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https://youtu.be/jY2eWJ-U_VQ

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Thinking About How We Think About Things

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Thinking About How We Think About Things

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Critical Literacy – Thinking About How We Think About Things | Financial Justice Ireland

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December 8th, 2015, Mark Malone

We live in a society and world where injustice and inequality is neither a natural nor accidental occurrence. The implications of this reality for all of us concerned with social justice demands an interrogation of our own assumptions about how power works in our communities, societies and across borders. Without a critical understanding of how and why injustice and inequality is perpetuated, we can at best only treat symptoms rather than the underlying causes. It is from this starting point that critical pedagogy asks us to both think and act.

The video 'Why Critical Pedagogy' introduces us to the ideas and work of Paulo Freire and other critical educationalists such as Henry Giroux. Collectively they describe how our formal education systems are akin to factories for children, rather than spaces of neutral knowledge transfer which is how we are encouraged to think about schools. Instead of explicitly developing the critical capacities and agency of students and teachers alike, more often than not, our schools and universities are shaped to suit the demands of 'the markets.'

One quote from teacher Shirley Steinberg is telling:

" The work we do is dangerous many times. People aren't happy to see disenfranchised groups raise their voices. They are not interested in hearing people go out... and say 'I exist and you have to listen to me.'"

In this she touches upon the social power dynamics that lie at the heart of questions of 'the truth' and 'knowledge'. Who gets to define 'the truth'? Whose truth does our education system systemically represent and whose does it not represent? Critical literacy asks us to specifically address these questions of power. Critical literacy understands that knowledge is socially dependent. In practice, critical pedagogy rejects the notion that students are empty vessels to be 'filled' with knowledge held by teachers. Instead students' capacity is developed in dialogue, conversation and critically engaging with facts. Such processes help encourage conceptual tools central to the examining of power relationships within societies. The traditional boundaries of learner and teacher are challenged.

John Pilger's piece looks at how mainstream media plays a significant role in (mis)shaping public knowledge and critical understanding of the world around us. The making invisible of injustices reduces the possibility of fighting them, precisely because it reduces our capacity to understand and act. Perhaps pessimistically, Pilger sees the interplay of media communications, social media and traditional media as an echo chamber that leaves out "crucial information that might help us make sense of the world". This has led us to the development of the corporate state and the roll-back of democracy.

Heather Coffey describes how conceptual tools help in understanding the power dynamics in our lives and societies as well as acting to challenge inequality. In introducing the work of John Dewey, Behrman, and Cervetti and many others, we discover that critical literacy education has a long and rich history and many applications. These vary from engaged reading - being able to critically situate texts within competing value bases that identify inequalities - to the connection of curriculum to action in the outside world that seeks to address injustice.

At the core of all these materials some observations are worth stating clearly. Critical literacy is a deeply humanising process.

It is not simply about knowing more stuff, but about challenging ourselves and others about how we act and relate in the world today. It is about developing social and emotional literacy through a combination of curiosity and care. By positioning ourselves in a long line of social struggles for a more equal society we can see similarities between the past and present. We can begin to articulate visions of our future.

Crucially, critical literacy does not seek to be neutral. As activist and educator Howard Zinn said, "it is impossible to be neutral on a moving train." As activists we learn very quickly that curiosity and care by themselves, even when shared between ten, a hundred or even a thousand people may not be enough on its own to ensure the eradication of injustices. In these moments we become aware that we must also think about power. Be that the power of our movements to remove certain injustices, or the power of other groups to maintain and reproduce those injustices. By directing our curiosity and care toward action with the people, community and planet around us we begin to ask some of the most important questions possible.

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Critical Literacy - Thinking About How We Think About Things | Financial Justice Ireland

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December 8th, 2015, Mark Malone We live in a society and world where injustice and inequality is neither a natural nor accidental occurrence. The implications of this reality for all of us concerned with social justice demands an interrogation of our own assumptions about how power works in our communities, societies and across borders.

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Critical Pedagogy - What is it? (emile-education.com)

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Critical pedagogy is becoming more and more discussed by teachers.

But what is it?

According to the academia, critical pedagogy is a “philosophy of education that has developed and applied concepts from critical theory” (Kincheloe, 1997), “It views teaching as an inherently political act, reject the neutrality of knowledge, and insist that issues of social justice and democracy itself are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning” (Giroux 2007).

So critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education that views teaching as a political act. This of course includes challenging students to examine the power structures and status quo of their surroundings.

The oft-cited example is the film Dead Poets Society, where a teacher encourages students to rip up their textbooks. The film is set at a traditional university and tells the story of how a teacher encourages students to seize the day and make the most out of their own education by rejecting traditions and thinking for themselves.

Advocates of critical pedagogy believe that a language classroom is not free of ideology. Education systems, as well as teachers to some degree, decide the content of a particular subject or course. For example, the process of selecting reading texts does not take place in a vacuum. It is motivated by political ideologies and worldviews.

Critics point out that while it makes sense in terms of the arts, it makes less sense when applied to maths or the sciences (although “intelligent design” taught in the US may contradict this supposition).

Should and how should critical pedagogy be used in a classroom?

Dr. Henry Giroux claimed in his book “Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope”, that “by creating appropriate conditions, teachers enable students to become cultural producers who can rewrite their experiences and perceptions.” (Giroux, 1997). By letting students be their own decision maker, it can help them better understand the world. Paulo Freire (1998) has a similar point of view towards critical pedagogy, he said that “classroom experiences, with the help of the teachers, should become situations in which students are encouraged to act as active agents in their own education and to develop a critical consciousness that helps them evaluate the validity, fairness, and authority within their educational and living situations”.

It is always good to form a decent learning and thinking habit, and the younger children can have that mindset, the better they can make good and rational decisions for themselves.

But isn’t this just critical thinking skills and discussing social issues?

Critical pedagogy goes one step further and in a classroom setting requires teachers to give more power to the students to decide what are they studying, from what sources and why.

If there are any studies or if anyone has shared this power with their students, we would be extremely interested in reading the impact.

Critical pedagogy in a classroom

So critical pedagogy is inevitably based on the world experience of the students and concurs with student interests and questions. It relies on students learning best when allowed to explore an answer for themselves.

I think all the best teachers allow students to follow any subject that captivates and inspires them. Indeed, inspiring these passions has to be a truly welcome reward for any teacher.

Curricula and teacher timetables need to allow for these “flights” of fancy if learning is to be an enjoyable activity for the student and self-learning embedded.

Critical pedagogy is a perfect riposte to those demanding ever more restricted curricula and the exam based system we seem to be becoming in the UK.

Giroux, H., 1997.Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling. A Critical Reader. West view Press.

Giroux, H., 2007. Utopian thinking in dangerous times: Critical pedagogy and the project of educated hope. Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, pp.25-42.

Kincheloe, Joe; Steinburg, Shirley (1997). Changing Multiculturalism. Bristol, PA: Open University Press. p. 24.

P. Freire. Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach the Edge, Critical Studies in Educational Theory. West view Press, 1998.

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Critical pedagogy, as one of the most popular and most discussed methods, is getting more and more attention.But what is it?

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How to Implement Critical Pedagogy into your Classroom - The Edvocate (theedadvocate.org)

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How to Implement Critical Pedagogy into your Classroom

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Spread the loveCritical pedagogy is a teaching philosophy that invites educators to encourage students to critique structures of power and oppression. It is rooted in critical theory, which involves becoming aware of and questioning the societal status quo.

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Teacher Reflection: How Do We Teach The Climate Crisis?

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Teacher Reflection: How Do We Teach The Climate Crisis?

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Climate Change & Economics: An Overview | Financial Justice Ireland

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The slides will progress automatically every 10 seconds. You can find the link with the speaker notes and video links here.

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Classroom Activities: Critical Literacy (see 4a and 4b)

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Classroom Activities: Critical Literacy (see 4a and 4b)

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See Activities 4a and 4b

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27 May 2021

PDF 2.87mb | Download Now

How the World Works is a selection of activities to support Transition Year teachers to integrate Global Citizenship Education (GCE) into their classrooms. GCE, also known as Development Education (DE), is an educational process aimed at increasing awareness and understanding of the rapidly changing, interdependent and unequal world in which we live. By challenging stereotypes and encouraging independent thinking, GCE helps students critically explore the root causes of global justice issues and how they interlink with our everyday lives. GCE inspires global solidarity by supporting people to fully realise their rights, responsibilities and potential as global citizens in order to take meaningful action for a just and sustainable world.

The activities can be used in standalone DE modules, or within a range of subjects. The new edition provides clear links with learning outcomes for both Junior and Senior Cycle, enabling teachers across a range of subjects to both build on students' prior knowledge, and design or supplement 'taster' modules for Leaving Certificate subjects. Two new themes are covered: tax justice and climate change. The section on climate change builds on the resource's emphasis on global inequality, taking a specific justice approach to the theme.

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How the World Works | Financial Justice Ireland

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A Cross-Curricular Transition Year Resource for Teachers How the World Works is a selection of activities to support Transition Year teachers to integrate Global Citizenship Education (GCE) into ...

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Teach the Future: Campaign for climate education

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Teach the Future is a campaign by secondary and tertiary education students to greatly improve teaching on the climate emergency and ecological crisis in the UK.

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Leaving Cert Applied Social Education Teacher Guide

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Leaving Cert Applied Social Education Teacher Guide

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Take part | Friends of the Earth

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Take part Find out what you can do | Friends of the Earth

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From joining a local group to becoming a member of Friends of the Earth, there's plenty you can do to help tackle the climate and ecological emergencies.

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Planning 2022 content: Transition Year Global Justice Module Resource Workshop - ‘How the World Works’ - Zoom

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How the World Works | Financial Justice Ireland

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27 May 2021

PDF 2.87mb | Download Now

How the World Works is a selection of activities to support Transition Year teachers to integrate Global Citizenship Education (GCE) into their classrooms. GCE, also known as Development Education (DE), is an educational process aimed at increasing awareness and understanding of the rapidly changing, interdependent and unequal world in which we live. By challenging stereotypes and encouraging independent thinking, GCE helps students critically explore the root causes of global justice issues and how they interlink with our everyday lives. GCE inspires global solidarity by supporting people to fully realise their rights, responsibilities and potential as global citizens in order to take meaningful action for a just and sustainable world.

The activities can be used in standalone DE modules, or within a range of subjects. The new edition provides clear links with learning outcomes for both Junior and Senior Cycle, enabling teachers across a range of subjects to both build on students' prior knowledge, and design or supplement 'taster' modules for Leaving Certificate subjects. Two new themes are covered: tax justice and climate change. The section on climate change builds on the resource's emphasis on global inequality, taking a specific justice approach to the theme.

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How the World Works | Financial Justice Ireland

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A Cross-Curricular Transition Year Resource for Teachers How the World Works is a selection of activities to support Transition Year teachers to integrate Global Citizenship Education (GCE) into ...

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What root causes of inequality does this video highlight? Did this video challenge your perspective at all? Reflect on one thing that surprised you in this video!

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What root causes of inequality does this video highlight? Did this video challenge your perspective at all? Reflect on one thing that surprised you in this video!

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https://youtu.be/uWSxzjyMNpU

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Global Wealth Inequality  -  What you never knew you never knew (See description for 2017 updates)

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This Activity Can be adapted for exploring Climate Justice or any connected Issue

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This Activity Can be adapted for exploring Climate Justice or any connected Issue

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Microsoft Word - Monitoring Creative and Critical Thinking Feb 18 (irresistible-learning.co.uk)

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This Changes Everything Study Guide and Lesson Plans | This Changes Everything

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This Changes Everything Study Guide and Lesson Plans | This Changes Everything

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A book, film and engagement project about why the climate crisis is the best opportunity we’ve ever had to build a better world.

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The Thingmabob game helps students grasp the essential relationship between climate and capitalism. And coming to this realization is not merely academic. How we think about solving the climate crisis depends, in large part, on what we think is causing it.

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What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency? ❧ Current Affairs

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As the dust settles on COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the results do not look good. Despite a flurry of headline-grabbing pledges, national commitments bring us nowhere near to meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. According to Climate Action Tracker, 73% of existing "net-zero" pledges are weak and inadequate-" lip service to climate action." What is more, a yawning gap remains between pledges, which are easy enough to make, and actual policies, which are all that really count. You can pledge all you like, but what we need is action. Right now existing government policies have us hurtling toward 2.7 degrees of heating in the coming decades.

What will happen to our world under these conditions? As temperatures approach 3 degrees, 30-50% of species are likely to be wiped out. More than 1.5 billion people will be displaced from their home regions. Yields of staple crops will face major decline, triggering sustained food supply disruptions globally. Much of the tropics will be rendered uninhabitable for humans. Such a world is not compatible with civilization as we know it. The status quo is a death march. Our governments are failing us-failing all of life on earth.

All of this makes it worth asking: What would it look like if we treated the climate crisis like an actual emergency? What would it take to keep global heating to no more than 1.5 degrees? The single most important intervention is the one that so far no government has been willing to touch: cap fossil fuel use and scale it down, on a binding annual schedule, until the industry is mostly dismantled by the middle of the century. That's it. This is the only fail-safe way to stop climate breakdown. If we want real action, this should be at the very top of our agenda.

How fast this needs to happen depends on the country. Rich countries are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the excess emissions that are causing climate breakdown. They also have levels of energy use that are vastly higher than other countries, and vastly in excess of what is required to meet human needs, with most of the surplus being diverted to service corporate expansion and elite consumption. Zero by 2050 is a global average target. A fair-share approach would require rich countries to eliminate most fossil fuel use by no later than 2030 or 2035, to give poorer countries more time to transition. Let that sink in.

It sounds simultaneously dramatic but also so obvious. Fossil fuels account for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions, and they have to go. A new campaign, endorsed by 100 Nobel laureates and several thousand scientists, calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to do just that: an international agreement to end fossil fuels on a fair and binding schedule. Why is it, then, that politicians are so unwilling to take this necessary step?

Part of it is because they're too cowardly to face down the fossil fuel companies and their army of lobbyists, who fight tooth and nail to prevent even the most moderate threats to their profits. And part of it is because they've bought into the narrative-peddled hard by billionaires and others who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, including the fossil fuel companies themselves-that technology will be developed to suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere such that we can keep burning fossil fuels for the rest of the century. This is the fudge behind "net zero" promises. Of course, carbon removal will have to play a role, but scientists have warned, repeatedly, that it is unfeasible at scale and highly risky: if for whatever reason it fails, we will be locked into a high-temperature trajectory from which it will be impossible to escape.

The tricky part is that once we accept this reality, we have to face up to the fact that scaling down fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophe means fundamentally changing the economy. And I mean fundamentally.

Think about it. Imagine next year we cut fossil fuel use by 10%. And then the following year we cut it by another 10%. And so on the next year and the next. Even if we throw everything we have at building our renewable energy capacity and improving energy efficiency-which we must do as a matter of urgency-there's no way we can cover the full gap. The truth is that rich countries are going to have to get by with less energy. A lot less.

How can we possibly manage such a scenario? Well, in the existing economy it would be sheer chaos. The price of energy would skyrocket. People would be unable to afford essential goods. Businesses would collapse. Unemployment would rise. Capitalism-which depends on perpetual growth just to stay afloat-is structurally incapable of sustaining such a transition.

Fortunately, there's another way. It is possible to keep global heating under 1.5 degrees, but it requires that we shift into emergency mode. And it requires us to be honest with ourselves about the reality of what has to change. No fairy tales.

First, we have to nationalize the fossil fuel industry and the energy companies, bringing them under public control, just like any other essential service or utility. This will allow us to wind down fossil fuel production and use in line with science-based schedules, without having to constantly fight fossil capital and their propaganda. It also allows us to protect against price chaos, and ration energy to where it's needed most, to keep essential services going.

At the same time, we need to scale down less-necessary parts of the economy in order to reduce excess energy demand: SUVs, private jets, commercial air travel, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, planned obsolescence, the military industrial complex and so on. We need to focus the economy on what is required for human well-being and ecological stability, rather than on corporate profits and elite consumption.

Second, we need to protect people by establishing a firm social foundation-a social guarantee. We need to guarantee universal public healthcare, housing, education, transport, water, and energy and internet, so that everyone has access to the resources they need to live well. And as unnecessary industrial production slows down, we need to shorten the working week to share necessary labor more evenly, and introduce a climate job guarantee to ensure that everyone has access to a decent livelihood-with a basic income for those who cannot work or who choose not to. This is the bread and butter of a just transition.

How do you pay for a social guarantee? Any government that has monetary sovereignty can fund it by issuing the national currency; think of quantitative easing, but this time for people and the planet. This is true for all high-income countries, although for EU countries it would have to be done in a coordinated fashion. The crucial thing is that to prevent any risk of inflation, we also have to reduce the purchasing power of the rich. And that brings us to the next key point.

Third, we need to tax the rich out of existence. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, cutting the purchasing power of the rich is the single most powerful way to reduce excess energy use and emissions. This may sound radical, but think about it: it is irrational-and dangerous-to continue supporting an over-consuming class in the middle of a climate emergency. We cannot allow them to appropriate energy so vastly beyond what anyone could reasonably need.

How can we do this? One approach would be to introduce a wealth tax. Make it tough enough that rich people will be incentivized to sell off assets that are surplus to actual requirements. We can also introduce a maximum income policy, such that anything over a certain threshold faces a 100% rate of tax. In addition to cutting excess consumption at the top, this approach will reduce inequality and eliminate the oligarchic power that pollutes our politics.

Fourth, we need a massive public mobilization to achieve our ecological goals. We need to build our renewable energy capacity, expand public transport, insulate buildings, and regenerate ecosystems. This requires public investment, but it also requires labor. There's a lot of work to do, and it won't happen on its own. This is where the climate job guarantee comes in. The job guarantee will ensure that anyone who wants to can train to participate in the most important collective projects of our generation, doing dignified, socially necessary work with a living wage.

Finally, we need a strong commitment to climate reparations. Rich countries have colonized the atmosphere for their own enrichment, while inflicting the majority of the costs onto the global South. This is an act of theft-theft of the atmospheric commons on which we all rely-and it needs to be repaired. We need to support our sisters and brothers in the South who already bear the overwhelming brunt of a catastrophe that they have done little to create. This should include a policy of debt cancellation, so poorer countries are no longer forced to devote their limited resources to servicing the demands of big banks and can instead focus on meeting people's needs. And renewable technologies should be transferred for free to countries that cannot easily afford them, with patent waivers if needed, to facilitate the fastest possible energy transition globally.

What would such a world look like? Our cynicism and fear would melt into hope and solidarity. We would feel the thrill and camaraderie of being part of something big, something transformative, something together. There would be a lot less needless commodity production, and a lot fewer bullshit jobs. Our society would be more equal, and poverty would be a thing of the past. Our economy would be organized around human needs and resilience rather than around endless capital accumulation. And most importantly, emissions would fall rapidly, year after year, in a dramatic break from the failure of the past several decades. Our planet would begin to heal.

It is unlikely, however, that any government will be willing to take the necessary steps alone, for fear of disadvantage. A few progressive countries might-and doing this would light the path ahead. But ultimately we need coordinated action, which is why the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is so important. We know that the only way governments will get rid of nuclear weapons is for everyone to agree to do it together. So too with fossil fuels.

This is how we stop climate breakdown. But it won't happen on its own. Asking politely for the ruling class to act is not going to cut it. It will require an extraordinary struggle against those who benefit so prodigiously from the status quo-as has every movement that has ever changed the world, from the Civil Rights movement to the anti-colonial movement. It requires doing the hard work of community organizing, building wall-to-wall solidarities strong enough to hold up against political attacks. It requires forging alliances between the environmentalist movement and the labor movement, and across national borders, sufficient to pull off coordinated strike action. This decade is the linchpin of history. We cannot afford to just sit back and wait to see what happens. We have to capture political power where we can, or otherwise force incumbents to change course.
IMAGE: A firefighter sprays water as embers threaten a residence as the Hillside fire burns through San Bernardino, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 31, 2019. The blaze, which ignited during red flag fire danger warnings, destroyed multiple residences. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

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What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency? ❧ Current Affairs

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As the dust settles on COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the results do not look good. Despite a flurry of headline-grabbing pledges, national commitments bring us nowhere near to meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. According to Climate Action Tracker, 73% of existing "net-zero" pledges are weak and inadequate-" lip service to climate action."

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Economic Stimulus Is an Environmental Disaster Waiting to Happen (foreignpolicy.com)

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Stimulus Is an Environmental Disaster Waiting to Happen

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A public jobs guarantee is the only way to provide economic recovery without endangering the climate.

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Viewsnight: Our addiction to economic growth is killing us - BBC News

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In this Viewsnight, anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that our addiction to economic growth is killing us and makes the case for "planned de-growth". Hickel is the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions.

Viewsnight is BBC Newsnight's place for ideas and debate. For more, head over to BBC Newsnight on Facebook and on YouTube

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In this Viewsnight, anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that our addiction to economic growth is killing us and makes the case for "planned de-growth". Hickel is the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Viewsnight is BBC Newsnight's place for ideas and debate.

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Episode 108: How GDP Fetishism Drives Climate Crisis and Inequality by Citations Needed Podcast (soundcloud.com)

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Episode 108: How GDP Fetishism Drives Climate Crisis and Inequality by Citations Needed Podcast

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"Economists' forecasts for GDP growth in 2020 vary widely," says The Economist. "Algeria's GDP growth falls to 0.8% in 2019," one Reuters headline reads. "GDP — the broadest measure of economic activity — grew at an annual rate of just 1.9% during the third quarter," NPR warns. Everywhere we turn for economic news, the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is held up as the key proxy for prosperity and sound fiscal policy. 

Since its codification as the new gold standard for measuring prosperity at the Bretton Wood conference in 1944, the GDP has been the most popular metric used by American and British media when measure a nation’s prosperity. The GDP, and its close cousin, the Gross National Product, have not been without its critics for decades, but prying it from its top position as The Most Important Policy Goal has been an impossible task. Despite many labor activists, environmentalists and economists leveling critiques at its myopic, capitalist ideology, the metric has remained central to how the media and lawmakers determine fiscal policy. 

But what is the GDP exactly? How did it become the go-to proxy for prosperity in Western media? What are its ideological inputs, and how did post-war notions of colonialism and extractivism helps cement its place in our collective mindset? And what, more importantly, do activists argue we should replace it with? On this episode of Citations Needed we will explore these questions and examine how centralizing Gross Domestic Product––by its very design––obscures climate crisis, labor abuses, racism, drudgery, and a whole host of society's ills. 

We welcome economic anthropologist Dr. Jason Hickel back to the show.

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Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says | Guardian sustainable business | The Guardian

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Just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report.

The Carbon Majors Report (pdf) "pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions," says Pedro Faria, technical director at environmental non-profit CDP, which published the report in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute.

Traditionally, large scale greenhouse gas emissions data is collected at a national level but this report focuses on fossil fuel producers. Compiled from a database of publicly available emissions figures, it is intended as the first in a series of publications to highlight the role companies and their investors could play in tackling climate change.

The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 - the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established - can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change, according to the report.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 1988 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by 4C by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks.

While companies have a huge role to play in driving climate change, says Faria, the barrier is the "absolute tension" between short-term profitability and the urgent need to reduce emissions.

A Carbon Tracker study in 2015 found that fossil fuel companies risked wasting more than $2tn over the coming decade by pursuing coal, oil and gas projects that could be worthless in the face of international action on climate change and advances in renewables - in turn posing substantial threats to investor returns.

CDP says its aims with the carbon majors project are both to improve transparency among fossil fuel producers and to help investors understand the emissions associated with their fossil fuel holdings.

A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report. "That puts a significant responsibility on those investors to engage with carbon majors and urge them to disclose climate risk," says Faria.

Investors should move out of fossil fuels, says Michael Brune, executive director of US environmental organisation the Sierra Club. "Not only is it morally risky, it's economically risky. The world is moving away from fossil fuels towards clean energy and is doing so at an accelerated pace. Those left holding investments in fossil fuel companies will find their investments becoming more and more risky over time."

There is a "growing wave of companies that are acting in the opposite manner to the companies in this report," says Brune. Nearly 100 companies including Apple, Facebook, Google and Ikea have committed to 100% renewable power under the RE100 initiative. Volvo recently announced that all its cars would be electric or hybrid from 2019.

And oil and gas companies are also embarking on green investments. Shell set up a renewables arm in 2015 with a $1.7bn investment attached and a spokesperson for Chevron says it's "committed to managing its [greenhouse gas] emissions" and is investing in two of the world's largest carbon dioxide injection projects to capture and store carbon. A BP spokesperson says its "determined to be part of the solution" for climate change and is "investing in renewables and low-carbon innovation." And ExxonMobil, which has faced heavy criticism for its environmental record, has been exploring carbon capture and storage.

But for many the sums involved and pace of change are nowhere near enough. A research paper published last year by Paul Stevens, an academic at think tank Chatham House, said international oil companies were no longer fit for purpose and warned these multinationals that they faced a "nasty, brutish and short" end within the next 10 years if they did not completely change their business models.

Investors now have a choice, according to Charlie Kronick, senior programme advisor at Greenpeace UK. "The future of the oil industry has already been written: the choice is will its decline be managed, returning capital to shareholders to be reinvested in the genuine industries of the future, or will they hold on, hoping not be the last one standing when the music stops?"

Top 100 producers and their cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from 1988-2015

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Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says

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A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change

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Climate reparations need to happen. Now. | openDemocracy

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The latest UN climate report highlights how communities that have contributed the least to climate change are suffering the most

A protester holds a 'Climate Reparations Now' placard during a demonstration in London, November 2021

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Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire

"A brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future."

That's the sobering assessment made by scientists on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which earlier this week published its latest report, on the impacts of the climate crisis.

In it, the IPPC argues that roughly 3.5 billion people - 45% of the world's population - currently live in areas of "high vulnerability" to climate change, meaning they will be heavily impacted by floods, droughts or extreme weather in the decades to come.

Yet even more striking than the sheer scale of these impacts is their inequality and unfairness. The vast majority of those 3.5 billion people are in "west-, central- and east Africa, south Asia, Central and South America, small island developing states and the Arctic". These regions - which have some of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the world - are now suffering the effects of a crisis that has been driven and exacerbated by the looting of their lands for wealth and natural resources.

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Not only are these countries and communities faced with displacement, food shortages, water insecurity and more, unless there is concerted global action, the report also asserts that many losses are already happening now, and are irreversible.

What's finance got to do with it?

This situation is a result of the failure (or perhaps more accurately, refusal) of rich countries to support the Global South against the climate crisis in UN negotiations. Not only have these " Annex 1 " countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and most of the EU, repeatedly resisted ambitious, binding targets on emissions reductions, they have also repeatedly broken promises on financial assistance.

Last November, at COP26 in Glasgow, the Global South had three key demands on finance: greatly increased climate finance grants; far more funding for climate adaptation; and a new pot of money to compensate for the loss and damage already being suffered by frontline communities.

This week's report highlights that, despite a 2009 pledge (at COP15) to commit roughly half of $100bn a year in climate finance to adaptation, only 4-8% of funding has supported projects that help vulnerable communities live with the impacts of the climate crisis (and some of those projects actually increase climate vulnerability). Those communities are now being sacrificed to the selfishness of rich governments that resist paying for the crisis they have caused every step of the way.

The demand for loss and damage compensation has also been heavily resisted at every previous COP. At COP26, the establishment of a new funding pot was rejected and almost all references were removed in the final agreement, the Glasgow Climate Pact.

Campaigners have hailed the promise for further discussions on loss and damage as a small win, and will push hard to make it a key issue at COP27 in Egypt this coming November. Yet, insiders have now raised concerns that there was significant pressure from the Biden administration to remove any mention of loss and damage from the latest IPCC report.

Meanwhile, frontline communities, such as in Sub-Saharan African, South East Asia and small island states in the Pacific and Caribbean, continue to lose homes, livelihoods and families to the climate crisis. For example, just before Christmas, while it also dealing with a steep rise in COVID-19 infections, the Philippines was hit by super typhoon Rai (also called Odette), which displaced half a million people and impacted nearly five million in total.

Lower income countries spend five times their climate adaptation budgets on external debt payments

Just a few weeks ago, tropical storm Ana affected nearly 200,000 people across several countries in southern Africa. Without adequate finance, countries often need to take out loans to rebuild, forcing them further into a colonial debt trap that forces them to prioritise debt payments over protecting their citizens. Research suggests that lower income countries spend five times their climate adaptation budgets on external debt payments.

Take Mozambique, which, after devastating cyclones in 2019, was forced to take on a $118m loan from the International Monetary Fund. World Bank data suggests that an average person in Mozambique contributes 76 times less carbon emissions than their US counterpart, yet it is Mozambicans and other frontline communities who are paying - with their wallets and their lives - for this crisis.

Reparations for a liveable world

Increasing the transfer of finance from the Global North to the Global South is therefore an important element of limiting the devastation, and moving towards climate justice, but it alone cannot repair all the damage done by capitalist extractivism.

Increasingly, social movements are calling for a broad programme of climate reparations to atone for the Global North's role in creating and accelerating the climate crisis. These calls are not new: campaigns for African reparations for colonialism have existed for centuries, while it has been more than a decade since climate movements called for financial and technology transfer to the Global South. However, the calls for reparations are growing in volume, and found support among youth strikers and climate justice activists at COP26.

As reparationist Esther Stanford-Xosei argues, reparations are not simply a matter of financial compensation, but must include bigger, more radical changes that help us build "new economic systems that don't produce and reproduce inequality". Alongside the much needed adaptation and loss and damage finance, a climate reparations programme in this vein could include (but would not be limited to) the patent-free sharing of green tech with the Global South, wealth taxation, debt cancellation, tax transparency reforms, and reforms to international institutions.

Demands such as these would not just be an attempt to right historical injustices created simultaneously by colonialism and climate change, but to prevent them occurring again in the future. As Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò says, these types of reparations are "central to the expansive project of building a more just world".

As radical as this might seem, for billions across the Global South it is the only just and liveable future. And the window to achieve it is closing rapidly.

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The case for climate reparations is now irrefutable

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The latest UN climate report highlights how communities that have contributed the least to climate change are suffering the most "A brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." That's the sobering assessment made by scientists on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which earlier this week published its latest report, on the impacts of the climate crisis.

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Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability | Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (ipcc.ch)

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Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report