By Hügo Krüger
Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Gwede Mantashe is right that the concept of a “just” energy transition is a foreign one and that South Africa should rather transition to on its our terms.
In fact, the minister is being diplomatic as the NGO Industrial Complex’s policies that are coming out of the Presidential Climate Commission are completely out of touch with reality, and, in particular, the scientific evidence cited in Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
How the IPCC’s working groups and task forces operate is poorly understood by the public. As Steve Koonin, Barack Obama’s former secretary of energy, remarked a few years ago, the game of telephone that is being played between scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, and media headlines, is of such a nature that by the time that the message gets to the reader it is entirely blown out of proportion.
The IPCC Assessment Report consists of three working groups. Working Group I deals with The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change, Working Group II with Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability and Working Group III with Mitigation of Climate Change.
Readers of Working Group I are often shocked to discover that with the notable exception of heat waves, the IPCC notes no statistically significant effect of carbon dioxide on other forms of extreme weather such as river floods, heavy precipitation, pluvial floods, landslides, droughts, severe wind-storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall, ice storms, hail, snow avalanches, coastal flooding or marine heat waves.
Furthermore, the Earth’s global temperature anomaly, a poorly defined index, only increased about 1◦C over the last century, and almost 1.5◦C since the Little Ice Age. With reasonable confidence, scientists can say that about 0.5◦C came from the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, but the rest of the warming comes from other effects such as natural variability, sunspot activity, instrumentation noise or the urban heat island effect.
In the 1900s, the C02 composition of the atmosphere was estimated at 0.03%, and today it is 0.04%. To suggest that a tiny increase in C02 and temperature implies doom and gloom is beyond absurd because the earth, throughout its history, has seen much higher temperature gradients than today. Notable anomalies include the Eocene Maximum, when carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than present. The temperature was quite compatible with life from pole to pole, and mammalian and plant life thrived.
But even if there were no greenhouse gas emissions, the earth was going to get warmer, regardless, because we are coming out of an ice age, and it is not obvious that a warmer world would be worst for the human species. Humans can adapt towards slightly warmer climates, as is evident that migrating patterns historically were from colder to warmer temperatures.
South Africa produces little more than 1% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and any policy that mitigates C02, even if successful, will have no impact on the temperature of the earth, as per IPCC’s own model projections.
Yet, the mitigation plans, if not properly managed, will certainly impact South Africa’s energy sovereignty, social stability, energy security and threaten the mining and automotive industries, the backbone of the industrial economy.
More callous are the proposed actions of Western nations to threaten to sanction South Africa for not “checking our carbon footprint”. There are few policies more racist and more colonial than punishing a country by rationing its energy usage, especially given the fact that two thirds of all youngsters, mostly black, are unemployed. These trade policies will cost South Africa around R2.2 trillion in trade, according to the CEO of The Energy Council of South Africa.
These climate policies are bound to fail because they are dogmatic and absolutist. Standards of living should not come at the price of environmental piety.
Who in South Africa will agree to these absurd measures that can only be compared to the British’s Colonial Policy towards Ireland in the 19th Century? The Great Potato Famine occurred when Malthusian thought infiltrated the British Elite as they prohibited new investment into Ireland’s agriculture on the grounds that Ireland’s population exceeded its “stocking ratio”.
The famine was so severe that Ireland was the only country that had a higher population in 1850 than today, and at the time when the life expectancy of an American slave was just over 30 years, it was 18 for Irish men – a situation not even rivalled by Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin.
Those policies are today’s equivalent of a “carbon budget”.
A more sensible policy approach would seek to balance between climate mitigation, the reduction of C02 and climate adaptation. It's far more proportionate than the “just” transition plans.
Hügo Krüger is a YouTube podcaster, writer, and civil nuclear engineer who has worked on a variety of energy related infrastructure projects ranging from Nuclear Power, LNG and Renewable Technologies.
* The views of the column are independent of Business Report and Independent Media.
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