Lohmann, Larry. "Strange Markets' and the Climate Crisis". In Crisis Financiera o Crisis Civilizatoria, edited by Elizabeth Bravo, 98-122. Quito: Instituto de Estudios Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo, 2010.

Lohmann, Larry. "Strange Markets' and the Climate Crisis". In Crisis Financiera o Crisis Civilizatoria, edited by Elizabeth Bravo, 98-122. Quito: Instituto de Estudios Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo, 2010.

• Following increases in global wealth disparity during the 1980s, the rich tried to find new opportunities to invest ever expanding amounts of capital. This led the financial industry to create new debt-based securities and financial products for sale, allowing the rich to investment capital in stable growth on the assumption that the debts they purchased were stable (98).
• These products became incredibly popular during the 1990s, as companies increasingly sought to find new methods of investment which would shield profits from commodity market fluctuation and currency inflation. Debt-based securities were seen as a stable solution to this issue (98).
• Ultimately, however, the traded securities turned out not to be stable nor safe. When this fact became apparent in 2007, secure ownership of debt became worthless as debtors defaulted on their mortgages, creating huge and sudden losses on corporate balance sheets (100).
• Carbon markets and the debt-backed securities of the 1990s have some similarities. Both were created to serve the needs of the global poor, through ensuring clean environments or providing access to affordable loans for housing, but both also allowed bankers to sell new assets and increase revenues (102).
• Carbon emissions in Europe and other areas where cap-and-trade schemes are in place are heavily commodified by financial markets. Since any company can buy credits, the actual value of carbon credits is not determined by polluting companies, but by the calculated investments and purchases of carbon credits by investment banks (105).
• The author objects to carbon trading schemes because they treat all forms of reducing greenhouse has emissions as equally good, regardless of to what degree they necessitate huge structural changes. The author thinks that a revolution in energy production is necessary, so he wants revolutionary technologies to be promoted (103).
• The instability and corruption which frequently pervades carbon trading markets is a major issue in actually using them as stable financial products. For example, a single case in 2008 where the Hungarian government illegally sold already-used carbon credits led to a global financial trading of those credit with billions of dollars of profit. The shock from the discovery that these credits were worthless caused a loss of billions more revenue because of a global crash in the price of carbon credits due to massive selloffs and uncertainty (107).