Business is brisk. Those who can make an extra dollar, or yuan these days, go ahead. They’ve become inured to cries about saving the planet.
The US, the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has increased its coal exports to China, the biggest emitter, in the past 10 years. Not to be outdone, South African firms are exporting large quantities of coal to Europe where, believe it or not, the lights must be on.
Europe is happy to receive the coal, as long as it's not from Russia. But coal, Europe will burn any day.
As the world talks about clean energy while feverishly buying the black rock, South Africa, well-endowed with coal, sits in the dark, after decommissioning some of its creaking power plants.
Why? We are too eager to please the West, to be seen to be doing the right things even when those we seek to please aren’t lifting a finger to do the right things they speak about. We take decisions without thinking about our own interests.
We seem to be in a rush to be seen to be doing the right thing even when it hurts us in ways that could be avoided.
We must learn prudence from China, which we envy so much we send delegations of politicians and officials regularly to study, if at all, how it is powering its economy to compete against the world superpower, the US.
In a speech to the Chinese Communist Party last year, President Xi Jinping was clear that energy security is more important to China than a rushed elimination of fossil fuels. Xi said China’s greenhouse gas emissions will peak in about 2030 but will hopefully be neutralised by 2060.
“Based on China’s energy and resource endowments, we will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way, in line with the principle of getting the new before discarding the old,” said Xi.
And therein lies what Eskom and the new minister of energy, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, should be doing, which is the opposite of what former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter was doing: shutting down old coal powered stations in the hope that the energy they produced would eventually be replaced by cleaner energy.
We must keep the economy running. We must keep the lights on. And only then make a plan to pursue our green agenda
While the pursuit of cleaner energy is correct and deserving of encouragement, the question has been: What takes precedence between energy security and doing right for the environment?
Meanwhile, the US, China and many European countries continue to use coal — importing millions of tonnes from us since the ban on Russian coal — to grow their economies.
The International Monetary Fund (read the Global North) told us in clear terms (as if we were unaware because we are unaffected) that our economy is on its death bed, growing, if we can call it that, at 0.1% because of our energy woes.
At the same time, the very China we envy for its growth increased its coal consumption by more than 2.3-billion tonnes in the past 10 years, an 83% upshot, according to US department of energy-funded Energy Information Administration.
Now, why rush to decommission our plants? Are we gleefully overcome by a sense of accomplishment as we sit in the dark, wallowing in meaningless banter about what stage of load-shedding we are in?
Like the true Africans we are, we have natural resources we can’t use to generate energy to save our collapsing economies. Is this really who we are? What is so complicated about what Xi is saying about being prudent in line with the “principle of getting the new before discarding the old”?
We must keep the economy running. We must keep the lights on. And only then make a plan to pursue our green agenda.
But we have become the global laughing stock, sitting in the dark, exporting sources of energy, simply because we want to be liked by the big boys of the G7 Hiroshima Summit and others who now have no time for us.
That said, we must not quibble, as we have in the past few weeks, about whether President Cyril Ramaphosa was invited and then disinvited to the summit in Japan or if he was not invited to start with. This quibbling changes nothing.
That Ramaphosa is not invited must give him time to reflect on what we need to do to get our house in order, to get our economy off the ground, to keep the lights on.
But if you think, too, about the asymmetry of messages in relation to the International Criminal Court, it is clear that the genesis of our woes is that we signed it without much thought.
On the face of it, it’s about international justice (a topic about which we get emotional) and so we blindly sign. Only after the fact do we ask why the US and other countries of the North are not subjected to the same rules.
We then, under former president Jacob Zuma, want to withdraw our participation, but then withdraw the withdrawal when Ramaphosa takes over, and then follow this with his confusion this week. The point isn’t whether we should have signed, but that we did not think about our participation clearly.
Just as we are not thinking about our green agenda clearly.
We agree that it is important to embrace cleaner energy and save our environment. We also agree that the floods we witnessed in KwaZulu-Natal and erratic weather patterns are a clear and present danger for many in the Global South.
But the prudence of the Chinese, their single-minded focus on raising millions out of poverty while figuring out how to transition to cleaner energy is sobering, more so when you’re staring at stage 9 load-shedding in winter.
No quantum physics required here; we just need to be prudent, to be rational.
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