Smoke (CTL) and mirrors (nuke)

At Copenhagen Pres Zuma indicated that South Africa would like to move to a low carbon economy, and meet the targets of the long term mitigation strategy to reduce carbon emissions by 34%. Since then, there have been many movements within national, provincial and local governments to be thinking about the green economy and green jobs.

This will all be for naught.

Not only are we planning to build 3 new huge coal power stations (which would make it simply impossible to meet these targets, and Carbon Capture and Storage is a pipe dream), but SASOL is rolling out a major expansion plan to boost its Secunda Coal to Liquid (CTL) plant by 5% at a cost of R12billion. To think Secunda is already the largest point source or carbon emissions in the world, and now they want to make it worse! (Well, on the bright side, that may not be the case for long, with SASOL building CTL plants in China, possibly China might overtake us in converting coal into petrol.)

Then, looking at nuclear, I have argued before that nuclear is too costly and takes too long to build to make any difference to climate change. The money would be much better used investing in other carbon emission reducing technologies and alternative energies. But it is now clear that the French Preseident Sarkozy is on the payroll of the nuclear industry. Not surprising really, since France has so much nuclear power (58 reactors), and Areva, the big nuke company, is stationed there. He is pushing to make the financing cheaper (i.e. shift more of the risk onto the taxpayer) and get developing countries to build them (i.e. another form of energy imperialism – more money flowing South to North).

If the SA government is srious about reorientating our economy to compete in the new green world, tehn they need to catch a wake up now, and deal with the carbon emission problem that is predominantly based in ESKOM, SASOL and their big customers.

Frank