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

neighbourhood. Community activists led by the late Sajida Khan had
demanded that Bisasar be shut but in 2002 the World Bank promised R100
million in funding to convert methane from rotting rubbish into electricity,
hence downplaying local health threats and environmental racism (Clare
Estate is a black suburb and for that reason was sited to host Africa’s
largest landfill). Durban politicians put profit ahead of people once again.
Because of the CDM officials’ increasing embrace of biofuels and
genetically engineered timber, civil society experts from the Global Forest
Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, Large Scale Biofuels Action
Group, the STOP GE Trees Campaign and World Rainforest Movement
condemned the Nairobi summit.
But van Schalkwyk reported back in a leading local newspaper that
Pretoria achieved its key Nairobi objectives, including kick-starting the
CDM in Africa, and welcomed UN support for more ‘equitable distribution
of CDM projects’, concluding that this work ‘sends a clear signal to carbon
markets of our common resolve to secure the future of the Kyoto regime.’
But immediately disproving any intent to support Kyoto emissions cuts, van
Schalkwyk’s Cabinet colleagues confirmed the largest proposed industrial
subsidies in African history just days later, for Port Elizabeth’s Coega
smelter, entailing a vast increase in subsidised coal-fired electricity.
Within a year, national electricity supplies suffered extreme loadshedding,
so the project ultimately failed in 2008. But the plan was to
build a R20 billion smelter, which would then apply for CDM financing to
subsidise the vast coal-fired power input even further.
One of the country’s leading climate scientists, Richard Fuggle,
condemned Coega in his University of Cape Town retirement lecture: ‘It is
rather pathetic that van Schalkwyk has expounded the virtues of South
Africa’s 13 small projects to garner carbon credits under the Kyoto
Protocol’s CDM, but has not expressed dismay at Eskom selling 1360
megawatts a year of coal-derived electricity to a foreign aluminium
company. We already have one of the world’s highest rates of carbon
emissions per dollar of GDP.’
Given this background, it is revealing that van Schalkwyk became, in March
2010, a leading candidate to run the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate (UNFCCC) after the resignation of its head, Yvo de Boer (who
took a revolving UN door to industry and is now a high-paid carbon trader)
following the 2009 Copenhagen COP where the UNFCCC lost all credibility.
The COPs were now called the ‘Conference of Polluters’.
If UN leader Ban ki-Moon needed an environmentalist of integrity to head
the UNFCCC, van Schalkwyk should not have applied, given his chequered
career as an apartheid student spy and a man who sold out his political
party for a junior cabinet seat. Moreover, if van Schalkwyk was a worldclass
climate diplomat, why did President Jacob Zuma demote him by
removing his environment duties in 2009?
On the last occasion he stood on the world climate stage, in 2007 in
Washington, van Schalkwyk enthusiastically promoted a global carbon
market, which in a just world would have disqualified him from further
international climate work. But another carbon trader, Christiana Figueres,
was leapfrogged in last May to get the UNFCCC leadership job.
In addition to environment ministers who consistently failed in their duties
to address the climate crisis, a handful of Pretoria technocrats must also
shoulder blame. In December 2009 in Copenhagen, South Africa’s