Climate Change and Idai

Cyclone Idai as represented by the European Space Agency

Cyclone Idai is one of many extreme weather events.

Storms on this scale are not a new thing. But we have to expect more storms of increased severity as the planet heats up.

One of the main drivers of weather is transfers of energy between the atmosphere and the oceans.

One of the lesser-known facts about climate change is that 90% of the extra energy being captured by greenhouse gases is in the oceans.

While warming of the surface is alarming that is, so as to speak, only the tip of the iceberg.

Here in South Africa, we see a limited effect – the temporary loss of electricity from Mozambique’s Cahora Bassa hydroelectric power plant. But for our neighbours, this is a massive calamity.

Can we still stand by quietly while the forces of fossil fuel propel our planet towards the risk of a major extinction event?

The risk is not theoretical and distant – it is real and on our own doorstep, with major impacts not only in Mozambique but in Malawi and Zimbabwe.

So why is climate change not a big issue in the 2019 South African elections? Instead, we hear a ramping up of xenophobic rhetoric – and that is before we have a significant number of climate refugees caused in part by our own addiction to fossil fuels.

How to stop infrastructure fails

The government should stop tying essential infrastructure projects to job creation. Essential infrastructure is that which is necessary to enable other development. Examples include water, electricity, transport and sewage.

Here’s an example to illustrate the point.

A city’s water supply is crumbling and needs to be renovated and expanded before any new opportunities can be opened up. You can’t build new houses, your local education institutions are under threat of closing, businesses are closing and not being replaced.

The government supplies funds and stipulates that at least 30% of the budget must be spent on local contractors to help stimulate the local economy and create skills.

The trouble with this policy is it creates a perverse incentive to fail. By requiring local contracting, it encourages awarding of the contract to a contractor who is open to corrupt awarding of local contracts to patronage networks. That becomes the goal, rather than awarding the contract to the contractor most able to deliver.

Short-term, a lot of jobs are created and everyone is happy. But this is where the perverse incentive comes in. Because the infrastructure is essential, if the project fails, it has to restart, creating more opportunity for bribes, kickbacks and rewarding patronage networks. Worse, with the failure of the project, there is no other economic game in town so the incentive to get on the next-round gravy train of the restarted project is even bigger.

Taken to the extreme, you kill your entire local economy – even future repeats of the failed project, as there becomes no point to the repeatedly failed project once there is no local economy to serve. Job creation? Short term. Then you go into decline and have a massive net job loss.

If this is done country-wide, the end result is an economic death spiral as the tax base contracts and new investment dries up.

Much better: remove the requirement for local investment from essential infrastructure, the kind that cannot be allowed to fail. Use the money you save by not having multiple disastrous repeats to create jobs in areas where failure will not have a knock-on effect. And allow the improved infrastructure to do its thing: stimulate new housing, new business, growth in public institutions.

Eskom – Restructure or Destructure?

The Government proposes to restructure Eskom into three entities:

• generation
• transmission
• distribution

What is not clear is what problem this is meant to solve. Eskom’s problems are many and deep. The most obvious are:

• failure to diversify away from coal – a sunset technology not only because of climate change but the massive pollution it causes in the vicinity of mines and the other toxic pollutants it emits like heavy metals
• massive crisis in municipal debt – many are so far behind in paying Eskom that they have no way of recovering
• unsustainable payroll –  there are estimates that Eskom has as many as 30,000 more employees than it can afford; the exact number is under question but it is likely to be large
• inability to manage large generator projects – not only is Eskom investing in massive coal plants when this is the worst possible time to do so, but they have had massive cost overruns and are not operating reliably many years after they should have been commissioned

Which, exactly, of these problems does the proposed restructuring solve?

None of them.

Instead, it creates a new problem. If you split distribution of electricity from production, the distribution entities have an incentive to under-invest in maintenance as their business does not suffer as much as the producer if parts of the network fail. This is exactly what happened in Australia when this sort of split occurred. A similar example is the split of the British rail system where the rail network was no longer owned by the train operators and maintenance was neglected.

So what is the alternative?

The simplest is to keep Eskom as it is and lay off a large part of the workforce. But politically this cannot fly as mass job losses is not a plan any party will sell at election time. We also need to consider the effect on the workforce.

A better plan is for Eskom to stop resisting large-scale deployment of small-scale solar power. A rapid roll-out of home-scale and small business solar could add a gigawatt to the grid in a short timer – as little as 6 months. Two things hold this back: inadequate support of exporting excess power to the grid and municipal reliance on profits from sale of electricity. Both of these can be addressed – and I will in a separate article.

Eskom should split as follows, to enable this:

• bulk generation and distribution – what Eskom does now but with a reduced workforce
• RDP solar – installation of a solar panel on every RDP house, with an initial target of 1-million homes, to be funded by a combination of government subsidy and cost recovery of a share of the electricity generated for the first 5 years
• public institution solar – schools and tertiary institutions should be encourage to go solar, with a mix of subsidies for the less wealthy and private funding for the well-funded insitutions
• home solar – no subsidy; those who can afford to buy solar should be permitted to feed into the grid with a feed in tariff equal to their municipal electricity tariff

Each of these could be one separate company, or be further split if geography makes a smaller entity more viable. In the initial stage, the former Eskom company would be the sole provider where government was involved to eliminate the time delays and corruption of the tender process. Once we have the first gigawatt installed, this can be opened up to competition.

Green Policy in South Africa

The major parties in the 2019 South African election do not mention climate change in their manifestos – an existential threat to humanity.

Nor do they seriously address green energy, a proven job creator as well as part of the pathway to solving the climate crisis.

This blog contains personal views on green policy that anyone is free to lift but with attribution if they use them wholesale. I am not in this for gain but credit where it is due is fair use practice.

Why is there urgency around this issue?

Large parts of the country are in the grip of a serious drought including the Eastern Cape where I live. A prediction of climate change science is intensification of the hydrological cycle as the planet warms – so extremes of drought and flood will increase. And the poor are the ones who suffer the most, so this is a question of equity and justice.

Protests by school children about climate inaction are both inspiring and shameful. They are inspiring because it shows they care; they are shameful because it should not be up to children. This country had the experience of leaving addressing change to school children in 1976; have we learnt nothing from that?

What do school children have to protest about? Stealing their future for a quick buck. This is also very much about intergenerational justice. So they are right to be concerned. The first stage hits the poor the hardest but eventually it will hit everyone.

This is not the time for silence – silence is complicity.

But anger alone is not enough – you have to have solutions. And that is what this blog is about.

Check in here for articles; you can also follow my Facebook page on the same subject. These are personal views – use them to inform your voting choice.