Saliem Fakir - Low Carbon Future
The problem with dogma
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Dullness versus the creative: prospects for development and human wellbeing
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Micro-arguments and process of large change – Part 2
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Micro-arguments and the process of large change – Part 1
By: Saliem Fakir 10th March 2023 ‘All men (women) are intellectuals . . . but not all men (women) have in society the function of intellectuals.” – Gramsci. It seems incremental... →
Is Eskom a dead project?
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Green hydrogen - reflections on the new green gold
By: Saliem Fakir 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.... →
Lost and damaged: reflections on COP27
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Value of stability for political and economic progress
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Extraction: it’s everywhere and on everything
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
Europe’s gas addiction undermining Africa’s energy transition
By: Saliem Fakir 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... →
