South Africa Allegedly Stolen Coal. Source Twitter
From Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
UN funded climate activists are trying to turn South Africa into a playground for their failed energy ideas.
Coal’s executioners gather to plot the kill
By Nick O’Malley
January 7, 2023 — 12.10am…
Coal’s new high price might be creating short-term profits, but it is also destroying demand.
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Countries such as China and India are still building plants permitted and contracted over the past decade, but are rapidly turning towards renewables. At the end of 2021, the coal industry’s key financiers – China, Japan and South Korea – declared they would no longer invest in new offshore coal plants.
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And with coal costs so high, even China’s new plants are running far below capacity.
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Under the so-called Just Energy Transition Investment Partnership (or JET IP, as it is now referred to in the jargon-rich world of climate diplomacy) the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union agreed to provide $US8.5 billion ($12.59 billion) in grants and cheap loans as seed money for a fund to purchase and close South Africa’s coal fleet and replace it with renewables.
South Africa is the perfect laboratory for such a program because it has some of the world’s best access to sun and wind. And because it has, even by a dirty industry’s standards, a particularly dirty coal fleet. As a result, a dollar spent greening South Africa cuts far more carbon than a dollar spent in, say, Europe.
The model is also in keeping with one of the Paris Agreement’s core principles, which recognises that nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in tackling climate change.
South Africa has horrible problems with energy supply and crime, organised criminals are substituting low quality coal for high grade coal on a vast scale, and allegedly selling the stolen coal to Europe. So I’m not sure how adding high value, easily detachable solar panels to South Africa’s energy mix will in any way help their situation.
And Europe desperately needs that allegedly stolen coal. For all their green rhetoric, Germany is so desperate for coal, they are on the verge of demolishing a village to expand a coal mine, to try to plug their energy shortages.
I don’t know what the word is for turning the suffering of South Africa into a laboratory for testing ideas which have utterly failed at home. Hypocrisy doesn’t seem to cover the full enormity and ugliness of what they are doing.
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