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

terms are failing beyond the most pessimistic expectations;
• Whacky, unworkable ‘geo-engineering’ strategies are going to multiply,
such as biomass planting to convert valuable food land into fodder for
ethanol fuel, or mass dumping of iron filings in the ocean to create carbonsucking
algae blooms, or ‘Carbon Capture and Sequestration/Storage’
schemes to pump power-plant CO2 underground but which tend to leak
catastrophically and which require a third more coal to run, or the nuclear
energy revival notwithstanding more Koeberg shutdowns; and
• South African world ‘climate leadership’ will be touted, even though
Pretoria’s reactionary UN negotiating stance includes fronting for
Washington’s much-condemned 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which even if
implemented faithfully, by all accounts, will roast Africa with a projected
temperature rise of 3.5°C.
If Jacob Zuma’s government really cared about climate and about his
relatives in rural KwaZulu-Natal villages who are amongst those most
adversely affected by worsening droughts and floods, then it would not
only halt Medupi and Kusile but also deny approval to the forty new coal
mines that Eskom recently announced will soon be needed – in the process
causing river and water table contamination, increased mercury residues
and global warming
There’s another reason that the power of the Minerals-Energy Complex
continues unchecked, even as treasures like the Cradle – and Kruger Park’s
surface water – are threatened by the mining industry: political bribery. In
addition to supplying the world’s cheapest power to BHP Billiton and Anglo
American Corporation by honoring dubious apartheid-era deals, Eskom’s
coal-fired mega-plants will also provide tens of millions of rands to African
National Congress party coffers through its Chancellor House relationships
with the Japanese boiler-maker Hitachi.
Other beneficiaries of Eskom’s estimated R6 billion trade finance package
now being devised at Washington’s Export-Import Bank (site of an anti-
Eskom protest last Thursday) include two desperate multinational
corporations whose political muscle armtwisted a US Congress already
notorious for payoffs: Black & Veatch from Kansas and Bucyrus from
Wisconsin.
According to Bucyrus, R800 million in financing for its equipment is
justifiable because of a Black Economic Empowerment partner in Gauteng
and job creation for US steelworkers, even though this means that SA
counterparts – especially a decades-old company, Rham (with BEE
credentials), that will now fire scores of local workers – lose out in the
competition.
Most importantly, the poor will repay this finance at a time South Africa
has become the world's most unequal large society. For Eskom to cover
interest on the R250 billion+ Medupi and Kusile powerplants requires
imposing a 127 percent electricity price increase on ordinary consumers
from 2009-12. This is already causing a rise in power disconnections in poor
households, and so service delivery protests continue.
Instead of relying on paralysed politicians and lazy bureaucrats, for
instance at next Thursday’s Durban hearings on the National Climate
Change Response Green Paper hearings, civil society should unite to force
adoption of genuine solutions: