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

of solar-powered geysers, for example, thus allowing Eskom to switch off
power to BHP Billiton’s aluminum smelters and to halt new powerplant
construction without net job loss;
• New public transport subsidies should reconfigure apartheid-era urban
design and pull us willingly from single-occupant cars;
• An employment-rich zero-waste strategy would recycle nearly
everything and compost our organic waste so as to eliminate methane
emissions at the remaining landfills;
• More direct-action protests against major emissions point sources –
Eskom, Sasol (apartheid’s wicked coal-to-oil company), the Engen refinery
in South Durban and the new Durban-Joburg oil mega-pipeline, for instance
– should better link micro-environmental struggles over local air, water
and land quality to climate change;
• More ambitious Air Quality Act regulations would label – and then phase
out – carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas ‘pollutants’, as
with the US 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, the
demand for ‘climate debt’ would permit the flow of strings-free, noncorrupt
and effective adaptation funds.
Through urgent adoption of genuine post-carbon strategies like these, by
the time the COP17 rolls around, the world could see in Durban a state and
society committed to reversing climate change.
But get real. Since none of these will be considered much less
implemented by the current ruling crew, instead we’ll see a mass
democratic movement rise, aiming to do to the climate threat what we did
to apartheid and the deniers of AIDS medicines: defeat them at source,
when respectively, old white politicians and their international business
buddies, and Thabo Mbeki and Big Pharma, had to stand back and respect
a new morality, a new bottom-up power.
(Durban-based academic Patrick Bond’s book The Politics of Climate
Justice will be released later this year, and recent articles are posted at
ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?4,80.)
Siqeda ukuziqhayisa kwemboni yamalahle ngo2011, kusukela eWest
Virginia (ngenyanga efile) kuze kube (uZibandlela) eThekwini
NguPatrick Bond Yahunyushwa NguFaith ka-Manzi
Umhlaba waseNingizimu Afrika ushiywe uyimigodigodi ekhamisile yase
ishiywa kanjalo kusika phansi-nje kutholakala amadayimani ngonyaka
ka1867 eKimerley kanye negolide eWitswatersrand (lapho osekuyiseGoli
manje) ngo1886. Kodwa ukuba nendaba komhlaba ngendlela esiyicekela
phansi ngayo imvelo yethu ike yaqhubeka futhi ngesonto elidlule ngenxa
yezizathu ezimbili:
• iqiniso elithusayo ukuthi ukuvuza kwezingqumbi zezimayini zesisisi i-acid
sekuchithekela endaweni yaseGoli eyaziwa ‘Njengendawo lapho
kwadabuka khona uluntu’ (Cradle of humankind), ikhaya lakhokho labantu
kusukela eminyakeni eyizigidi ezintathu zeminyaka, lapho amathambo