PETER BRUCE: Dealing with climate is messy and often unrewarding

If it’s not citrus, its carbon. SA has a problem with the EU, and can’t seem to shake it.

I remember soon after the Russians invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov cracked a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa during a visit to SA that should have involved only his counterpart, international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor.

In the same week Lavrov was in the country, in January last year, Josep Borrell was in town and also sought a meeting with the president. Borrell, a Spaniard, is Lavrov’s equivalent in the EU and is its leading policymaker in matters of both security and trade. Ramaphosa’s office turned down his meeting request.

Needless to say, we do almost no trade with Russia, while the EU is easily our most valuable export market and our single biggest source of fixed capital investment. When push comes to shove with the ANC, and perhaps especially this Ramaphosa administration, we make time for our ideological friends while our investors can go f#@k themselves.

A Bloomberg story last week suggesting that SA had avoided holding a summit with the EU for more than a year drew a rapid joint statement from both sides that in fact they were deeply in love and would be meeting soon.

That doesn’t stop SA ministers and officials whining about how unfair the EU is every time they get an opportunity. The Sunday Times reported that trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel told a World Trade Organisation meeting of trade ministers in Abu Dhabi last month that the EU’s plans to erect a Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) — which would tax imports into the EU according to their carbon content — would undermine our industrial transition, whatever that is, and destroy jobs in SA.

“The cost of the transition to a greener more sustainable economy must be done on a just basis,” the newspaper quoted him saying. You have to have some sympathy for this view. Environmental awareness is far higher in the industrial West than it might be in what we now call the Global South. And it is true that, largely, the industrial West has caused the huge over-production of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

But a country like SA surely also has to be able, as its pleads for leniency in its large export markets like the EU, to show what it is doing to combat climate change. One of the world’s largest polluters is right here — Sasol’s synthetic fuels plan at Secunda.

We were filled with green fervour just two years ago as the West offered us $8.5bn to help kick-start our transition to a greener future. Today that enthusiasm has dissipated. We have the money but suddenly, ag sorrie, we can't get Eskom off coal that quickly, our transmission grid cannot take any more solar projects where the sun shines best and there are oil and gas deposits off our coasts that we are going to find just irresistible.

The Europeans may listen to us a bit. There is no point in them setting themselves unreachable climate targets, and climate policies — along with immigration — bear a large part of the blame for the rise in right-wing populism in Europe. But there is another side to the debate, however eloquent Patel is on the justice of climate policy.

The fact is that we are asking for a pause so that we can catch up in our own sweet time, and that is never going to happen. No matter how much resistance there may be to an energy transition in the world; no matter how much people like mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe may want to weave an entirely new gas-fired tender-rich industrial matrix in SA, the fact is that climate change is real and until humans find another way to live the increases we are now causing in average temperatures will simply become unbearable. They will literally kill millions of humans.

So the arc bends towards serious carbon mitigation whether you like it or not. It may take far more time than is now “the plan”, but it will happen and our opportunity in SA is to get on that boat early, as a matter of national and patriotic strategic policy.

We don’t have to shut down Eskom now. But then, nor do we have to spend a cent on developing gas. If we push forward and ensure that every energy decision we make from now on in actually contributes to a lowering of the stock of carbon in the atmosphere we will carve a powerful place for ourselves in the world. Cars made here would be welcome anywhere in the world, textiles and foodstuffs too. We could become the rich world’s favourite emerging market.

But if we continue to duck and weave around our core responsibilities, driven by the need to serve political constituencies already living on borrowed time, we will fail ourselves and our children. The fact is that climate change and dealing with it is messy and often unrewarding, but always unrelenting. It is such a pity that our government continues to beg from the side of the road rather than lead the columns marching past it.

I hear Patel will not be returning to parliament after the election. That can only mean Ramaphosa has other plans for him. Ambassador to the US, perhaps, or — God forbid — the EU. Or perhaps a roving ambassador to wherever we are in trouble. Ideologically disabled, he has been nonetheless easily Ramaphosa’s most effective minister.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.