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The recent rounds of world climate negotiations reveal severe flaws in the character of global capitalism, the role of leading state agents in its transformation, and state-capitalist relations. The hope for the planet’s survival has been vested in a combination of multilateral emissions rearrangements and national regulation. But these are unfolding not within the parameters of multilateral agency – much less national state – control of market dynamics, but instead, subordinated to the ongoing neoliberal accumulation strategy known as financialization. This process is fraught with contradictions, resulting in amplified crises. In this context, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change summits in Copenhagen (2009), Cancún (2010) and Durban (2011) confirm that with the demise of the Kyoto Protocol’s binding commitments by leading industrial states to make emissions cuts, a renewed effort is underway to promote market-incentivised reductions in spite of widely-acknowledged emissions market failure. The social, geopolitical and ecological implications are sobering, especially for a Climate Justice movement that seeks to radically reduce GreenHouse Gas emissions in a way that permits Southern industrialisation, to decommission carbon markets and to enforce payment of the North’s ‘climate debt.’
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