If you are a fan of Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment now”, Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness“ or even our own JP Landman, you will agree that the world continues to improve despite the dismal daily press reports.
Only bad news sells.
Pinker, Rosling and Landman are an optimist’s dream, but even Pinker, who wrote his book in 2018 and had to admit that global warming and carbon emissions had room for improvement, so I am sure he is happy with progress since then. No bank will finance a coal mine or coal power station and the UK, whose industrial revolution was built on coal, has two coal power stations left, for example, and there are many examples.
We nearly missed the news today that The Developed World has put together a package to accelerate the decommissioning of some older SA coal power stations and connect renewable energy to our grid.
Sounds altruistic, but it gives the world the best bang for their bucks to reduce global warming and carbon emissions. We are the world’s 12th largest polluter with the 43rd largest economy and the deal will take 1,5 gigatonnes (big, it seems) of emissions out of the system over 20 years.
And help to protect our future exports.
The journey to net zero emissions has a few bumps in the road, and I am not talking about our minister of mines. Poor Sweden tops the EU environment standards, having worked hard to get there for 30 years. Their carbon emissions per head are 3,5 tonnes, well below the EU average of 6,4 tonnes; they have the highest carbon tax of $ 137 per tonne, with the global average of $3.
So environmental activists were overjoyed when The Court ordered Sweden’s largest cement maker to shut shop. Sure, the cement factory was Sweden’s second highest carbon emitter, but now Sweden will be forced to import cement from Turkey or Belarus who have little control or regard about carbon emissions.
Sweden’s carbon emission reduction will be the world’s carbon emission increase, and that is before one factors in the transport costs and their emissions, shipping cement from Turkey to Sweden.
The EU will now implement rules to stop such carbon leakage, stop EU firms from circumventing EU environmental laws by importing goods from countries that do not have strict environmental laws or have high carbon emissions.
Like South Africa.
We must reduce our carbon footprint, or we will have a carbon tax on all our exports to the EU, which will make us uncompetitive.
Holding thumbs that the Eskom deal comes through. And we have enough sense to see that solar and wind power can be generated at a cost lower than the price of coal.
It is sometimes hard to be an optimist.