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

In parallel battles, though, the beheading of King Coal is underway in West
Virginia, where nine days after the January 3 cancer death of heroic ecowarrior
Judy Bonds, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overturned
the Army Corps of Engineers’ prior approval of Spruce No. 1 mine, the
world’s largest-ever ‘mountaintop removal’ operation. Coal companies
have been blowing up the once-rolling now-stumbling Appalachians. In
order to rip out a ton of fossil fuel, they dump 16 tons of rubble into the
adjoining valleys.
After an avalanche of pressure by mountain communities and
environmentalists, the EPA ruled against the “unacceptable adverse effect
on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas (including
spawning and breeding areas), wildlife, or recreational areas.” According
to leading US climatologist James Hansen, quoted in Bonds’ New York
Times obituary last week, “There are many things we ought to do to deal
with climate change, but stopping mountaintop-removal is the place to
start. Coal contributes the most carbon dioxide of any energy source.” The
EPA also took a stance in late December to belatedly begin regulating
greenhouse gas emissions.
Through activism and legal strategies, US communities and the Sierra Club
have prevented construction of 150 proposed coal-fired power plants over
the last couple of years, a remarkable accomplishment (only a couple got
through their net).
But in South Africa, the fight is just beginning. The national government in
Pretoria and municipal officials in seaside Durban will continue invoking
several myths in defense of coal, Kusile and the ‘COP17’, the November
28-December 9 climate summit officially called the ‘Conference of the
Parties 17’ (but which should be renamed the Conference of Polluters).
Here are some strategies of the SA state and big business meant to blind
us:
• In Durban, aggressive ‘greenwashing’ will attempt to distract 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 unnecessary new
King Shaka international airport, electricity going to the very dangerous
Assmang 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 Durban’s emissions will again be fatuously
marketed to an unsuspecting public, as during the 2010 World Cup,
including mass planting of trees (though when they die the carbon is rereleased)
and municipal landfill methane capture – even though the
increasingly-corrupt offset industry and European carbon markets which
market our emissions credits are now ridiculed across the world, and in
economic terms are failing beyond even the most pessimistic predictions;
• 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