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Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere edited by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society (http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs) and Transnational Institute (http://www.tni.org) Published 17 October 2005 ISBN 1-86840-613X CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION PATRICK BOND AND REHANA DADA PART ONE: CORE ARGUMENTS AND CONTEXT WHAT'S WRONG WITH CARBON TRADING? 1 GRAHAM ERION WHAT'S WRONG WITH OUR ENERGY SYSTEM? 5 PATRICK BOND WHAT'S WRONG WITH NUKES, WHAT'S RIGHT WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY? 28 MUNA LAKHANI WHAT'S RIGHT WITH POLLUTION TRADING? 40 LAWRENCE SUMMERS PART TWO: SOUTH AFRICA'S CARBON TRADE DEBATE PROFITS FROM FRESH AIR 41 JANET WILHELM PUTTING A PRICE ON FRESH AIR 44 PATRICK BOND AND REHANA DADA KYOTO CREDITS SYSTEM AIDS THE RICH, SOME SAY 47 SHANKAR VEDANTAM DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF THE KYOTO PROTOCOL 50 RICHARD WORTHINGTON A NEW SOURCE OF AFRICAN FINANCE 54 MEGAN LINDOW AN APPEAL FOR ZERO WASTE 64 MUNA LAKHANI PART THREE: DEVILS IN THE CDM DETAILS DURBAN'S PERFUME RODS, PLASTIC COVERS AND SWEET-SMELLING TOXIC DUMP 65 TRUSHA REDDY PROTEST OVER DUMP SITE PLAN 77 JUGGIE NARAN A NEW DUMP AT BISASAR ROAD: IMMORAL, STUPID MOVE 79 SUNDAY TRIBUNE HERALD BISASAR COMMUNITY BUY-IN? 80 REHANA DADA BELLVILLE'S 'SOCIALLY SUSTAINABLE' DUMP 85 MPUMELELO MHLALISI SASOLBURG'S FILTHY AIR 86 CAROLINE NTAOPANE LOW HANGING FRUIT ALWAYS ROTS FIRST: SOUTH AFRICA'S CRONY CARBON MARKET 88 GRAHAM ERION PART FOUR: CRITIQUES OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS TRADING CLIMATE FRAUD AND CARBON COLONIALISM 132 HEIDI BACHRAM IS FOLLOWING THE AMERICAN POLLUTION TRADING MODEL A RECIPE FOR INJUSTICE IN 149 GLOBAL CARBON MARKETS? LARRY LOHMANN, JUTTA KILL, GRAHAM ERION AND MICHAEL K. DORSEY PART FIVE: BIG OIL - CARBON TRADING'S BIG BENEFICIARY PROFITS VIA PROTOTYPE CARBON FUND GREENWASH 187 LARRY LOHMANN, JUTTA KILL, GRAHAM ERION AND MICHAEL K. DORSEY WHOSE ENERGY FUTURE? BIG OIL AGAINST THE AFRICAN PEOPLE 190 GROUNDWORK OIL COMPANIES DRAIN AFRICA, NOW - AND WITH PRETORIA'S HELP, IN FUTURE? 197 PATRICK BOND PART SIX: DOCUMENTATION PRETORIA'S CLEAN DEVELOPMENT MECHANISM POLICY REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS 215 AND TOURISM CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW! 218 THE DURBAN DECLARATION ON CARBON TRADING CONDEMN CARBON TRADING! SUPPORT FOR THE DURBAN DECLARATION ON CARBON TRADING 223 CONTRIBUTORS Heidi Bachram is a member of the Amsterdam-based TransNational Institute's Carbon Trade Watch collective. Patrick Bond is director of the Centre for Civil Society and professor of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Rehana Dada is an environmental journalist and a post-graduate student at UKZN CCS. Michael K. Dorsey is assistant professor of environment at Dartmouth College, USA and a leading ecological anti-racism activist. Graham Erion is based at the York University School of Law and Faculty of Environmental Studies in Toronto, is a TNI Carbon Trade Watch research associate, and served as a CCS visiting scholar and trainer in mid-2005. groundWork is an award-winning Pietermaritzburg-based environmental justice NGO, whose most recent major study is The groundWork Report 2005: Whose energy future? Big oil against people in Africa. Jutta Kill heads up SinksWatch and is a founding member of the Durban Declaration group. Muna Lakhani is a CCS energy research associate, an activist with Earthlife Africa, and founder of the Institute for Zero Waste in Africa. Megan Lindow writes for the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg. Larry Lohmann works at Cornerhouse, a British eco-social thinktank and recently edited a special issue of Development Dialogue on carbon trading. Mpumelelo Mhlalisi is an activist with the Environmental Justice Networking Forum and Earthlife Africa. Juggie Naran writes for the Sunday Tribune. Caroline Ntaopane is a leader of the Sasolburg Air Quality Monitoring Committee. Trusha Reddy was a CCS visiting scholar in early 2005 and subsequently has pursued post-graduate studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Lawrence Summers is president of Harvard University and formerly served as US Treasury Secretary and World Bank chief economist (http://www.whirledbank.org). Shankar Vedantam is a Washington Post journalist. Janet Wilhelm writes for the Mail & Guardian. Richard Worthington is coordinator of the SA Climate Action Network and works for Earthlife Africa in Johannesburg. TROUBLE IN THE AIR GLOBAL WARMING AND THE PRIVATISED ATMOSPHERE Introduction The international debate over climate change is heating up, the more irrefutable evidence of global warming we see emerging. The overarching problem is well known to South Africans who follow the news; less understood - if at all - is this country's responsibility for the world's overdose of greenhouse gases. Like filthy laundry, it sometimes seems like a national secret that the economy we inherited from apartheid is so addicted to fossil fuel, and moreover that the post-apartheid government has made the situation much much worse. South Africa is classified as a developing country in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect in February 2005. We are not subject to emissions reduction targets at this stage. But we will be in future, and looking ahead, officials and corporations - and even a few NGOs which should know better - are promoting the Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as a way to continue South Africa's hedonistic output of greenhouse gases, and earn profits in the process. Do we deserve to earn 'foreign investment' from South African industry's indefensible contribution to global warming? From his base at the University of Zululand, professor Mark Jury has gathered the following damning facts about South Africa's debt to the planet: . South Africa contributes 1,8% of total Greenhouse Gases, making it one of the top contributing countries in the world; . the energy sector is responsible for 87% of carbon dioxide (CO2), 96% of sulpher dioxide (SO2) and 94% of nitrous oxide emissions; . 90% of energy is generated from the combustion of coal that contains greater than 1% sulfur and greater than 30% ash; . with a domestic economy powered by coal, South Africa has experienced a five-fold increase in CO2 emissions since 1950; . SA is signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Montreal Protocol, yet CO2 emissions increased 18% between 1990 and 2000; . South Africa has only recently enacted legally binding air pollution regulations via the National Environmental Management Air Quality Act, but energy efficiency is low; . in rural areas of South Africa, approximately three million households burn fuelwood for their energy needs, causing deforestation, reduction of CO2 sinks, and indoor health problems; . the industrial sector consumes 2,6 quads of energy (57% of total primary energy consumption) and emits 66,8 M T of carbon (65% of total carbon emissions from fossil fuels), while industry's contribution to GDP is only 29%; . since 1970, South Africa consistently has consumed the most energy and emitted the most carbon per dollar of GDP among major countries. South African energy intensity measured 33,5 K BTU per $unit (above), is nearly at China's level; . South Africa's carbon intensity is far higher than in most other countries due to its dependence on coal; and . household and industrial energy consumption across the continent is predicted to increase by over 300 % in the next fifty years with significant growth in sulphur and nitrogen emissions. Coal is by far the biggest single South African contributor to global warming, representing between 80 and 95% of CO2 emissions since the 1950s. But liquid CO2 emissions mainly from transport have risen to the level of more than 10 000 metric tonnes a year since the early 1990s. It is regrettable but true, just as in Eastern Europe (whose CO2 emissions are well below 1990 levels), that the long recession of the early 1990s was the only point in South Africa's history since the early 1930s' economic crisis, that CO2 emissions stabilised and dropped slightly. Needless to say, South Africa is by far the primary global warming villain in Africa, responsible for 42% of the continent's CO2 emissions, more than Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria and Libya put together. Given the vast CO2 emissions increases by South Africa especially during the 1980s- 90s, added to similar increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, it is only logical to find an average 1 degree C increase in our region's temperature, over historic norms. This is merely the surface-level information about the climate change crisis, as it emerges. Much more could be said about the various other indicators, ranging from droughts/floods in South Africa and Africa, to the hurricanes that belted George W. Bush's oil producing and refining belt in Texas/Louisiana in September 2005. But our purpose is to immediately dig deeper, in order to uncover an emerging form of environmental injustice, and to highlight cutting-edge attempts to mitigate that injustice through civil society activism and advocacy. This is not an entirely celebratory account, for one of the concerns our research has uncovered is the failure of the environmental justice critique to penetrate the realm of policy. In that sphere, Big Oil and the South African minerals-energy complex appear to have the upper hand. What perhaps needs most attention, our contributors all agree, is finding consensus with what might be considered the 'reform' wing of the climate activist community who, through networks like the Climate Action Network and the SA Climate Action Network, have so far accepted carbon trading as a necessary evil. Although in at least one case, Durban's Bisasar Road, the more critical climate justice activists have halted the potential $15 million carbon trading project, it is also true that the reform-minded environmental NGOs have been far more effective in pointing out the problems in the strategy, even as they seek to improve it. An extremely good example of this level of detailed concern is the work of Richard Worthington, featured below. There are far too many 'environmentalists' in the large, corporate-funded international NGOs such as the IUCN, Sierra, World Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund and even Greenpeace who have bought into market solutions, and if the damning information about carbon trading is not convincing, it is hard to know how their minds might be changed. But we must begin this volume by providing a sufficient amount of core argumentation and context, in Part One. The basic arguments against the carbon trading pilots in South Africa are initially presented by Graham Erion, in a short version of the long argument he makes in Part Four. Patrick Bond follows with a broader critique of the national energy system, and Muna Lakhani adds more detail about the government's dangerous nuclear fantasy, as well as its underfunding of vitally-needed renewable energy sources. Speaking of fantasies, we thought it advisable to warn readers of destructive ideas that easily compete with those found in the White House, Pentagon and Osama Bin Laden's cave. The most famous words ever written by Harvard president Larry Summers are included in Part One. Even if it is 14 years old, his internal World Bank memo promoting trade in pollution was a seminal statement. It was even endorsed by The Economist magazine, which first revealed Summers' fetish for the toxic waste trade in February 1992. We consider his 'impeccable logic' a classical example of environmental racism. Though extreme, it's not unfair to allege that the rationale for 'dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country' is in part what informed the apartheid system's own landfill policies. Those policies are, indeed, potentially amplified by none other than Summers' old employer, the World Bank. Were it not for citizen activist Sajida Khan, the Bank would today be happily investing in a plan to keep the Bisasar Road dump open for more decades (even though the rather unreliable African National Congress government promised it would be closed in 1996). In Part Two, South Africa's 2005 debate over climate change is revisited. A Mail & Guardian review of South African carbon trading techniques is provided by Janet Wilhelm, followed by our own rebuttal in the same newspaper. The Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam soon picked up the story, using Bisasar Road as a handle to explain why the Kyoto Protocol has its genuine environmental critics. In contrast, a supportive position on behalf of carbon trading is articulated by Megan Lindow of the SA Institute of International Affairs, which regularly and eloquently brings to South Africa the thoughts of the Washington Consensus and White House. Somewhere in between, leaning left, Richard Worthington of the SA Climate Action Network addresses climate trading, and as usual his work is fine-grained and balanced. A more passionate critic of carbon trading, Lakhani, makes an alternative 'appeal for Zero Waste' to the SA Climate Action Network as they begin deliberations on climate trade. Part Three provides yet more detail on the key pilots, with Trusha Reddy, Juggie Naran, the Sunday Tribune Herald editorial team and Rehana Dada exploring the Bisasar Road and Kennedy Road controversies. In the Western Cape, Mpumelelo Mhlalisi takes up the story, and is joined by Caroline Ntaopane of Sasolburg. Graham Erion puts all of this information into a coherent, rich and nuanced story, including shocking revalations about Sasol's bogus application for carbon credits and the 'crony' character of the CDM verification process. In Part Four, the global critique is reviewed. We are fortunate that our colleagues at Amsterdam's TransNational Institute have a Carbon Trade Watch project. Heidi Bachram articulates their concerns about 'carbon colonialism'. Others associated with the Durban Declaration - Larry Lohmann, Jutta Kill, Graham Erion and Michael K. Dorsey - provide more detail about why emissions trading is fundamentally flawed based on the US model. Part Five unveils the main beneficiaries of carbon trading: Big Oil. In September 2005, an exceptionally powerful analysis was presented to the World Petroleum Congress in September by groundWork: Whose energy future? Big oil against the people of Africa. We are grateful for this world-renowned NGO's research and permission to excerpt from that book. Finally, Patrick Bond shows how the search for Africa's oil has generated serious geopolitical and economic crises for the continent's citizens. This leads to the conclusion that perhaps Africans should consider keeping oil within the ground, since it so clearly underdevelops countries and also so clearly threatens the world's climate. To achieve that logical outcome will require a far stronger international push to limit Big Oil's power, not to mention the Bush imperial agenda. It will require us all to work overtime for reparations - $75 billion per year merely for serving as a carbon sink, trusted experts argue - that the South is owed by the North. That project continues, not only within the global justice movements (especially groups like Jubilee South Africa), but in other CCS work yet to be published. In Part Six, we provide the three key documents issued during the past year: Pretoria's September 2004 Clean Development Mechanism Policy, the October 2004 'Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading' and the follow-up 'South Africa needs Climate Justice Now!' statement issued by activists and allied intellectuals in October 2005. For assistance in gathering information at colloquia in June and October 2005, funding our TNI colleagues' travel, and publishing this Civil Society Reader, we are most grateful to our financial sponsors, the SA-Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development. SANPAD pursues the following objectives, with which we agree entirely: 'To stimulate and promote quality research; to produce research outputs intended and useful for development purposes; to promote cooperation between Dutch and South African researchers, and between institutions within South Africa; and to develop research capacity and a culture conducive to research, aimed particularly at researchers from historically disadvantaged communities.' This is the first of several outputs financed by a SANPAD grant on energy alternatives, and we will follow this report with a study of retail electricity controversies in 2006. SANPAD director Anshu Padayachee is especially thanked for her support, as are the director of the TransNational Institute - Fiona Dove - and TNI public services/energy specialist Daniel Chavez, who assisted us in February 2004 with project design. All three have gone far beyond the call of duty. We also appreciate the support of the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa in facilitating contact with the Amsterdam team. Although the vast majority of material in this volume is brand new, we are very grateful to various journals and periodicals for permission to republish some of the articles below. We have also used graphics originally assembled by Mark Jury of the University of Zululand and Anton Eberhardt of the University of Cape Town, as well as by the environmental economics staff at the World Bank (an institution whose policies have been profoundly damaging in this and so many other areas). We're very grateful for the hard work that went into these. To those who participated in the Colloquium on Energy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society on 5 October 2005, special thanks: Amanda Alexander, CCS; Heidi Bachram, TransNational Institute CarbonTrade Watch; Vanessa Black, Earthlife Africa; Desmond D'Sa, South Durban Community Environmental Alliance; David Hallowes, groundWork; Graham Erion, CCS/TransNational Institute CarbonTradeWatch; Gill Hart, UKZN Sociology & University of California/Berkeley Geography; Siziwe Khanyile, groundWork; Muna Lakhani, Earthlife Africa/Institute for Zero Waste in Africa; Llewellyn Leonard, groundWork; Wally Menne, Timberwatch; Mpumelelo Mhlalisi, Environmental Justice Networking Forum and Earthlife Africa; Setjele Mofokeng, Vaal Economic Justice Alliance; Alan Murphy, Ecopeace; Prishani Naidoo, Anti-Privatisation Forum; Melumzi Nontangaga, Strategic Environmental Associates; Caroline Ntaopane, Sasolburg Air Quality Monitoring Committee; Basil Palan, Center for Research and Communication; Virginia Setshedi, CCS/Freedom of Expression Institute. All of you, your predecessors at the Durban meeting in October 2004, and the many thousands of other radical climate justice activists in South Africa and across the world, are the reason we still have hope for our descendants. Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada Centre for Civil Society, Durban, 10 October 2005 *** South Africa needs climate justice now! CONDEMN CARBON TRADING! SUPPORT FOR THE DURBAN DECLARATION ON CARBON TRADING Exactly one year ago, the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading was signed by environmental justice organisations and concerned citizens who spent the prior week analysing carbon trading, before rejecting the strategy. Since then, yet more evidence of global warming has emerged. Leading officials concede that September's brutal hurricanes were mainly attributable to higher Gulf of Mexico water temperatures. And yet as climate change generates destruction and misery, the very people and corporations responsible for these problems - especially in the US/EU-centred petro-mineral-military complex and associated financial agencies like the World Bank - are renewing their grip on power. Without shame, the largest petroleum corporations visited Johannesburg in September to celebrate their world-historic profits. Without a worry for his legitimacy, George W. Bush established a new alliance of hyperpolluters - the US, Australia, India and China - in July to again foil serious carbon reduction efforts. Without caveat, the G8 leaders met in Gleneagles in July, giving the architect of the Iraq War, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, the green light to accelerate his institution's prolific contribution to climate change. Without a thought to Wolfowitz's legacy or agenda, the chair of the World Bank/IMF Development Committee, South African finance minister Trevor Manuel, welcomed him to his new job in April, calling him 'a wonderful individual. perfectly capable'. The South African government's willingness to buy into the North's agenda for the South's continued subordination is not an accident or aberration. It is, instead, an integral part of a system - named 'global apartheid' by president Thabo Mbeki - that must be fully dismantled. What role are Pretoria's politicians and technocrats playing? Is it similar to that of the elite collaborators of the apartheid-era Bantustans? There is no better example than the South African government's 'National Climate Change Response Strategy' of 2004. What can only be described as the pimping of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects appears as a central objective: 'It should be understood up-front that CDM primarily presents a range of commercial opportunities, both big and small. This could be a very important source of foreign direct investment, thus it is essential that the Department of Trade and Industry participate fully in the process.' TROUBLE IN THE AIR 224 This is the same government - led by Eskom and the DTI - that has disconnected an estimated ten million low-income South Africans from electricity due to inability to pay, while committing billions of rands of subsidies to yet another energy-guzzling aluminium smelter, at Coega in the Mandela Metropole. Even before Coega, on a per capita basis, the carbon intensity of the South African economy was roughly twenty times worse than that of the United States. To propose 'commercial opportunities' associated with carbon trading and, simultaneously, the intensification of South Africa's world-record CO2 emissions, does have a certain logic. It is the logic of an immature, greedy society led by calculating, corrupt politicians and neoliberal technocrats - not a society in which we can be proud of membership. As in the first Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading a year ago, we again reject the claim that this strategy will halt the climate crisis. We reiterate that this crisis has been caused more than anything else by the mining of fossil fuels and the release of their carbon to the oceans, air, soil and living things. A year ago, we suggested that people need to be made more aware of carbon trading threat, and to actively intervene against it. By August 2005, the inspiring rise of citizen activism in Durban's Clare Estate community forced the eThekwini municipality to withdraw an application to the World Bank for carbon trading finance to include methane extraction from the vast Bisasar Road landfill (instead, the application was for two relatively tiny eThekwini dumps). But the heroic battle against Bisasar's CDM status was merely defensive. We join community residents in urgently seeking the safe and environmentally sound extraction of methane from the Bisasar Road landfill, even if that means slightly higher rubbish removal bills for those in Durban who are thoughtlessly filling its landfills, without recycling their waste. We endorse calls for Clare Estate's apartheid-era dump to now finally be closed, a decade after originally promised. Simultaneously, we agree that good jobs and bursaries be given to the dump's neighbours, especially in the Kennedy Road cmmunity, as partial compensation for their long suffering. Their fight for housing and decent services has been equally heroic; the current handful of toilets and standpoints for six thousand people should shame the eThekwini municipal officials, whose reprehensible response has been to mislead residents into believing dozens of jobs will materialise through World Bank CDM funding. We also seek a commitment to a zero waste philosophy and policies by eThekwini and all other municipalities in South Africa. In Bellville, Western Cape, we offer solidarity to the many residents who are also victims of apartheid-dumping, and who may also be victimised by the Bellville Landfill's status as a CDM project. We also seek allies in South African, African and international civil society. A year ago, only cutting-edge environmental activists and experts understood the dangers of carbon trading. Others - including many well-meaning climate activists - argued that A CIVIL SOCIETY ENERGY READER 225 the dangers are not intrinsic in trading, just in the rotting 'low hanging fruits' that represent the first and easiest projects to fund, at the cheapest carbon price. Since October 2004, however, numerous voices have been raised against carbon colonialism. These voices oppose the notion that, through carbon trading, Northern polluters can continue their fossil fuel addiction, drawing down the global atmospheric commons in the process. Rather than foisting destructive schemes like the toxic Bisasar Road dump on the South, the North owes a vast ecological debt. For playing the role of 'carbon sink' alone, political ecologist Joan Martinez-Alier and UN climate change commissioner Jyoti Parikh calculate that an annual subsidy of $75 billion is provided from South to North. Many advocates of environmental justice signed the Durban Declaration and sponsored debates within their own organisations and communities. The South African Climate Action Network is overdue for such a debate. A year ago we also noted that the internal weaknesses and contradictions of carbon trading are likely to make global warming worse rather than 'mitigate' it. We are ever more convinced of that in South Africa, partly because in August, a leading official of state-owned Sasol publicly conceded that his own ambitious carbon trading project is merely a gimmick, without technical merit (because he cannot prove what is termed 'additionality'). The 'crony' character of the CDM verification system may allow this travesty to pass into the market, unless our critique is amplified. We said last year that 'giving carbon a price' will not prove to be any more effective, democratic, or conducive to human welfare, than giving genes, forests, biodiversity or clean rivers a price. Over the last year, the South African government's own climate change strategy has been increasingly oriented itself to the 'commercial opportunities' associated with carbon. The results include inadequate subsidies and R&D commitments to renewable energy; a renewed focus on nuclear energy using the specious, incorrect argument that it is safer, cheaper and cleaner than coal; and a turn to potential hydroelectricity projects, which even the South African-based World Commission on Dams condemned as often contributing more to global warming than coal-generated electricity (through methane emissions from plant decay). Last year we committed ourselves to building a global grassroots movement for climate justice. In coming days, weeks and months, we commit ourselves to returning to our roots in South Africa, and to mobilising communities around the country against the farce of carbon trading. Real solutions are needed, and with our world-leading CO2 emissions, South Africans must be at the cutting-edge of progressive climate activism, not partners in the privatisation of the atmosphere. 10 October 2005 University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, Durban, South Africa
