Terrible Twins: Fossil Fuels & Finance
Join us to discuss how the financial sector is using our money to fuel the climate crisis - and what we can do about it! Plus an event on unleashing creativity for climate action.
Dear Fossil Free SA friends and supporters,
Following a Northern Hemisphere summer of record temperatures and natural disasters, and an unfolding flooding crisis in Libya and other parts of the world, it’s ever clearer that climate change is one of the present, not a future possibility. But it’s still a crisis that we can either stop in its tracks or allow to become even worse.
So it’s all the more important to find powerful and practical ways to work together to challenge the fossil fuel industry that is the real cause of the crisis – much as some still prefer to shy away from mentioning this.Â
The fossil fuel industry has been at the centre of violent colonial extraction in Africa. They have lied, cheated, and corrupted their way to their current power – and still love nothing more than to tell us how we should be minimising our carbon footprint – while they do everything in their power to make that really hard. (We strongly recommend a recent Ted talk by former US vice president Al Gore in which he explains in detail how the fossil fuel industry is doubling down on extraction and obstructing climate action).
Here at FFSA, we’re redoubling our efforts to tackle this industry’s power, via our divest-reinvest and anti-greenwashing campaigns. We have some exciting events happening just next week.
For more about the events and our most recent work, do scroll on.
Very best wishes,
David and Sarah, on behalf of the (growing) FFSA Team
Our upcoming web event – Terrible Twins: Finance and Fossil FuelsÂ
As part of Cape Town Climate Week, we’ve teamed up with Just Share and the Fair Finance Coalition to bring you accessible information on how different aspects of financial mechanisms are contributing to the climate crisis, from private investments, to banks to public money.Â
Date: Thursday 21 September 2023
Time: 17h30–19h00
Venue: Online – Register NowÂ
Unleashing Creativity For Climate Action
Our Clean Creatives SA campaign team is also hosting an online and in-person event as part of Cape Town Climate Week on how advertising creatives and climate activists can join forces. On the panel is Fossil Free SA campaigner, Thameena Dhansay, who works on our Fossil Ad Ban Cape Town campaign team, and Clean Creatives SA country director, Stephen Horn.
The announcement of the winning work of the Creative Cleanup 2023 Schools Challenge will also be taking place at this event.
Date: Wednesday 20 September 2023
Time: 17h30 for 18h00
Venue: The Kaya Café, 35 Loop St, Cape Town Sign up here.Â
The divest-reinvest dispatch
Bite-sized updates on our most recent work
We have reconvened our university work now that it is the new semester. Our updated universities page can be seen on our website and we recently presented our work at Stellenbosch University at the screening of the Janet Solomon documentary Becoming Visible. We have also been building on our work for university disassociation from fossil fuels and have been introduced to Fossil Free Research, a great new movement on campuses to further disengage from the fossil fuel industry.
In light of the most recent Africa Climate Summit, which had an excessively business-dominated approach and said nothing about the most urgent imperatives for both mitigation and adaptation on climate, we have developed a response with our feedback and concerns on the event, a perspective which was also featured on Business Day TV.
In our climate reporting work, we discuss how reporters can accurately weave climate change into stories about fires, floods and other extreme weather events – or even into stories on finance.Â
Our Fossil Ad Ban Cape Town campaign is gaining momentum, and has now been endorsed by several more organisations and people, including the Public Health Association of SA, and independent parliamentary candidate Zackie Achmat. Our campaigner Thameena Dhansay recently wrote a compelling piece on how Environmental destruction by Sasol taints Banyana Banyana’s breakthrough success. We hope to launch a dedicated ad ban campaign website very soon.Â
Our #InvestFossil Free campaign is building momentum behind the scenes. We have now secured a meeting with Old Mutual, we have reviewed and responded to their recent sustainability report, and will be sharing more on this soon.Â
For all of you who continue to support our work, we are very grateful. If you have the means, please consider donating. Even very small monthly contributions are greatly appreciated.