steer it in a low-carbon direction, harnessing the potential of carefully constructed green markets, or making capital flow from North to South, instead of from South to North’. To do so, argues Lohman, amounts to putting a gloss over the ‘lessons gained from more than a half-century’s popular and institutional experience of what development — neo-liberal or otherwise — actually does.’ Lohmann rightly asks: ‘what does the project of a just solution to the climate crisis become once it is associated with or incorporated into an economic development or carbon market framework?’ To quote Lohmann, ‘… carbon trading as part of the “climate development” package that has become entrenched at national and international levels over the past ten years, is organized in ways that make it more difficult even to see what the central issues of climate justice are, much less to take action on them’ (ibid).