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

• Major investments in Green Jobs would let metalworkers weld millions
of solar-powered geysers, for example, thus allowing Eskom to switch off
power to the guzzling aluminum smelters and to halt Medupi and Kusile
construction without net job losses;
• New public transport subsidies should reconfigure apartheid-era urban
design and pull us (willingly) from our single-occupant cars;
• A job-rich zero-waste strategy would recycle nearly everything and
especially compost our organic waste so as to eliminate climatedestructive
methane emissions at the remaining landfills;
• More ambitious Air Quality Act regulations would label as ‘pollutants’ –
and then phase out – carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases,
as even the US Environmental Protection Agency can do now thanks to its
Clean Air Act;
• Government planning and utility board decisions would halt willy-nilly
suburbanisation and ungreen ‘development’; and
• Instead of North-South financing via destructive carbon markets and the
World Bank, the collection of ‘climate debt’ from the industrial countries
would permit strings-free, effective funds for adaptation.
Through urgent consideration and adoption of genuine climate solutions
like these, by the time the COP17 rolls around, the world could see in
Durban a state and society committed to climate change.
But since none of these will be adopted by the current ruling crew, instead
we’ll see a mass democratic movement rise, aiming to do to the climate
change threat what we did to apartheid and the deniers of AIDS medicines:
defeat them at source, when respectively, white politicians and their
international business buddies, and Mbekites and drug companies, had to
stand back and respect a new dominant morality.
(Patrick Bond’s book The Politics of Climate Justice, will be released midyear.)
Dethroning King Coal in 2011, from West Virginia (January) to Durban
(December)
Patrick Bond
South Africa’s crust was drill-pocked with abandon since Kimberley
diamonds were found in 1867 and then Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) gold
was unearthed in 1886. But the world’s interest in how we trash our
environment perked up again last week for two reasons:
• The shocking revelation that acid mine drainage is now seeping into the
Johannesburg region’s ‘Cradle of Humankind’, home of hominid fossils
dating more than three million years, where our Australopithecus
ancestors’ earliest bones are now threatened by the area’s pollutionintensive
mining industry; and
• Hot contestation of new United States financing for South Africa’s
proposed Kusile power plant, which will be the world’s third largest coalfired
facility.