[Debate] Dirty Durban’s manual for climate greenwashing

[Patrick Bond]

Click the cover page for the manual: 
http://www.assaf.org.za/2011/08/durban-on-a-pathway-towards-a-low-carbon-city/#more-4981


http://links.org.au/node/2469


  As COP17 approaches: Dirty Durban’s manual for climate greenwashing

/Durban’s infamous Bisasar Road dump: Africa’s largest “Clean 
Development Mechanism” is one of the world’s primary cases of 
carbon-trading environmental racism./

By *Patrick Bond*

August 29, 2011 – /Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ 
<http://links.org.au/node/2469> -- Will the host city for the 
November-December world climate summit, COP17, clean up its act? The 
August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) 
report, /Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban/ 
<http://www.assaf.org.za/2011/08/durban-on-a-pathway-towards-a-low-carbon-city/> 
–offers an early chance to test whether new municipal leaders are 
climate greenwashers, attempting to disguise high-carbon economic 
policies with pleasing rhetoric, as did their predecessors.

Will Durban Mayor James Nxumalo and a new city manager, still to be 
named, instead get serious about the threat we face – and that major 
industries pose – as a result of runaway greenhouse gas emissions? We 
needn’t rehearse concerns about future rising sea levels, extreme 
storms, flooding that will overwhelm dirty Durban’s decrepit storm-water 
drainage system, landslides on our hilly terrain, droughts that draw new 
“climate refugees” from the region into a xenophobic populace, the 
disruption of food chains and other coming disasters.

However, what might be termed South Africa’s “mitigation denialism” 
remains a notable problem. Not only did planning minister Trevor Manuel 
announce last week that he expects the global North to pay South Africa 
up to $2 billion a year through the Green Climate Fund he co-chairs – 
when in reality it is South Africa that owes a vast climate debt to 
Africa given our world-leading rate of CO2/GDP/person – but Assaf seeks 
to persuade politicians that Durban can “entrench its reputation as SA’s 
leading city in terms of climate change actions” [/sic/].

*Missing in analysis: Durban’s worsening carbon habit *

This is pure hot air, because Assaf’s 262-page study shies away from 
critical mention of high-carbon Durban’s unprecedented public subsidies 
on long-distance air transport, shipping, fossil-fuel infrastructure, 
highway extension and international tourism.

For example, the study tells us nothing about the $35 billion that “back 
of port” planners have in mind for South Durban: displacing residents of 
the 140-year-old Clairwood neighbourhood to allow more expansion of the 
vast harbour (and its ships’ dirty bunker fuel), a new highway leading 
to more container terminals and supertoxic petrochemical facilities 
(including doubling oil flows through a new pipeline to Johannesburg via 
black neighbourhoods), expanding the automotive industry, and digging a 
huge new harbor on the old airport site. Not a mention.

Assaf says nothing about the damage done by building the $1.2 billion 
King Shaka International Airport way too early and way too far north of 
the city, nor – aside from a throwaway reference in the governance 
chapter – about the mostly empty $430 million Moses Mabhida Stadium 
built for the 2010 World Cup, next door to an existing world-class rugby 
stadium that should have been used. Durban was nearly rewarded with a 
climate-destabilising 2020 Olympics bid before the South African cabinet 
had a rare commonsense moment in June and withdrew from the competition.

All these mega-investments certainly make Durban “SA’s leading city in 
terms of climate change actions” – but opposite the way Assaf claims.

In a failure of analytical nerve, the Assaf scientists appear too 
intimidated to discuss these expensive mistakes in polite company, much 
less argue for a detox-rehab of Durban’s carbon-addicted corporates. Yet 
it makes no sense to avoid the harsh reality of fast-rising emissions in 
sectors that make our city exceptionally vulnerable when carbon taxes do 
finally kick in, given how far Durban is located from the world’s main 
markets and given adverse implications for tourism.

At one point, buried in a dry table, are the names of Durban’s biggest 
emitters measured by consumption of /municipal/ electricity: the Mondi 
paper mill, Sapref and Engen oil refineries, Toyota, Frame Textiles and 
the Gateway and Pavillion shopping malls. But the city’s biggest 
contributor to climate change via the /national grid’s/ coal-fired power 
plants is a deadly manganese smelter, completely forgotten in Assaf’s 
study even though Assore’s most recent annual report concedes, 
“Electricity consumption is the major contributor to Assmang’s corporate 
carbon footprint and reflects energy sourced from Eskom grid supply, 
particularly by the Cato Ridge Works.”

Nor in Assaf’s chapter on “The national context” do we learn that South 
Africa is building the world’s third- and fourth-largest coal-fired 
power plants, Eskom’s Kusile and Medupi, with a $3.75 billion loan from 
the World Bank in spite of fierce opposition from civil society.

Not mentioned either are apartheid-era special pricing agreements that 
give BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation the world’s cheapest 
electricity ($0.02/kiloWatt hour), about 1/8th what ordinary households 
pay. Nor is there a word about the millions of poor South Africans 
disconnected from electricity, unable to absorb the 130 per cent price 
hike Eskom has imposed since 2008 so as to pay for the coal-fired 
generators.

These gaping holes are too wide for even Durban’s most skilled 
greenwashers – like municipal climate adaptation manager Debra Roberts – 
to hide, and to her credit, joking that “You want to get me fired for 
publicly agreeing with you”, she did just that when at the International 
Convention Centre launch I drew attention to these 
white-elephants-in-the-room.

Assaf chief executive Roseanne Diab replied that the city’s main 
mitigation focus should be Durban’s anarchic truck-freight transport 
mess, which she claimed can be tackled by air-quality regulation. That 
might be the case if South Africa had the USA’s Clean Air Act, which 
considers greenhouse gases to be pollutants – something the South 
African Air Quality Act doesn’t. And it might also help if the 
municipality had an effective air pollution monitoring unit, but in 
March it was stripped of most of its staff by the city manager and is 
now considered a joke.

And here in South Africa’s petrochemical armpit, from where I write, we 
South Durban residents continue to be the main victims, including 
Settlers Primary School with its 52 per cent asthma rate, the world’s 
highest. I spent an hour last Friday night (August 26) out on 
Clairwood’s Houghton Road, where local residents’ association secretary 
Mervyn Reddy led 100 people blockading Consolidated Transport for 
letting truck drivers race like Michael Schumacher through the 
neighbourhood. After 10 deaths caused by maniac truckers, who can blame 
this community for rising up.

*Durban chases the carbon trade*

What Reddy knows, but Assaf doesn’t say, is that the sources of 
climate-threatening CO2 emissions are also responsible for much more 
immediate socio-ecological destruction. For example, Assaf 
enthusiastically promotes landfill methane gas-to-electricity conversion 
at Durban’s infamous Bisasar Road dump without observing (as do most 
academic articles) that Africa’s largest “Clean Development Mechanism” 
is actually one of the world’s primary cases of carbon-trading 
/environmental racism/, worthy of a front-page article in the 
/Washington Post /in 2005 on the day the Kyoto Protocol took effect.

Placed in a black neighbourhood during apartheid, Bisasar Road – 
Africa’s largest landfill – should have been closed when Nelson Mandela 
came to power, as African National Congress pamphlets in the 1994 
election promised the community it would be. But thanks in part to World 
Bank encouragement, Bisasar became the leading pilot for carbon trading 
and still pollutes the area to this day, with no prospect for closure 
before it fills up around 2020. A sister landfill in northern Durban, La 
Mercy, also had a methane-electricity project funded by the World Bank, 
but Assaf concedes that it failed to properly extract the gas.

In its enthusiasm for such financing, the Assaf study also forgets that 
the COP17 will witness the demise of Kyoto, the treaty that mandates 
these kinds of carbon-trade investments in places like Durban. The end 
of the only binding multilateral climate treaty is mainly due to 
Washington’s intransigence, and it is heartening to those of us in 
Durban that hundreds of people have been arrested at the White House 
over the last two weeks, demanding US rejection of filthy Canadian tar 
sands oil. In solidarity, Durban climate justice activists will 
demonstrate at the US Consulate just west of City Hall on Wednesday 
during afternoon rush hour.

Blithely, Assaf scientists recommend “innovative market-based financing 
mechanisms” such as “the voluntary carbon market” – while downplaying 
the emissions-trading fraud, corruption, speculation and collapse now 
rife across the world. As even a February 2011 report by the US 
Government Accounting Office revealed, for such voluntary market offsets 
to be considered genuine requires proof of “additionality”, but this “is 
difficult because it involves determining what emissions would have been 
without the incentives provided by the offset program. Studies suggest 
that existing programs have awarded offsets that were not additional.”

As for measuring CO2 in the voluntary emissions markets, “it is 
challenging to estimate the amount of carbon stored and to manage the 
risk that carbon may later be released by, for example, fires or changes 
in land management”. And verification of offsets is a challenge because 
“project developers and offset buyers may have few incentives to report 
information accurately or to investigate offset quality”.

*Climate-smart Durban? *

Regrettably, Assaf believes in a few other “false solutions” to the 
climate crisis, such as biofuels (Durban is a sugarcane centre) and 
co-incineration of tyres in cement kilns. Interestingly, the GAO has 
just released a report confirming analysis by progressive scientists in 
the ETC Group that the “climate engineering” technologies of choice – 
geo-engineering, nanotechnology, biofuels and synthetic biology – are 
“currently immature, many with potentially negative consequences… 
Climate engineering technologies do not now offer a viable response to 
global climate change.”

In another disturbing development, Assaf’s emphasis on residents’ 
behavioural change risks a blame-the-victim mentality: for example, 
discouraging flush toilets for poor people so as to avoid increased 
electricity use at the sewage works. Adds Diab, “We must encourage 
people to stop using their cars and start using public transport” – yet 
she is silent about how city officials let a crony-capitalist firm, 
Remant Alton, privatise and wreck our municipal bus system.

Not a total write-off, Assaf’s report at least encourages Durban to 
“produce local, buy local” at a time of inane currency-induced trading 
patterns that have little to do with rational comparative advantages 
between competing economies. The report condemns suburban sprawl and 
much post-apartheid planning, while endorsing the “polluter pays” 
principle, which, if ever implemented, would radically improve the 
city’s environment. All obvious enough, but what hope for implementation 
given our rulers’ pro-pollution bias?

“Climate smart”, according to Roberts, means a city’s “low-carbon, green 
economy provides opportunities for both climate change mitigation and 
adaptation and fosters a new form of urban development that ensures 
ecological integrity and human well being”.

Precisely. But if Diab is correct that “poor public awareness” is a 
major barrier to addressing the most serious crisis humanity has ever 
faced, Assaf scientists now contribute to that very problem with their 
bland, blind greenwashing of climate-dumb Durban.

[Patrick Bond directs the UKZN Centre for Civil Society 
<http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za> and is author of the forthcoming book /Politics 
of Climate Justice/ (University of KwaZulu-Natald Press).]


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