April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

enewable energy technology and retrofitting of buildings to lower
emissions.
Those are the genuine solutions whose name cannot be spoken in South
Africa’s climate policy, given the adverse balance of forces here, and
everywhere. Changing that power balance is the task ahead for climate
justice activism.
(Based at the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, Patrick Bond is completing
a book, Politics of Climate Justice.)
South Africa prepares for ‘Conference of Polluters’
Patrick Bond
At the past two United Nations Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Conference of the
Parties’ (COPs) climate summits, Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancún in 2010,
as well as at prior meetings such as Nairobi, how did South African leaders
and negotiators perform?
Sadly, they regularly let down their constituents, their African colleagues
as well as the global environment.
Most embarrassingly, going forward to the Durban COP 17 in November,
the new Green Paper on climate under public debate this month promotes
two dangerous strategies – nuclear energy and carbon trading – and
concedes dramatic increases in CO2 emissions.
South Africa is building two massive coal-fired plants at Kusile and Medupi
(the world’s third and fourth largest), opening an anticipated forty new
coal mines in spite of scandalous local air and water pollution, and
claiming that more ‘carbon space’ to pollute the air and thus threaten
future generations is required for ‘development’.
SA was not required to cut emissions in the first (1997-2012) stage of the
Kyoto Protocol. But when it comes to a potential second stage, which
ideally would be negotiated in Durban, South Africa’s negotiators are
joining a contradictory movement of emerging economic powers which
both want to retain Kyoto’s North-South differentiation of responsibility to
cut emissions, and to either gut Kyoto’s binding targets or establish
complicated, fraud-ridden offsets and carbon trades which would have the
same effect.
The 2006 Nairobi COP helped set the tone, because Pretoria’s minister of
environment and tourism at the time was Marthinus van Schalkwyk,
formerly head of the New National Party. (He is today merely tourism
minister.)
A new Adaptation Fund was established in Nairobi, but its resources were
reliant upon revenues from the controversial Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) carbon trading mechanism. Last week the European
Union announced a ban on the main source of CDM credits, Chinese
refrigeration gas emissions that are responsible for nearly two thirds of
recent payments, because they incentivized production of more
greenhouse gases.
The CDM market is worth less than $8 billion/year at present, and Africa
has received only around 2 percent, mostly for South African projects like
the controversial Bisasar Road dump in Durban’s Clare Estate