Rio+20…deleting justice

The world’s governments are gathering in Rio de Janeiro in June for Rio+20 – the 20^th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. They will dedicate a document to the occasion with the inspiring title ‘The Future We Want’. That might sound a bit like ‘the hamburger we want’ or ‘the chewing gum we want’ and indeed Rio+20 comes with strong assurance that everything is for sale. That’s because anything that is not for sale just doesn’t make sense.

So the river, the watershed, the forest, the whole ecosystem must be re-defined as providing ecological services with a price on the services. Otherwise the river is a non-thing – a void in the map – and the people there are nowhere. With a price on it, the ecosystem can be privatised right down to its DNA and then traded. That is what makes it real to the world’s rulers. When they can own it – some hope – maybe they won’t trash it. It might also be hoped that, if they own the people they won’t trash them either. Regrettably, the history of slavery does not confirm this.

This is the ‘green economy’ that suddenly became so fashionable when the banker’s economy went bust in 2008. Even South Africa got in on the act with the Department of Trade and Industry hosting big green economy conferences. It is driven by the desperation to find something more to profit from. The green economy does not mean that renewables will now replace coal. It means that renewables will be added to coal. There must be more, always more.

The first draft of the Rio+20 document, called the zero draft, was 19 pages. The next version, with every nation’s brackets, amendments and deletions, comes in at over 250 incomprehensible pages. Fortunately Paul Quintos of the Ibon Foundation, a Filipino NGO, is there to tell us what’s going on. Any text that says people have rights must be expunged:   “the ‘Right to food and proper nutrition’ – delete says one major power … ‘Right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation’ – delete!”

On the other side of these deletions is the sacred market: “‘promoting open and transparent markets; … promoting secure rights to land and natural resources, …’ -- by secure rights they mean property rights – that is fine for them!” But do not mess with the market: “‘Regulating financial and commodity markets to address price volatility’ – Delete!”

Bracketing text is preparing it for deletion. All the Rio principles, says Quintos, “are being bracketed: the Polluter Pays Principle, Precautionary Principle, Common But Differentiated Responsibility.”

This last principle is the one that means that the North is more powerful than the South – and got rich on causing the destruction – and must therefore contribute more to cleaning up the mess. The US does not like allusions to inequality of power. Such allusions suggest that there is something wrong with the world in which it is top dog, that it owes something.

Indeed they do. For the Southern elites, common but differentiated responsibility means that the North must put cash on the table. It also means that, in the name of equality between nations, it is the South’s turn to destroy. Money, not destruction, will be at the heart of the divisions at Rio+20.

Yet North and South are all agreed that equality between classes may not be discussed. If it was, how could they push down the price of labour? How could they plunder the land?

In June we will see if they arrive at an agreed text. With any luck, the conference will end in mutual recrimination and they will leave Rio in shame and disarray. But however that may be, they will keep coming with the common and undifferentiated agenda to wipe out all rights but the rights of the market.

To moat a dumpsite

Musa Chamane

Middelburg municipality contemplates digging a moat to keep waste pickers off the landfill. The moat was used by French kings during dark ages to keep the enemy off their palaces. It is a trench which is about 15 feet wide and deep. Usually the trench is dug next to the water supply so that it becomes easy to fill the moat with water in order to make it impossible for the intruder to cross. The man-made controlled bridge was used to access the palace or the protected town. This was more practiced in ancient times during times of war in Europe.  This medieval practice is about to re-emerge in South Africa.

The municipality has tried unsuccessfully in the past to keep waste pickers off dumping sites. Fences have been cut, walls have been dismantled by waste pickers in search of the recyclables. Extra security with police dogs, high walls, and heavily armed security has proven futile in trying to prevent waste recovery at various dumpsites of South Africa.  People have even been shot at by municipal security people.

Lack of employment opportunities has lead to extreme poverty in most regions in South Africa. Poverty and hunger has encouraged people to engage their minds in finding a way of putting food on the table. Some people have resorted to street trading in towns, some have urbanized, and some have started recycling at various landfills in the country. I really have respect for such people because instead of resorting to crime, they decided to make an honest living. Their biggest enemy is the government that they are always voting into power with a hope of improving their lives but to their disappointment now and again.

I cannot stop thinking about what a municipal employee in Middleburg landfill said when I visited three weeks ago. He promised them that since they are problematic to their operations at the dumping site therefore a moat will be erected around the landfill. He uttered these words during the meeting between groundWork, SAWPA and Middelburg waste pickers. Here about 400 waste pickers survive by picking recyclable material at the landfill.

Should a moat be erected that means more than 400 people will be on the streets without jobs? Our government needs to rethink their governing tendencies. Otherwise we would witness a poor and working class revolution in South Africa. Waste pickers have vowed that they will try and protect their livelihoods by all means - if it means taking to the streets, let it be, and if it means that the elections have to be boycotted, then let it be. People are “gatvol” of a government who is oppressing them economically and politically. Warning bells have always been ringing in everyone’s ears but for some reason government is not listening.

I have witnessed government spending taxpayer’s money in protecting waste at various landfills. I asked myself if this spending is worth it when people are desperately poor in South Africa? Recycling needs to be formalized and waste pickers needs to be assisted instead of being discriminated against by our government.

This is a job for so many South Africans. The formal recycling industry exists because of the informal industry which is mostly driven by waste pickers. Collect a Can for example is in the Guinness Book of Records for collecting a million recyclable cans, and who did most of the work at various landfills/dumps for these cans to be recovered? 

It is the waste pickers, and there is no recognition or prize for waste pickers because they are at the bottom in our social class system. Our government is talking about mitigation of climate change impacts, green economy, green jobs but waste pickers are not seen as people who are contributing positively towards the above policy issues. Our government needs to rethink the way it does things and allow people to come with solutions on the challenges faced by the country. 

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  © )

Disastrous Durban: a post-COP review.

The Durban outcome. COP17 failed the world… as expected.

Ahead of the COP, African Ministers met in Bamako and agreed that, to save the world, we need to limit temperature increase to well below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; that the major historical polluters (AKA the rich Northern countries) must reduce their emissions by at least 40 percent by 2017, and that they must make new and additional public finances available to Southern countries to enable the urgent actions needed to save peoples’ lives and the environment.

In Brussels, while the COP was in session, Europe’s leaders patched agreement after agreement in a desperate attempt to avoid the economic depression into which their devotion to ‘the market’ has led them. In Durban, the world’s leaders went into extra time on the climate negotiations but the deal done there merely confirms that severe and prolonged global depression presents the best hope that global carbon emissions will be reduced at the scale required to avoid escalating the already dangerous climate crisis.

It may be recalled that, during the first round of the depression in 2008-2009, the national states made some $13 trillion available to bail ‘the market’ – effectively defined by a core group of just 147 corporations – from the consequences of its insatiable greed. Since the national states assumed the costs of market failure, ‘the market’ now insists that these costs are passed onto the people. The citizens of the weakest countries in the Euro-zone are the first in line for the austerity treatment demanded by ‘the market’.

Throughout the process of climate negotiations, national states have represented their respective interests in the global accumulation of capital. The USA in particular has ensured that there will be no deal that jeopardises corporate power. The Durban session clarified, if clarity was needed, that it will not under any circumstance agree to any binding obligation to reduce carbon. Not now, not ever. Nor will it agree to pay more than a token amount into any climate fund. It will instead use China as a scapegoat for its own refusal to act.

The ‘Durban Platform’ opens a new negotiating track within the climate negotiations. This is to develop some form of new agreement with obligations applicable to all parties. This initiative, proposed by the EU and supported by the South African hosts who wanted a result with brand value, is meaningless. As it has been in the past, the condition for agreement is that it should be ineffective in addressing climate change.

The costs of inaction will be severe. The poor will be hit first, the people of Africa and of the drowning islands will be hit first, but ultimately all will perish. The people of the world must consider whether the short-term interest of the ruling corporate and state elites is worth it and, if not, what they can do about it.

It is of particular concern to groundWork that the South African state enabled and then justified the use of informal violence against legitimate protest. On the first occasion, official Durban City ‘volunteers’ – who were in fact paid to be there – joined the people’s march organised for the Global Day of Action on December 3^rd. They responded with violence to protesters who denounced the record of Jacob Zuma’s presidency. Five days later, at an open meeting with President Zuma in the Durban City Hall, the City volunteers attacked people holding posters which called on South Africa to stand firm with the African Bamako position. President Zuma did nothing to intervene and city officials later justified their volunteers’ actions.

Without a very radical change of policies, more people will suffer growing distress in consequence of both economic depression and climate change. And more people will come onto the streets to denounce policies which protect the rich at their expense. It appears that the state used the COP to rehearse violent responses to even the mildest forms of dissent. Parallel with this rehearsal, the Secrecy Bill and the Weather Bill are respectively designed to close down people’s access to information and their right to free speech on pollution and weather incidents.

We believe that South Africans who are concerned with environmental justice, with climate justice or even with the physical survival of people on earth must defend and expand on these freedoms which are essential to their capacity for action.