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[Nat Quinn]

South Africa carrying a ‘dirty’ secret

South Africa is one of the world’s largest coal-producing countries in the world – and it may be emitting up to fourteen times more coal mine methane than it officially discloses.

This is according to a report published by clean energy think tank, Ember, which has given the country a reporting confidence score of only two out of six.

South Africa was fingered as one of three countries (including Indonesia and Germany) with some of the largest discrepancies in reported and independently estimated active mine methane emissions.

Methane (CH4) is produced during coalification (the process of coal formation) and is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas.

“Methane is accelerating climate change this decade, and yet we have no idea of the scale of the issue,” said methane analyst Dr Sabrina Assan.

According to a report by Climate Transparency, South Africa’s total greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 59% (1990–2019). In the same period, its total reported methane emissions increased by 30%.

The confidence level in coal mine methane reporting is determined by a score ranging from 0 to 6. This score is based on evaluating three categories – recency of reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), similarity to other independent estimates, and the reliability of the methods used to estimate emissions.

A major contributing factor to the score is that the country last submitted its methane emissions estimates to the UNFCCC back in 2017. The report also says that 97% of emissions come from countries that use standard emissions factors for whole regions rather than directly measuring the methane actually emitted by mines.

“It is shocking that the vast majority of mines are allowed to operate without measuring what they emit,” said Assan. “Closing the information gap between estimated and emitted emissions is the first step to cutting methane emissions, which is the strongest lever we have to slow climate change in the short term.” she added.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that a 75% reduction of fossil fuel methane by 2030 is required for the world to remain on a pathway aligned with their agreed goals of limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

According to the International Monetary Fund, “South Africa (the largest greenhouse gas emitter on the African continent) has ambitious climate mitigation goals.”

South Africa has consistently backed global agreements to move away from fossil fuels to counter climate change by ramping up investment in renewable energy. The most recent commitment made by the country was at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in December in Dubai.

The COP28 deal was backed by Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment Barbara Creecy, saying that “for the first time, we have language which calls for transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”

Back in 2019, South Africa piloted its Just Energy Transition Partnership at COP26, aimed at helping developing countries transition towards renewable energy. The government later announced its Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET-IP), which planned a R1.5 trillion (US$80 billion) investment into renewable energy, green hydrogen, and new energy vehicles.

The country’s plans to move towards renewables have faced numerous obstacles. From resistance from civil society and coal, oil, and gas lobbies to the country’s most recent energy plan, the government’s ‘going green’ policy may not be moving at the pace it would have liked – and agreed to.

The government’s energy plan in 2019 had a considerable emphasis on solar and wind energy, which has drastically gained momentum over the past several years.

Source: The Outlier

However, according to the Department of Mineral Resources, around 77% of South Africa’s primary energy needs are provided by coal and “is unlikely to change significantly in the next two decades owing to the relative lack of suitable alternatives to coal as an energy source.”

The country’s most recent energy plan has considerably less of a focus on solar and windenergy.

Reasons for this include delayed decommissioning of Eskom’s ageing coal-fired power stations and about 6 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-to-power plants as the country attempts to crawl its way out of an energy crisis.

 

SOURCE:South Africa carrying a ‘dirty’ secret – BusinessTech

[Nat Quinn]

[Nat Quinn]

It is somewhat ironic that the official announcement that South Africa is to begin the process of acquiring 2 500 MW of new nuclear power coincided with the latest climate change circus, COP28 (28^th Conference of the Parties). The conference was convened at Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a rich oil producer, to discuss the non-existent problem of climate change – which is completely natural and has nothing to do with the rise of CO2, a wonderful gas, without which we (animals and plants) could not exist. COP conferences always seek to reduce CO2 or even to achieve net zero (no CO2 emissions at all).

This would wreck the world economy and kill millions of poor people, especially in Africa, the continent least susceptible to climate change but most susceptible to being denied modern energy by the green imperialists of the north. (The climate changes very little at the equator and most in higher latitudes.) None of the proposals they suggest for the greater use of renewable energywould reduce CO2 emissions. It so happens that the UAE is a world leader in the one proven technology that would, a technology that happens to be very safe and clean: nuclear power. In the UAE, South Korea has recently built and commissioned the new Barakah nuclear power station of 5 600 MW (four units of 1 400 MW; this compares with Koeberg, which has two units of 960 MW). As usual, when a nuclear power station of proven design is built by a nuclear contractor with an unbroken record of building nuclear plants, the station was built on time and on budget. Yet I do not recall anyone from the UAE boasting about this at COP28. But I must admit I was not paying much attention to proceedings there, and perhaps someone did.

Both the nuclear announcement and COP28 received the predictable shower of nonsense. Every discredited claim of the past was repeated. Ignorance ruled. Science and critical thought were rejected in favour of superstition and blind faith. Strangely enough, even Mother Nature played her usual tricks.

Most ignorant

At COP28, which is essentially a meeting of the world’s richest, most privileged, most powerful, most ignorant people, there was the usual competition to see who could arrive in the most expensive transport, releasing the greatest amount of CO2. Private jets abounded. Greta Thunberg did not arrive from the Monaco Yacht Club in an extremely expensive carbon fibre racing yacht. In fact she did not arrive at all. I think she has made the sensational discovery that there is trouble in the Middle East and wants to tell the world how to solve it. She was replaced by a 12-year-old girl from India.

For some mysterious reason, when a conference to discuss dangerous global warming approaches, there is a tendency for temperatures to drop and for it to start snowing. This is known as the Al Gore Effect. Just before COP28 there was record cold in parts of the northern hemisphere and some airports had to be closed because of the ice. At the conference itself, there was all the usual hysterical rubbish. There were warnings that “the world is actually on track for around 2.7C of warming by 2100.” Utter nonsense. If the Sun remains quiet, 2100 will be about 0.5C cooler than now; if she becomes active again, it will be about 0.5C higher than now. It does not matter how high CO2 rises. Above 150ppm, CO2 has no further warming effect, and it is about 430ppm now. The vague and ridiculous Paris accord of 2015, which now has the aura of something Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, wants to limit the present warming to less than 1.5C above the “pre-industrial era”. Actually temperatures right now are cooler than they were for most of the pre-industrial era (from 9000 BC to 1700 AD).

I love the fact that COP28 was held in a country that has made a fortune from selling fossil fuels and is determined to continue doing so. The COP28 President, Sultan al-Jaber, an Emirates Minister and also head of the UAE oil company, said he “respects climate science” but that “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuels is what’s going to achieve 1.5 (degrees).” Perfectly true.

A pity he did not go further and say that rising CO2 is having no effect on global temperatures. The slight warming of the last 150 years is perfectly natural, just like the warm periods before it. The conference ended last Tuesday with the usual nebulous promises to do better. This was hailed by some as a “landmark” proclamation, denounced by others as a sell-out, and ignored by most as tedious baloney.

Incomparable

The nuclear announcement here is incomparably more important and most welcome. It is horribly late. It should have been made at least a year ago. South Africa is experiencing an energy crisis, caused entirely by the ANC’s destruction of Eskom by incompetence, corruption and ruinous policies of racial preferment. We have blackouts all the time, ruining industries, disrupting lives and crippling the economy. We desperately need more power stations that can provide reliable electricity at an affordable cost. Nuclear is by far the best energy source. Renewable energy, meaning solar and wind, is by far the worst, horribly unreliable and horribly expensive, causing electricity prices to soar and electricity failures to increase in every country that has tried them, including Germany, Denmark, the UK, the USA, Australia and South Africa.

The Full Cost of Electricity (FCOE) for solar and wind is extremely high. This is the cost of converting the unreliable electricity coming of the solar panel or wind turbine into reliable electricity. It is this cost that makes electricity so ruinously expensive in countries like Germany, with a high proportion of wind and solar. The greens try to ignore this cost; the wind and solar companies try to evade it. In our Risk Mitigation Independent Power Producers Procurement Program (RMIPPP), independent power producers had to bid on dispatchable energy (energy when you want it), on the FCOE. All of a sudden the price of solar, wind and battery energy shot up.

We only have one nuclear power station, Koeberg, which began operating in 1984, and has been running safely, reliably and cheaply ever since. Koeberg blundered in the replacement of its steam generators (heat exchangers, making steam from the hot water of the reactors), with many stupid delays, but they have now been successfully replaced in Unit 1 and will be replaced in Unit 2 next year. Despite these setbacks, Koeberg has demonstrated the success of nuclear in South Africa. But it only has a capacity of 1 920MW. We need far more. Getting another 2 500MW will be a good start. But for heaven’s sake, let’s get on with it!

In 2020, the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) published a Request for Information (RFI) for the 2,500 MW Nuclear New Build Program. This was in line with Decision 8 in IRP2019. (IRP2019 was the Integrated Resource Plan of 2019, a mainly very silly document, setting out new energy sources for electricity until 2030. It said that solar and wind, which is actually the highest cost energy, was the lowest cost energy, based purely on fantasy. But it did allow for some nuclear to be planned.)

It should have taken a couple of months to proceed to the next stage, which was to ask likely nuclear vendors for Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Instead it took two years. There was endless bureaucratic dithering from the nuclear section of DMRE, endless public hearings and endless open consultations with all interested parties, for and against. I see that some of the anti-nuclear people are saying that it was all “rushed”. This must be the slowest rush in history. Anyway, at long last, RFPs for 2,500 MW of new nuclear will go out in March

From the issue of RFPs to the award of final contracts to the successful bidder should take about two years. From then to operation of the first new nuclear unit should take another eight years. Ten years altogether from March 2024 until we have new nuclear on the grid.

Successful vendor

The successful vendor should probably help in the financing of the project as well as the supply, construction and commissioning of the plant. Capital costs are by far the most important for nuclear. (Fuel costs are extremely low. If nuclear fuel were free, like sunlight or wind, it would make little difference to nuclear costing.) The key to nuclear financing is the cost of capital. With a real-world cost of capital, the cost that is actually paid right now, in bonds for example, the lifetime costs of nuclear are actually low. They are made artificially high by assuming an absurd cost of capital, 8% real, for example.

It is vital that the successful vendor can point to a proven nuclear design and – critically important – can demonstrate a successful, continuous record of building nuclear plants on time and on budget. Russia, China and South Korea can do so. France and the USA cannot, and so in my mind should not be considered. France once had a very successful nuclear program but has lost her way in recent decades, and her new EPR reactor is far too big and complicated. Japan also has a good record of building affordable reactors on time but the politics of nuclear in Japan might be a problem.

The usual disproven objections to nuclear have popped up again. “All new nuclear projects are over-budget and way behind schedule.” Wrong, as I have shown above. The only recent over-runs have been from vendors with a broken record of building, such as from France or the USA. “Nuclear is not clean because of the waste problem.” Wrong. Nuclear waste is tiny in volume, chemically stable and easy to store so that it presents no danger to man or the environment. The Vaalputs nuclear disposal facility in the arid, geologically stable Northern Cape desert can easily store all of our nuclear waste for centuries. It only needs a signature on an official document to allow it to store high level waste (spent fuel).

By contrast, solar and wind produce vast amounts of waste, including toxic materials remaining dangerous for millions of years. I know not one plan for storing this relatively dangerous waste for even the next thousand years. The only thing in its favour is that the radioactive wastes from renewables (i.e. thorium from mining for neodymium for some wind generators) last for a very long time, and are therefore not dangerous, whereas some radioactive nuclear waste only lasts for minutes and is therefore dangerous – although it rapidly decays to safety. There was one objection I had not heard before, and this was that 2 500 MW was not enough to build up a nuclear industry. Well, Koeberg is even less, 1 920 MW, and has been highly successful, both in providing reliable, cheap electricity and in building up some nuclear industry. I am pleased to say that few questioned nuclear safety. Nuclear’s outstanding safety record seems to be acknowledged by almost everyone now.

A curious argument for renewables for the grid is that they can be localised. Actually, they cannot, and nuclear can. Renewable energy can only work for the grid (and then not very well) in a highly centralised supply system. This is because solar and wind power plants can only operate in areas of good solar conditions, such as the Northern Cape, or good wind conditions, such as near the southern coasts and a few other locations inland. Often these areas are far from the centres of demand, and so their electricity has to be sent over huge distances, up to a thousand km, along very expensive transmission lines. The whole, huge transmission system needed for renewable electricity has to have a strict central controller, dispatching the electricity to where it is needed.

South Africa now faces costs of at least R2 billion to build new transmission lines for renewable energy. If we got no more renewables but nuclear or gas instead, the existing transmission lines would be perfectly adequate. Nuclear plants can be located anywhere. A year’s fuel for a nuclear unit can be transported on the back of a truck. Nuclear plants can be cooled by sea water, fresh water or air, so they can get cooling anywhere. New nuclear can be build next to existing transmission lines.

Genuine argument

There is only one genuine argument against new nuclear: it will take ten years for the first plan to come on stream. That is true. But when it does it will provide clean, reliable, affordable electricity. Solar and wind plants can come on stream earlier but they can only provide unreliable, expensive electricity. Just look at their disastrous experience all around the world.

Batteries will never provide more than small amounts of electricity, good for households and small applications but useless for grid electricity. We failed to make good decisions about our electricity supply ten years ago; let us not fail again for the next ten years. In the meantime let us try to get existing Eskom stations into a better state of repair and use various means of getting reliable electricity right now, such as from powerships using natural gas. Most of all, let us rely on science, data and facts about the real world not silly ideology, woke superstition and green computer models that always get things wrong.

 

source:Nuclear power and COP 28 – Daily Friend

[Nat Quinn]

COP28 President_Remarks_ClosingPlenary_13 Dec

[Nat Quinn]

Fifty-seven years ago, the British Labour Party government panicked over black immigration to Britain. It passed the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. An immigration expert commented, “This extraordinary piece of legislation” was passed in “a parliamentary atmosphere reminiscent of emergency measures passed in the shadow of war”. It was passed because the black government of Kenya was making life difficult for Asians living in Kenya and the Labour Party was terrified they would flee to the UK. A previous Tory government had explained that such laws were necessary to “prevent the arrival in this country of many people of wholly alien cultures, habits and outlook”.

This was happening at the same time as British political leaders were giving sanctimonious lectures to the white governments of Rhodesia and South Africa on their treatment of black people. Yes, but the black people of Rhodesia and South Africa had been there long before the whites and greatly outnumbered them. True, but the white people of Rhodesia and South Africa had not spent centuries in invading and conquering black countries around the world and dealing with black slaves on a massive scale.

And more than half a century later, Britain is still panicking about black immigration. This week, the British parliament was in turmoil about a bizarre bill to send illegal black immigrants to Rwanda, a small African country in the Great Lakes region, ruled by a brutal super-apartheid dictatorship with the worse racial problems on Earth – although, thanks to massive oppression, it is stable and quite successful economically.

The idea was that illegal African immigrants in France, leaving in small boats for Britain, would be so frightened of the prospect of being returned to Africa that they would cease trying to come to Britain. There is logic in that, since black African emigrants hate the idea of going to Africa; they want to go to Europe or America. But otherwise the scheme is preposterous. It would cost a fortune to send people to Rwanda, and so few could ever be sent that it would hardly make a dent on the massive influx of illegal black immigrants. This year the British government had also passed laws to prevent the families of legal immigrants accompanying them.

The reason behind the 1968 immigration laws and the 2023 laws are the same. In both cases, Labour and Tories were panicking about being wiped out in the next election over the issue of too many black people coming to Britain. It now seems to be the biggest election concern there. Black immigration, legal and illegal, is also going to be a big issue in the 2024 election in South Africa. In Britain, the white people, especially working-class white people, hate black immigration. In South Africa, the black people, especially working-class black people, also hate black immigration. In South Africa, white people are not bothered about black immigration and black people are not bothered about white immigration but black people are mightily bothered about black immigration.

Not intended

I had not intended to do this column on this subject. I had thought of doing it on the farcical COP28 in Dubai, but only if something interesting or unusual happened there. So far, nothing has. It is the same old rubbish, completely devoid of science. Contrary to the climate alarmists, there is no climate crisis. Rising CO2 is having no effect on the climate but a wonderful effect on plants. The present slight warming is completely natural. There has been no increase in weather extremes. The usual things happened before the COP.

Rich green activists tried to fly from Germany in their private jets to condemn air travel and warn about global warming; the trouble was that it was so cold that some airports froze over and planes could not take off. Yawn. The wretched nonsense goes on until 12^th, and maybe I’ll write about it after that. Meanwhile I got distracted by watching a friend’s TV over events in England.

We do not have TV at home in Cape Town but I was staying with friends in Jo’burg, who do. I found myself watching a lot of Sky News. Apart from being slightly mesmerised by Kay Burly, I was drawn into British affairs and concerns. There is an official enquiry into the government’s handling of Covid-19. The enquiry ignores all the important issues, such as why there was a terribly damaging lockdown for children and healthy young adults long after it was clear that they were hardly affected by Covid at all, and why the whole country was stampeded into dangerous, untested and not very effective vaccines. Instead it dealt with peripheral issues such as the behaviour of political leaders at the time. Boris Johnson was interrogated for two days. But all this was swept away by the fiasco over the new immigration measures. It was this that made the headlines in most of the British newspapers. I watched the parliamentary debates in amazement.

I was born in Glasgow in 1948 when Clement Attlee was PM. I have lived most of my adult life in South Africa but ten years in England, and I know a little about every British government in the last 75 years. Never have I known such a useless bunch as now. Their incompetence is unique. Not only do they not know how to do what they want, they do not know what they want.

Tory government

This Tory government is utterly useless and deserves to be wiped out at the next election. The trouble is that the Labour Party is not much better, and has equally stupid ideas, if it has any ideas at all. Both parties are panicking about black immigration, and Labour is too scared to say that it opposes the Tory bills on it, since it mainly agrees with them and does not want to be seen to be opposing any measure to stop blacks coming to Britain. However, the latest bill to waive EU human rights regulations to allow illegal black immigrants to be sent to Rwanda was so absurd that Labour attacked it forcefully and successfully in parliament. Strangely enough, the three Tory politicians I heard shouting the loudest against black immigration, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly and Rishi Sunak, are all themselves black – or would be classified “black” by the ANC, under its Employment Equity Act. This makes things rather complicated and confusing, which I suppose is better than the simple, unconfusing hatred black South Africans feel towards black immigrants.

In the debate, I did not hear the Tory Minister of Immigration, a white man, Robert Jenrick. That is because he was not in parliament to hear the debate on his own portfolio. And that was because he opposed the bill completely – not because it was farcical but because “it doesn’t go far enough”. It will not “stop the boats”. He resigned that night.

Stopping the boats is the top priority of Tory and Labour politicians. The boats are precarious, overloaded little vessels run by criminals who get paid by illegal black immigrants to ship them from France to England, where they believe they will receive full benefits and privileges at the expense of the British taxpayer. Some of them are desperate refugees; some of them are just looking for a more comfortable life.

My own views on immigration are conventional. There must be immigration and it must be controlled and lawful. Uncontrolled and illegal immigration to Britain is a huge problem, which is causing great damage to British society. I think the answer is to be clear and ruthless in enforcing the law. All potential illegal immigrants must know that they will not be allowed in, that their boats will be impounded and that they will be sent back to Africa or wherever they came from. Then they can try to apply as legal immigrants. But British governments must stop dithering. They have dithered for over sixty years.

Enoch Powell

I was in England in the 1970s when Enoch Powell was the most popular politician in the country, and when Idi Amin kicked the Asians out of Uganda. Powell was a phenomenon. He was probably the cleverest, most learned politician in British history, He was a wonderful linguist, a poet, and a professor of classics at the age of 24. He had a brilliant war (WW2), rising to be brigadier. He was Tory Minister of Health in 1960.

In Birmingham, in 1968, he made his famous “Rivers of Blood Speech” against black immigration. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. Part of the speech was scholarly and thought provoking. Part of it was crude racism. The speech earned Powell expulsion from high office in the Tory party and made him the most popular politician in Britain – by far. A poll showed that many British people felt that Powell “was the first British politician who was actually listening to them”. Powell caused the greatest class divide I have ever seen in England. The white working classes supported him overwhelmingly, and were overwhelmingly opposed to black immigration. I heard this over and over again on the factory floors I worked on in England.

The middle classes, the journalists and politicians, the superior people with university degrees, overwhelmingly opposed him. Around Europe right now I see a similar divide. The ruling classes in Britain dithered and took no firm steps to control black immigration. Often, in fact, they encouraged it, trying to bring in black nurses, for example, to make up for the chronic shortage in England. (It seems Powell had done the same when Minister of health.) Many other blacks came as well as the needed nurses.

Under both Labour and Tory governments from the late 1990s on, black immigration, legal and illegal, has soared. Hence the panic.

Rwanda

The fact that this stupid bill proposes to expel illegal black immigrants to Rwanda particularly riles me. I am obsessed with Rwanda and Burundi, which have the worst racial problems on Earth. I have been so obsessed since 1972, when I heard about the appalling events there. Each country contains about 14% Tutsi, a Nilotic people, and 85% Hutu, a Bantu people. The two races hate each other.

The Tutsis consider themselves racially superior to the Hutu and ruled over them in pre-colonial times. In 1962, the departing Belgian colonialists, to the horror of the Tutsis, allowed a free election in Rwanda, which the Hutu won. In both countries, each race committed atrocities against the other. In 1972, the ruling Tutsi in Burundi slaughtered about 300 000 Hutu (which is when I first heard of the race crimes there). In 1990, a Tutsi army, eventually lead by Paul Kagame, invaded Rwanda with the intention of overthrowing the majority Hutu government and imposing a Tutsi government. The Hutus faced a choice: be killed, like the Hutu in Burundi, or be enslaved. The Hutu became filled with fear and hatred.

In 1994, when their president’s plane was shot down in Rwanda, they exploded into a frenzy of terror and rage, and killed about 800 000 Tutsis. But the Tutsis are much better soldiers than the Hutu and eventually Kagame’s forces beat the Hutu army and seized power. Kagame has ruled Rwanda ever since in a brutal, racist dictatorship – which is much admired by the West because it maintains order and is economically successful. It is to this racist tyranny that the British government wishes to deport illegal black immigrants. Will the prospect of being deported to Rwanda scare the life out of prospective illegal black immigrants?

It would certainly scare the life out of me. But since so few, if any, will actually end up in Rwanda, maybe they will not be scared at all.

 

source:UK panic over black immigration – Daily Friend

[Nat Quinn]

[Nat Quinn]

[Nat Quinn]

South Africa warns of going from electricity to darkness

One of the architects of South Africa’s groundbreaking deal with rich nations to move more quickly away from coal sounded a note of caution to other countries considering similar agreements.

Environment Minister Barbara Creecy urged developing nations to make sure energy security and jobs are prioritized in any arrangement.

“You can’t go from electricity to darkness,” she said in an interview in Johannesburg on Thursday ahead of the COP28 climate talks in Dubai. “That’s not good for your economy, it’s not good for communities, it’s not good for your development trajectory.”

Pretoria secured a pledge of $8.8 billion in financing from some of the world’s richest nations for a Just Energy Transition Partnership, which requires South Africa to close down some of its coal-fired power plants earlier than planned.

Several cabinet ministers have said conditions attached to the deal are exacerbating electricity shortages and contributing to the rolling blackouts that have dogged the country for years.

Nations such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal that have also secured concessional funds must “front-load energy security” before switching to alternate supplies, Creecy said.

Alternatives should be provided to those whose livelihoods depend on dirty energy facilities, because “you can’t give people a promise that some green jobs will be created somewhere,” she added.

South Africa is the world’s 14th-largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, and it burns coal to generate more than 80% of its electricity.

An implementation plan for its climate pact, which was first agreed in Glasgow in late 2021, was laid out this month. It will see investment flowing into electricity infrastructure, electric vehicles, developing skills in the green hydrogen industry, support for municipalities and projects in the coal-dependent Mpumalanga province.

Creecy also called for developing nations to provide clarity on the sourcing of public financing that will be provided to developing countries to mitigate against climate change and adapt to it.

“We are all living through the climate crisis and developing countries, particularly those on the African continent, are becoming severely affected,” she said. While there was an agreement reached at last year’s COP talks to establish a fund to help vulnerable nations with damages from more extreme weather, “it’s far better to build climate resilience in developing countries,” she said.

Other Highlights:

• Private money isn’t flowing to developing countries. Now, public finance is very important because it can play a role in de-risking investment needed to respond to climate change.

• Africa is placing a lot of emphasis on adaptation at the COP28 talks, because historically the “continent has contributed less than 2% to the accumulation of emissions that’s causing the current crisis” but has been badly impacted.

• “The Paris Agreement recognizes that developed countries have created the climate crisis, it recognizes that developed countries have their accumulated wealth as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, and it recognizes the responsibility of developed countries to contribute to the climate transitions of developing countries.”

• No one is “seeking to rewrite the Paris Agreement, but we are seeking to get an outcome that is balanced, that has appropriate work around mitigation, around adaptation and around the means of implementation.”

 

source:South Africa warns of going from electricity to darkness – BusinessTech

[Nat Quinn]

Blue Carbon: A UAE company has secured African land the size of the UK for controversial carbon offset projects | CNN

[Nat Quinn]

A Zimbabwe- and Dubai-based firm has inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Zimbabwe that would see a fifth of the southern African country’s landmass conceded for carbon credit production.

The deal, which was announced in Harare on 29 September, will give Blue Carbon blanket control over 7.5 million hectares of Zimbabwean forest.

The agreement comes shortly after the firm signed a slew of similar controversial MOUs with other African countries, including a deal with Liberia conceding 10 percent of the country’s territory to the firm, in breach of several land laws.

The flurry of contracts comes ahead of the UN Climate Summit Cop 28, set to take place in Dubai in November, with carbon credits slated to be a topline issue.

The global $2bn voluntary carbon offset market allows carbon emitters to offset emissions by purchasing credits from emission-reducing projects primarily in forest conservation.

Blue Carbon’s chairman, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the UAE royal family, said the deal could funnel $1.5bn in climate finance into the country.

The Dubai-based firm was established only a year ago and has no track record of managing carbon offset projects.

Campaigners have warned that Al Maktoum’s ties to the royal family, who are heavily invested in oil and gas infrastructure, mean that these deals carry a “greenwashing risk,” as the harvested credits could also be used to offset UAE’s own emissions.

‘A secret’

Zimbabwe is the third largest carbon credit producer in Africa and the site of the Kariba project, the world’s first large-scale forest protection project spanning 785,000 hectares, jointly managed by Zimbabwean entrepreneur, Stephen Wentzel, and Swiss carbon credits trading company, South Pole.

Attracting multinationals such as Gucci and Volkswagen, South Pole reaped 100 million euros from the project. Half of these profits were originally promised to local communities, but a Follow the Money investigation revealed that most of that sum remained unaccounted for.

‘The money does not usually go directly to the community which is involved in the preservation of the forest’

– Tracy Mutowekuziva

In May, the Zimbabwean government revised its carbon regulations to reduce a government share in profits from carbon offset projects to 30 percent. Carbon trading developers will retain 70 percent, but will have to invest a quarter of their profits in community projects.

But according to Tracy Mutowekuziva, an attorney for the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG), there are concerns about whether the money will reach the impacted communities.

“The money does not usually go directly to the community which is involved in the preservation of the forest,” Mutowekuziva told MEE. “Usually the government just takes the money and they do what they think the community needs.”

Like the MOU with Liberia that preceded it, the details of the contract are opaque.

“It’s a secret…We really don’t know the figures. We can’t even tell if the (value) of the land is accurately measured or if it tallies with the amount being offered by the buyer,” Mutowekuziva said.

A resource curse

Customary land rights are not enshrined in Zimbabwean law, which stipulates that communal land is owned by the government.

“We know that the government has not respected communal land rights historically,” a communication specialist for Zimbabwe, Shaun Matsheza, told MEE. “This is a colonial legacy that was not corrected upon independence.”

‘You can be uprooted at the drop of a hat’

– Shaun Matsheza, communication specialist for Zimbabwe

“You can be uprooted at the drop of a hat,” Matsheza said. ”You can’t actually trust that any investments you make in your land are going to pay off in the end because you could easily be displaced.”

According to Matsheza, no villages were consulted about the deal.

“This has been the case for multiple other deals which the government makes behind closed doors, and is never actually put up for deliberation or any form of democratic process,” Matsheza said.

Zimbabwe has long been plundered for its resources, with coal mining swallowing vast tracts of land and displacing thousands. A 2019 report by a local watchdog found that mining projects would displace at least 30,000 families within five years.

In 2010, diamond mining in Marange saw thousands of people forcibly relocated to a deserted government farm without compensation.

“Every time a resource is discovered it has terrible implications for the community…it’s a resource curse,” Matsheza told MEE.

Swathes of the land earmarked for the deal also include existing nature reserves.

Blue Carbon says it adheres to the standards of REDD+, the international initiative to reduce emissions from deforestation.

Cop28 host UAE ‘failed to report’ decade of methane emissions to UN

However, REDD+ requires additionality, which dictates that a project generates additional benefits, such as carbon reductions, to the ones that would naturally occur without it.

And by buying land that includes protected land, Blue Carbon would not be providing any additional benefits.

Mounting scientific evidence is casting doubt on the efficacy of carbon credits in reducing emissions: a recent study on Verra, the world’s largest carbon standard framework, found that 94 percent of the credits had no benefit for the climate.

“It’s essentially increasing the licence for developed countries to further pollute the environment,” Matsheza told MEE.

“What Blue Carbon has done is identify this opportunity and place themselves as the middleman between developed countries and developing countries who are yet to fully develop mechanisms for participating in this market.”

 

UAE firm inks deal to buy a fifth of Zimbabwe’s land for carbon credit scheme | Middle East Eye

[Nat Quinn]

World leaders are due to gather for annual climate change talks in Dubai in December. On the agenda: everything from cutting greenhouse gas emissions, to adapting to extreme weather events, trading carbon emissions and gender inequality.

This year has once again seen the devastating effects of climate change on the planet. The summer season in the northern hemisphere was the warmest on record globally. At least 5 000 people were killed in Libya in the Mediterranean storm Daniel in September, while a wildfire on the Hawaiian island Maui killed at least 115 people.

When is COP28?

It starts on Thursday 30 November and is due to finish on Tuesday 12 December. While the talks are scheduled to last a fortnight, they are notorious for spilling over by an extra day or two as delegates argue over the final language of the communique.

Where is COP28 being held?

This year the rotating presidency is held by the United Arab Emirates and COP28 will be held at the Expo City in Dubai.

While eyebrows were raised when one of the world’s biggest oil producers was selected to lead the talks, the UAE argues it is in a strong position to convince other oil-and-gas-rich countries to go further and faster on cutting emissions.

What is COP28?

Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, addresses last year’s COP in Egypt Photographer: Islam Safwat/Bloomberg

It’s the annual gathering of nearly 200 countries, hosted by the United Nations, to discuss ways of avoiding man made climate change and adapting to warming temperatures. The talks have been going for 28 years, giving this year’s talks the technical name of the 28th Conference of the Parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The original idea three decades ago was to create a multilateral process in which everyone got to have an equal say in how the world should best cut greenhouse gases. In reality, there are stubborn divides between rich and poor countries. Developing countries argue that developed countries got rich over the last century by creating industries founded on fossil fuels, and that they should be able to do the same.

The COP process made a breakthrough deal in Paris in 2015, when all countries agreed for the first time to ensure that temperature rises stay well below 2 degrees Celcius compared to pre industrial levels and they set a stretch goal to ensure warming doesn’t breach 1.5 C. To achieve that means emissions should fall to “net zero” by the middle of the century.

While the Paris Agreement was a landmark moment, countries have struggled to deliver on it. Each member must make pledges showing how they will contribute their fair share to keeping temperatures in check. But those plans aren’t good enough.

How many people will attend COP28?

This year’s summit is expected to be the biggest yet. The UAE is well set up to manage a mammoth event with plenty of hotel rooms in Dubai and one of the world’s best-connected airports. Both COP21 in Paris and COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 had more than 40,000 registered participants, while 33 000 people registered to attend last year’s meeting in Egypt.

Who can attend COP28?

Delegates in traditional headdress attend the COP27 climate conference. Photographer: Islam Safwat/Bloomberg

At the heart of COP28 are the negotiators — civil servants from 197 countries, who spend two weeks locked behind closed doors thrashing out the details of the agreements that are supposed to drive action on tackling climate change. Negotiators are often accompanied by their ministers, and sometimes the heads of state who can help to seal a deal.

But it’s not just governments who attend. Members of civil society groups as well as businesses all turn up too, to make their cases heard on the fringes of the event. And of course, the site is teeming with journalists reporting what’s happening to the wider world.

Why is COP28 important?

This is the first year since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 that countries will take stock of the progress they’re making  on tackling climate change. We already know the answer: that they’re not going fast enough in cutting emissions at the pace Paris promised. The review is supposed to put pressure on countries to speed things up.

After COP28, countries will have until 2025 to submit new national plans to fight climate change  — which will truly determine if the world is heading in the right direction.

Some richer countries, particularly in Europe, are pushing for tougher commitments, such as phasing out fossil fuels and “peaking” emissions (stop them from climbing) by 2025. That’s a big ask for many developing countries, such as India that see fossil fuels as crucial to growing their economies.

This year’s COP will also be crucial for climate finance. Rich countries have never managed to deliver on their promise to mobilize $100 billion a year to help poor countries deal with the worst impacts of climate change. Next year, negotiators will be seeking to reach a deal on a new, post-2025 collective goal for climate finance. Initially, wealthy nations responsible for the most historical emissions were asked to chip in, but now countries such as Ghana are calling for the pool of contributors to be widened to include major economies such as China, the world’s biggest source of climate-warming gases.

Is COP28 destined to be a flop?

A true COP flop is when no progress can be agreed at the end of the two weeks. This happened in Madrid in 2019, with COP25 ending in failure when the parties could not compromise on a final text in many areas. COP21 in Copenhagen in 2009 was also famously deemed a failure. Negotiators couldn’t reach a binding deal to cut greenhouse gases that was supposed to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expired in 2012.

But even if a final text is agreed, many countries — particularly small island nations — will still see it as a failure unless it commits to strong language around phasing out fossil fuels and keeping global warming below 1.5C. The risk this year is that the COP president won’t be seen as impartial enough to broker a deal with all the parties.

Who is the COP28 president?

Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, this year’s COP president Photographer: Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg

The UAE has appointed Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber as COP28 president. He also heads up the UAE’s state oil producer, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., and that has led many environmental campaigners to question whether he can remain impartial as the negotiations heat up over the course of the conference. His supporters point out that he also chairs Masdar, the state renewable company and one of the world’s leading solar developer’s Al Jaber’s job is to bring together all 197 parties, using his diplomacy skills to help countries bridge their divides and final agreement over the line.

 

source:What is COP28 and why is it important? – Moneyweb

[Nat Quinn]

Tue 02 May 2023:

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called on governments to keep their pledge and act against climate change.

“The International Panel on Climate Change tells us that breaching 1.5 degrees, even temporarily, could be disastrous,” he told the Petersberg Climate Dialogue meeting via video link.

Guterres warned that the temperatures are set to rise 2.8 degrees by the end of the century if countries maintain their present policies.

He called for closer cooperation to end dependence on fossil fuel, and underlined that industrialized nations should deliver on their promises and provide financial support to less developed countries to invest in clean energy.

“The climate crisis demands honesty. We can only solve problems if we name them and look them squarely in the eye,” Guterres said.

“The truth is, on climate, we know what to do, when to do it, and why. But for too long, we have looked the other way,” he added.

Germany is hosting the two-day climate conference, which brings representatives from around 40 countries, to discuss concrete steps toward overcoming the climate crisis.

The conference aims at preparing the ground for successful negotiations at the COP28 Climate Change Conference in the United Arab Emirates later this year.

-Anadolu Agency

 

source:UN CHIEF WARNS: BREACHING CLIMATE GOALS COULD BE ‘DISASTROUS’ (independentpress.cc)