Let’s not kid ourselves. SA is no emissions babe in the woods

Environment minister Barbara Creecy has become the latest in a string of voices calling on the industrialised West to fund the decarbonisation of the developing world. President Cyril Ramaphosa did much the same at and before COP27 last week in Sharm el-Sheikh.

The SA left generally blames the West for causing global warming in the first place. Therefore, it is something the West should pay to fix. What could be more obvious?

Creecy, also at COP27, suggested not only that the West should provide climate change aid through a loss/damage mechanism, but also that multilateral development banks — I presume she meant the World Bank, the IMF and a range of sovereign and regional development banks — ought to be recapitalised to provide more finance to the developing world, what used to be called the Third World. She said India and China should be exempt from these new obligations as they are still developing countries.

I have a little sympathy for her view, but also some questions. In SA, for instance, the sixth biggest carbon polluter in the world, the General Electric Power Company, built the first coal-fired power station in Germiston in 1898, 124 years ago. Eskom built its first coalfired power stations, Congella in Durban and Salt River in Cape Town, in 1928.

Even then the world was aware of the damage carbon pollution would do.

Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, predicted that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could raise earth surface temperatures dramatically.

In 1938 Guy Callendar, an English steam engineer, calculated that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would warm the planet but thought it might be a good thing as it would melt glaciers in northern Europe and make more land available for farming.

So, though we have been using coal power in SA for well over a century and commissioned nearly 10GW of coal power just over a decade ago (it doesn’t work properly, but that doesn’t count) the West should still pay? Obviously, that long ago SA was burning coal mainly to power the mining industry, and the big beneficiaries were mine owners. But the inescapable fact is that when this country became a democracy its industrial economy, which the ANC is now scrambling, ineffectively, to recreate, had been built entirely on coal-fired power and was largely intact.

There were no complaints then. The ANC took over control of arguably the most sophisticated energy system in the southern hemisphere. By 1994, Eskom had not borrowed a single cent from the state. It had been entirely self-financed, mainly through the issuance of its own bonds, which were wildly popular in fixed interest markets around the world.

Since then the ANC has broken virtually the entire industrial edifice it inherited, Eskom included. Had it taken more care it would today be more than capable of financing its own decarbonisation.

I remember being asked to speak at a KwaZulu-Natal government investment conference in about 2004 in Pietermaritzburg, and I clearly remember saying: “Please take care of what you already have.”

People applauded, but no-one listened. I guess few revolutions take their prizes intact. The ANC did, and then it destroyed them.

Is the West really to blame for the grand-scale stupidity we present in SA?

The hypocrisy in Creecy’s remarks extends to China. Before any ANC elective conference, such as we look forward to in December, the ANC holds a policy conference. At that meeting the party prepares various policy papers and the ones on foreign policy are almost always carbon copies of each other. I remember one in particular congratulating China for lifting so many millions of its people out of poverty.

But that achievement was driven solely by Chinese coalfired energy. China is not only the second most powerful economy on earth. It builds its own sophisticated fighter jets, its own high-speed trains. If this is a developing economy then black is white. More than any big polluter, the Chinese have polluted the most, most recently.

Between 1750 — roughly the start of the industrial revolution in the UK — and 2017, the US emitted 457-billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the combined EU 353-billion tonnes, Russia 101-billion tonnes, China (which only started industrialising 70 years ago) 200-billion tonnes, India 48-billion tonnes and SA 20-billion tonnes, more than South Korea, Australia, Brazil and Mexico, all bigger economies than ours.

The need to decarbonise now falls on all emitters, us included, and it is way too late to turn this too into a battle between rich and poor countries. In African countries that never used coal and have suffered from poor electricity availability for a very long time, the solution is thankfully new and relatively cheap renewable energy. They don’t have to shut down power plants and change power grids like we do.

And the West will be falling over itself to finance the introduction of that new power. No-one is going to give SA free money though. We will have to borrow. Ramaphosa reckons we will need R1.5-trillion to meet our climate-change goals. That’s actually not a lot, and plenty of money will be available at soft rates.

We’re a sophisticated economy with an incapable government. We need to get capable, and before we start playing the victim and blame game, we should take responsibility for what we have done to ourselves.

BEFORE WE START PLAYING THE VICTIM AND BLAME GAME, WE SHOULD TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT WE HAVE DONE TO OURSELVES