ABSTRACT Contestations over temporal categories are marginalized in transition debates. This article reorients such debates by exploring the structural relationship between time and just transition or planetary justice. I demonstrate how transition, defined as governments and inter-state institutions’ efforts to shift to a lower carbon future, is inscribed with categories of time and certain notions of justice. I argue the recent acknowledgement of the link of colonization with climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not necessarily disrupt the deployment of a linear and recursive (universal) notion of capital time nor does it challenge the co-constitution of racialized accumulation institutions and governance power technologies, with dire effects on a ‘just transition.’ I then draw on Frantz Fanon’s idea of invention as an event without sense or content, a decolonial violence whose subject plunges into an abyss and whose ‘measure’ or possibility is always unprecedented.