Saliem Fakir

https://staging1.creamermedia.com/

Saliem Fakir

Fakir is interim executive director of the African Climate Foundation – saliem@africanclimatefoundation.org

Single-cause issues and the problem of collective action

18th October 2024 In his book, How Neoliberalism Failed, and What a Better Society Could Look Like, which critiques neoliberal policies and explores alternatives for creating a more equitable and sustainable society, American economist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 Joseph Stiglitz... →

Africa’s multiple transitions

6th September 2024 The issue of transitions in Africa is not singular; rather, the continent is experiencing multiple, convergent transitions. Addressing the energy transition, therefore, cannot be done in isolation but must be done alongside progress in other areas. Often, energy transition advocates – such as... →

Varied ways of thinking and not thinking in the world of policy commentators

9th August 2024 We are entering a period of intense transition processes globally, necessitating the phasing out of fossil fuels. Implementation needs to be fast-tracked but this will not be without friction.Commentary on the nature of these transition processes often does not draw sufficiently from insider... →

‘Justice’ in the Just Transition

19th July 2024 The concept of ‘just’ in the Just Transition, associated with processes such as Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs), should not be viewed as a splendid island of bliss from which justice will effortlessly emerge, as this is not feasible in reality. There is also a common tendency among... →

Energy transitions and stranded economies

21st June 2024 In the context of African economies and the phasing out of fossil fuels, the issue is not about stranded assets per se, but stranded economies. This phenomenon is playing out in Europe, where countries are becoming stranded economies because of their imprudent reliance on Russian gas. Suddenly,... →

Climate and development investment platforms as tools for transformation

17th May 2024 It takes a while but, slowly, one gets to see the possibility of things. Climate action has long been the mainstay of a specific tradition, which is based on the assumption that, if you throw enough Molotov cocktails at a thing that you have come to loathe, the world will just change. Even where... →

The age of anxiety and turbulence

12th April 2024 A range of statements echoed through the chambers of the Munich Security Conference recently, and etched on everyone’s face was anxiousness about how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) is proceeding into the future. Russia was accused, at around the same time, of launching a satellite... →

Debt, climate change and economic transformation

22nd March 2024 Debt is never free lunch, even if it is for the cause of climate change. Debt’s relation is defined by what the creditor demands as the rate of return in what the sociologist George Simmel would characterise as the “complete heartlessness of money”. There is a certain varnish put on forms of... →

Climate change post COP 28

16th February 2024 You must have felt a bit of a daze with the cacophony of announcements at the twenty-eighth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – or COP 28 – which was hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Dubai from November 28 to December 3. Every COP... →

The value of tacit knowledge for economic success

26th January 2024 Michael Polanyi, the brother of the famous Karl Polanyi (the writer of The Great Transformation), says in his book, Tacit Knowledge, that “we can know more than we can tell”. He brought to the fore the importance of tacit knowledge – knowledge that comes from experience and in which deep... →

Of policy wonks, Utopians and realists

15th December 2023 Policy wonks like me are in the business of persuasion and perhaps a little grandstanding. The picture of the world we want has to be a different one from the status quo. Utopias can display dogmatic fervour, a tinge of delusional thinking or be seen as a compass to guide us out of the current... →

Fractured trade, inflation and prospects for climate action

17th November 2023 The world is in a very different place to where it was when the World Trade Organisation (WTO) came into being in 1995: geopolitics and geoeconomic fragmentation are on the rise, and we are seeing a shifting of the sands on multiple fronts. Key signposts of the changes taking place include the... →

Climate summits are about both reality and unreality

13th October 2023 Climate gatherings are traditional stomping grounds where calls for radical change can be met with lukewarm or whimsical responses, but you can be left with the illusion of progress having been made – after all the declarations and press statements. Climate summits and other events, such as... →

Technocene – the age where technology takes over the world

15th September 2023 The concept of ‘technocene’ is not novel; in fact, there are lots of writings on this concept. The Technocene age holds the premise that we are not in the Anthropocene age any longer – technology is overwhelming in that it is around us, with us everywhere, and we are attached to it to such a... →

Transitions and the politics of national sovereignty

18th August 2023 One of my favourite childhood authors was the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001 Space Odyssey – which was later turned into a movie – who wrote: “For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.” What I write in this column always has the risk of being... →

Antidevelopment – the paradox of development

7th July 2023 It has been said by some that those who desire to ensure we have a more sustainable planet and oppose fossil fuels are antidevelopment. Indeed, the antidevelopment argument against environmentalists comprises loose comments and is conducted with reckless abandon. These flimsy comments often have... →

The problem with dogma

16th June 2023 “Bad ideas matter. They have their own coherence and own power”. These words are attributable to Timothy Snyder, a US historian who specialises in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. He currently serves as a professor at Yale University, in the US, and... →

Dullness versus the creative: prospects for development and human wellbeing

19th May 2023 Africa’s problem is not fossil fuels or the continent’s dependence on raw land and minerals but the lack of capacity to transition from these dependences into something else. This is a matter requiring imagination, as it is an enabling environment to change the status quo of dependence on natural... →

Micro-arguments and process of large change – Part 2

21st April 2023 This article is a continuation of the last instalment of this column, which concluded by highlighting the transformative power of a single legal victory in the US – the granting, in 1973, of the right for women to have an abortion – and the overturning of that right through its being muted by the... →

Micro-arguments and the process of large change – Part 1

10th March 2023 ‘All men (women) are intellectuals . . . but not all men (women) have in society the function of intellectuals.” – Gramsci. It seems incremental change, or what one would call the reformist agenda, is complex and slow, but perhaps more stable. Disruptive change, like a tsunami hurtling through... →

Is Eskom a dead project?

17th February 2023 “Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.” – Seneca, letter XXVIII. Our coal situation is like the satirical movie Don’t Look Up where a catastrophic meteorite is heading our way. Common sense plans are ditched for outlandish ideas. This is... →

Green hydrogen - reflections on the new green gold

20th January 2023 South Africa had its first investor and policy summit in Cape Town in late November when President Cyril Ramaphosa opened the hydrogen conference. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and it is what the sun is made of. These days, it is the most sought-after molecule, the global... →

Lost and damaged: reflections on COP27

16th December 2022 Yes, I was in Sharm El Shaik, Egypt, attending the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was a busy place of deliberations and trade fares, and you could easily get lost in the dizzying array of events and the labyrinth of... →

Value of stability for political and economic progress

11th November 2022 Stability can be a recurrent fable that we tell ourselves that we have in order to preserve the idea of the ‘good’ life – sometimes at the expense of others. Stability is a product of a utopian vision but is achieved through the capacity for force and the execution of political and economic will. →

Extraction: it’s everywhere and on everything

7th October 2022 “We live not only in a market economy but more generally in a market society – that is to say, a space of civilisation where all human relations and similarly where all human relationships with the world are mediated through simple human calculations.” The above quotation is from French novelist... →

Europe’s gas addiction undermining Africa’s energy transition

9th September 2022 The sad thing about the Russia-Ukraine war is that the 1.5 oC-aligned energy transition looks set to be interrupted once again. We are here today with this troubling predicament of having done little to tackle climate change during the latest oil crisis because Europe’s new gas demand is taking... →

Reflections on ESG, net zero and corporate citizenship

12th August 2022 It is important to locate environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals and net-zero targets in the context of corporate citizenship today. There will be some who would say that corporate citizenship is a misnomer. The inherent interest of corporations is to get away with making as much... →

Inflation, climate change and fossil fuels – we enter a new crisis

29th July 2022 Who would have thought that we would enter a new inflationary era? Even US Federal Reserve chairperson Janet Yellen was caught off guard by the sudden turn upward inflationary trajectory. It was thought that trade liberalisation and globalisation would cure all inflationary problems and inflation... →

Africa can decarbonise faster than the rest of the world

3rd June 2022 It is oxymoronic to talk of Africa decarbonising – with the exception of South Africa and a few other countries, the continent has the lowest per capita carbon footprint. A recent analytical piece published in the Guardian Weekly on May 20 noted that the pledges being made by Big Oil and Gas are... →

The basis for good judgment: can we really know?

6th May 2022 Over the past decade, I have been engaged in an inquiry into the nature of judgment, given that I have had the privilege of setting up new entities and programmes over the course of my two-decade career. I will attempt to capture some thoughts from these experiences in this column as time goes by. →

Ukraine and the geopolitics of energy

8th April 2022 “It takes two mirrors for the correct image of one’s self” (Diary of Patricia Highsmith, 1968). By now we are all aware of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and what has happened to our world. Several commentators have proposed that the reason for the invasion was the rapid decline in international... →

Observations on Africa’s climate and development nexus

11th March 2022 It has always been maintained and will continue to be maintained that the route to curing the climate challenge in Africa is to define a new pathway for development. That pathway has to be aligned towards a industrialisation strategy that is decarbonised and ushers in a new modernity. The path... →

A significant year for climate in South Africa

11th February 2022 The year 2021 should be remembered as a turning point for climate change policy and diplomacy in South Africa. It is hard to recall a time when so many players felt that the game had been lifted and some optimism infused. It is a struggle to garner the energy for optimism, given the... →

The Just Energy Transition Transaction in South Africa

21st January 2022 Sometimes the ‘impossible’ seems far-fetched and unrealistic, but it can be on the cusp of happening, even if it still has some journey to cover. This is illustrated by the history of the Just Energy Transition Transaction (JETT), which has many dimensions and offers many lessons. I will share... →

Some takeaways from COP26

3rd December 2021 We are in what we may call slow burn and incremental shock of climate vulnerability – recent events tell a story of increased frequency of extreme weather patterns, yet the world struggles to engage in global collective action that is beyond pledges and symbolic gestures. We cannot be oblivious... →

New economic frontier for climate change action

26th November 2021 Last year, marked a tectonic shift in the climate change arena, and this was spurred on by the recognition by the European Union (EU) that no crisis should be spoilt as Europe moved to change the direction of the world by hard-wiring deeper carbon cuts as part of the bloc’s Covid-19 recovery... →

Organising for climate change: the ‘two cultures’ problem

22nd October 2021 Ulrich Beck wrote: “One can possess wealth but one can be afflicted by risks; they are, so to speak, ascribed by civilisation . . . Risk society is a catastrophic society” (Risk Society: Towards A New Modernity). The physicist CP Snow once wrote a famous essay titled The Two Cultures, which... →

The need for grit – industrialism in Africa

10th September 2021 Extractive industries offer no long-term solution for countries that continue to rely on their natural resources as levers for an economic boost; when a commodity boom end, the countries will slide back into debt and economic doldrums. There is need for diversification. As the Covid-19 pandemic... →

Of insurrection, malls and hunger

27th August 2021 We have been made to believe the narrative that things were under control When, in July, looting and rioting broke out in KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Gauteng, we were told that the country was in the throes of an insurrection. However, politicians, the police and the army tried to convince... →

Intersectional issues in renewables: the race debate in the energy sector

16th July 2021 We must guard against the idea that green means socially responsible and equitable. Green and optimum social outcomes are not synonymous; therefore, a debate about intersectional issues relating to gender, race, inequality and justice is warranted. Green transitions can preserve the old system of... →

The private versus the public: living within the hierarchical system

18th June 2021 Societies that are most vulnerable to economic piracy need countervailing forces to protect them from those who deliberately pursue actions intended to maximise their own gain at the expense of the welfare of us all. This point is often not considered by free marketeers, given that they are... →

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