Energy control to the people!

Bobby Peek

Electricity pricing is a contentious issue in South Africa.  Just reflect on the very many demonstrations and arrests of people at the National Energy Regulator of South African (NERSA) hearings in early 2010. Once again NERSA will have to prepare itself for another round of consultations with the public, as it proposes the next multi-year price increase in electricity. Will people be more organised and forceful to demand that the pricing of electricity responds to the needs of people – more than 2.5 million homes do not have electricity – rather than the needs of corporate giants such as BHP Billiton, which we all know probably receives the cheapest electricity in the world at their plants in Richards Bay, South Africa and Maputo, Mozambique?

I hope so.

Is the writing on the wall for BHP Billiton? I am not too sure, and they have a strategy to keep the cheap electricity flowing.  Due to strong local and global resistance by communities and NGOs to Eskom’s proposed Medupi and Kusile plants, it is unlikely that SA will build more coal fired power strations. Thus, the days of cheap electricity are over. BHP is well prepared for this next round of public debates.  There are rumours going around that BHP is planning to withdraw from SA. They have just announced that they are no longer interested in developing the Inga Three dam hydro project – which should be a relief for poor Congolese who would have had to live with the negative externalities of this dam – and they have sold their 37% interest in the South African titanium industry to Rio Tinto. The South African rumour – if indeed it is truthful – might be good for SA society as we would not have an electricity challenge of giving away 11% of all our electricity produced at below cost prices to BHP. The question to ask oneself is will the rumour have traction during the debates on the next multi-year pricing.

If we leave the electricity pricing regime up to Kloppers, Director of BHP, and the government, we as South Africans could be in for a shock.  Noting the very vocal civil society presence at the last NERSA hearings, government is preparing themselves for this already. 

How are they doing it? 

By just nixing the NERSA.  Who needs a process that facilitates public input officially to constitutionally air their grievances?  Certainly not Kloppers and the South African cabinet!  Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg in a recent press statement responding to the amendments to the NERSA Amendment Bill and the Electricity Regulation Second Amendment Bill, warns that these Bills will make NERSA powerless as a institution where the public has some role of engagement. It gives the Minister of Energy all power and decision making on tariff increases, without subjection “to democratic oversight”.  Bloody scary.  Just what Kloppers would want.  Are these Bills written in the way that they are by chance?  Don’t fool yourself.

But resistance is brewing, and not only in the ranks of the known environmental justice sector, but in the union sector as well.  The National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA), who is one of the main organising unions at BHP Billiton’s South African plants are taking the issue of the restructuring of the energy sector on with gusto.  In a gathering of NUMSA representatives and international delegates in early February, NUMSA considered the agenda of “Envisioning a Socially-Owned Renewable Energy Sector”.  We cannot have a paradigm of ownership of future energy reflecting the status quo.  But we also need to start, by changing the status quo, as well as changing the control and ownership of the present means of energy production.

We cannot have our new renewable energy processes owned by multi-national organisations such as Shell and BP, or other profit seeking energy companies, for then the social injustices of the Niger Delta, Nigeria and County Mayo, Ireland hyperlink to shelltosea.com] will become common place for people living on lands which have high wind and high degrees of sunshine, which invariably are marginal lands, where people live sustainably. There will be new land grabs and more bloodshed all in the name of ‘energy security’.

I hope ... I hope for a socially-owned renewable energy sector and energy sovereignty that results in a peoples’ energy reality, a system where people take control over their own energy provision.  As in the case of the Nyeleni Declaration on food sovereignty, energy sovereignty should put those “who produce, distribute and consume” energy at the heart of the energy systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.

We do not need a BHP Billiton energy paradigm.

Ask NUMSA, they will tell you ...

The Waste Tyre Green Levy – boon or doom for the peoples’ or green economy... oops capitalism?

Rico
Euripidou

Unwittingly, South Africans are rolling into a dirty situation. As the brutal war between the South African Tyre Recycling Process Company (SATRP) and the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (REDISA) unfolds for the control of the waste tyre green levy, it derails the potential implementation of the much needed levy by the end of February 2012.  The question that begs asking is whether the waste tyre green levy is South Africa’s green economy boon or doom? ...or will it be just another capitalist gimmick.

The conflict began when the Minister of Environmental Affairs approved and gazetted the REDISA integrated waste management plan in November 2011, over the SATRP plan which had been gazetted months previously. In doing so, the SATRP was effectively robbed of a potential windfall of approximately R600 million per year from the waste tyre green levy – calculated as an average of between R2.30 to R11 per kg of new tyre sold each year x 11 million tyres per year.  However, following legal action by the SATRP in the high courts the Minister withdrew her support for the REDISA plan because the Ministry had not undertaken mandatory public consultation.

The Waste Act sets out the minimum contents of such plans which includes effecting the waste hierarchy, in a socially and environmental responsible manner, as well as promoting skills training and job development. REDISA’s aim is to establish a network of up to 150 collection depots across the country, which would employ up to 15 000 people, including about 5 000 people in the informal sector within five years).

The SATRP maintains that REDISA “stole” the ideas within the Plan that was  submitted, however, the SATRP is commonly known to be a front for the consolidated cement industry in SA (who were instrumental in its establishment and subsistence) and neglected to incorporate these general principles . Furthermore, the cement industry in  SA  have a vested interest in the SATRP because they want to be a beneficiary of the waste tyre green levy so that they can use the millions  the levy will generate to fund retrofitting their kilns to burn waste tyres. Additionally it will mean they save on fuel costs by replacing up to 30% of coal with waste tyres and, to add insult to injury, to be the recipient of a disposal levy of up to 31c per kg of waste tyre burnt, potentially saving and earning the cement industry in excess of R50 million per year, conveniently paid for by the public, from burning waste from poorly regulated cement kilns. To top this they will claim cleaner development mechanism funding for moving away from coal to waste, something waste pickers globally are fighting against.


This is a fundamentally flawed approach. Waste should not be viewed as a sustainable or renewable resource.  Lafarge, PPC, NPC Cimpor and Afrisam/Holcim are proposing that by burning waste they are saving on the use of coal, a non-renewable source of energy.  While this might be so, they will need an on-going supply of waste in order to fuel their kilns.  Waste is not a renewable source of energy, and the Waste Act compels us to primarily endorse the concept of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Should waste become recognised as a standard source of fuel, it is clear that there will be little incentive for dirty industry to move towards meaningful long term waste recycling and reduction scenarios and will instead continue the consumption of natural resources.

SATREP’S hogwash that only 4 percent of waste tyres can be recycled (the rest have to be burned by cement companies) is farcical considering that we can use all our waste tyres to support road construction which could solve our bitumen crisis forever.


So… we are at the cusp of something that will make a mockery of something the public are being fed to believe, i.e. that the green economy will save the world.  Here we see what the true intention is of the green economy: capitalism re-inventing itself at the expense of you and me, while the cement industry laughs all the way to the bank and poisons our environment externalising its costs at the expense of our environmental and public health.


Read an article on the green economy: http://www.isreview.org/issues/70/feat-greencapitalism.shtml

The COP in Durban: a pit-stop in the fossil fuel journey to global destruction.

OK. We all know what a cop is and we now know what a COP is. And, as the slogan said, we can’t find a good one. It is true that the official delegates did not get into a big circle to follow Todd Stern chanting ‘burn baby, burn’. Todd Stern, for those who don’t know him, is the head honcho of the US delegation. It cannot be said that he or they have acted alone. Pretty much everyone has joined the dance on the embers. But the US sure has the leading role.

They certainly know where this lot is headed. A couple of years back, they sent a White House staffer out to inform us that we are heading for four degrees and the US is cool with that. There are two things to be said about four degrees: first, most of the world will be uninhabitable, including Texas; and second, four degrees is unstoppably on the way to eight degrees which will take care of the rest of us.

Perhaps there is some disappointment that the first version of Mutually Assured Destruction failed. MAD1 was the Dr Strangelove version and had the bronco man from Texas riding a big fat A-bomb to the end of the world over Moscow. That didn’t happen. Instead, the Berlin wall fell, the Soviet Union was dismembered and privatised and great profits were made.It was the end of history. Capitalism was in charge finally and for ever. Until 2008.

MAD2 seems more assured but there’s a twist to it. The alternative to destruction is absolute control. MAD2 presents the opportunity for geo-engineering – such as producing heat shields in space – as the final conquest of nature. Strangelove’s ghost is cheering from the shadows of an underground weapons laboratory.

Corporate America is already licking its lips. This is what you might call Business As Usual Plus Plus (BAU++) and it’s already in rehearsal. First, big oil has stopped all that nonsense about ‘beyond petroleum’. Now it’s ‘drill baby, drill’ and everyone out the way. Next up, profiteering from catastrophe is already under way with carbon trading but the Rio+20 agenda takes a broader view of sustainable development: all of what we once thought was ‘nature’ will be dismembered and privatised and great profits will be made. Geo-engineering – still to be officially announced –is the second plus for monster profits.

All this will, of course, turn to dust. Absolute control fails all the time. Just think of the regularity with which Sasol and the refineries catch fire. In the end, absolute control is not the alternative to destruction but the story line for MAD2.

There were some people at the COP and they talked of the Disaster in Durban. On the other hand, our minister who presided over the COP thought it was wonderful. We got the ‘Durban platform’ and that label will be attached to the negotiations process for at least another two years. It might go all the way to 2020. A triumph of branding. After all, why would anyone care what happens outside the world of image making?
(Images: Latha Ravjee  © )