Essays by Eric Worrall
UN-funded climate activists are trying to turn South Africa into a playground for their failed energy ideas.
Coal’s executioner gathers to plot a murder
Via Nick O’Malley
January 7, 2023 — 12:10 am…
New coal prices soar may be generating short-term profits, but it is also destroying demand.
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Countries like China and India have been building licensed and contracted plants over the past decade, but are rapidly switching to renewable energy. At the end of 2021, the main coal industry sponsors – China, Japan and South Korea – announced 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 below capacity.
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Under the so-called Equity Transition Investment Partnership (or JET IP, as it is now referred to in the jargon-rich world of climate diplomacy), the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and the European Union agreed to provide $8.8 billion. 5 billion ($12.59 billion) in grants and cheap loans as the start of a fund to buy and build South Africa’s coal fleet and replace it with renewable energy.
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 dirty industry standards, a particularly dirty fleet of coal. As a result, a dollar spent on greening South Africa cuts more carbon than a dollar spent in Europe.
The model also aligns with one of the core principles of the Paris Agreement, which recognizes that countries have a “shared but differentiated responsibility” for tackling climate change.
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South Africa has terrible energy supply and crime problems, organized criminals are replacing low quality coal with high quality coal on a large scale, and accused of selling stolen coal to Europe. So I’m not sure adding high-value, easy-to-remove solar panels to South Africa’s energy mix will help their situation in any way.
And Europe desperately needs that alleged stolen coal. For all their green rhetoric, Germany craves coal so much that it destroys the village to expand its coal mineto try to overcome their lack of energy.
I don’t know the words to turn South Africa’s suffering into a laboratory for testing ideas that have completely failed at home. Hypocrisy doesn’t seem to cover up the full enormity and evil of what they’re doing.
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