In an extraordinary article Monday Dethroning King Coal: From West Virginia to Durban, South African author Patrick Bond (his upcoming book is The Politics of Climate Justice) presents a no-holds-barred evaluation of the behind-the-curtain realities which define international climate negotiations: Faulty, horrifying remediation and mitigation schemes; corrupt carbon markets; the faux green gold glitter of climate conferences; and the terrifying truth behind "the multiple set of interlinked climate-energy-economic travesties" which define the toxic paralysis of 'futures' as currently derived and bundled by power brokers.
Bond's article presents an outstanding opportunity to present some deep background on many of the issues which characterize how big business and the power elite continue to control, manipulate and define our world.
I dive in to flesh out this devastating look into the underbelly of climate justice. (Direct excerpts from Bond's article are in quotes - all hyperlinks added by me - my comments are in plain text, and background information is in blockquotes. Access the entire article here.)
South Africa ... central pivot irrigation by Dmitriy Fomenko
"South Africa’s crust was drill-pocked with abandon since Kimberley diamonds were found in 1867 and then Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) gold was unearthed in 1886. But the world’s interest in how we trash our environment perked up again last week for two reasons:
* the shocking revelation that acid mine drainage is now seeping into the Johannesburg region’s ‘Cradle of Humankind’, home of hominid fossils dating more than three million years, where our Australopithecus ancestors’ earliest bones are now threatened by the area’s pollution-intensive mining industry;
and
* hot contestation of new United States financing for South Africa’s proposed Kusile power plant, which will be the world’s third largest coal-fired facility."
Johannesburg - Decisive action has become imperative as acidic mine water has reached the Cradle of Humankind from the West Rand, the United Association of South Africa said on Friday.
"If urgent measures aren’t taken immediately, it will result in reactive rather than proactive measures trying to limit the damage instead of preventing it," said Uasa spokesperson Andre Venter.
He said in a statement that acidic water reached the Cradle of Humankind, as predicted by scientists and water specialists, from the West Rand via the Tweelopiespruit which springs from the radioactive Robinson lake outside Randfontein. News24 1/15/11
What's Being Discussed
There is currently a project that is being fought by environmental groups around the world to stop the United States from building a new coal plant in South Africa called the Kusile Coal Plant. Currently under fire is the U. S. Export Import Bank(Ex-Im), which provides financial support to U.S. companies that want to do business abroad, often by providing loans, loan guarantees, and different types of insurance. They have financed billions of dollars in the past for building coal power plants abroad, often times in developing countries, whom are manipulated into the 'dirty' business of coal. Polluting coal plants have been financed in India, South Africa and other developing countries by the U.S in the past. The World Bank had already made a business deal in 2010 to build a similar plant South Africa, the Medupi plant where similar effects to the Kusile plant are being seen.
Today, Eskom, a South African company, is being targeted by the U.S. to help build this plant. Environmental groups in the U.S. are demanding that Ex-Im Bank vote NO on financing such a project this year. The Fight Against Financing Coal for South Africa, 1/18/11
"But in South Africa, the fight is just beginning. The national government in Pretoria and municipal officials in seaside Durban will continue invoking several myths in defense of coal, Kusile and the ‘COP17’, the November 28-December 9 climate summit officially called the ‘Conference of the Parties 17’ (but which should be renamed the Conference of Polluters). Here are some strategies of the SA state and big business meant to blind us:
1. in Durban, aggressive ‘greenwashing’ will attempt to distract attention from vast CO2 emissions attributable to South Durban’s oft-exploding oil refineries and petrochemical complex, Africa’s largest port, the hyperactive tourism promotion strategy (in lieu of any bottom-up economic development), unending sports stadia construction and unnecessary new King Shaka international airport, electricity going to the very dangerous Assmang ferromanganese smelter (the city’s largest power guzzler by far at more than a half-million megawatt hours per year), sprawly new suburban developments, and inefficient electricity consumption and transport because of state failure to provide adequate renewable energy and mass transit incentives;
- ‘offsets’ for a tiny fraction of Durban’s emissions will again be fatuously marketed to an unsuspecting public, as during the 2010 World Cup, including mass planting of trees (though when they die the carbon is re-released) and municipal landfill methane capture – even though the increasingly-corrupt offset industry and European carbon markets which market our emissions credits are now ridiculed across the world, and in economic terms are failing beyond even the most pessimistic predictions;
- whacky, unworkable ‘geo-engineering’ strategies are going to multiply, such as biomass planting to convert valuable food land into fodder for ethanol fuel, or mass dumping of iron filings in the ocean to create carbon-sucking algae blooms, or ‘Carbon Capture and Sequestration/Storage’ schemes to pump power-plant CO2 underground but which tend to leak catastrophically and which require a third more coal to run, or the nuclear energy revival notwithstanding more shutdowns at the main plant, Koeberg (five years ago the industry minister, Alec Erwin, notoriously described as ‘sabotage’ a minor Koeberg accident that cost the ruling party its control of Cape Town in the subsequent municipal election); and
- South African ‘global climate leadership’ will be touted, even though Pretoria’s reactionary United Nations negotiating stance includes fronting for Washington’s much-condemned 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which even if implemented faithfully, by all accounts, will roast Africa with a projected temperature rise of 3.5°C."
Cancún & COP16: An Exercise in Hypocrisy
The erosion along the Hotel Row beaches is astonishing! At some points, you have to slide down a five foot wall of sand just to get your feet wet!
Cancún is a deceptive artificial mirage. An ecological wasteland construced out of greed, with complete disregard of the natural ecosystem, or the well-being of the small local fishing communities who depended on the sea's providence to sustain their families.
(snip)
During the past few years the problem of beach erosion in the Cancún tourist area has been so grave, that the government's been forced to take radical --and stupid-- measures: they replace the lost sand with hundreds of tonnes extracted from the nearby island of Cozumel, to the obvious discontent of the Cozumel islanders.
EU eyes climate 'paradigm shift' on tax, growth and China
One underlying issue facing the Commission is the entry of China into the global green energy race. The country is expected to announce its own five-year energy plan at the Chinese National People's Congress, also in March.
Initiatives such as moves toward an Emissions Trading Scheme and a pricing mechanism for energy are expected. Until now, the EU has been ahead of the field in the global carbon market, but now "our leadership is being challenged," Hedegaard warned.
Her sentiments were echoed by Artur Runge-Metzger, the EU's chief negotiator in Cancún, in a policy seminar at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) on 12 January.
He said that China saw "a real economic prize [in that] it could be associated with a more advanced position in international climate change than it was before".
In his view, the Chinese plan would be "the first real test" for the implementation of what was agreed in Cancún, the "starting point" for international climate policy, and "the next step" for the future.
"Our Chinese colleagues say: 'You will see the finger-prints of Cancún in that five-year plan. We will stick to our word. We are going to implement it.' And that's so damned important – also for the private sector, in order to get moving."
It was also time for the pledges of countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Russia and the US to be implemented, Runge-Metzger said.
NEW YORK -- A huge influx of international greenhouse gas emission offsets looms over the carbon markets, but traders and banks don't know yet what to make of the situation.
Participants in Europe's Emissions Trading System (ETS), the main market for the credits, are normally used to worrying about an oversupply of government-allocated emissions allowances sinking carbon prices. Many of them are now wondering if they're now facing an oversupply of offsets having a similar effect.
Procedural reforms and new hires at the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an agency established by the Kyoto Protocol and headquartered in Bonn, Germany, have led to record issuances of offset credits from that office since December. As a result, credits are getting approved and flying out the door faster than ever before. Proliferation of Emissions Offsets Threatens to Depress Europe's Carbon Trading, NYT, 1/17/11
Global carbon market gears up for 2011 climate talks
"Everything achieved at Cancun, was useful – the nitty-gritty issues have been solved, all necessary but unfortunately not sufficient," says Emmanuel Fages, head of carbon at carbon origination company Orbeo. "We have not moved forward on the main questions that could obstruct a main agreement, such as what is the burden, what are the targets and new mechanisms, what are the verification processes. [These questions] were not addressed," he says.
The consensus among climate change scientists is that temperatures need to be limited to a rise of two degrees Celsius per year to avert dangerous levels of global warming. But limited progress towards a global treaty, involving the mandatory commitments of nations to emissions reduction cuts, is making this target seem less realistic. Cancun was not expected to be the forum for any solid action on reaching this target, but some critics have highlighted how the UN discussions are appearing less and less effective.
"If I was to be very negative, I would say it might have been better if Cancun had been a complete failure then at least we would be rid of this UN process. As essentially it is one more year lost," says Fages. "There is value in that it is a small step towards something meaningful in 10 years' time. That is what these UN talks are likely to produce, either a long process to something meaningful, or a short process to something more fake," he adds.
Keeling Curve. Charles David Keeling's measurements provided the first significant evidence of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Visit climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/keeling_curve for more information.
South Africa's recent National Climate Change Response Green Paper reports catastrophic consequences for Africa unless international agreement is reached on the 2 degree limit and that "under conservative assumptions, "after 2050, warming is projected to reach around 3-4°C along the coast, and 6-7°C in the interior" – which is, simply, non-survivable."
"There’s another reason that the power of what is termed the Minerals-Energy Complex continues unchecked, even as treasures like the Cradle – and also the priceless Kruger Park’s surface water plus millions of people’s health – are threatened: political bribery. In addition to supplying the world’s cheapest power to BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation smelters by honoring dubious apartheid-era deals, Eskom’s coal-fired mega-plants will provide millions of dollars to African National Congress (ANC) party coffers through crony-capitalist relations with the Japanese firm Hitachi." Link
A forest of change in South Africa by Brentjp99
"Last year, Pretoria’s own ombudsman termed the role of then Eskom chairman and ANC Finance Committee member Valli Moosa ‘improper’ in cutting the Hitachi deal. As a result, even pro-corporate Business Day newspaper joined more than 60 local civil society groups and 80 others around the world in formally denouncing $3.75 billion World Bank loan to Eskom which were granted by neoconservative-neoliberal Bank president Robert Zoellick last April." Link
Electricity prices could be raised up to 127 percent to cover costs of interest on Eskom loans. Already, poor households have had their power disconnected and police have arrested "shack-dwellers for electricity theft."
A call to Action
Like many frustrated, oftimes infuriated climate scientists, diplomats and NGOs, who hold out a mere modicum of hope for for the future of COPs and the highly compromised, infiltratred and bloated UNFCCC process), Bond believes the only adequate answer capable of tackling and solving "the greatest crisis of our times" requires massive, highly organized grassroots and labor activism. An activism which coalesces the powerful voices of South Africa's environmental, community, women’s, youth and labor.
Along with calling for a significant investment in "green jobs" (for example metalworkers welding millions of solar powered geysers to switch from aluminum smelters and halt power plant production), Bond also advises the South African government to subsidize public transit, establish a zero-waste policy, implement stringent Air Quality regulations to phase out GHGs, and active planning and utility boards to curtail suburban sprawl and non sustainable development. South Africa must participate in direct-action protests against major polluters, such as "Eskom, Sasol (apartheid’s wicked coal-to-oil company), the Engen refinery in South Durban and the new Durban-Joburg oil mega-pipeline, for instance – should better link micro-environmental struggles over local air, water and land quality to climate change."
Ending corruption in climate financing means replacing traditional North-South financing (characterized by destructive and highly toxic carbon markets) with paradigms based on climate debt that focus not on mitigation but rather on well funded adaptation projects.
Implementation of such post-carbon strategies just might lay the groundwork for an effective COP17, as South Africa citizens reclaim their voices and propel their government towards an informed, transparent and highly empowered conference with new and authentic voices engaged in the battle to reverse climate change.
Only "a mass democratic movement" which .... "defeat(s) them at the source" will have enough clout to overcome South Africa's current power structure and, Bond says, this effort must be of the magnitude of South Africa's triumph over apartheid and its decisive win in the battle for access to AIDS medicines "when respectively, old white politicians and their international business buddies, and Thabo Mbeki and Big Pharma, had to stand back and respect a new morality, a new bottom-up power."