Z Needs Your Help!
The Biden climate plan has important reforms, but can’t reach the stated targets with market mechanisms and carbon capture high tech
Patrick Bond
Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.
Is U.S. President Joe Biden’s January 27 Executive Order to address ‘climate crisis’ as good as many activists claim, enough to reverse earlier scepticism?
Deaths of four frontline KwaZulu-Natal activists – and latest Durban oil refinery explosion – define 2021 battlegrounds
In establishing a strategic approach to these big-picture problems, which we continue to face in South Africa, no one I know embraced scale-politics better, with more seriousness and historical reach, and with such a long-range, compassionate future viewpoint, than Immanuel Wallerstein
The World Bank and IMF continue squeezing poor countries on behalf of commercial lenders, failing to provide the debt cancellations desperately needed.
How would a foreign loan help, given that the Reserve Bank could easily boost state finances by direct bond purchases – as indeed already occurred on a small scale in late March when the private sector failed to buy Treasury bills at auction?
Lacking linkages to the necessary street-heat that should accompany all the new policy demands, most pro-poor advocacy has been directed at meekly persuading a Presidency, Treasury and Reserve Bank to reverse course
Lula’s release leaves capitalists annoyed and nervous
South Africa is one of the most difficult places to combat fossil fuels
The 75th anniversary is a good time to ask whether such out-dated ideologies and their enforcers deserve to be retired, not (as the right-wing populist protectionists argue) so as to close the door on global governance, but to open it much wider in a way that serves people and planet, not multinational corporate profits