Decolonising climate action

If inequality of consumption is recognised as the major obstacle to tackling the climate crisis, then the conversation would be different

The global climate change challenge is to reverse global warming. This requires reducing carbon emissions. The effort is to make energy production less carbon-intensive by choosing different energy sources, and developing commercially viable zero-carbon technologies that substitute for fossil fuels.

This is a profoundly colonial framework. Consider the framework that was in vogue when environment, and not just climate change, was the focus. Relentless growth in consumption happened without regard to the impact on biodiversity, on the pollution of the natural environment, on the “commons” — things that all creatures took for granted as a common bounty, until the unprecedented acceleration