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Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of movement activity has been negotiations over climate policy. More recently, activists and communities are engaged in a struggle over the expansion of fossil fuels. A third contest has been waged over the present and future position of renewable energy technologies in Australia’s electricity market. In the wake of climate policy failure, energy campaigns have been deepened, and it seems that a broader energy justice agenda is being forged. New strategic dilemmas are visible in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost two decades since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising rapidly. We argue that the global climate policy focus on carbon markets has played a significant role in the failure to reduce emissions. There are 16 compliance carbon markets in operation across the world. Many more are planned, although there have been numerous problems with carbon trading, including ineffectiveness, weak regulation and implementation, instances of fraud, little to no emissions reduction and major legitimacy issues for governments and the private sector. In this paper we take a “strong” position, arguing that carbon markets do not have a role to play in a policy scenario that requires radical emissions reductions in order to avoid dangerous greenhouse gas concentrations. We put forward 10 reasons why carbon markets should not be the preferred climate policy choice, which we have collated from positions taken by grassroots social movement organizations, think tanks, NGOs and other political advocacy groups as well as individual scientists and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]