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In this limited podcast series from Oil Change International, host Shady Khalil pulls back the curtain on the true cost of fossil fuels and the villains blocking climate action. Through candid conversations with global climate leaders, the podcast explores the damage caused by fossil fuels, the obstacles in our path, and how people-powered movements are forging the path towards a just and equitable transition that leaves no one behind.
From the frontlines of the climate crisis to the global halls of power, we look at the political, economic, and people-powered battles shaping our future. This is not just a fight about climate and carbon, it’s a fight for people and justice. Together we can create the livable future we deserve.
New episodes will be released every week. Find out more at https://oilchange.org/burned/
Shady Khalil (00:03)
Hello everyone, this is Shady Khalil from Oil Change International. You are listening to Burned: the Price of Oil, a podcast where we expose the true cause of fossil fuel and the villains blocking climate action and how a movement of people's power is fighting back to create momentum for a just and equitable transition that leaves no one behind. Joining me on this episode is Dipti Bhatnagar who serves on the executive committee of Friends of the Earth International and works with Justica Ambiental, Friends of the Earth Mozambique,
Thank you so much for joining us.
Dipti Bhatnagar (00:35)
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Shady Khalil (00:38)
So Dipti, we want our listeners to get to know you a little better. Can you take us back to the beginning? You have spent 25 years fighting for environmental and social justice. What first brought you into this work and what kept you going?
Dipti Bhatnagar (00:53)
Sure. It's been a long time. Some of us have been around for a while looking at all of this injustice and looking at the patterns, right? When you've been in this field for 25 years, you start to see the patterns and we will talk about some of that later. But I was a young student in university in Delhi. I'm born and raised in India. And Arundhati Roy, the famous writer, activist came to my university.
And at that time it was the height of the Narmada anti-dam struggle in central India and the communities there. At that time, the dam was funded by the World Bank. Let's talk about the World Bank later as well. The World Bank was funding this destruction and this injustice. is environmental and social injustice in India. And I got connected to this struggle. At the same time, I was in...
San Francisco in California, a young immigrant South Asian woman at the time of 9-11. I just got thrown into the anti-war movement and the immigrant rights movement and the Palestine Solidarity Movement at that time. And started to make all of the connections about the social and environmental injustices that I was seeing in India, but not just in India. This was happening with dam affected communities across the world. This was happening in
The first time I went to a coal affected community, I think it was 2004 in the state of Jharkhand in India, which is the hotbed for the coal injustice. And I started to connect, especially being in the US and being in India and starting to understand how empire functions. And over the last 25 years, we've seen it unfold like a book, how empire has, how the US empire, but
the thinking about empire and colonialism has spread throughout the world and how it's taking over the lives of people and it's taking over the planet's ability to support humanity. So this is where I started and it's been an absolutely wonderful journey through so many, so many different struggles and so many different movements. And the anti-dam struggle actually helped.
me to meet my partner. We met at meet at an anti-dams meeting more than 20 years ago. He was fighting a dam in Mozambique, which we're still fighting today. It still hasn't been built. We still kept it stopped all these years. And I was fighting the dam in India and we met in Thailand at an anti-dams meeting. And I've lived in Mozambique now for 15 years almost. So it's really about understanding globally how injustice
functions and how all of it is connected. And then of course, how are we going to take it apart and support a life of dignity for all our peoples?
Shady Khalil (03:52)
means there are two things that are actually grabbing my attention. Also, like when it comes to you finding love in middle of all of this, this is quite exciting. I'm just like happy to hear this. And then also you mentioning the word empire, because it's quite, it's quite important to do this word. And then it's really, really catching my, my attention. I really want to stress on it. So thank you for using this word. And you have been working with J.A.
for almost 15 years, right? Which has of course come with fighting against one of the most globally controversial mega projects, the Total Energy LNG project in northern Mozambique. A project that is not only a carbon bomb, but it's also linked to horrific human rights abuses. Can you tell us what is the situation on the ground and how this project is impacting local communities?
Dipti Bhatnagar (04:43)
Definitely. So the Mozambique gas project, this huge gas field was discovered off the coast of northern Mozambique. It's been around 15 years since the gas field was discovered. And then it's kind of been a textbook case. What we see happening in Africa and across the global South with fossil fuels. It's a textbook case of the resource curse.
how the fossil fuels discoveries is increasing conflict and insecurity and militarization, how it's increasing indebtedness for people, how it's increasing the shrinking civic space, how it's increasing the biodiversity impacts. Very recently we found out that ⁓ the project has just restarted recently and already we've seen huge impacts to the corals off the coast of northern Mozambique.
The most horrific has been the human rights violations. So starting around 2017, this gas rush that happened in Northern Mozambique provoked an insurgency. So local people seeing their resources being taken and being used for others to benefit, which includes corporate elites, which includes
local government elites as well. This is how impunity functions. It's the corporate elites and the government elites coming together to just strip resources and strip agency from the poorest people on the planet. And that's what we saw in Cabo Delgado as well. So in 2021, the decapitations and the insurgency and the horrificness of
what the people of Palma and what the people of Kabul Delgado have faced. And then in 2021, there was a really horrific attack in the city of Palma. And it's one of the biggest so-called terrorist attacks since 9-11, but nobody knows about it, nobody talks about it. So once this happened, then Total did a force majeure and they said, oh, the security situation is not good. They pulled back.
There were all kinds of complications with that. And Justi Sambiantal, which is my group on the ground, has been working with communities, supporting communities the whole time. I think it was my partner who first went to Cabo Delgado. I think it was 2006, maybe, starting to work with communities there. So we have a history of building with communities and trying to understand their concerns with this whole project.
So the most horrific attack happens in Palma in 2021. Total does a force majeure. And then they're just constantly trying to come back, trying to restart the project, trying to get the financiers to give them the money. Earlier this year, the Trump administration, the Exim Bank, agreed to a $4.7 billion loan to the Mozambique Gas Project, which we're opposing as Justi Sambiantal.
And now Total is talking about lifting the force majeure and restarting the project. But it's interesting, they want to put the cost of that onto the Mozambique government. So there was a letter that was leaked which said that Total was asking the Mozambique government for $4.5 billion as the cost of the force majeure. our countries, Shadi, especially in Africa, are going to be on the absolute bottom.
It's what Tunisian economist Fadhel Kaboub calls the fossil fuel debt entrapment. These are some of the ways that fossil fuels are operating in our continent, increasing the militarization, the insecurity, the insurgency, increasing the indebtedness. And using these legal means, like the investor state dispute settlement, the ISDS, which is a mechanism by which companies
get to take countries to court. So fossil fuels has so many issues. You we talk about the climate change. We're speaking while the COP 30 in Belem is going on. And of course, climate change is going to impact our peoples. It's going to impact the poorest and already is the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. But there are so many other reasons why we have been fighting fossil fuels for decades. And that relates to
the insurgencies, it relates to the debt crisis, the disinformation and misinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry and so many other layers in which the fossil fuel industry has sort of created the global governance systems and entrenched itself into the way that the world functions. that is, our task is big because our task collectively is to actually separate that and to say, we see life.
And we see dignity for people beyond fossil fuels.
Shady Khalil (09:59)
I mean, it's very classic international oil and gas company sort of arrangement where they actually make contracts that are not in the favor of the Global South countries. And they come with the notion of development. we are coming here to develop your countries through oil and gas. But the reality, you have mentioned, Dipti it's never the terms are never in the favor of Global South countries. it's like in the best case scenarios only serving the elite of Global South countries.
and how the international financial architecture and also the multilateral architecture is also serving the dynamics in the favor of international oil and gas companies and their countries that they come from in a way that does not serve the people and that the global majority in this case, and lock us in cycles of debt.
that allows them to exploit us not only in oil and gas but also in extractive dynamics and new colonial dynamics. know this is an area that you are very passionate about and you have been working a lot on. But I really want to ask you on the question, despite all of this happening right now, Total is pushing to restore this operation in Mozambique. What does this make you feel? And what does this mean to the people of Cabo Delgado?
Dipti Bhatnagar (11:10)
This project, the Mozambique gas project, never was for the Mozambican people. There is always this narrative of, our countries need energy access. And definitely they do need energy access because Mozambique is one of the countries with a very low level of energy access. But these projects were never meant for our peoples. This is such typical colonial dynamics that our resources come out of the ground, go to the coast.
and out of the continent on ships, you know, just like they've been doing for 500 years. So that pattern is very much continuing. The people of Cabo Delgado, you know, it's interesting when the Mozambican fight against Portuguese colonialism was going on, the first shots were fired in Cabo Delgado. It was an armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism.
and the first people to lift their arms were in Cabo Delgado. So these are people who are going to fight back. They're going to fight for the dignity of their land and their peoples and their lives. And they very much need to have the ability to protect themselves. So the people of Cabo Delgado are horrified with this project, right? Because it's brought so many evils to the land. People want a life of dignity.
development, but what kind of development are we talking about? We're talking about health and education and transport and communication and energy and food and clean water, care, the things that actually keep our bodies and our communities alive and thriving. Africa is the origin of the modern humans. People have lived in Africa for 300,000 years. Our people know how to survive.
Our people know how to take care of each other and move and migrate to all corners of the world, like I've done now. I've migrated across the world and our people have been doing that for so long. We need to be able to support the communities in Cabo Delgado right now. We need to continue fighting back against Total. Keep exposing the tactics that they use to spread this information, the tactics that they use.
to bully and threaten global South countries like Mozambique and so many others to accept all kinds of bad deals. And at the same time, at the national level, we need to be challenging our own governments to say, you cannot accept these deals. The fight is so multi-layered and people like us who work.
From the grassroots to the halls of power, we know that we need to have this fight at every single level and we need to actually connect all of those fights.
Shady Khalil (14:04)
I mean, I can feel you with all of my heart and I have tremendous respect to the work that you're leading because it's really about governance and it's a very, very delicate line, right? It's really about the international laws and international dynamics and really reforming this imbalance within the architecture of the international multilateral and also financial architecture. And then also there is the layer of governance and how we are leading the work domestically and how we are informing our policymakers within our local
lows, it's a lot of work, a lot of juggling. So lots of respect on this juggling between the two fronts. And as you have been mentioning, despite the enormous risk, criminalization, displacement, violence, communities, most of them continue to organize. And much of this resistance is led by women, youth, and community leaders. If you can mention to our listeners, what are some of the most powerful forms of resistance to this project you have seen on the ground?
Dipti Bhatnagar (15:04)
Of course, Mozambique's been going through some tough times lately, just like many of our places that we love and care about. We had presidential elections last year in October, and the ruling party has been in power now for 50 years. Mozambique celebrated 50 years of independence this year in June, and for 50 years, the party...
that is in power have not been serving the people. And the youth finally got very tired of that. And people across the country who are facing not just the gas extraction, but we've got coal as well. We've got coal extraction that's going on in Mozambique already for 20 years.
We've got land grabbing happening all across the country. We've got the transition minerals, right? Now they want the critical minerals too. It's not just the fossil fuels. Now they want the critical minerals from under our people's land. to whom? And what kind of, you know, in Portuguese we say, for who and for what?
We don't just say, we need X amount of gigawatts of energy. What are you going to use the energy for? Are you going to use the energy as Israel does to bomb and cause a genocide in Gaza? Or are you going to use the energy to light up a school, to build futures for communities? What are you actually using the energy for? This is very much part of the conversation that we need to have. And the people of Mozambique have been...
up in arms since last year saying, we don't accept this. We don't accept our elections being manipulated. We don't accept other people's will. Democracy, this is really very deeply about questions of democracy. And of course, colonialism was never set up for democracy. The global governance systems, the way they are. ⁓
is not really compatible with democracy. So what does that mean? So we need to look for us as Africans, what does democracy look like? I wrote an article about that last year, you know, like how democracy happens in villages in Africa, for example, how communities get together and decide how the decisions in the community will be taken.
Shady Khalil (17:29)
This is such an important point really. It's really that our societies, because we are always deemed, I mean the global South, we're always deemed, you have never known democracy before the Western world, but we have our own system of governance that is full of care, that has its own dynamics, that actually considers the entire histories, entire society and brings, I think, so much depth to the way governance is, as you have mentioned, so really I wanted to take a pause here because...
We have known different versions of what they call democracy or like Western democracies that actually care about the society and the community. And now is the time if you're imagining a new future, if you're imagining a just transition, is to look in our resources and our history and how can we actually redefine the word democracy and look into our legacy of governance and how can we take it forward.
Dipti Bhatnagar (18:20)
Absolutely. I I live on the Indian Ocean coast and my origins are in India on the other side of the Indian Ocean coast and our peoples have been communicating and trading across that ocean for a long, long time. So we need to reimagine it. And of course, indigenous peoples are teaching us this. We need to reimagine how we relate with each other and how we relate with the earth. And if we don't do that, then
The push for critical minerals and the push for 100 % renewable energy is not going to be enough because we need to talk about 100 % renewable energy for all, not Tesla electric cars for the elites and who can afford put solar panels on your roof and everyone else gets a candle or a diesel generator. That's not the world that we're envisioning. So it's very much from the roots to try and...
understand how are we going to dismantle the fossil, this entrenched fossil fuel neocolonial system and at the same time go back to how we relate with each other, how we relate with the earth and how are we actually going to build a system from the ground up where the democracy is about how people relate with each other and how people decide how to use the resources. So at the same time, it's very, very local. Every place has
locally appropriate materials that you can use for building, for energy, for food production. At the same time, because I'm such a globalist and I've spread my life across so many continents, I see the beauty in this very beautiful global networks that we are building. And the crises are very much global. So some of us need to do that work of, you know, being the connective tissue globally. And of course,
challenging the global governance systems when they're not serving us. These global governance systems, the United Nations was set up in 1945 when here in San Francisco, which is where I am sitting right now, India was not independent at that time. Mozambique was not independent at that time. These systems were set up in the colonial era. We still need them. They are really, really important. Multilateralism and the global governance systems are critical.
to our survival as global South countries at the moment, because at least our countries can lift up the flag and say, have something to say at COP 30. I have something to say. I have something to talk about. I have something to oppose or some points to raise. There are other fora where our voices are not even heard. So the global governance systems we see right now are very, critical, but they are not delivering because they were set up at a time when our countries...
were enslaved still. And of course, they're being pulled in the directions of the most authoritarian and the climate denying and the bullies. These are the bullies of the world who are operating, even though the big bully is not in Belém at the moment, but still they are exerting all of their bulliness and their power. And it's our job as local to global organizing to actually confront all of that.
Shady Khalil (21:41)
I mean, speaking about this, Total's own CEO has said in other contexts, we are simply guys, and I stress on guys. We see joint resources. We cannot avoid trying to get it. Especially like it's revealing of the lenses these fossil fuel companies will go to, right? The mentality that they have. Not even recently, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights filed a criminal complaint in France against Total for
alleged complicity in war crimes and torture because of the project. We see this cycle not just in Mozambique, but all around the world, where the fossil fuel industry is deeply rooted in colonialism and neocolonialism, as you have mentioned. Can you share with us your thoughts on how fossil fuel companies continue to sustain the systems of violence and oppression and neocolonialism and everything you have mentioned?
Dipti Bhatnagar (22:33)
Absolutely. This links back to empire, what we talked about in the very beginning. It's very interesting because at the moment with all the Epstein-Files drama that's going on, one of the names that came up in this took me back. Lawrence Summers is one of the people, he used to be the economist at the World Bank and president of Harvard, et cetera, et cetera.
But when I heard the name Laurence Summers, what I remembered in 1991, Laurence Summers was in a scandal because there was a memo from the World Bank that had been leaked. And that memo said that, oh, let's send more polluting industries to, they called it LDCs, to the least developed countries. Africa is under polluted.
let's send more polluting industries there. It just makes economic sense. So I heard about Lawrence Summers first in that context. He is doing all kinds of other injustices. Now all of that is coming out as well. But the point is that these patterns have been operating like this for a really, really long time. And the other thing that I was remembering in 2003,
when the US, the George Bush government was getting ready to attack Iraq. You remember, it was two years after 9-11. We were on the streets fighting against that. My God, it's been 23 years since that happened. And at that time, there was one of the slogans that we were talking about was, body bags are an oil byproduct.
because US soldiers were getting killed and coming home in body bags. And those body bags are made of plastic. And plastic is an oil byproduct. And today we have so many of our allies who are working on the Global Plastics Treaty and on the petrochemical side of fossil fuels and fighting against that because we know that the fossil fuels are just a commodity to them.
Right? It's a highly, highly destructive commodity that's causing a huge amount of destruction in so many parts of the world. But it's just a commodity to them. So they will burn fossil fuels for energy and they are also creating a whole industry of petrochemicals because they're creating a new market for their commodity. So.
It's just putting all these things together. You realize this is how power functions and this is how empire functions. The attacks of empire 25 years ago, 23 years ago on West Asia has just been relentless and has continued. But of course it's spread all throughout. It's supporting dictatorships and coups across Latin America.
Now the same thing happening in Africa as well. So this is how we need to connect it. This is the, as you said, the international financial architecture with these empire holders at the very top. They've created this architecture and all of us just are put into that system.
This is the commodity that they're currently using, fossil fuels, to really dominate their empire ambitions. But tomorrow it will be something else. The transition minerals are already being implicated in people's deaths and environmental destruction in the Congo, in Mozambique, and so many other places in the world. The lithium from Argentina and all of this. So we... ⁓
Those of us who understand how these systems work need to be so clear that that is what we are fighting. We are fighting for survival. We are fighting for dismantling this international architecture. And we need to fight against fossil fuels because they're extremely, extremely destructive. But let us not make the fight only about fossil fuels.
because their plan is much, much bigger and our lives are far more important for us to miss the fact that this isn't just about the fossil fuels, this is about the structure that they have built that we need to dismantle.
Shady Khalil (27:21)
Thank you so much for bringing this point forward because that's why the oil and gas companies that we have been seeing trying to claim that they can address the climate chaos that they have caused and actually solve it. And they cannot be trusted. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be trusted to put out the fire because they are operating on an extractive mentality. As you have mentioned, even within the energy transition, even if those oil and gas companies like transformed into which is
I mean, from what they are doing, they are not doing great on that front, like transforming into renewables, they will continue with the systematic extractive dynamics that they have operated with and the global south that you have mentioned. That's why they cannot be trusted for the energy transition. fuel companies and their enablers continue to invest billions in new oil and gas companies, like despite like even claiming to be transitioning and being green.
while spreading misinformation and lobbying against meaningful climate policies in an effort to delay the transition to renewable energy so they can actually extract as much as possible from oil and gas until they get to the point to extract from transitional minerals as you have mentioned and bank on it. And we have seen just recently at the UN climate talks in Brazil where more than 1600 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the climate talks. And let's take a pause here because 1600 is like bigger than any
delegation, any country delegation of impacted communities. I think this is like only equivalent to the host country, Brazil, because it's happening in Brazil. They own climate talks. So we have like populations and community of the most impacted people being outnumbered by those lobbyists who has money, has resources, can stay in expensive hotels.
Making yet another year of overwhelming industry presence at the crucial climate negotiations. And you don't see, for example, the tobacco industry being invited in a public health conference, but you see this within the climate talks. There is obviously a need to establish a clear conflict of interest. Policies and accountability measures within the UN climate talks when it comes to the industry, corrupting influence.
How does it feel to see the industry influence deep in year after year when governments have been negotiating as the climate talks for three decades and they only recognize the need to transition away from fossil fuel just two years ago in Dubai?
Dipti Bhatnagar (29:39)
It's
very tragic that they've been talking about climate change for 30 years, but they only first mentioned fossil fuels in the text two years ago, and even that they're trying to completely undo. And of course, our colleagues with the Kick Big Polluters Out campaign have been doing great work over the years, tracking how many fossil fuel lobbyists are coming in and trying to also
push the UNFCCC to say you cannot allow this. At least now people have to report where do they get the financing from to go to the cop and all of this, but it's still voluntary. It's still not enough. Shadi, I think our work on fighting corporate power is really the biggest fight that people across the world need to have at the moment. I was recently in Geneva.
So I didn't go to the Belay Circus this year, I went to another circus, which is the binding treaty on transnational corporations. Those negotiations are going on in Geneva for the last 11 years. And it's the global campaign to dismantle corporate power that organizes the civil society in that space. And watching that process, you know, and me, I've been in the climate cop for so long and I'm...
watching the two spaces and comparing how the power is operating, but also the access to negotiators, which is so difficult now at the climate cop. But in Geneva, we were sitting in the room with the negotiators and the civil society is right there. And we're going up and I said hello to the Mozambican negotiator and the Ghanaian negotiator and the indigenous peoples and the frontline peoples are in the room as well.
speaking directly to the negotiators, directly in the halls of power. So those of us who are operating in these different spaces also have a responsibility to connect up how we are operating in these spaces. So learning the lessons from the kick big polluters out work in the COP and linking that to the fighting of corporate power in these processes, linking to the global plastics work.
and linking to the anti-dams fight, know, those of us who understand from the root how injustice functions also understand how we need to fight it. So that means not getting into our silos and not getting very, very specific about, this is the only way we know how to fight. We need to learn from people, the most vulnerable people, the ones who have the most to lose. We need to be able to learn from them how to fight at this time.
to protect multilateralism, to be able to fight the bullies of the world right now, to have our global organizing, to have our local building, local organizing, rebuilding economies. We need to be able to do all of that. But the real key is what you were saying. The real key is fighting corporate power because, I mean, it's valuing profit and greed over life itself. In our continent, people are...
struggling to survive across the global South. mean, including in the richest country in the world, people are struggling to survive. People don't have food on the table. And you have millions and billions and Elon Musk has been given one trillion something. What is going on as humanity, as a planet? We need to just be able to expose all of these numbers and to be able to support the communities who are living
on the edge who are absolutely have every single thing to lose. And that's whose voices need to be driving us in all of our organizing and in all of these conversations at the international level.
Shady Khalil (33:34)
you bring very closely to clear connection is specifically on the billionaires and the corporate captures that we have been seeing. It's like only it's 1 % of the world just like banking on the rest of us. They're just like trying to make money in all different ways. And they are the one responsible for this inequalities, let it be when it comes to social and economic justice and also the climate justice. And this is a clear linkage that they work hand in hand. They are not separate things because as you have mentioned, people care.
about having food on the table. There's so many people are operating on daily wages and this is what they care about at this point, but it's connected to climate. It's connected to the same villains that we have been seeing extracting and extracting in order to get more and more wealth. And they are banking on those inequalities. And this is again, why I really, really appreciate the work that you are leading and the connection when it comes to the economic and social justice with the climate justice, because they work hand in hand, they are not separate. Despite some people trying to make it separate, they are not separate. They work hand in hand.
And we know that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for driving devastating and shocking climate social injustices and human rights violations around the world. It's not hard to be angry. I'm angry. But my question is in this fight against the fossil fuel industry, against the corporate captures that we are seeing, it gets overwhelming. But what gives you hope, inspiration and drive you to keep fighting?
Dipti Bhatnagar (34:57)
That's a great question. ⁓ I am full of anger, but I'm also full of love because I see what our people have to offer. People are living full lives with their
Shady Khalil (35:09)
And
you find love in this fight. Literally.
Dipti Bhatnagar (35:14)
I think we need to approach the world with love because we need to show what we're fighting for. Yes, I can tell you everything that we're fighting against. We're fighting against fossil fuels. We're fighting against inequality. We're fighting against this global structure. We're fighting against the bullies of the world. But we are also fighting for, we're fighting for a life of dignity for our people. We're fighting for energy.
We're fighting for good, healthy food for our people in their own hands. We're fighting for sovereignty. We're fighting for people being able to make their own decisions. The local democratic initiatives. We're fighting for care. We're fighting for ⁓ an economics which takes care into account. That's why we work not just with economists, but also with feminist economists, because we need to figure out how we're going to bring the economics of care.
We're fighting for a binding treaty on transnational cooperation so that they can be accountable for their crimes. These are the things that we're fighting for. We're fighting for Ubuntu, which comes from our continent, which is the sense of human interconnectedness. I am because we are. We don't exist separate from each other. know, Shadi, the African charter...
is called the African Charter on Human and People's Rights. So it sounds funny. Why are those two words in there? But it's because human rights are individual. But we recognize that individual is not the only way we live on this planet. We live in community. We live as peoples. And that is the work that keeps us going because it's so much beyond us. And there may be times when each of us
needs to take a break and needs to take care of ourselves, but we need to bring the collective care together and that collective sense of what is happening to me is happening to everyone else. What is happening to someone else is happening to me as well. And that sort of connectedness is what keeps us going. But it's really about that long term thinking that if everyone was doing what I was doing, would the world be a better place or a worse place?
That's one of the metrics that I use. So the actions that I'm doing, are they moving us towards the world that we want to see, the world that we want to live in, a better world for all of our peoples where we feel more connected? So anything that builds us towards greater connection, towards understanding the struggles of somebody else.
and building our strategies and our movements around that. I think that's the direction we need to be going. So that's what I've been doing for a long time. I hope to that it's service, you know, for me, this is my service to peoples and planet. And I hope to continue to do it in whatever form I can.
Shady Khalil (38:15)
What you have just mentioned when it comes to the community and that we are not alone in this is quite key. And I think as you have mentioned, feminism and the feminists within the movement, they bring this like value of like not only criticizing what happened and how to deconstruct it, but also bringing a vision to the future where you can actually envision communities of care of how can we envision a world that is not based on extractivism, but based in the community and this kind of notions and value and also solutions on the way forward is what keep me going.
If I can also answer the question. thank you for all the work that is transformational and systematic that you have been doing. And we had the privilege within this podcast to host so many feminists to bring this on the table because in our opinion, this is key towards the transition and towards the futures that we are trying to build because we are not trying to a future that is similar to the past, but a future that can actually be based on care and communities. So thank you so much, Dipti, for all the work that you have been leading. It's been an honor having you on this episode of Burned: The Price of Oil.
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Burned the price of oil. Subscribe and stay tuned for the next episode for more conversations uncovering the heading coast of fossil fuels and imagining the just energy future that we want. Don't forget to rate us and review us on whatever app you get your podcast on. more information you can always check our website at oilchange.org and follow us on social media @Priceofoil
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Voxtopica.