Instead of going to sleep earlier as the energy minister advised during the load-shedding crisis earlier this year, we should have used the time to debate our need for a new energy regime. But we continue to be passive consumers now awaiting ”smoothing”, as Eskom terms the forthcoming increases in energy pricing.
However, we can no longer be seduced by Eskom’s euphemisms or intimidated by our experience of the initial, random electricity cuts that had chaotic effects on production, households and traffic.
Access to clean, affordable and sustainable energy is the crucial public issue of our time. It is crucial to economic production and to social justice. Almost every weekend there are shack fires (usually due to an overturned candle or a paraffin spill) in some informal settlement in which the poorest of the poor lose all their possessions and suffer disfigurement and sometimes death.
Access to electricity remains uneven despite a significant expansion. Even for those households that are connected, the cost of electricity is so high that many poor women rely on the additional use of paraffin, wood or coal for lighting, cooking or heating with all the attendant effort and health hazards.
Access to clean, affordable and sustainable energy is also crucial to avoid the ecological catastrophe that climate change will involve unless carbon emissions are drastically reduced. All the indicators of climate change, such as rising temperatures, melting glaciers and more extreme weather events around the globe, are the direct consequence of the fossil energy regime. This means energy based on burning fossil fuels in the form of coal, gas and oil. It involves the release of greenhouse gases, of which the main one is carbon dioxide.
South Africa is one of the worst contributors to climate change. The government’s decision to provide massive amounts of cheap electricity to Rio Tinto Alcan to establish a R20-billion aluminium smelter at Coega will have major polluting effects and, according to environmental scientist Professor Richard Fuggle, will push South Africa into becoming the top per capita emitter of carbon emissions in the world.
The results of climate change are going to be particularly devastating for us in sub-Saharan Africa. Already there is a clash emerging between energy (for example, biofuels) and food security maize), and this will worsen. For example, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that wheat production will disappear from Africa and there will be a marked decrease in the amount of maize under cultivation across the continent.
Those with power in post-apartheid South Africa are in denial about this reality. Eskom plans to rely on more coal-fired power stations while embarking on a risky nuclear programme. It plans to spend R343-billion by 2013 and more than R1-trillion by 2025 on coal and nuclear options. Leaving aside what we should have learned from the arms deal about large foreign procurement exercises, this should be compared to the R50-million planned to be spent on the development of renewable energy. So far this has been limited to a small wind project.
This raises some crucial questions: Why is so little being invested in wind and solar power? Why is there no public debate on an alternative energy policy? Who are the individuals, state institutions and corporations operating in the energy sector and whose interests do they serve?
Why have we shifted from the Reconstruction and Development Programme plan ”to concentrate on the provision of energy services to meet the basic needs of poor households”?
These are some of the questions that will be addressed during the 2008 Ruth First Memorial lecture and exhibition on August 18.
Professor Jacklyn Cock is a sociologist at the University of the Witwatersrand
Ruth First was a journalist, scholar and activist at the heart of the liberation movement who was assassinated by the apartheid government on August 17 1982. She is remembered in an annual event featuring two Ruth First Fellows in the journalism programme at Wits. This year includes a lecture by journalist Hillary Joffe and an exhibition by photographer Alon Skuy on the theme Power and Powerlessness: South Africa’s Energy Crisis. Also speaking will be activist Bobby Peek. The event is on August 18 at 6pm at Atlas Studios, 33 Frost Avenue, Milpark, Johannesburg