Growing Divides between Establishment and Climate Justice Proponents: A View from the Extremes of South Africa

Abstract

The failure of elites negotiating global public goods – e.g., ending COVID-19 “vaccine apartheid,” forging geopolitical stability, reducing inequality, regulating international financial flows, and avoiding world recession – is nowhere more dangerous than the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s refusal to cut greenhouse gas emissions deeply and fairly. “Climate Justice” principles are ignored, so divisions grow between what ruling elites consider possible, and what activists demand. This is evident in a South Africa suffering among the world’s highest emissions levels, extreme weather events, the worst inequality, and a neoliberal, carbon-addicted corporate power bloc determining most of the policy terrain. But activists are forcefully resisting.