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

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2 Coal Critiques
The latest Minerals-Energy Complex attack on nature and society
Patrick Bond 18 January 2011
We’ve soiled South Africa’s beautiful natural nest for more than a century,
but the world’s interest in how we trash our environment perked up last
week for two reasons:
• First, the shocking announcement of acid mine drainage now arriving at
the Cradle of Humankind northwest of Johannesburg thanks to the area’s
pollution-intensive Minerals Energy Complex (so named by Durban
economist Zav Rustomjee when he was director-general of the SA
Department of Trade and Industry fifteen years ago); and
• Second, hot contestation of new United States government financing for
Eskom’s proposed Kusile power plant, which will be the world’s third
largest coal-fired facility, thus raising SA’s carbon emissions by nearly 10
percent.
Pretoria will invoke several myths in defense of coal, Kusile and the
‘COP17’ – the November-December climate summit in Durban called the
‘Conference of the Parties 17’ but which we’ve come to know as the
Conference of Polluters.
Keep a critical eye open so these strategies of government and big
business don’t blind us:
• Greenwashing’ will be deployed to distract hometown 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 silly new King
Shaka airport, electricity going to Assore’s dangerous Assmang Cato Ridge
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 these emissions will again be fatuously
marketed to an unsuspecting public, as during the World Cup, including
mass planting of trees (though when they die the carbon is re-released)
and municipal landfill methane capture – even though the increasinglycorrupt
offset industry and European carbon markets which market our
emissions credits are now ridiculed across the world, and in economic