A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

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294 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradinganyway. Sasol’s coal mine in Sasolburg ‘reached the end of its economiclife in 2001,’ 145 and trucking in replacement coal from Secundawas not ‘economically sustainable’. 146 Yet the company insists that theobvious choice for a new feedstock source was not gas from Mozambiquebut rather digging a new coal strip mine near Sasolburg. Althoughthere was ‘public concern’ over this proposed mine, whichwould have been sited on the banks of the Vaal river, 147 as well as ‘adesire from Sasol and the South African government to reduce localair pollution’, the company insists that there was no incentive or legalobligation not to go with coal. 148 The pipeline option, on the otherhand, was blocked by ‘numerous and difficult-to-manage barriers’including capital costs, political instability, and fluctuating gas prices– all of which needed carbon finance to overcome.I guess that’s reasonable – if you think a fossil fuel company should be grantedcarbon credits at all.The only trouble is that Sasol’s claims are contradicted by several ofits own executives’ accounts of how the pipeline option was chosen.For example, at a June 2005 meeting of the South African NationalEnergy Association at the Siemens Headquarters in Sandton, outsideof Johannesburg, Sasol’s Natural Gas Supply Manager, Peter Geef,noted that the Mozambique pipeline had already been ‘completelypaid for’ and that there were no outstanding financial inputs. Uponbeing questioned about the CDM, Geef responded that ‘yes, we areindeed trying to get some carbon finance for this pipeline…you get alot of pay-back in terms of dollars per tonne’, but that ‘we would havedone this project anyway’. 149‘You shouldn’t be sellingoff your crown jewelsso the North can keeppolluting.’ 169Sheriene Rosenberg,SouthSouthNorth,South Africa, June 2005So essentially Sasol is asking for carbon fi nance not to do something it wouldnot have done otherwise, but as a bonus for what it has already done but justwished was more profi table.Exactly. Even Richard Worthington of the South African ClimateAction Network (SACAN), who supports carbon trading projects intheory, says that the project merely entrenches Sasol’s pipeline monopoly.He adds that the company’s quest for extra income from carboncredit sales ‘is just baseless greed’. 150What about the other South African projects you mentioned.Another South African landfill gas CDM project is located at theBellville South Waste Disposal (BSWD) dump in the north of CapeTown municipality. This project aims at capturing 70 per cent of thesite’s methane, instead of the current 30 per cent, which is merelyfl a r e d . 151 The methane would then be used as fuel by local industry.
offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 295Sasol’s Sasolburgplant, seen fromthe south.Used in the early 1930s for sewage disposal, the site has been a dumpingground since the 1960s. Originally far from human settlement, itis now surrounded by the largely coloured and Indian Belhar community.152 Although the site was closed for a time due to the ‘closeproximity to residential areas and the risk of contamination to theunderlying Cape Flats aquifer’, 153 it was later reopened, enraging localresidents, who formed two separate organisations in opposition: theLandfill Monitoring Group and the richer and more Indian-basedBelhar Development Forum. Both groups were relieved by the city’spledge to close the site in 2006 but alarmed at negotiations that arenow under way to extend its life until 2009.Does the extension of the life of the dump have anything to do with the CDMproject?Project developer Walter Loots, head of Cape Town Solid Waste, deniesthis. Cape Town ‘is running out of landfill space’, Loots says, and ‘theonly alternative would be a higher-cost regional landfill 60 kilometresout of town’. 154 It hasn’t been revealed whether any increase in availablegas caused by keeping the dump open was included in the CDM accountingfor the project, as was the case at Bisasar Road in Durban.And who’s developing the project?Unlike the larger Bisasar Road scheme, Bellville is being developedunder the close supervision of a non-profit consultancy, South-SouthNorth (SSN), in a municipality in which climate change issueshave their own office. It has also gained ‘Gold Standard’ statusas a project meeting the highest standards for environmental andsocial sustainability.
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PRESS RELEASEContact:Linda Chiavaro
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ContentsEditorial note 2Chapter 1 I
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editorial note 3in Dorset, UK - poi
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6 development dialogue september 20
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Chapter 2‘Made in the USA’A sho
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Page 339 and 340: ways forward 337Unlike carbon tradi
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ways forward 345energy - loan benef
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ways forward 347From an Open Letter
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ways forward 349be answered in the
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ways forward 351rogated by Indian v
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ways forward 353argue, they’ve he
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ways forward 355‘The US alone acc
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appendix - the durban declaration o
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appendix - the durban declaration o
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A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

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