Carbon Colonialism: Oil-Rich <span class="caps">UAE</span> Buys Up Large Swaths of Africa for Carbon Credits to Keep Polluting

As Democracy Now! broadcasts from COP28 in Dubai, we look at how the United Arab Emirates is using its vast oil money to buy up the rights to land in many African countries in order to sell carbon credits to major polluters, a plan that critics characterize as a new form of colonialism. “After failing to mitigate at the source,” wealthy polluters now “want to, basically, buy, on the cheap, African land,” says Power Shift Africa’s Mohamed Adow about wealthy nations’ failure to deliver on climate finance and turn to a “land grab” on the African continent. “What they’re doing is actually commodifying nature,” says Adow, who describes carbon credits as an “imaginary concept” amounting to “permits to pollute.”