Climate Colonialism: Ann Pettifor & Hamza Hamouchene
Ann Pettifor and Hamza Hamouchene join The Verso Podcast to discuss finance capitalism, energy sovereignty, and green colonialism.
This week on The Verso Podcast we take a close look at the political economy of climate breakdown as Ann Pettifor (author of The Case for the Green New Deal and The Production of Money) and and Hamza Hamouchene discuss climate justice, private equity, degrowth, and the false promise of techno-fixes.
The world is heating up, and time is of the essence. Climate change is already here - already a disastrous and sometimes deadly reality for billions of people across the globe. We know that every positive step taken now means more lives saved down the line, yet even the planetary weight of the crisis hasn’t managed to iron out the ordinary problems of politics - problems of financialisation, democratic deficits, land theft and resource extraction, not to mention the colonialism and racism inherent to our economic system.
As these forces continue to warp our politics, exploitative practices and non-solutions are presented as easy fixes. Meanwhile, capitalist interests are reliably hostile to any ideas that threaten to inconvenience CEOs and shareholders. So maybe it’s a good time to ask - who should shoulder the cost of saving the world? When you think about a green, liveable tomorrow - who is it built for? Who does the hard graft of building it? And whose land and whose resources does it rely on?
Ann Pettifor is a political economist. She is director of Prime: Policy Research in Macroeconomics, an Honorary Research Fellow at City University, and she’s a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. She was a leader in the Jubilee debt cancellation campaign, and she has served on the board of the UN Development Report. She was also on the economic advisory board to the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. Her books include The Coming First World Debt Crisis, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Osborne, The Production of Money, and The Case for the Green New Deal.
Hamza Hamouchene is a researcher and activist, and the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute. He’s a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign, Environmental Justice North Africa, and the North African Food Sovereignty Network. He has written and edited several books including The Arab Uprisings: A Decade of Struggles and The Struggle for Energy Democracy in the Maghreb. His writings have appeared in Guardian, Huffington Post, Middle East Eye, and many other outlets. Together with Katie Sandwell, he edited the volume Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region.
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