1 Light a Fire under sa’s Climate Policy1
Most South Africans don’t appreciate that we are living in a new world, shaped – and increasingly determined – by a heating planet.
In 2015, when the World Meteorological Organisation declared a 1°C increase in planetary temperature since the industrial revolution, it acknowledges that the planetary conditions that sustain life had been fundamentally changed.
For geologists meeting in South Africa on August 29 last year, and responsible for documenting the Earth’s history, a sober scientific conclusion was reached. We are now living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This means humans as a geological force are shaping the Earth’s systems and planetary conditions that determine life.
The Anthropocene is a geological, historical and climatic marker that confirms we have broken with a relatively stable climatic condition known as the Holocene, which lasted about 11 700 years. How we produce, consume and organise social life affects the Earth’s systems. Carbon emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are contributing to global warming.
A planet that heats by three, four or five degrees will make human life almost impossible. If we do not act now, we are likely to breach two degrees in this century. As our planet heats complex feedback loops such as methane release from melting in the polar zones, carbon saturation in oceans and even destruction of rain forests will feed into global warming.
There is no time to spare if we want to create the conditions, institutions and practices that will sustain South Africa into the future. We also cannot hide behind false dichotomies of jobs and development versus the environment.
The longer we postpone the urgency of climate change the more costly and catastrophic it becomes. There are currently 20 vulnerable countries, mainly island states, with 700-million people who do not have the capabilities to deal with the climate shocks induced by a 1°C increase, including the rise in the sea level. Many of these countries will have to be abandoned and climate refugees will increase.
The Syrian conflict is also considered a “climate war” – one of the worst droughts in Syria’s history (which fell between 2006 and 2011) caused the failure of most of Syria’s agriculture and the migration of 1.5-million Syrians to urban areas. Although the conflict is complex, climate change as a contributing factor cannot be ignored.
The cost of South Africa’s drought has not been calculated and we are not coming to terms with what we are dealing with. Most politicians and policy-makers use the language of a “natural disaster”, which suggests this is a freak event of nature – a transient problem and the concomitant response is “disaster relief”. This mode of thinking betrays a serious crisis of leadership and the makings of climate crisis in South Africa.
The drought that has ravaged rural South Africa since 2014, and which is now threatening big metropolitan conglomerations such as Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay and Durban, has to be a defining moment. The Cape Town water crisis portends the problems we face if we want to construct a climate emergency state that can support a citizen-led transition that affirms climate justice.
The poor and working-class citizens of Cape Town have endured three levels of climate injustice and, if this repeats itself, climate conflict will tear South Africa apart.
First, inequality and geographies are racialised in Cape Town.
A Day Zero approach, with its emphasis on disciplinary demand management and fear, squeezed households and neighbourhoods already dealing with water insecurity. Water management devices and punitive tariffs shifted the burden and cost to poor communities, whereas agriculture and business were let off the hook.
More generally, farming in South Africa controls 62% of our water resources. Because of irrigation-fed agriculture, including in the Western Cape, we are exporting our water as we export food. This approach to water and food systems contributes to climate injustice and is not viable in a climate-driven world.
Second, the state at all three levels has failed, thus passing the burden on to the most vulnerable.
The City of Cape Town and the Western Cape did not have a sustainable water management strategy in place, despite numerous warnings and the science of climate change already forewarning drier conditions in the Cape.
At the same time, activists and civic organisations have developed compelling critiques of the state’s responses and have also developed systemic solutions. Many of the water crisis organisations in Cape Town justifiably reject desalination as an expensive techno fix, with serious negative environmental effects.
Instead, they are calling for water leaks to be plugged, water to be harvested from water channels leading to the ocean, the protection of agro-ecological farming communities such as the Philippi horticultural area, the integration of ground water into the water system in a sustainable manner, incorporation of farmer-controlled dams into the water system and reuse of water, among other just solutions.
A discourse on water and food sovereignty is emerging from below but is not finding policy traction in the state.
The third injustice experienced relates to an anc government committed to a fossil fuel energy path (as entrenched in the Integrated Resource Plan). This can be seen in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ambition to see mining as a “sunrise industry” – which includes more coal, fracking and off-shore extraction – and a National Development Plan that affirms the importance of resource nationalism.
The carbon criminality of the anc government is not exceptional and includes President Donald Trump’s United States, Russia, China, India and other petro-states.
Essentially, ruling elites have chosen more carbon emissions and hence a climate-driven world with devastating consequences for the poor, working class and marginal. This exists alongside imperial designs to police zones of climate chaos and to keep the world enthralled by symbolic gestures such as the Paris Climate Agreement, which provides too little, too late. Cape Town registers the disproportionate effects and climate injustices of carbon criminality.
We are in a “no-analogue” situation and as uncharted territory for the human race we have to develop a new paradigm to sustain life in response to the climate crisis. This has to reflect in how we think about decarbonising our society and building new ecocentric systems (water, energy, food, living, governance) to manage climate shocks.
South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. Climate change and shocks will deepen racial, gender and class inequalities, yet at the
The climate crisis does not have to be about catastrophism or end-of-times millenarianism. The ecocidal destruction of the conditions that sustain life can be confronted with radical nonracialism and a new direction for the nation-building project that unites us all.
South Africa can be a beacon to the world again. As a climate-justice state it can embrace a deep and just transition, an idea championed by trade unions and consider democratic systemic reforms already emerging such as food, seed and water sovereignty, climate jobs, zero waste, the rights of nature, socially owned renewable energy, solidarity economies, a substantive basic income grant and democratic planning, among others.
As in the struggle against hiv, the world could not stop us from producing the generic drugs we required to sustain lives. Trump’s US cannot stand in the way of us confronting the existential threats of climate change.
In this context, climate crisis international relations require us to build support for a climate-justice agenda in our continent, the inter-state system and isolating those countries that are carbon criminals. This might even include climate justice sanctions against some states.
Global leadership has failed over the past 20 years to tackle the climate crisis. South Africa, post-Zuma, can show a different way for humanity and other life forms we share this beautiful planet with.
It is not too late to advance a deep and just transition for South Africa, as the central thrust of a new eco-centric National Development Plan.
2 South Africa’s Carbon Democracy Is Going over the Cliff2
The past few weeks have revealed palace wars: Public Protector against Pravin Gordhan; Public Protector against President Cyril Ramaphosa; more of the Red Berets’ undemocratic moves in Parliament and then former president Jacob Zuma going for broke with his toxic tales at the Zondo Commission.
All of this political theatre has become high drama in our political discourse. The liberal commentariat amplifies the narrative by framing the script with simple binaries: constitutionalists versus looters, democrats versus authoritarians. All of this correlating with good versus evil and all one has to do is choose
Another optic to explain developments in contemporary South Africa is to think beyond the binaries. We are living through and observing the second transition in our market-driven carbon democracy. This transition is about the terminal decline of anc-led national liberation politics and nationalism; it is exhausted. Its greatest achievement has been to engender the forces that will destroy it and possibly our constitutional democratic order.
For the past two decades, we have been fed a regular diet of how virtuous the middle class is by an Afro-neoliberal common sense. The anc-led Alliance succeeded in creating almost nine million new African members of the middle class. This social class is marked by an Americanised consciousness which includes an obsession with acquisition, possessive individualism, a technology fetish, nihilistic celebrity culture and a carbon centric way of life. As conscripts of a globalised American way of life, wanting to be more American than actual Americans, this middle class is also debt-ridden and precarious. At the same time, it has not been a bulwark against the degeneration of South Africa’s democracy and its capture. In the largest democracies in the global south, India and Brazil, sizeable parts of the Americanised middle class have delivered their democracies to anti-democratic forces through the ballot box.
The new post-apartheid middle class is centrally implicated in the degeneration of South Africa’s democracy. To understand this, we have to understand how the anc-led Alliance turned its back on the working class and the poor.
This is also the story of how South Africa has received and internalised neoliberal reason: a world order project to remake the global political economy in the image of the USA and transnational capital. South Africa’s national liberation movement is one of the oldest on the African continent and in the world. It was also a revolutionary movement. Moreover, the anc was also a movement vaunted and celebrated given how repulsive, racist and brutal apartheid was. We imbued it with mythical virtues and gave it an over-inflated place in our national imagination.
Given the convergence of diverse ideological forces in its midst the anc is also contradictory, facing limits and objectively constrained by the contingencies of power relations. At the same time, it made political choices that shaped the direction of nation-building and post-apartheid democracy. Many of these choices related to economic policy went beyond the necessities of stabilising a debt-and crisis-ridden post-apartheid economy and became entrenched in state policy for over two decades.
This homegrown Afro-neoliberalism is grounded in two forms of reason: a de-democratising commitment against society (Thatcherite influenced) and hard-boiled pragmatic calculations (Reaganite influenced) to ensure what works for the market, first and foremost, will ostensibly work for society.
The Afro-neoliberal class project maintained the strategic initiative for over two decades, which entailed locking South Africa into deep globalisation through entrenching the power of global finance in the economy, shrinking manufacturing, encouraging further reproduction of the carbon-based minerals-energy complex such that platinum and coal became major exports and ensured South African agricultural exports continued under further monopolization of the sector. While this class project spawned a broader and racially diverse middle class it failed in terms of unemployment, inequality, hunger and ecological devastation. It has been central in creating a crisis of socio-ecological reproduction for which workers and the poor have had to pay the price.
Moreover, Afro-neoliberalism also failed politically and this is what defines South Africa’s second transition. Those at the centre of this project have to take responsibility for where South Africa’s thin and fragile market-centred carbon democracy has come to. Afro-neoliberalism spawned three counter projects from within the national liberation bloc and all are led by aspirant or new middle-class forces. These forces are infused with the impulses of a desperate and crisis-ridden society.
First, Zuma’s kleptocratic project has entailed criminalising the state to engender a transactional middle class. The ersatz scream of “radical economic transformation” is from one fraction of the national liberation bloc wanting rapid class mobility.
Second, the emergence of the Economic Freedom Fighters reflects the first significant rupture in the national liberation bloc. Malema and his Red Berets
Third, Irvin Jim’s Socialist and Revolutionary Workers Party, is the second significant rupture in the national liberation bloc, although it still has to be seriously tested politically. It is led by well-paid middle-class union functionaries, who are building a caricature of the South African Communist Party, but grounded in sectarian dogma harking back to a Stalinised dystopia in which some are more equal than others and state terror is the means for social engineering.
These forces are not anachronistic and have the potential to fracture the anc-led Alliance but also destroy the foundations of South Africa’s constitutional order. To continue an Afro-neoliberal class project is to strengthen these forces. Cyril Ramaphosa’s economic thinking has not displayed a fundamental break with Afro-neoliberalism. His fixation on foreign direct investment, as the basis of growth and development, completely occludes the socio-ecological crisis that is the result of such thinking.
A good example of this is how the business press has been cheering on the potential take-over of Pioneer foods by a US investor as a realisation of Ramaphosa’s dream for investment-led growth. In the context of climate shocks, volatility in globalised food markets and the recent collapse of South Africa’s food system in the drought such investment is certainly not in the national interest.
Also the brazen intention by his government to break up Eskom without a national debate and a clear plan to ensure a just transition for workers and society is a flashpoint that is also gridlocking South Africa’s socially-owned renewable energy transition. Again, the Afro-neoliberal class project expressing the power of credit rating agencies, investors and international institutions like the World Bank is a recipe for major social conflict.
In a climate-driven world, building blocks for society such as food, water and energy have to be ring-fenced as strategic and even anchored around democratic public utilities and other socialised institutional forms. However, these issues do not feature in the Afro-neoliberal reasoning at work in Ramaphosa’s class project.
Hence a weak carbon democracy, anchored in explosive socio-ecological conditions, is being led down a self-destructive path. In short, Afro-neoliberalism, which has been at the heart of anc rule, through its own anti-democratic
Political disorder and the uncertainties of South Africa’s future are compounded by the dynamics of intensifying climate chaos. The anc electoral manifesto does not have anything serious to say about the worsening climate crisis, the lessons to be learned from the drought and the deep just transition required now. Instead, it flaunts commitments to 20th-century style industrial development, a declaratory developmental state and resource nationalism. The anc is willing to bury its head in the sand regarding the worsening climate crisis and premise its choices for the country on the false dichotomy of carbon development as opposed to addressing a mere “environmental problem”.
This means the anc simply does not care if more people die from drought, heatwaves, floods and other extreme climate impacts induced by global heating. It does not appreciate the challenge of socio-ecological collapse as an imminent possibility with the worsening climate crisis.
In this context, Barbara Creecy, Minister for Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, does not have a strong mandate from the anc to advance ambitions climate crisis policy. She is also leading a department that has consistently failed to hold accountable those responsible for carbon and broader toxic air pollution in our society. According to the World Bank, 20,000 people die annually from air pollution. Given that this minister was part of the Gauteng Government responsible for the #LifeEsidemeni tragedy she needs to appreciate that one more death from air pollution because of ineffective regulation is unacceptable.
Gwede Mantashe, Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, is clearly hell-bent on driving the resource nationalism of the anc, with more carbon extraction as the “big game-changer”.
Besides having Eskom (number 29 on the list of 100 major carbon polluters in the world) and Sasol (number 45 on the list of 100 major carbon polluters in the world) within his portfolio, his pronouncements about the Total gas find, his opposition to the Xolobeni judgment against extractivism and his commitment to the dubious idea of “clean coal” place him on a collision course with present and future generations. He and the anc are imposing a death sentence on all life forms through support for carbon interests and the reproduction of this weak carbon democracy. It is not the first time Mantashe is on the wrong side of history. His boisterous support for Zuma was the first.
This time, he and the Afro-neoliberal project of the Ramaphosa regime will have to face the street rage of climate justice forces, led by children and other progressive social forces, rising in the country against human and non-human extinction. Hope born from such rage emerges at a social-ecological breaking
3 Open Letter: Call For a UN Treaty to End Fossil Fuels3
This is an open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, General Antonio Guterres.
3.1 Secretary General Antonio Guterres
The recent UN Climate Action Summit which you convened in New York has been a disappointment. Major carbon-emitting countries are not rising to the challenge. These governments do not have excuses given that for more than 20 years they have been informed by the UN International Panel on Climate Change about climate science and growing urgency. On the streets, climate justice movements have been doing the same.
The problems with UN Climate multilateralism have to be engaged with openly and honestly. In this regard, it is important to share with you a demand made to the UN by the children, youth and climate justice forces that took to the streets for #GlobalClimateStrike on 20 September in South Africa.
However, before I get there it is important for you to understand my orientation to the climate crisis.
I am writing to you from a society in which youth unemployment (aged between 15–24) stands at 55%. Hope for many young people has been stolen by Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (anc). Widespread looting of state resources by many in the anc has deprived large parts of the post-apartheid generation a place in democratic South Africa.
When I was 11 years old in 1980, my family home was surrounded by apartheid police who detained my elder brother for his anti-apartheid activism. As a child, I was terrified for what would happen to my elder brother given that many were being killed in detention. I was moved by this injustice and attempted a school boycott the next day. The boycott did not last long but it sparked an uncompromising commitment to social justice and emancipation which has stayed with me for almost four decades as an activist. I continue to feel a deep sense of inter-generational solidarity, given my politicisation at a young age. Hence, I am deeply concerned about the bleak economic future
Let me also be open about my ideological approach to the climate crisis. I have a climate justice perspective which has largely been excluded from the mainstream discourse in the UN system. It has had its strongest expression among movements struggling against extractivism, for climate jobs, food sovereignty, transition towns, solidarity economies, rights of nature, zero waste, socially owned renewable energy and generally, system change.
My climate justice orientation goes back 20 years when I worked on an eco-village in a township community and contributed to the Green-House project in the inner city of Johannesburg. I brought my ecological consciousness into my academic work and designed a postgraduate course on Empire and the Crisis of Civilisation, almost a decade ago. This has enabled me to expose my students to the various socio-ecological crises plaguing our world, including the climate crisis.
In 2011, I took 120 of my students to the Conference of the Parties (cop) 17 Summit in Durban. We marched for a climate justice future and handed out pamphlets to delegates going into the conference, appealing to them to ensure they take the fate of human and non-human life seriously. I also participated in the Peoples Space at the cop20 Summit in 2014 in Lima, Peru. I spent time with some of the leading climate justice activists from the Global South grappling with systemic alternatives which were not being considered inside the UN negotiations.
We knew that after the Copenhagen cop (2009) we were defeated by the fossil fuel lobbies and pro-business agendas of most governments. The high point of the first cycle of climate justice activism was the Cochabamba Peoples Summit (2010) in Bolivia, which the UN also disregarded.
One cannot help but wonder: if the UN listened to climate justice movements over the past two decades, where would the world be today in terms of the climate crisis?
So, ecological politics and more specifically climate crisis and justice are not new to me. On Friday, 20 September, one of our main #SAClimateStrike targets was a protest outside the corporate offices of Sasol, the 45th highest carbon emitter in the world. I was proud of the children and youth gathered at this event and about 18 other such events across South Africa.
This was historic for South Africa. Besides affirming the scientific urgency of the climate crisis, these mobilisations affirmed the democracy deficit in climate policy-making, both in South Africa and at a UN level. One of the demands made to Sasol was for a just transition plan to be developed so that
Despite South Africa being committed to the Paris Climate Agreement since 2015, according to Afro-Barometer, 54% of South Africans have not heard of climate change. This includes rural residents (63%), women (58%) and citizens without formal education (65%). The failure of the Paris Climate Agreement to engender urgency in South Africa is patently clear. Climate negotiations are elite negotiations, despite the climate crisis affecting all life forms on planet Earth. This disconnect between the UN system and local civil societies is an expression of the democracy deficit in climate negotiations and is certainly going to engender further conflict with increased planetary heating.
In South Africa, climate crisis governance is performative and made routine. South Africa has a few policies on climate change, including work being done on an adaptation strategy. These policies are not mainstreamed into governance. Moreover, the failure of the South African government’s climate policy commitments is also expressed through a failed response to our current drought (2014 to the present). The El Niño (intensified through climate change) induced drought in South Africa has been the worst in the history of the country. The anc government only declared the drought a national emergency in early 2018, after our food system nearly collapsed.
According to climate scientists in South Africa, the entire water system that the country relies on, including the Katse Dam in the Lesotho highlands, can handle a five-year drought. We are now in the fifth year of drought, and the Katse Dam, one of the main feeders into the industrial heartland of South Africa, has levels sitting at 16.9%. This is a serious crisis with “day zero” a looming possibility for the densely populated province of Gauteng (over 12 million).
Yet the anc government is maintaining a carbon-based development path, including building one of the largest coal-fired power stations in the world, promoting fracking, offshore gas extraction and the importation of gas from Mozambique. South Africa continues to also have oil interests in Saudi Arabia, Angola and even in conflict-ridden South Sudan. The Paris Climate Agreement is not stopping any of this.
Actually, despite the excellent science from the International Panel on Climate Change, particularly the 1.5C report of 2018 and more recent work done on the risks, costs, benefits and consequences of addressing 1.5C, the ruling elites in South Africa are afflicted with cognitive dissonance. This is more than climate denialism but actually plain insanity. From the standpoint of
3.2 In My View, There Are Three Reasons for This
First, the Paris Climate Agreement is not legally compelling for signatory countries. The principle of voluntary cooperation has completely undermined the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. There is no regulated push for nationally determined targets to be achieved, which would have tackled immediately the major carbon-based industrial powerhouses on the planet. This is the triumph of neoliberal international relations, in which states are even understood as competitive market actors and therefore have the freedom to choose whether to act on the problem or not. Ironically, this is happening at a time when the eco-fascist Donald Trump is deepening the crisis of the liberal intellectual project, including in its neoliberal incarnation.
Second, the entire UN system is founded on the primacy of nation-states. The nation-state is a product of the emergence of capitalist modernity, secular nationalism and the imposition of Western colonialism. Sovereignty has a chequered and dubious history which I do not want to get into, but just to say, the consensus among many critical international relations scholars is that the marketised neoliberal state has a functionality shaped by the sovereignty capital and is extremely weak to deal with democratic pressures arising from deep inequality.
The third wave of democratisation in the 20th century has also stalled in this context. African states that are fossil fuel (oil and gas) producers, are some of the most illiberal on the African continent and they will certainly not empower their citizens to understand, let alone shape, the climate policies and just transitions required in their countries. These countries are trapped; “resource curse” on one side, and worsening climate crisis on the other. Mozambique, Nigeria, Angola are all examples. The Paris Climate agreement with its present approach is not providing a way out for these countries.
Third, the carbon budget approach central to the cop process, while useful, merely expects countries to manage emissions through setting targets and implementing mitigation and adaptation measures. There is a huge gap in this logic. This has to do with holding nefarious fossil fuel corporations (gas, oil and coal) accountable. While divestment campaigns have attempted to put pressure on shareholder-based fossil fuel corporations, this has not gone
The cop negotiations have not locked in fossil fuel corporations (state and non-state) in terms of their just transition plans. Pinning down fossil fuel corporations is crucial to give momentum to decarbonisation of all other sectors in the national and global economy. This is a civilisational and intergenerational necessity. There is an urgent need for an “End Fossil Fuel Treaty” that can be added to the Paris Climate Agreement, under Article 6 of the agreement, dealing with mitigation, and particularly Article 6.9 which seeks to elaborate a framework for non-market approaches. Such a treaty has to be based on the principle of climate debt owed by fossil fuel corporations to all of us. This will go a long way to addressing the weaknesses I have identified above, the failure of the UN process to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable, for more than 20 years, and it will ensure we move with greater haste to a peaceful resolution of the climate crisis.
Of course, this might be ignored by the UN, but this is how we framed the challenge in our memorandum handed over to Sasol:
A National and Global Call to #GridlockCarbon on May 1st, 2020 – 1.5C is Not Negotiable.
We will be back next year to assess progress on Sasol’s just transition plan but also to confront all other carbon corporations, investors and government institutions. Today is the start of ongoing and rolling action to #GridlockCarbon.
Hence we call on South Africa and the World to stand with us on 1 May 2020, to #GridlockCarbon corporations everywhere.
- 1.Ambitious just transition plans from all carbon corporations and polluters so we accelerate the realisation of net-zero emissions and prevent a 1.5C overshoot;
- 2.No new investments in oil, gas and coal;
- 3.All governments to withdraw subsidies from fossil fuel industries and redirect this money to socially owned renewable energy transitions;
- 4.The UN establish an “End Fossil Fuel Treaty” which ensures fossil fuel corporations pay the world a carbon debt for the harm they have caused, poor countries are compensated for a problem they did not
create, including poor countries with fossil fuel reserves, and the oil, coal and gas industries are shut down in the next 10 years or sooner.
1.5°C is not negotiable. Our common future is in jeopardy and we are ready to fight for it. People and planet before profits.
Together with the children, youth, workers and citizens in the climate justice struggle in South Africa, we look forward to your response.
4 covid-19, the Climate Crisis and Lockdown – An Opportunity to End the War with Nature4
covid-19 has pushed an already weak and crisis-ridden global economy over the edge. Massive value has been erased from crashing stock market prices. Many commentators are talking about the return of economic conditions similar to the great financial crash of 2007–2009. The most powerful countries in the world from China to the US have ground to a halt.
This pathogen, possibly from delicate creatures like a pangolin or a bat, has engendered the worst global pandemic since the Spanish flu (1918–1920), which killed 100-million people. Death rates are going up globally. Right-wing nationalists in Europe and the USA have been confused as this virus has jumped racist border regimes, and infected all populations. Citizens are no longer concerned about their racist messages, but rather about how to survive.
Governments all across the world are seized with the challenge of protecting their populations, at least that is what it seems like given the people-centred rhetoric. The geo-politics of covid-19, engulfing the entire globalised world in its rapid spread, is also a shot across the bow of carbon capitalism. Elite consumption of exotic animals, at high prices, in Wuhan, China unleashed the swift and lethal revenge of nature.
This does not mean that this is a “Chinese virus” as the racist Donald Trump has suggested. We are all susceptible and are trying to live through the fear, paralysis and risks brought by this pandemic. Overnight, jobs have disappeared, pay cheques have shrunk, loved ones are in critical health situations fighting for their lives and hunger is knocking on the door of many. Healthcare systems, weakened and commodified through decades of marketisation, have or will be overwhelmed.
4.1 ‘Black Swan’ Event, or Worsening Systemic Crisis
In the business world, covid-19 tends to be reduced to a “black swan event”. A sudden or unforeseen happening, with great consequence and rationalised after the fact. The idea was initially popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s five volumes on uncertainty including the famous Black Swan, which has been described as one of the most famous books since World War ii. While in his work, the concept has a richer philosophical grounding, it has become part of everyday risk management discourse. Business risk analyses missed the likelihood of a covid-19 pandemic and it certainly was not a concern. Its occurrence, however, cannot be explained as a black swan event.
From an ecological Marxist perspective, it has to do with the contradictory relationship between natural and social relations, has a historical genealogy within how eco-cidal capitalism works and can be causally attributed. Simply, for covid-19, this means it’s a dangerous problem that is engendered by capitalism’s persistent domination of nature.
It spread from a “wet market” involving organised crime syndicates, linked to shadowy global poaching, and smuggling networks that steal wild creatures from their habitats and place them on elite menus. Avaricious Chinese capitalism, with its appetite for resources and capturing markets, like the West, understands nature as a site of extracting value; nature must serve the juggernaut of accumulation.
South Africans are now familiar with the appetites and reach of this capitalism due to the annihilation of our rhino population merely for their horns. Wet markets also exist in other parts of South and East Asia, and have not been restricted, leaving open the possibilities of new waves of pandemics.
For many years, epidemiologists and environmentalists have been concerned about the public health consequences of such markets, given that animal to human transmission of deadly viruses is a known fact and has been implicated in avian flu (from birds), mers (from camels) and ebola (monkeys), for instance. These animals are also traumatised and kept in unsafe conditions.
Climate scientists have already warned humanity that further warming of the Arctic, for instance, will not only release deadly greenhouse gases such as methane, but also pathogens that have been frozen into ice sheets. Like covid-19, the worsening climate crisis and its global shocks, are not black swan events, but dangerous systemic crisis tendencies produced by a hard-wired logic based on the duality of capitalism versus nature. Science has provided us with understandings and warnings, and yet the global capitalist system persists in driving us towards harm and destruction.
4.2 Carbon Capitalism and Imposed Collective Suicide
A world led by those who place profit above human and non-human life, is placing us all in jeopardy. We are not given a choice as the eco-cidal logic of global capitalism destroys the conditions that sustain life. Our planetary commons – biosphere, oceans, forests, land and water sources – are all being commodified and destroyed to make a few wealthy.
On a planetary scale, we are living through an imposed collective suicide. As neoliberalism becomes authoritarian and mutates into the second coming of fascism to defend the wealth of the few, it is revealing a simple fact: It’s not learning lessons about the harm it is inflicting. Instead, it wants to defend at all costs a life-destroying system.
Karl Polanyi in the social science classic, the Great Transformation (1944), drew attention to such elite behaviour when the ship is sinking. In the late 19th century, based on marketisation through the gold standard, the world was driven into World War 1. Lessons were not learned and the world was again locked into gold standard marketisation in the 1920s, and this gave rise also to fascism and World War 2.
Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I cried. I felt everything inside of me: the depth and immensity of my pain, my sorrow, my grief, my lament, my worry, my confusion, my longing, my despair – I felt it all and wept, wept for the sadness I’ve kept hidden so long, wept for the loved ones I miss so dearly, wept for the suffering and uncertainty of the world, wept for reasons I don’t even understand.
Many of us weep for the collective suicide we are living through. This is not about victimhood, but about understanding the depth of crisis and the urgency to overcome this universal challenge of our extinction. It is a conscious knowing rooted in deep wells of pain, anxiety and existential suffering growing in prevalence among the young because of the collective suicide being imposed by financialised carbon capitalism.
Greta Thunberg and many of the young climate activists in South Africa such as Raeesah Noor Mohamed, Nosintu Mcimeli, William Shoki, Awande Buthelezi, Jane Cherry and Courtney Morgan, to name a few, understand this. They carry their pain, their understanding of injustice as they protest.
But is the present resistance enough? The cry of 1 degree Celsius movements – Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, #FridaysForFuture and the Climate Justice Charter process in South Africa – are all coming up against power structures and ruling classes not willing to break with the imposed collective suicide of financialised eco-cidal carbon capitalism. Yet in the context of covid-19, not only are global populations shocked, but it has rocked, assailed and unhinged the very same power structure standing in the way of addressing the climate crisis. covid-19 is forcing, even reluctantly, ruling classes to try to act with concern for life.
4.3 Lockdown and the anc’s Epidemiological Neoliberalism
covid-19 has thrown us into a state of exception. From a climate justice perspective, this is a dress rehearsal for a world that breaches 2 and 3 degrees Celsius in which climate shocks on a global scale imperil life-supporting socio-ecological systems such as food, water and health systems through unbearable temperatures. Waking up then is too late.
This is the underlying premise of climate justice activism, given that climate science is telling us what is arriving with business as usual or low mitigation trajectories. With the covid-19 crisis, our governments seem to be suddenly
The disaster capitalism of covid-19, as Naomi Klein reminds us, brings forth profit-making opportunities even from the suffering of the people. Trump is leading the way. His first crucial move was to build up fossil fuel reserves thus keeping oil prices bolstered, then he unleashed the privatised healthcare system and is now keeping pharmaceutical companies “free” to manipulate the prices of essential medical equipment instead of repurposing production through the Defense Production Act. However, this is not the end of the story and struggles inside US society will certainly determine if Trump’s epidemiological neoliberalism will triumph or not.
In South Africa, we have been witness to a sea change from kleptocratic state and neoliberal austerity policies (including cutting billions of rands from health spending), announced by Minister of Finance Tito Mboweni, to cross-subsidise corrupted and failing parastatals, to the war on covid-19.
The country is going into this government-declared war with a dualistic healthcare system, with the vast majority dependent on a public healthcare system gutted by corruption, mismanagement and austerity. This healthcare system, with these specific features, is what is going to be overwhelmed not just by covid-19, but by over two decades of anc misrule. The lockdown of South Africa has to be understood in this context.
Put more sharply, the warped rationalities of commodified healthcare for a few and failing healthcare for the many is clearly the frontline the government is trying to avoid in the country’s covid-19 response. For most South Africans, in a state of shock and panic, this lockdown crash-landing of the economy on the wretched lives of a precarious working class and poor seems like the best response.
Of course, this shock therapy has been administered repeatedly since neoliberal strictures informed the first democratic budget in 1994 and the macro-economic shift of 1996, kleptocratic neoliberalism of the Jacob Zuma project and now the new epidemiological neoliberalism of the anc. In this context, the so-called China success story of shutting down Wuhan peppers government-speak.
But the other epidemiological success story of South Korea is not referenced. South Korea did not lock down its economy, but put the emphasis on: (1) intervening fast through test kits produced (100,000 a day), on a mass scale domestically; (2) test early, often and safely (it has conducted over 300,000 tests), such that detection happens quickly; (3) contact tracing, isolation and surveillance, which has used smart apps, mass messaging and has prevented an overload on
South Africa’s lockdown has not been preceded by mass testing despite the two-month lead time the South African government had since the outbreak in China. Even as the country goes into lockdown, the costs of tests are prohibitive, there has been no clear communication about international partnerships to get testing going on a mass scale, there is no clear messaging on testing details and grassroots civil society has not been mobilised, despite its enthusiasm to rise to the challenge.
Instead, the lockdown has shifted the focus to managing economic chaos, mitigation measures and privatised charity through a “solidarity fund”. Deep anxiety, fear and insecurity is running through society. South Africa is going into the lockdown as one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The crisis of socio-ecological reproduction is deep as expressed through high levels of structural unemployment, intra-African income inequality, hunger and water inequalities (54% of South African households do not have access to clean water through a tap in their homes).
Lockdown means South Africa’s precarious working class and poor are now responsible for solving the covid-19 problem because they carry the burden. Lockdown is meant to save their lives while worsening their already wretched life worlds. Hence the anc government is off the hook with this cunning move of epidemiological neoliberalism while taking covid-19 disaster capitalism to a new level.
4.4 Ending the War with Nature
covid-19 is an expression of contradictory natural relations. On the one hand, it is devouring the most vulnerable in our society and, on the other hand, it is prompting humanity to slow down collective climate suicide. Carbon emission data is certainly going to register deep drops since the onset of covid-19, with airlines, shipping, cars and other carbon-emitting technologies brought to a halt.
covid-19 has achieved what almost three decades of UN multilateral negotiations have failed to achieve. If governments can take the covid-19 emergency seriously, they can take the climate crisis seriously. The UN climate meeting in Glasgow this year has to open with lessons learned from covid-19 to address the global climate emergency. In this context, South Africa will have to tell its story to the global public. However, there is a lot the South African
South Africa’s government declared covid-19 a disaster in terms of the Disaster Management Act. It has unleashed an important coordination capacity in the state, preventative regulations, is disseminating information, has imposed a 21-day lockdown and introduced economic mitigation measures. The command structure is led by the president. The Disaster Management Act was not kicked into gear during the worst drought in South Africa’s history (2014-till now), which ravaged numerous communities, collapsed part of the globalised food system and pushed up food prices. Many communities still have acute water needs and are being challenged to maintain basic hygiene.
As covid-19 transmission spreads, water-stressed communities are going to be hotspots as these are poor communities and very likely to also have many with compromised immune systems. If the drought was handled properly by the anc government, water issues would not have been a problem now.
Moreover, if the anc government did not get caught up in the tides of populism around the land question and listened to the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, including taking seriously their Peoples Food Sovereignty Act handed over to Parliament, we would be sitting in the midst of covid-19 with more communities, villages, towns and cities having localised agro-ecological food sovereignty pathways to cope with the current situation. Instead, we are living the drama of a war-centred crisis management approach.
The war approach to covid-19 is limited in three respects and holds out dangers for how leadership is practiced now and what capacities we build in this defining moment. First, war works with a simple logic. There’s an enemy, militarise (build war-making capabilities), mobilise your society in the effort and deploy this to destroy the enemy. It is a reductionist way of thinking; it is not a systems view of the world.
covid-19 is manifesting in our midst together with other systemic crises, such as economic crises and climate crises. Financialised capitalism has produced an unstable global economy and grotesque inequalities. It has not worked. The climate crisis is worsening with a lack of will to phase out fossil fuels and decarbonise.
We are facing a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in planetary temperature most likely in the next five years, accompanied by intensifying climate shocks. These crises are interconnected, cascade into each other and push our
Put differently, even if covid-19 is addressed with war-like precision and the epidemiological curve flattens globally and in South Africa, we are not returning to a new normal. We are returning to a world in permanent crisis; a new abnormal. Hence, how we address covid-19 and reconstruction after it, must lock in democratic systemic reforms that cushion us from more crises.
South Africa will need an eco-justice stimulus package to tackle the impacts of covid-19, the economic crisis and worsening climate crisis. South Africa’s climate justice charter is a crucial point of departure in this regard.
Second, a war approach to covid-19 is based on dangerous philosophical foundations. It continues the anthropocentric conquest of nature, central to capitalist thinking. Killing covid-19 in this frame is about us being the dominant species. We demonstrate to the forces of nature our superiority. This is really a conceit which fails to understand that nature has been and will always be more powerful than us.
Moreover, we are extremely dependent on nature as a species to ensure our reproduction. With covid-19, we are really trying to mitigate the revenge blow from nature. It’s a moment to be humble and realise our finitude in a wondrous and infinite natural order. We are just one little part of a vast and delicate web of life. Ending covid-19 should be about ending the war with nature. This includes ending wet markets for exotic animals, ending globalised industrial agriculture and rapidly phasing out fossil fuels.
Third, the war on covid-19 keeps us bound up in an ethical knot and derives from deeply oppressive ways of thinking. Violence whether colonial, imperial, patriarchal, racist or eco-cidal is not what the world needs. Modern industrial scale violence that is calculated, instrumental in its reason and deadly is breeding a fast violence from nature. A violence we cannot match. Everyday violence of poverty and structural inequality has to be addressed as we come out of this pandemic moment.
Complex and holistic systems thinking, grounded in an ethics of care rather than war has to prevail. Put differently, if covid-19 helps jettison the Thatcherite neoliberal subject – competitive, greedy and possessive individual – for a more humane state of being and solidarity-based society, it would have produced our strongest defence against a crisis-ridden world. It would have also affirmed an ethics of care for our natural relations that nurture us, feed us and enable us to have life.
5
The Biedouw Valley is one of many spectacular wildflower hotspots in South Africa at this time of year. Rolling valleys, veld and mountains of breath-taking colour await intrepid travellers visiting the West Coast and Cederberg. Flowers are central to how humans imagine and experience nature.
In Germany during covid-19 restrictions, florists were allowed to stay open so that loved ones could share flowers and homes could have flowers to brighten otherwise dark times. For the artist Van Gogh, the feral and mesmerising beauty of flowers, including sunflowers, was captured through his path breaking use of deep layers of colour. These iconic images evoke deep wells of emotion to this day.
As South Africans, we are aware that nature’s sublime beauty stretches from the heights of Table Mountain in the south, to the undulating landscapes of the Kruger Park in the north and the two oceans that hug our coastlines. We are a country endowed with a natural diversity that is unique on Earth. Our ecosystems are home to all forms of life: from snoek, sardines, the rare sighting of the blue whale, the “Big Five”, rivers, forests, blue cranes and a unique floral kingdom. We have built a country on these precious and fragile ecological foundations. Yet, we are failing to appreciate that all of this is enmeshed in a delicate web of life, connected directly to the maintenance of a stable climate.
In 2015, the planet we consider our home changed dramatically. Climate science recorded a 1°C increase in planetary temperature since the First Industrial Revolution. The extraction and continued use of coal, oil and gas pushed Earth’s thermometer to a place it has not been for the past 11,000 years. The climate our grandparents and parents grew up with and thrived in, is being lost.
Thirty years of climate science have warned us that a fossil-fuel addicted world will heat our planet and induce extreme weather shocks, and the time to address this crisis is limited. This was affirmed in 2018 when the world’s leading climate scientists loudly sounded the alarm bell in the un-ipcc 1.5°C report shared with the world. This was our final warning about the urgency of the climate crisis.
The next UN climate summit, postponed to next year in Glasgow, will not tell us anything new, except that climate shocks are getting worse and how close we are to the edge of runaway climate chaos with its complex feedback loops.
In the midst of covid-19, the world has also come to appreciate the disproportionate impacts of a global catastrophe in relation to race, gender and class. An unequal world means more harm for those without economic means. Moreover, the unemployed and low-income earners do not have lifestyles of air travel, resource-intensive consumption and high levels of carbon emissions that cause damage to the Earth system. Earth is reacting to the life-destroying system that benefits a few with a power we cannot match.
An era of pandemics has also been announced by scientists, directly linked to further global heating and the destruction of ecosystems that keep zoonotic pathogens safely away from humans. This calls for a pause in the human journey and for our societies to think deeply about our choices. To continue with the assumption that dominating nature, even through “green growth”, and harnessing technology will save us is deeply flawed. Despite our power to re-engineer the genome, make hyper-intelligent machines and design nanotechnologies, this imagination of progress and productivism is deeply implicated in the prospect of our extinction.
In five years’ time, if the planetary temperature rise overshoots 1.5°C, southern Africa and South Africa, heating by twice the global average, will be a dangerously hotter region and this will threaten everything. According to the consensus climate science we have in South Africa, our carbon-emitting industrial farming system from farm to table will face livestock and crop systems collapse. We will also experience multi-year droughts and more extreme climate-related shocks. South Africa’s climate science is not an allegory, but is an echo of the final warning to all of us about a worsening climate-driven future.
We need new thinking informed by the urgency of climate science and complex systems thinking to remake everything to survive multiple crises affecting our societies. Such thinking is embodied in the Climate Justice Charter launched on August 28 by the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, the Cooperative and Policy Alternative and various allies in progressive civil society. This charter emerges from six years of campaigning during the worst drought experienced in South Africa and is a historic step, not only to affirm democratic, just and people-driven systemic alternatives to mitigate and adapt South Africa, but it also calls for a paradigm shift to emancipatory ecology that can ensure present and future generations have a chance of surviving.
- 1.Continued fossil fuel extraction, including complex hydrocarbons through fracking, tar sands and offshore extraction buttressed by financial investment, regulation, policy, corporate interests and in the global North, imperial power. South Africa’s extension of its minerals-energy complex to the oceans is a good example of this lock-in;
- 2.Using carbon-based energy systems and technologies in the airline, shipping, automotive, industrial agriculture, manufacturing, cement and digital sector. Phasing out fossil fuels in these industries requires more than a carbon tax in the context of the climate emergency and an understanding of how carbonisation is entrenched in these sectors and how some of these technologies such as cement or mono-industrial farming do not have a place in a post-carbon world;
- 3.Mass consumption based on carbon-based, resource-intensive ways of living and excessive waste. In unequal societies, the wealthy have the largest carbon-and resource-intensive footprints. South Africa is no exception and this has to be tackled directly. A wealth tax or an ecological debt tax are just some of the measures that need to be considered; and
- 4.Global heating due to historical and continuing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-driven societies. As the 12th highest emitter of carbon emissions in the world and one of the frontrunners on the continent, South Africa has to break its addiction to coal-driven energy now. It cannot unite African governments, let alone demand reparations from the global North for historical climate debts with its continued coal dependence. Moreover, important system-change transformations are necessary to ensure our society can endure extreme climate shocks.
The Climate Justice Charter seeks to confront and displace these lock-ins that are driving a rupture in our stable Earth system, while engendering a social practice of transformative systems regeneration as part of a deep, just transition. This relates to food, water, work, energy, transport, housing, a public climate insurance fund, a people-led disaster management system and much more that is essential to producing a caring society. The democratic systemic reforms envisaged will meet our social needs, prevent socio-ecological collapse
On 16 October, during a national day of action calling for an end to hunger, thirst, pollution (including climate harm), the Climate Justice Charter and a climate science future document, prepared by some of South Africa’s leading climate scientists, will be handed over to the speaker of Parliament and all leaders of political parties. As concerned citizens we will be claiming the right of section 234 of the Constitution, which provides for charters to be adopted to strengthen the Constitution, and thus will demand Parliament adopts the Climate Justice Charter.
The scientific warnings have been trumpeted loud and clear; we do not have a second chance to address the worsening climate crisis given the time wasted on “green tinkering”, false solutions and climate concern rhetoric. In addressing this dangerous challenge in a transformative manner, we can be certain of one simple truth: our collective failure to act systemically now means greater harm for all and future generations.
All living in South Africa need to embrace the climate problem and its systemic solutions as part of the new mass-based climate justice politics inaugurated by the Climate Justice Charter. In five years’ time, it will be too late and in 10 years’ time certainly catastrophic if we do not rise to this challenge. Now is the time for united action, at every level of society, to advance deep, just transitions where we live and work. If you listen with your conscience and heart, the screams of pain of future generations born in a world of intolerable heat can be heard.
But it does not have to be like this.
6 Party Politicians Fiddle about with Climate Change While sa Burns6
Anyone standing on the banks of the overflowing Theewaterskloof dam, the largest in the Western Cape, could be excused for scoffing at any assertion that sa is on fire. With the dam 99% full, such an observer can also be excused for forgetting about the day zero challenge that engulfed Cape Town in 2018.
Those with access to water, air conditioning and living spaces do better, but many do not have such luxuries and endure climate injustice. This “normalised inequality” has been exacerbated during the covid-19 pandemic.
Climate science has warned about the risks that further heating will bring to sa. In simple terms, it is telling us that increased use of oil, gas and coal means tomorrow is born in fire. In this decade, a 1.5°C planetary overshoot is very likely, which means sa will be 3°C hotter.
At such temperatures, globalised commercial agriculture will break down and multi-year droughts will be a regular occurrence. Extreme weather shocks are also likely. Our ecosystems will be further stressed, and our socio-ecological order will be pushed decisively in the direction of collapse.
This is not science fiction or alarmist fearmongering. These challenges are set out in a document prepared by some of sa’s leading climate scientists and shared with parliament on October 16, World Food Day.
The online assembly with parliament also shared the world’s first Climate Justice Charter, demanding that it be adopted by sa. The charter comes out of six years of campaigning, during the worst drought in sa’s history, led by the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign. It was shaped by constituency dialogues and public input over a two-year period.
Why did civil society rally widely before the handover of these documents to parliament, under the banner of ending hunger, thirst, pollution and climate harm? Why did 220 organisations endorse the charter, including trade unions, informal traders, schools, social justice organisations, environmental organisations and leading political foundations like the Mandela, Gandhi and Kathrada foundations? Because we are dealing with a serious challenge, which everybody needs to own.
But our political leaders are not taking it seriously. With the prospect of our extinction as a species on the planetary agenda, it is rational to assume that every person who considers themselves a leader in society – particularly every political party – will be seized with this issue. You would expect climate crisis news to be mainstreamed in the media. You would expect every policy agenda to mainstream it as a problem to be solved. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
sa is the 11th-highest emitter of carbon emissions in the world. Our coal addiction is criminal. Successive anc governments have continued to
At the same time, none of our political parties in parliament have a serious agenda to tackle the crisis. This was evident when the top four parties in parliament (the anc, da, eff and Freedom Front Plus) declined an invitation to debate the urgency of the climate crisis at the recent online assembly. The three parties that did participate displayed extremely lacklustre conceptions of climate issues. Are these professional politicians really serious about the concerns of citizens?
When the world overshot a 1°C rise in temperature in 2015, a second cycle of global climate justice activism exploded onto the world stage, led by indigenous peoples’ struggles at Standing Rock in the US, followed by Extinction Rebellion and then Greta Thunberg ’s #FridaysForFuture movement. These movements have raised awareness about the worsening climate crisis, but governments have continued to lack the commitment to decarbonise.
At the same time, the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign started its long march to connect hunger, food price increases, drought and climate crisis. In the hurly-burly of this activism the Climate Justice Charter was germinated.
Like the Freedom Charter, it is premised on the need to give voice to the desires, visions and systemic alternatives that ordinary people want for a deep, just transition to survive a worsening climate crisis. It also calls for sa to lead a climate justice agenda in Africa.
After the nuclear arms race of the 20th century brought the world to the edge of extinction, sa’s new democratic government boosted its moral authority by destroying all nuclear weapons. This gave Mandela ’s government a stature unrivalled in the global north and south.
Similarly, the Climate Justice Charter calls on sa to lead decarbonisation, to provide an inspiring example to the world and to lead a climate justice deal for Africa, including an “end fossil fuel treaty” in the UN system. The world needs such an example before irreversible climate change is locked in. The Climate Justice Charter movement born in this process will not settle for anything less.
In a year’s time, on October 16 2021, the Climate Justice Charter movement will return to parliament to confirm that the charter has been adopted. If sa’s parliamentary parties do not rise to this challenge, all legal and democratic options will be pursued to advance a climate justice future for sa.
7
A recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change confirmed that extreme weather and climate shocks have arrived – increasing threefold since the 1980s. For many societies, climate risks have already contributed to collapsing food systems.
Some of the countries on this tragic list include: Zimbabwe (2015–2016 El Niño-induced drought), Ethiopia (El Niño-induced drought and now the Tigray region impacted by war, locusts and a prolonged drought), Puerto Rico (devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017 with 80% of its agricultural yield wiped out), southern Madagascar (in famine after several years of drought) and Honduras (a four-year drought, two hurricanes and flooding, which resulted in the collapse of its food systems).
In Mozambique at least 500,000 people had to receive emergency food aid or face starvation after cyclones in 2019. Mozambique is also facing drought in the southern part of the country.
sa’s drought since 2014 was one of the worst in the history of the country. However, though agricultural sectors collapsed, the country was spared a climate famine this time – despite 14-million going to bed hungry, increased food prices and stressed subsistence production due to water problems.
The failures of the anc state to comprehend this reality and ensure our water systems are repurposed is apparent in the local government elections, with water needs a major concern in several communities.
The anc state is far from being ready to face climate-induced weather extremes. Climate policy shifts in sa are not happening as part of a national strategy to place sa on a climate emergency footing but are rather taking place due to increasing climate justice pressure from below, the imperative of meeting formal international commitments, and the increased momentum in climate geopolitics.
The recent announcement by Sasol that it will cut emissions by 30% by 2030, divest from coal and shift to gas is significant. For climate justice activists, this shift came from making public research on Sasol’s carbon criminality, forming a human chain around Sasol in 2019, challenging the leadership to engage on climate science, marching on its agm and putting stiff pressure on the inside through shareholder activism.
And Sasol’s climate commitments are still not ambitious enough – or guided by a Just Transition plan that secures workers and communities. This is the
The assumption in all of this is that transition risks matter, not human life. sa will lose out on “green finance” and access to markets. This conservative market rationality fails to appreciate that sa has been a climate pariah. It is the largest African emitter of carbon and owes the world a climate debt. It is not a moment of securing opportunities but rather about leading by example, morally and politically.
Last month two important UN conferences provided a global platform to test commitments to the climate emergency. The UN General Assembly, building up to the cop26 summit in Glasgow, gave us a glimpse of climate geopolitics. US President Joe Biden signalled strongly that he is working on more ambitious financial contributions to the Green Climate Fund. China has signalled an end to investments in coal-fired power stations in other parts of the world. The EU and the US are working on an ambitious plan to reduce methane emissions by 2030.
However, while the US, China and Europe seem to be cooperating on climate, the overall picture is still not hopeful for Glasgow. As it stands, sa and other big emitters have not put forward ambitious enough climate pledges.
The second important UN summit was on food systems. Climate concerns were centre stage, but this conference was hijacked by corporate interests wanting to further entrench corporate fixes to the food crisis such as mono-industrial plant-based diets, nutritional fortification of food, and enhanced food aid. The summit failed to address the needs of small-scale farmers who are crucial to feeding the world.
A parallel conference on food systems for people supported by global movements affirmed the importance of feeding countries through food sovereignty, agro-ecology and small-scale farming. sa’s government believes in many of the false techn-ofixes of the UN Food Summit and is committed to a water-intensive and export-led industrial agriculture system, in a context in which the world is moving closer to more widespread climate famines.
By now a South African state committed to addressing the climate crisis should have adopted the Climate Justice Charter, had a new deep Just Transition national development plan in place, unpacked a new macroeconomic approach consistent with advancing a climate emergency social contract, and worked closely with the au to secure a climate justice deal and treaty to phase out fossil fuel in the forthcoming UN climate summit.
Instead, the minister of mineral resources & energy has outdated ideas about clean coal, Karpowerships and even nuclear power. The minister of forestry, fisheries & the environment is merely marching in lock-step with the climate needs of business and the imperative of leveraging international climate resources. She believes the Just Transition is merely about renewable energy and shallow adaptation. sa’s growing climate-aware public and the world see this incoherence and lack of ambition. With the current crisis of leadership, every effort will have to be made to ensure the 2024 national election is a climate justice election to secure sa’s future.
8 An Open Letter to Hosken Consolidated Investments and Minister Gwede Mantashe: A Beginner’s Guide to Poppycock8
With Janet SolomonHosken Consolidated Investments’ ceo Johnny Copelyn declared the criticism of seismic surveys to be “poppycock” in an interview with Cape Talk, subsequently carried by Business Day under the headline: “hci board blasts criticism of seismic surveys as ‘poppycock’”.9
Fortunately, this assertion has got nothing to do with male genitalia and its size. In this case, Johnny’s being bigger than everyone else’s and thus the Alpha white-male-knows-what’s-best-of-all-of-us kind of posing. Thank you, Johnny, for steering clear of the cock fight!
Nonetheless, this discursive rant has set the tone for how the hci Board’s letter10 published in Daily Maverick opposing resistance to seismic surveys has been received. Something is stirring in the command centres of hci, a certain executive arousal, probably based on a realisation that the mass resistance to their interests in offshore oil and gas extraction is not about to disappear any
The etymology of the term “poppycock” goes back to Dutch usage, “pappekak” or “soft dung”. In the course of its linguistic journey into the white supremacist colonial imaginary, it became part of conquering white reason. To be reduced to animal excrement was the worst thing in the colonial imaginary based on the hierarchy of white male supremacy over women, native peoples and non-human nature (animals, plants and eco-systems).
To be “poppycock” or express “poppycock” meant that you were at the bottom of the pile: bullshit. Valueless, idiotic, insignificant and ultimately devoid of voice. The online Cambridge Dictionary defines the term to mean: old-fashion disapproving. It’s clear Johnny has a penchant for old fashion English language usage. Smarter vocabulary could have been: bunk or garbage.
Anyway, we get the message: we are worse than animal scat. Of course, hci is not the same as the Dutch East India Company or the British East India company but there is certainly a continuity in its colonial ecological philosophy as expressed in its diction. It is stuck in a simplistic conception of the human-nature relationship; capitalist business is now at the apex of the human-nature hierarchy. It will determine what will happen to human and non-human life, even through its vaunted “green investments”.
We beg to differ and will tell you why.
8.1 Pragmatic opportunism and faux development
Another revealing aspect of the hci world view contained in its Daily Maverick letter is the assumption that its business interests, particularly oil and gas extraction, converge with the national interest; its investments in oil and gas will give South Africa economic autonomy, it will enable an orderly energy transition but most importantly it represents hard-headed realist thinking.
But is it really that? There are echoes of this position in the derisive statements made by Minister Gwede Mantashe against resistance to seismic surveys and fossil fuel extraction. Mantashe, in his defence of coal, gas (including the master plan) and oil has even suggested those who resist further extraction are “anti-development” and want to maintain “apartheid and colonialism of a special type”.
Let’s be clear, this is pragmatic opportunism, which draws selectively on knowledge to make its argument seem convincing. Pragmatism is also a “fix it” philosophy, claiming to be above “isms” and being practical about problems. This is a delusion given that solutions to economic problems are expressive of class interests.
For instance, hci suggests it is merely working with government energy planning and trying to find a fit. hci’s investments in coal and interests in
This is not benign. The state’s skewing of the Integrated Resource Plan towards coal (44.6%) and gas (15.7%) by 2030 expresses these vested carbon-capitalist class interests. Simply, there are profits to be made by such extractivism and not some concern for an orderly energy transition. The counter-factual shows this up even more starkly. If tomorrow the state lifted the ceiling on wind, the country could meet its energy needs eight times over through offshore wind power, according to a recent study done by Stellenbosch University. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency,11 the costs of renewable energy systems and unit costs of renewable energy generation have come down dramatically in comparison to fossil fuels such as coal.
Brown et al12 have shown the feasibility and economic viability of a 100% renewable electricity system for South Africa, meeting the “energy needs of all citizens at all times” is “cost-competitive with fossil-fuel-based systems, even before externalities such as global warming, water usage and environmental pollution are taken into account”. They have established that this renewable system requires no “reinvention” of the power system, rather only a “directed evolution of the current system is required to guarantee affordability, reliability and sustainability”. In far less than the six years before Total’s offshore Brulpadda well comes online, there could be sufficient renewable electricity generation and storage technology to convert entirely to renewables.
So why is there a ceiling on renewable energy in the national energy mix? Who benefits from this failure to exploit limitless wind and sunshine? Certainly, the time has come for an orderly energy transition driven by the technical and economic advantages offered by renewable energy, including socially owned renewable energy in households, communities and local government.
Mantashe is also hiding behind a pragmatic opportunism, both as Energy Minister and Chair of the anc. He understands South Africa’s mineral reserves are worth about R147.91-trillion and significantly half of this value is in coal. Defending coal is crucial for greasing the wheels of political support from the National Union of Mineworkers, for the anc and business aligned to the anc invested in coal.
In news reports over the past two months it has been revealed that Batho Batho Trust, which owns 46% of Thebe gave a R15-million loan to the anc to deal with its various financial problems. The logic is simple: Shell secures its interests in oil and gas, Thebe benefits, Batho Batho Trust gains and ultimately anc interests are realised. So who is really pursuing the national interest and “development” in this context?
Moreover, according to the Alternative Information and Development Centre’s climate jobs research, if socially owned renewable energy is scaled up, 250,000 climate jobs can be created in electricity and renewable energy alone, way more than what exists in coal mining. Current estimates sit at about 113,000 coal jobs13 in South Africa. This also stands in contrast to oil and gas jobs, with international research affirming fewer, more technical jobs, are created in offshore oil and gas than projected.
But Mantashe’s rant about resistance to oil and gas entrenches “colonialism of a special type” rather than development, deserves a “special type response”. The anc has ruled South Africa for over 25 years and the economic crisis we are living through is simply a matter of its own doing. A horrendous 46% unemployment rate, in the midst of covid-19. African women, among women more generally, continue to be the most vulnerable with a 41% unemployment rate, about 30 million food insecure, 10% of income earners receive 65% of national income and 80% of wealth is in the hands of 10% of the population.
Then there is the staggering scale of corruption with billions looted from parastatals, state departments and local government. A crucial consequence in this regard is the theft of the future of millions of desperate and unemployed youth in South Africa. So who has really been reinforcing and reproducing colonialism of a special type? Mantashe’s disingenuous declarations need to be measured against the record of the anc in power. He stands for a faux development that benefits him and his insider anc cronies, certainly not the country. hci is clearly on this bandwagon.
8.2
So why bother demonising small scale fisherfolk and a few hundred thousand ocean activists? Zuma-era Operation Phakisa offshore oil and gas stream’s founding documents highlighted the greatest threat to commodifying the ocean commons as being social opposition to it. Offshore Phakisa (hurry-up) has accelerated seismic survey permitting since public push-back began to heat up after the Schlumberger survey of 2016 saw the highest recorded animal stranding numbers14 along the east coast, including kzn’s first mass stranding. A number of these strandings were unusual – a dolphin with its top and bottom jaw broken outwards and a deep-water Cuvier’s beaked whale had washed up with its innards in its mouth, likely having suffered barotrauma (the bends). Fisherfolk, scientists, activists, sea users and journalists sensed foul play.
This seismic survey had been extended into the whale migration season, without the requisite public participation. Yes, there’s a pattern here. The lubrication of the entry of oil majors onto South Africa’s coastline for Zuma’s offshore oil and gas development programme involved certain reversals in environmental regulation, since environmental authorisation for seismic survey reconnaissance is onerous.
Dropping protective legislation out of law simultaneous to the launch of offshore Phakisa in 2014 was an attempt to remove barriers to extending the minerals-energy complex to oceans. That these animals were perceived to be acceptable collateral damage struck a chord with the South Durban community, who live with the real-life impacts of toxic air pollution from two of the country’s biggest oil refineries. An Oceans Not Oil, citizen-led marine environmental justice coalition, supported by academia and scientists, was formed.
hci and Copelyn’s elaborate discourses of denial construct an alternate reality that doesn’t involve violent aftermaths to their dealings. Copelyn is practising an appeal to ignorance – that the claim of irreparable harm caused by seismic surveys is false because it has not yet been proved true.
It is more convenient to ignore the science15 and fantasise that an array of 32 airguns detonating sound16 and pressure waves so powerful as to find gas reserves 40km below the seabed 8,640 times a day in an acoustic watery home is without consequence.
At an Inquiry into Media Credibility and Ethics, the sa National Editors Forum found that Copelyn’s eNCA news channel (owned by hci) failed to
That indigenous people’s intangible heritage, social consensus and marine science might have begun to pull the rug from Impact Oil and Gas’s empire-building, shifting its sovereign claim from “acreage” to meaningless lines on the blank blue of the “Petroleum Exploration and Production Activities” map, must be a worry to a man used to dictating the narrative.
8.3 Living Ocean or Oil?
Pipedream gas-for-development is not reparative economics. Playing itself out in Mozambique currently is the recurring syndrome of the “resource curse” effect: increased indebtedness, corruption and instability which frequently follow major oil and gas resource finds, before extraction, during and post-production. E3G, an independent European climate change think tank, has found that17 on average Mozambicans are poorer than they were a decade ago with 90% under the international poverty line. Cabo Delgado, where the gas projects are based and site of an ongoing violent conflict, has been hit the worst: household spending has dropped by 38% in the last five years.
The accelerating effects of co2 absorption by the oceans are manifesting themselves clearly now, so delusional forging ahead with 30 new offshore wells by 2030 shows cowboy risk tolerance. The ipcc in the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate18 lists ocean deoxygenation and ocean acidification as irreversible for centuries to come and makes achieving the 1.5°C target more difficult to achieve.19 These dual stressors are profoundly altering ecosystems – globally 40% of coral species have died and local fisheries20 have become vulnerable, to name only the obvious.
Once rare, extreme events are likely to occur in southern Africa now every year due to sea-level rise and increased storm intensity. In 2019 two cyclones,
At the time of writing, there are also devastating tropical storm impacts and cyclone build-up happening on the oceans near Madagascar and Mozambique.
8.4 Bread and Increasing Systemic Risk of Fossil Fuel Extraction
In 2016, a bread march through the streets of Johannesburg led by the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign (safsc), trade unions and community organisations made the connection between one of the worst droughts in the history of the country, high food prices and the worsening climate crisis. Hunger was being exacerbated by this climate shock.
In 2018 the safsc, together with over 60 organisations, called on the South African president to convene an urgent sitting of Parliament to debate the alarming 1.5°C UN International Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) report on the need to cut carbon emissions by half by 2030. The safsc and allies wanted Parliament to mainstream the urgency of this challenge into government policy, but this went unheeded.
Hence, in solidarity with drought-affected communities and progressive sectors of society (including trade unions), the safsc went on to pioneer the development of a Climate Justice Charter (cjc) for South Africa. The charter was handed over to Parliament on World Food Day October 2020, with the demand it be adopted as per section 234 of the South African Constitution which provides for the adoption of charters. Underlying the creation and championing of the cjc was a deep concern for the urgency for climate science and the dangers it highlighted for the future of South Africa.
According to leading South African climate scientists,21 working with the ipcc, South Africa is one of 10 climate hot spots in the world and is heating at twice the global average. An overshoot of 1.5°C over the next decade would mean we are at 3°C warming. The existential risk this poses to life in the country cannot be underestimated and has to be acted on now, not in 2050.
This urgency is underlined by the recent ipcc report on the Physical Science Basis of Climate Change,22 which went into the recent Glasgow cop summit, affirming that extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heatwaves, cyclones) are our new reality and scientific attribution is clear.
The recent drought (2014–2021) cost the Western Cape economy R5-billion and at a national level, the government had to bail out the Land Bank to the tune of R7-billion, mainly because of defaulting farmer loans due to the drought. Flooding in KwaZulu-Natal in 2019 was estimated at R1-billion and this year between December and January at R3.3-billion.
South Africa’s ballooning public debt will increase with more climate shocks. From this perspective, Mantashe and hci will bankrupt South Africa as they push for coal, oil and gas extraction which contributes to global warming and, in turn, feeds back as costly and dangerous climate shocks. More coal, oil and gas is literally about making the climate crisis a systemic risk and is against thinking climate economics and the future of South Africa. It is tantamount to unlawful endangerment and has to be stopped now.
8.5 Climate Injustice, Workers and Peoples of South Africa
When day zero impacted Cape Town, the disproportionate impacts were on poor and working-class households, many being women workers in the textile industry in which the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union organises. They had to queue up to access water from public springs and faced punitive prices for water supplied by the municipality, increasing their care burdens.
When the drought made itself felt deep in the Eastern Cape, where many mineworkers come from, climate injustice was registering as hunger. When cyclones Idai and Kenneth pummelled Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, this also impacted the lives of migrant miners and other workers. hci and Mantashe’s drive for more coal, gas and oil extraction simply means more suffering, more climate shocks, for the members of Sactwu, num, their families, communities and the working class in general.
The trade union movement in South Africa is waking up to the urgencies of the climate crisis. Cosatu is working on a just transition blueprint. In a survey done by Naledi, the overwhelming number of workers surveyed in Cosatu support the Climate Justice Charter. Fedusa has developed a position on the just transition, Saftu is deeply committed to such and even Solidarity is engaging on these issues.
8.6
How unions champion the phase-out of fossil fuels, the energy transition and systemic transformation required to decarbonise and build adaptive systems will impact the future of all in South Africa. The trade union movement has been bedevilled by the narrow interests of trade union investment companies and corruption, but the lived experiences of members in the context of intensifying climate harm is certainly going to force them to rise to the challenge of accelerating and deepening the just transition.
The #OceansNotOil Campaign and the Climate Justice Charter Movement stand in solidarity and encourage unions to step up and lead society now. In this regard, the positions of Gwede Mantashe and hci need to be tackled head-on by workers who stand to lose the most.
8.7 What Do We Want for South Africa?
Weighing up the systemic risks of further coal, oil and gas extractions as it relates to the climate crisis shows that it will increase climate harms, economic costs, injustice and will undermine the immediate realisation of viable alternatives. This simply means there is no case for further coal, gas and oil extraction in South Africa; it is a climate curse.
Mantashe and hci have a narrow, self-seeking agenda that is at odds with the national interest. South Africa has used coal for more than 100 years and it owes the world a climate debt. It needs to act responsibly in this regard. At least 100 million Africans will be forced to be climate refugees in the coming decades. South Africa cannot be a carbon pariah in this context.
Instead, we need to be leading by example through renewing radical Pan-Africanism by demonstrating how to accelerate and deepen the just transition now.
The South African state is lagging behind and should have had a Just Transition plan in place that goes beyond climate modernisation (with its emphasis on money, markets, technology and more growth), and shallow tinkering. Merely declaring “net-zero by 2050” is unambitious and delays decisive transformative action.
Rather, it should be taking the cue from the Climate Justice Charter pluri-vision to place the country on climate emergency footing now and enable transformative systemic change to be led from below. The charter is a compass of the many rising to advance climate justice, it is a thread of hope that reaches into the frontlines of struggles that are defending our oceans, biodiversity and the defence of life-making more generally.
These emancipatory ecologies, feminist and socialist commons alternatives are championed by various movements in South Africa. Maybe rather than environmentalist phobia and polarising rants, Mantashe and hci should rather engage with these ideas so their loved ones also stand a chance of surviving in a world of worsening climate chaos.
9 US, Russia and Ukraine – The Death Trap beyond the New Cold War and World War 323
Vladimir Putin’s regime, unlike Franco, Mussolini or Hitler, has a formidable nuclear arsenal. In this context, the contemporary world stands on the brink, facing extinction either through nuclear holocaust emanating from battle fields in Ukraine or worsening the climate crisis, while in our everyday lives prices for food and fossil fuels are skyrocketing.
Precariousness, uncertainty and complex risk have become the lived reality of deep globalisation in which markets for finance, energy, food and production have been integrated.
The fragility of this global economy was exposed in the “great financial crisis” (circa 2007–2009) from which the world economy has not recovered, by the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, and now by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These realities cannot be understood through simple memes, propagandistic binaries or abstract security concepts.
9.1
A global historical process has brought us to where we are, a political project to remake the world in the image of the US after the end of the Cold War. This project has failed after four decades and is driving all of us deeper into a death trap.
Yet the leadership of the US and its allies continue to repeat the same mistakes. If we do not grasp this premise as the basis to understand the world disorder, we are also not going to escape this madness. Moreover, we are not going to be able to think through – or find a way out of – this crisis and will remain hostage to a paradigm of war shared by the US, the EU, Russia and China.
Using a more nuanced and critical geostrategic reading of the US, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its wider implications will illustrate the point.
Many security strategists and media commentators, mainly in the West, characterise the invasion of Ukraine as the inauguration of “World War 3” or a “new Cold War”. This framing defines international politics by setting up two opposing sides with distinct ideological orientations: the liberal West versus the authoritarian Russian Federation and China.
This narrative has immense commonsense appeal but does not correspond to reality. US democracy sits on the same authoritarian spectrum as Russia and China. It is a failed market democracy, best designated as a plutocracy in which it has given overwhelming power to corporations over citizens.
The Republican Party is also the harbinger of a minority project based on supremacist white nationalism, including voter suppression laws in several states. US democracy looks more like a “racist banana republic” than a shining example of democratic rights and freedoms.
Moreover, the binary geopolitical frame is dangerous because it reinforces a paradigm of war which serves the interests of countries with big military-industrial-security complexes, and as a result believes war is necessary to order international relations.
Philosophically, this rests on simplistic and static conceptions of human nature as inherently about violence. Both world wars in the 20th century led to immense loss of life, about 80 million people, and scorched ecosystems.
While the US likes to believe it won the Cold War through outspending the former ussr in an arms race, the fact of the matter is that Mikhail Gorbachev and his party realised – after decades of building nuclear arsenals, chemical and biological weapons – that the geopolitics of the Cold War was a dead end for humanity.
9.2
By the 1960s, both sides had nuclear weapons that could vapourise cities the size of Cape Town and Johannesburg. No matter what military doctrine and narrative was used to justify nuclear weapons, these technologies of mass annihilation were never about deterrence, but essentially about first strike extermination of millions of human beings.
About 40 recorded nuclear incidents occurred during the 45-year Cold War, including planes and submarines armed with nuclear warheads ending up in accidents. Our world could have ended during the Cold War because none of the safeguards really worked. A whole generation alive on our planet today does not understand this threat.
Most people also do not appreciate that nuclear war fighting has become ingrained in how the US understands its superiority in the world. After the Cold War, instead of embracing Gorbachev’s invitation to secure a nuclear weapons-free world, the US leadership did the opposite. It failed to sign on to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and take seriously nuclear arms reduction and reductions in strategic ballistic missiles.
Instead, it steamed ahead with the wrongheaded assumption that nuclear capability, both strategic and tactical, was necessary to complement conventional military capabilities.
In the 1990s, Russia’s military budget collapsed and its nuclear arsenal was put into storage. However, other nuclear powers such as Britain, France and China followed the US lead. Putin jumped on this bandwagon once ensconced in the Kremlin, propped up by criminalised petro-capitalism (aided by US corporations), as Nato expanded east and his revanchist ultranationalist dreams of territorial empire took shape.
The world has to ask: Why has the US not thrown up a Gorbachev? Why is the US, which has had the power to lead by example, not actively worked to prevent nuclear proliferation after the end of the Cold War? Where is the American leader who can ensure Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and all other nuclear powers terminate their nuclear arsenals and ambitions by showing the US will do the same for world peace?
Militarist expansionism has its roots deep in US history going back to early frontier expansion and genocidal violence against Native Americans. In the 19th century, this was married to the notion of “manifest destiny” which is about a divine right to expand the territorial boundaries of the country.
Hence, throughout its modern history, the US has had a selective respect for international law, including the UN Charter. This was demonstrated starkly during the Cold War, when US-trained militaries in the infamous School of the America’s overthrew democratically elected governments in Latin America. In
For Noam Chomsky, such forms of US interventionism were tantamount to fascism and up till now there has been no reckoning. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the US continues to furnish this example of hypocrisy to the world through violations of human rights, illegal invasions and extrajudicial killings during its “war on terror”.
Putin is a good student of US hypocrisy and is putting it to the test in his own maniacal way. Some misread Putin and his denazification rhetoric as a progressive anti-imperialism.
In the post-Cold War world, based on a complex weave of fragile economic integration, the US also trailblazed with a new form of global warfare, adding to its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capability. This is made up of three elements: 1) Full-spectrum dominance (including air, land, sea, space and the cybersphere); 2) Hybridising full-spectrum warfare in combination with economic, extrajudicial actions, embedded journalism and even multilateral relations; and 3) Projecting global reach.
9.3 Producing Copycats Like the Putin Regime
This war machine and national security orientation nonetheless has a contradictory relationship with its ambitions for global economic integration.
Global war constantly disrupts economic circuits and introduces instability into the global economy. The first Gulf War had implications for oil supplies; the failed “war on terror” created risk all over the world; and US involvement in Syria added to the tragic refugee crisis (which did not receive the same commitment to humanitarian aid as Ukraine but instead exclusionary border regimes were utilised by European countries).
Current sanctions against Russia, including oil and gas bans by the US and UK, led to a spike in global oil and gas prices and it triggered a food and fertiliser export ban from Putin causing a price spike and global food shock.
The logic of global war within US national security thinking has explicitly been about a collision with declared “rivals” such as Russia and China, ensnaring them in a spiral of escalation including defensive and dangerous pre-emptive moves. Both Trump and Biden’s national security thinking fit this template.
Even if Putin withdraws from Ukraine, the US is certainly on a warpath with China. Does the American public want this? Will the US plutocratic rulers democratise US foreign policy, including having a national referendum on such an issue? Does the world want this kind of explicit warmongering which threatens everything?
The faltering Minsk agreements, after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, and the amassing of a sizeable number of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border over the past few months should have given the US and its EU ally pause to secure a lasting peace. Instead, aid packages have kicked into gear mainly to militarise the conflict. Both the US and EU have escalated the conflict with increasing military resourcing and thus have reduced Ukraine to a military proxy of the US-EU-Nato alliance.
9.4 Failure by the EU
The EU in particular has failed spectacularly to incorporate Russia into a pan-European project and break out of the shadows of US power.
After the Cold War, a London-Paris-Berlin-Moscow project was a distinct possibility. Again, embracing the peace opening inaugurated by Gorbachev was dismissed. Instead, selective geostrategic relations were maintained with Russia for commodities and for laundering dirty oligarchic finance, mainly through London.
Germany and the EU are now remilitarising and embracing the US global war paradigm. Together with Brexit, rising ultranationalism, deepening economic crisis and worsening climate shocks, the EU project faces serious challenges.
With growing signs of shifting towards robotised warfare (including drones, roboticised guard dogs on the US border and the robot soldier) the US is laying the basis to take the world into endless global warfare.
The US military has one of the largest carbon footprints in the world; some studies show it has a carbon footprint larger than Portugal or Denmark. Biden’s administration has just secured a bipartisan military budget worth close to $800-billion while at the same time only allocating $100-billion to assist poor countries with the climate crisis – a problem it has played a major part in creating.
At the same time, in the midst of the conflict with Russia it has called on US shale oil and gas producers to increase supply, as well as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to also meet global supply needs. The EU is also faltering in terms of using this moment to break its dependence on fossil fuels.
Recent studies show the world will only cut emissions by 9% rather than half by the end of the decade, which means the world risks overshooting the 1.5°C
9.5 An American Failure
The Cold War wasted the talents and skills of two generations. The world cannot afford to repeat this mistake.
All scholarly security thinking today highlights the climate crisis as the primary complex threat facing the world; the entire world needs to be seized with this challenge. The US is brazenly failing to take responsibility for its contribution to the worsening climate crisis and rather has become a threat multiplier in both military and climate terms to the world.
Is it time for climate justice sanctions against the US and those like it? Russia, China and the EU are no different if they remain within the US death trap. All these geopolitical competitors certainly do not represent the interests of the greatest superpower on planet Earth: the human species.
Even with a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine based on commitments not to join Nato and security guarantees, the situation in eastern Europe is going to be tenuous; there will be no lasting peace.
Hence, at minimum, anti-war politics today has to stand for a nuclear-free Europe and world (already billions of people in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia are in nuclear-free zones); a renewed social rather than a market-centred pan-European project embracing both Ukraine and Russia; an end to Nato; the termination of war machines driving endless global war in Ukraine, Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere; extending support to all refugees on the planet, including enhancing humanitarian aid to Ukraine through cancelling all foreign debts; and an end to the war with nature, particularly the climate crisis, by immediately phasing out fossil fuels and going beyond a politics of nationalism to embrace a politics of human and non-human solidarity.
It’s time for collective human power to prevail over those who threaten all of us before it is too late.
The South African government, in its “neutrality” stance, is far from these concerns and is stuck in outdated geostrategic and security thinking. It needs to use the termination of the apartheid nuclear arsenal and chemical and biological warfare programme to echo the imperatives of contemporary anti-war politics on the global stage: in the AU, the UN, brics and in engagements with the US, EU and Ukraine.
10
Human life on planet Earth has faced three natural threats to its existence: catastrophic volcanic eruptions, a huge extra-terrestrial object like an asteroid crashing, and the end of the sun. None of these pose any immediate danger. This means it is up to us to make the best of our world while acting as stewards of this fragile web of life. Yet, with the levels of investment in fossil fuels and the increase in greenhouse gases, the human species faces the prospect of self-extinction this century. At a painful historic moment, without decisive action as called for by the UN in this decade, irreversible geophysical changes, together with extreme heat, will make Earth unlivable. Somewhere the last source of drinkable water will run dry, the oceans will boil, humans will cook and ecosystems will perish. Planet Earth would be post-human. Beyond the arcane language of climate science this is what we are facing.
If this happens, modern humans, bipedal, upright, with bigger brains and about 200,000 years old, on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet, would have taken about 150 years of using oil, coal and gas to wipe out themselves and many other species. They would have ended the human journey.
Those propelling us in this direction are deciding if our loved ones live or die, whether our children have a future, enjoy the gift of life, have a stable environment and can revel in the wonder of one of the most beautiful planets in the solar system. Those investing in more oil, coal and gas, thereby creating a global gas chamber to exterminate life, are determining the fate of humans and nonhuman species through their control of power and despite urgent climate science warnings. In pursuit of their greed they are compromising all of our futures. There is no other way to say this.
Assuming you are a caring and thoughtful politician and serious about your duty to serve society, this worst-case scenario should keep you up at night. As citizens in a modern constitutional democracy, we can assume our government has thought this problem through, has clear answers and is making things happen to secure our common futures.
The extinction of the human species together with other life forms is not a trivial matter. In a democracy it is a complex problem we all have to be empowered to deal with, and have a say in how we solve. This becomes even more urgent when the climate crisis is not a distant problem.
The South African government has not seriously informed the public about this threat, nor does it have a valid reason for failing to act on these risks to our society.
It has been a party to the climate negotiations for almost three decades, it hosted the cop17 summit in 2011 in Durban, it is a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, it is a participant in the scientific work of the International Panel on Climate Change, it is part of a global cities climate network and it is obliged to act on our constitutional right to a healthy and pollution-free environment. So taxpayers can reasonably expect that by now sa should be a shining example of a just transition, adaptation strategies – including in the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality: (Durban) – and even of accelerated decarbonisation. After all, as taxpayers we have paid for all this expensive and carbon-burning theatre.
Instead, sa has experienced several climate weather extremes since 2015, including the worst drought in its history, tornadoes, flash flooding (in 2017, 2019 and late 2021 in KwaZulu-Natal), landslides and wildfires, and the state has not acted to prepare and protect society. The anc government has not learnt any lessons from these extremes.
sa does not have a national extreme weather warning system, the disaster management system is not people-driven and fully capacitated; instead civil society has to constantly fill in gaps. There is no national public climate insurance scheme or national firefighting service; local government planning has not adjusted to actively protect the most vulnerable. For instance, it has failed to ensure informal settlements are out of harm’s way and that residents are fast-tracked into formal housing based on eco-housing standards.
In terms of future emissions, President Cyril Ramaphosa touts offshore oil and gas as a “game – changer” for sa and he runs a government with a coal-heavy energy mix. His government is actively ensuring sa contributes to a 1.5°C overshoot globally, which would place sa and southern Africa at 3°C. At these
Pummelled by droughts, flash floods and other disasters, with food systems collapsing and water supplies constrained, sa – a failing economy and weak state riddled with corruption – is facing full-blown collapse. The tragic floods in KwaZulu-Natal (and parts of the Eastern Cape) and our recent drought (2014–2021) are glimpses of what’s coming.
If our government was committed to its international climate obligations, concerned for its citizens and serious about the constitution, and it listened to the calls of climate justice movements, it should have placed the country on a climate-emergency footing a long time ago. The tragic loss of more than 400 lives during this month ’s floods could have been prevented. For the reasons stated, the president, his cabinet, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal, the mayor of eThekwini and the deputy head of the climate commission, Valli Moosa, have been charged by the Climate Justice Charter Movement (cjcm) for culpable homicide.
This simply refers to the killing of a human being through illegal and negligent action. The anc government has given us Aids denialism; the Marikana massacre; #LifeEsidemeni; corruption-related violence (including the July 2021 riots); structural violence against women and children linked to inequality; rampant corruption; and now a major climate disaster.
The anc has placed us all on a rollercoaster of endless disaster. It certainly cannot be trusted with securing our climate future. As long as it wants to lead our democracy we must hold it accountable for its failings. If not, we are as complicit as it in destroying everything. The powerful in our country responsible for preventing the worsening climate crisis and taking measures to protect society have now been given legal notice to be accountable.
Source: Mail&Guardian, 18 April 2018.
Source: Daily Maverick, 24 July 2019,
Source: Daily Maverick, 25 September 2019,
Source: Daily Maverick, 25 March 2020,
Source: Daily Maverick, 7 September 2020,
Source: Sunday Times, 1 November 2020.
Source: Sunday Times, 3 October 2021.
Source: Daily Maverick, 19 October 2021,
Source: Daily Maverick, 22 March 2022,
Source: Sunday Times, 24 April 2022.