Abhimita Das* and Dr Akshay Kumar**
Once again, the world stands at a familiar crossroad, an essential banality, where the smoke from a thousand chimneys curls into the same grey-scale skies and we call it progress. The irony is so thick it could be bottled and sold in a glass jar labelled 'Hope', stocked neatly beside imported air purifiers.
The "Hope" is both absurd, surreal, and prophetic. It reveals the oldest delusion of empire and imperialism, that human progress can somehow be directly proportional to the natural resources the earth holds. In other words, the imperial notion of progress sees the planet not as something to coexist with but something to exploit and take from. Its idea of advancement assumes that to grow, one must extract, consume, and dominate nature, regardless of the damage.
Following in the footsteps, the new Caesar of the global empire with a spray-tan halo, Donald Trump, on April 8, 2025, declared coal to be “The single most reliable, durable, secure, and powerful form of energy on earth.”
The Republican leader has long promised to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal to fire power plants and for other uses, reinforcing the policy of the United States that coal is essential to its national and economic security. Minutes later, he signed an executive order halting America’s transition away from it.
His reasoning? That artificial intelligence was necessary, that data centres, and the future itself would need more electricity. The irony was biblical. To feed the machines that pretend to think, he offered up the lungs of the living world.
Ministers, corporate lobbies, and bureaucrats often repeat the same green-washed hymns in another language. Growth, they tell us, is sacred. Development is inevitable. Sustainability is achievable if only we build a few more solar panels, plant a few more trees, hold a few more conferences where the rich discuss carbon footprints in a vocabulary of sustainability that has become a kind of moral laundering.
Between Rhetoric & Reality
This is a perfect recipe to make greed sound noble, and destruction sound like progress.
There are ritualistic, tokenistic state interventions in immediate climate emergencies, without any meaningful help, considering the scale of the crisis, which is mostly fuelled by the fossil fuel industry.
Another great irony of this empire is that COP30 was organised in Brazil from November 10, 2025, with representatives from over 195 countries. Coinciding with the event, an investigation published in the Guardian found that over 5350 fossil fuel lobbyists, who worked for 859 fossil fuel organisations, have participated in UN climate summits in the past four years. These four years marked the rise of catastrophic extreme weather, climate inaction and oil and natural gas expansion.
Even during the climate crisis, businesses make money, mostly from Europe and the USA. This was evident from the Climate Risk Index 2026 released at COP30, which recorded over 9700 extreme weather events between 1995 and 2024 with more than 8.3 lakhs fatalities and $4.5 trillion in direct damages.
Most of the countries affected by these events were from the Global south including India, Myanmar, Philippines, wrote Vera Künzel and Laura Schäfer, two of the Climate Risk Index authors.
Within countries of the Global South, whether it's state subsidies or green taxes, the poor pay with their houses, healthcare, lifestyle, clean air, and food. Despite this, the sloganeering of sustainable development is being parroted by National and Global Emperors.
Climate Change & Hierarchies of Impact
Since the Brundtland Commission’s report in 1987, sustainable development has been the planet’s favourite slogan, a promise to balance growth and ecology, but it functions more like an alibi than a principle. The world is reimagined as a neutral playing field where “humanity” collectively faces climate change, erasing the brutal fact that collapse is not democratic and the poor working class is ultimately bearing the brunt of the climatic wrath.
In India's Delhi, the difference between breathing and choking has a distinct class character. When the Air Quality Index surges beyond 350, air purifiers hum inside gated colonies while construction labourers work bare-faced at construction sites. The same pollution that the privileged measure on an App is what the poor inhale at work.
“Sustainability,” here, means sustaining and doting a glaring mass inequality and this unequal class also comprises over 80 crore Indians who have meagre earnings, as the government acknowledges and gives them free food. At the same time, India has had a rise in billionaires which peaked to 284 in 2025 as per Hurun Global Rich List 2025, their combined wealth towering above the GDPs of several nations, a stark reminder of India’s hierarchical society. These hierarchies hover at the top of the ecological crises like an impending doom.
Murray Bookchin’s theory of social ecology reminds us that ecological crises are born not in nature but in society, in hierarchies that enable domination of humans over humans, and therefore, over the Earth.
Delhi’s smog is not a meteorological accident. It is the exhaust of an economic model built on the corporate-owned private ownership-led modernisation. In this modernisation model, everything has been pushed to the market.
For instance, the transport sector or vehicular pollution contributes to over 50 percent of the pollution problem of Delhi NCR. Most of these vehicles are privately owned and have become a lifeline for several people. A viable alternative could have been the expansion of a robust public transport system, which is unfortunately on the verge of extinction.
Add to this the chaos of unregulated real-estate construction, the continuous emissions from thousands of factories, and an economic ideology obsessed with perpetual growth, Delhi’s toxic air emerges not as an anomaly but as the logical outcome of the system itself.
A Policy of Denial
It is evident from the latest Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analysis report, which states that not even a single district in India has safe air quality.
The safe air quality, as per World Health Organisation standards, is the concentration of Particulate matter (PM 2.5) which should be 5 microgram per cubic metres. However, as per Indian government, if the concentration of PM 2.5 is less than 40 micrograms per cubic metre, then it is safe air.
Despite altering the cap on WHO regulatory standards, over 60 percent of Indian districts have poor air quality levels. Governments respond with ritualistic gestures, banning firecrackers, implementing odd-odd-even schemes, holding high-level meetings for headline-making, praying for “artificial rain.”
But the deeper causes remain untouched. There is sordid, ceremonial guilt, never concrete solutions. The real culprits - private vehicular pollution, coal-fired power plants, carbon emission industries, speculative real estate, expanding cities, and construction of new infrastructure - are the sacred cows. These are seldom questioned.
Artificial rain is not a solution. It is a symptom of denial. It embodies cornucopianism, the belief that human ingenuity and technology can outwit the ecological limits set by human greed. If the air is toxic, make it rain or use air purifiers. If the planet warms, geoengineer the sky or use air-conditioners. But this optimism is a luxury belief in the power of technology, accessible only to the rich.
This fallacy is held intact with a bandage and unrealistically overstretched to call it progress.
The flood never drowns everyone equally. The worker, the farmer, the woman in a factory slum, they cannot “adapt” to the unbreathable. Cornucopianism’s blind spot is class. It assumes infinite innovation while ignoring who pays the cost.
Violence of the word ‘Development’
India, that self-proclaimed Vishwaguru, now stands among the top polluters of the world. As the COP30 summit concluded in Brazil, India didn’t submit the climate report. The targets of 1.5 °C have already slipped beyond reach.
The Aravalli hills which were called as lungs of Delhi, are ready to be plundered in the name of mining, following the acceptance by Supreme Court of the Indian government’s definition of hills, according to which all hills under 100 meters of elevation can be leased for mining purposes.
In the Northeast and Himalayan region, rivers are damned, forests mutilated, mountains drilled in the name of national interest for creating new infrastructure. “Clean energy,” they call it.
The public sector that once protected the commons has been gutted, sold off to private gods who pray only to the market. Development is the sacred word, but it becomes a guise for dispossession.
We are trained to think of expressways as progress, of malls as modernity, of endless growth as destiny but the dark truth of this growth is that only the richest countries and some elites in the developing and underdeveloped countries have been benefiting from this discourse of modernity, which is based on the plundering of natural resources.
Breaking the Vicious Cycle
An alternative pathway is outlined in the Oxfam report, which argues that governments must break the vicious cycle created by the emissions of the super-rich. This requires increasing taxes on the world’s wealthiest individuals, introducing permanent progressive taxes on income and wealth, and imposing a 50 percent excess-profits tax on large corporations for returns on total assets above 10 percent.
The report also calls for banning excessively carbon-intensive luxury goods and activities such as superyachts and private jets and strengthening people-led, democratic governance.
Empowering the civil society by expanding their voice and granting them a formal seat in climate planning and decision-making processes, it suggests, could mark the beginning of real change. Yet this beginning remains elusive, suspended between promise and political inertia, reminding us that transformative climate justice is still being deferred, feeling more like a distant aspiration than an impending reality.
(*Abhimita Das, is a student of Bachelor of Media and Public Affairs 6th Semester at Christ Deemed to be University, Delhi NCR Campus)
(**Dr Akshay Kumar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies, School of Social Sciences, Christ Deemed to be University, Delhi NCR Campus)
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