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

Pambazuka News.
South Africa prepares for ‘Conference of Polluters’
Patrick Bond 27 January 2011
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
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