This groundWork Report continues with the theme of climate and energy justice explored from different angles in the last two reports: Talking Energy (2013) and Planning Poverty (2014). Talking Energy is a report of conversations with people from the fenceline communities about their energy use and lived environments, what they thought of the wider energy system and their ideas for an alternative system. It opens with a discussion of the scale of inequality and poverty in South Africa and of the concentration of power and control in the carbon intensive and polluting economy defined by the minerals-energy complex. Planning Poverty shows that the National Development Plan will not address poverty and inequality but is rather a plan to deliver cheap labour and natural resources to capital. It documents the port and petrochemical expansion plans in south Durban to show that the massive infrastructure projects central to government planning are designed to fit with a world of ever increasing carbon emissions, a world that is made ever more toxic.
