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.
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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/coal-s-executioners-gather-to-plot-the-kill-20230105-p5cani.html
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.
Some 30-50 years ago we had the “golden years” in terms of how major progress was made in society. In simplest terms, society let it be knoiwn what we wanted. A group in society, let’s call them progressives. conveted those needs into reality when reality was possible. Example: People wanted cheap, reliable electricity supplies and cheap, reliable devices like TV sets and electric dishwashers to hang off the ends of the power lines. The progressives obliged on both counts, with the invention and adoption of nuclear energy and the requested appliances that did such a good job of removing some tedium from the lives of the people.
One essential ingredient in the golden years was choice, People were much more free than now, to do their own thing, to invent a better clothes washer and to market it. There were people labelled as early adopters, people called inventors, people called as innovation financiers and optimistic future planners. Corporations often developed in-house R&D departments to widen their ability to provide what society demanded.
People could choose to do their own thing and risk their financial futures, knowing that if they failed, little stopped them from tyring again.
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Move to the present. The biggest social change I have seen in my 80 years is the growth of the number of people paid to tell others what they can and cannot do. Intellectual freedom to do ones own thing k had been rather stifled by a growing bureaucracy and social media onlookers that cannot exist without telling the free thinkers what the new rules are – and enforcing them. Just read that is happening to Dr Jordan Petersen in Canada and ask yourself if that is right.
We have the recent vile idea of the ‘cancel culture’ where those who think for themselves or think differently are at risk of punishment by expressing free, independent thoughts. Loss of employment is one punishment. People have to take that seriously, for it goes on their c.v. and makes a restart harder.
If we want to return to the golden years, we have to recognise anew the good points and bad of those past years and try to revive the good points. I see next to no effort by society to do this improvement. Dominantly, we are opressed by intellectual killjoys who lust for control over others, without contibuting much of positive value from themselves. It is sick, it is wrong.
Geoff S
As I recall, S. Africa experienced power shortages a few years ago because a number of their coal plants had to be shut down due to poor maintenance. Then it was revealed that the money from foreign aid that was supposed to be used for this maintenance was being skimmed off by the officials in charge of these facilities. So what makes anyone believe the same type of graft and corruption won’t occur if renewable energy plants are built, especially in a country with S. Africa’s record of lawlessness?
I’m a South African and I’m relieved that this version of neo-colonialism is getting more international attention, even if its only on WUWT! Judith Curry recently remarked that the objective of the West (WEF, WB, IMF, USAID, EU, etc.) to deny the use of fossil fuels to countries whose former colonial masters achieved the highest standard of living in history on just these fuels was an enormous global crime. Instead they offer us a mountain of U$ to switch to solar and wind. There is no justification for this arrogance since there is manifestly no ‘climate crisis’. So they offer us an unworkable solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Terribly ironic is that we were one of the very first countries to design and make practical small modular (pebble bed) reactors. We should have already been energy self-sufficient and exporting nuclear technology to the rest of Africa. Thus freeing them, and us, from reliance on the West for our most basic needs.
PS. I agree with just about all of the comments about SA below. A corrupt, racist and incompetent government, like king Midas in reverse, has despoiled everything it has touched. And – urged on by the academic and progressive left along with private sector opportunists – is currently expectantly looking forward to the next renewables cow they will drain.