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

acism (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 load-shedding, 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
world-class 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