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Durban appears as a central site from which to fight climate injustice, as major SA environmental groups greenwash firms addicted to fossil fuels
THERE are crucial moments when dividing-and-conquering a pliable civil society occurs far too easily, and just such a moment has arrived here in Copenhagen, as the UN climate summit begins.
With outright climate denialism now passé (notwithstanding scandalous e-mail traffic between numbskull University of East Anglia researchers), more sophisticated ways have emerged for polluting corporations and states to maintain business as usual.
Usefully for those addicted to fossil fuels, a few green agencies are making common cause with polluters and governments. They endorse the Cap and Trade carbon trading strategy allegedly meant to lower greenhouse gases - even though the European Union's pilot Emissions Trading Scheme has conclusively failed. Sadly, two local groups are also greenwashing SA firms addicted to fossil fuels - including metals smelters and mining houses desperate for more cheap, coal-fired electricity - plus Pretoria politicians like Environment Minister Buyelwa Sonjica.
Science requires a steady reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at the world scale, starting now and reaching a 45 percent decline by 2020. Given the vast waste in the world economy, that's not an unreasonable figure to shoot for in the North; the US Environmental Protection Agency could begin immediately, by all accounts.
But the same is true in the most egregious emerging market economies whose growth strategies have stunted genuine development in favour of carbon-intensive exports. SA is a case in point.
Look in the mirror and let's be frank: we're one of the world's ugliest, meanest carbon tsotsis. It's not only because of our extreme social inequality, which limits adequate, affordable electricity access to the wealthiest, but even more so due to the metals and mining houses which use an inordinate share of the world's cheapest electricity. Eskom's CO2 emissions are many times worse per unit of per capita economic output than even the United States, that great climate satan.
Shady deals Why? Shady, decades-long deals done during apartheid are still in place, providing Anglo, Arcelor Mittal, BHP Billiton and their ilk with huge profits, which they export to London and Melbourne - in the process worsening SA's extreme balance of payments deficit and driving the electricity price for the rest of us skyhigh.
As a result, deputy Transport Minister Jeremy Cronin last month suggested phasing out aluminium smelters to lower both emissions and Eskom tariff hikes. In early 2008 Standard Bank chairman Derek Cooper advocated cutting the smelters' power source to avoid brownouts.
The new social movement, Climate Justice Now (CJN), also calls for immediate reductions and a policy of keeping fossil fuels like oil in the soil, and coal in the hole. And CJN's members in Earthlife Africa were instrumental in defeating Sasol's carbon trading strategy earlier in 2009, and in making Sasol a leading candidate for the mock prize of most obnoxious polluter to be found lobbying here in Copenhagen (the Angry Mermaid award, named after the famous harbour statue).
In contrast, the most visible and well-resourced NGO, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is tightly allied with Pretoria's obscure Long Term Mitigation Scenario, which its staff helped draft during the reign of environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk. His successor, Sonjica, has apparently rejected Cronin's wise counsel in order to maintain Van Schalkwyk's destructive trajectory: SA's emissions will rise until 2025, thanks mainly to two huge new coal-fired power plants, plateau for a decade and then decline from 2035, as she confirmed in a speech last month.
Sonjica added: Without financial and technology support, it will not be possible to do more than what we are already doing. This is nonsense, of course (as Cronin shows in an Umsebenzi article), and reflects mainly the agenda of the big vested interests which donate funds to the ruling party and its BEE buddies.
More optimistically, recall that 18 months ago, Sonjica - then mining minister - initially backed the Australian titanium grab in the Wild Coast's Xolobeni dunes, but community resistance forced her to U-turn, suggesting there may be flexibility under pressure.
Tragically, however, former environmental activist Peter Lukey - now Sonjica's main climate spokesman - defends Pretoria's irresponsible Copenhagen stance on etv's Big Debate climate show. The WWF terms Sonjica's head-in-the-sand posture very progressive. Likewise, another SA civil society group in which WWF is dominant, Climate Action Network, has endorsed another six years of rising emissions.
The WWF is playing a role reminiscent of the 1990s scandal in which oil behemoth Chevron trashed Papua New Guinea's fragile Lake Kutubu. When local residents opposed the oil company's ecological and cultural destruction, WWF took a $3 million Chevron contract for an Integrated Conservation and Development Project.
In exchange, Chevron viewed WWF as indispensable for spin-doctoring efforts to control media and interest groups, specifically Greenpeace. In the event of an oil spill, wrote a Chevron official, WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism.
Price to pay But there is a price for this behaviour. For example, last month, 80 environmental and indigenous people's organisations attacked WWF-certified palm oil projects for dislocation of local populations' livelihoods, destruction of rainforests and peat lands, pollution of soils and water, and contribution to global warming.
And in Geneva last week, dozens more activists from across the globe demonstrated at the group's international headquarters. According to protester Michelle Pressend of the church-based Economic Justice Network in Cape Town, they demanded an end to WWF's promotion of genetically modified soya, to its Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil - a contradiction in terms - and to counterproductive Latin American carbon trading and other market-based climate strategies.
In part because WWF and market-friendly environmentalists support carbon trading, others in civil society have redoubled their efforts against this US/EU strategy. Last Tuesday, Climate Justice Now! and the Durban Group for Climate Justice launched a 10-minute film, http://www.storyofcapandtrade.org, and within six days recorded nearly 100 000 downloads.
Durban appears as a central site from which to fight climate injustice, I can tell you from Copenhagen. The social justice internationalism - mistakenly called the anti-globalisation movement - that increased in earnest at the Seattle protest against free trade exactly 10 years ago is nothing without the linkages made by the Durban groups.
As in the case of Aids treatment activism, civil society again shows that thinking globally and acting locally are much more than a bumper-sticker slogan. Without that combination, we will lose this vital battle over our planet's future to the polluters, their paid politicians, and a few greenwashing NGOs.
# Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society, and with Rehana Dada and Graham Erion he co-edited the book Climate Change, Civil Society and Carbon Trading (UKZN Press, 2009).
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