Since they were heralded as a key weapon in the fight against climate change, biofuels have been criticized heavily for doing more harm than good due to deforestation and stealing agricultural land essential to farmers in the developing world. This book asks whether there is any place for biofuels in a low-carbon future.

Francois Houtart argues that the green potential of biofuels has been wasted by businesses that put profits above environmental protection. This has led to the absurd situation where an energy source that should be sustainable actually increases human and ecological damage, simply due to the profit-maximizing decisions of capitalists rather than a flaw in the concept of biofuels.

Students of development studies and environmental economics will find that this book offers a interesting new perspective on the future of energy.

Since they were heralded as a key weapon in the fight against climate change, biofuels have been criticized heavily for doing more harm than good due to deforestation and stealing agricultural land essential to farmers in the developing world. This book asks whether there is any place for biofuels in a low-carbon future.

Francois Houtart argues that the green potential of biofuels has been wasted by businesses that put profits above environmental protection. This has led to the absurd situation where an energy source that should be sustainable actually increases human and ecological damage, simply due to the profit-maximizing decisions of capitalists rather than a flaw in the concept of biofuels.

Students of development studies and environmental economics will find that this book offers a interesting new perspective on the future of energy.

With his usual verve and sharpness Samir Amin examines the factors that brought about the 2008 financial collapse and explores the systemic crisis of capitalism after two decades of neoliberal globalisation. He lays bare the relationship between dominating oligopolies and the globalisation of the world economy. The current crisis, he argues, is a profound crisis of the capitalist system itself, bringing forward an era in which wars, and perhaps revolutions, will once again shake the world. Amin examines the threat to the plutocracies of the US, Europe and Japan from decisions of recent G20 meetings. He analyses the attempts by these powers to get back to the pre-2008 system, and to impose their domination on the peoples of the South through intensifying military intervention by using institutions such as NATO. Amin presents original proposals for the way forward: an alternative strategy which, by building on the advances made by progressive forces in Latin America, would allow for a more humane society through both the North and the South working together. Samir Amin is a renowned radical economist, the director of the Forum du Tiers Monde (Third World Forum) in Dakar, Senegal, and chair of the World Forum for Alternatives. He is one of the best-known thinkers of his generation, both in political science and in the analysis of global capitalism.

With the collapse of colonialism, the millions who had joined the struggle accepted their leaders' new call for 'development'. Little today remains of that enthusiasm. The question they now ask is: can anything be done to stop the process and regenerate the forces needed to bring about change more in accordance with their own aspirations? This reader brings together an exceptionally gifted group of thinkers and activists - from South and North - who have long pondered these questions. Diverse in background and experience, they are all committed, however, to seeing through the rhetoric of development, free from the distorting lenses of ideology and habit. They are also interested in looking at 'the other side of the story', particularly from the perspective of the 'losers'. It is these orientations which make this reader such an original compilation. The contributors illuminate the wisdom of vernacular society which modern development thinking and practice has done so much to denigrate and destroy. They deliver devastating critiques of the dominant development paradigm and what it has done to the peoples of the world and their richly diverse and sustainable ways of living. Most importantly, in terms of the future, they present some of the experiences and ideals out of which ordinary people are now trying to construct their own more humane and culturally and ecologically respectful alternatives to development, which, in turn, may provide useful signposts for those concerned with the post-development era that is now at hand.