Facing the most serious civilizational threat ever, what is the South African government doing? The new Infrastructure Development Act pushed into law by economic development minister Ebrahim Patel will fast-track carbon-intensive mega-projects on behalf of mainly...
emissions
It’s the coal, stupid
South AfrIca's coal-fuelled development path delivers jobs that are less than decent and results in massively negative externalities – water contamination, air pollution, loss of farmland and community commons and livelihoods. With theexception of Sasol, coal is still...
The controversial jatropha stumbles in Kenya | by Leah Temper
A campaign by Nature Kenya and other Environmental Justice Organizations (EJOs) has saved the Dakatcha Woodland Important Bird Area (IBA) from destruction from biofuel crops after Kenya's National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) rejected clearance for a...
Rio+20 or Rio-20: Green economy vs Ecological debt | by Rikard Warlenius
The high-level UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last week was called an "epic failure" by Greenpeace and other environmental organizations, their disappointments reminiscent of the "epic failure" of the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa only half...
“Greed” economy and more disasters for humankind | by Ricardo B. Reyes
Expect more natural disasters, social and economic inequality and marginalization in the near future once the United States and other Northern countries succeeded in ramming through its proposed “Green Economy” in the upcoming Rio+20 Conference. A historic conference...
Contentious Politics and the Climate Justice Movement | by Jacklyn Cock
‘Ask for a camel when you expect to get a goat’ Introduction The climate crisis is deepening. Despite 17 years of multinational negotiations there is no binding global agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. In fact carbon emissions are rising which means...
At Rio+20: Values versus prices | by Patrick Bond
[RIO DE JANEIRO, JUNE 18, 2012] Given the worsening world economic crisis, the turn to Green Economy rhetoric looms as a potential saviour for footloose financial capital, and is also enormously welcome to those corporations panicking at market chaos in the...
The UN’s ‘Green Economy’ plan is a destructive illusion | by Pablo Solon
Pablo Solon was chief negotiator for climate change and United Nations Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia from 2009 to June 2011. Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, the...
Green energy won’t save the earth without social change | by Ian Angus
The most popular techno-fix for global warming is green energy. If energy companies would only deploy wind, hydro, solar, geothermal or nuclear, then emission-intensive fossil fuels will eventually disappear. But will that actually work? A new study by Richard York of...

