South Africa Beats Climate Goal as Blackouts Slash Emissions. It’s one of those headlines you read and assume the Babylon Bee is to blame. In this case, it came from a Bloomberg article, gushing about South Africa’s falling emissions putting it on track to meet its 2025 climate goals. They were even bold enough to note: ‘Power plant breakdowns are reducing industrial activity.’

Sure, collapsing into the Stone Age is probably going to lower your CO2 emissions – for a while – but pretty soon everyone is going to be chopping down the nearest forest like it’s 5000 BC.

‘Regular breakdowns of the coal-fired power plants that supply more than 80 per cent of South Africa’s electricity mean that less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere and daily rotational cuts of more than 10 hours a day are further limiting emissions from factories.’

Such an apparently gleeful tone at widespread suffering and dysfunction reminds me of MSM newspapers salivating during the lockdown years when the streets were empty. An Extinction Rebellion nirvana.

Oh, how journalists applauded our silent cities, free of evil cars. Never mind the business owners watching their Australian dream die in broad daylight. There were even a few hacks that noted how wonderfully clean the air in China was now that its citizens were being welded into their apartment buildings. Your liberty is always expendable in the eyes of a zealot.

When it comes to South Africa, at the beginning of May it was predicted that 2023 would see 250 days of widespread blackouts lasting up to 12 hours at a time. Some say this is costing $51 million a day. A mixture of corruption, mismanagement, and accusations of sabotage have led to the nation’s old coal-fired power stations packing-in.

The politically-motivated sabotage is severe and more than a footnote in this story:

‘In December 2022 President Ramaphosa’s spokesperson announced that the South African National Defence Force would be deployed at four Eskom power stations “in response to the growing threat of sabotage, theft, vandalism and corruption” for an indeterminate length of time. In late February 2023 then Eskom CEO, André de Ruyter, controversially stated that four criminal syndicates had established themselves within the national utility, that an unnamed senior ANC MP was involved, and that government lacked political will to resolve the situation. De Ruyter also stated that in his opinion “load shedding is, to a large extent, attributable to crime and corruption”.’

And while sabotage isn’t helping, had the nation properly prepared itself with new energy assets, disruption would be considerably more difficult.

Instead of holding the South African leadership to account and making them pay to fix years of mismanagement with a workable solution agreed upon with citizens, the white-saviour West has rushed in with offers to shower the nation in cash so long as it is used to build ‘renewable’ technology.

Grabbing onto the ‘get out of jail free card’ with both hands, President Cyril Ramaphosa has made this one of his chief goals. How strange that despite 87 wind and solar plants being constructed, South Africa is continuing to turn into a black hole. If they had built 87 nuclear plants I’m willing to bet the lights would still be on.

When I read comments such as ‘renewable developers have taken advantage of this certainty to invest in the country’ I can’t help but imagine the raptors from Jurassic Park hunting Muldoon in the forest enclosure, ready to bite his neck and tear his arms off.

Take note of the critical issue facing South Africa, because Australia has the exact same problem, even if Bowen keeps it hush-hush.

‘The scale of the challenge in upgrading the country’s electricity grid is daunting. The existing grid is designed to distribute electricity from coal-fired power stations,’ writes Infrastructure Investor.

What Bowen won’t admit is that nuclear plants can be built over existing coal-fired plants in a plug-and-play scenario without any need to tear up the wiring. Renewables require an ungodly mesh of wire to be strung up across Australia. Not only does this make the nation look like it’s travelled back in time to the age of messy DC electricity suffocating New York, but it will require the forced acquisition of who-knows how much currently pristine private property.

Australia is going to look horrific by the time Bowen is finished – and that’s before he trashes the coastline with giant turbines. We’ll be like a cyborg nation, mutilated by corporate greed and politically convenient virtue.

The South African state of disaster endured for two months and has been ended by the government (even though the energy grid hasn’t been fixed). During this period, South Africa was permitted to buy electricity from its neighbours. For those who are curious, the state of disaster legislation was created to handle the Covid era and is being repurposed for the energy crisis.

These things don’t happen overnight, and yet no one stepped in to stop it. South Africa’s energy problems have been creeping up on them since 2007, a situation they were warned about in a 1998 report. We are watching this unfold in Australia as our coal-fired plants are blown up and destroyed. Who is ensuring that the power requirements will be met? No one. The ‘renewables will fix it’ is an ideology that continues to fail and it is doubtful anyone will fess up to the mess until the lights go out.

One wonders if South Africa’s bureaucratic elite care about the hell they are putting their nation through, with the executive director of the Presidential Climate Commission admitting the situation was unintentional before adding, ‘We reckon we are well within the range of meeting the 2030 target.’

It’s hard to imagine a responsible political leadership cheering on the shutdown of electricity across the nation, or attempting to paint 10-hour blackouts as some sort of virtue. Then again, South Africa secured $8.5 billion in ‘climate finance’ from first-world nations who, in my opinion, are complicit in the suffering of the people of South Africa, even if it is unintentional. It’s like aid organisations that inadvertently incentivise tribal militias to murder in search of the resources dropped from the sky. When you stack the deck with billions of dollars, the market is unable to pick a solution based on merit.

The $8.5 billion for renewables sounds generous, but it comes with strings attached and those investors are not happy that – shock – South Africa doesn’t want to shut down its coal-fired plants in the middle of an energy crisis. The funding partners want to be able to tick ‘climate justice’ off their books, even if it means leaving South Africans in the dark.

Germany, France, the UK, US, and the EU – nations who are broke but tossing money at South Africa anyway – want to fund the closure of coal-fired plants and transition to renewables, including the development of electric vehicles. This is cute until you realise that South Africa is essentially the crime capital of the world where shanty towns litter the streets. It would be better if these generous overlords focused on getting the basic stuff right first – like keeping the energy grid operational.

Just as China debt-traps its neighbours, it could be argued that the same thing is happening here, with South Africa required to repay almost all of these investment loans while it is guaranteed the true cost of the renewables switchover will be gargantuan. With coal-fired plants shutting and nasty green-tape binding the nation to these agreements, South Africa will find itself desperately burning money as chaos and civil unrest erupt around them – notably from the coal miners and unions.

If you want to send a country into a state of disaster, this is an effective way to do it.

‘The UK is fully committed to supporting South Africa’s energy transition,’ said Antony Phillipson, the British High Commissioner to South Africa.

Perhaps they shouldn’t be meddling at all because in 50 years this will be seen as the new colonial curse that destroyed South Africa with its fake climate politics and predatory corporate enterprises. The next generation of Woke will sneer at Net Zero evangelicals the same way the press criticise missionaries.

Besides, Britain can’t keep its own lights on, so why is it so concerned about South Africa? Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should stop repeating the mistakes of his predecessors and devote his time to the people of the UK. It’s their money.

When Sunak gushes about South Africa being a leader in renewables minerals, what he leaves out is China’s infiltration and control of the African rare earths market, including (but not limited to) South Africa. As an example, 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt is exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo to China – the child slave labour that builds the virtuous solar panels, wind turbines, and ecars championed by Australian politicians.

Western nations are throwing money at South Africa’s energy grid not to ‘save them’ from evil coal, or even to ‘save the planet’ from climate change. They are doing it to buy back market control of Africa’s rare earths from China, with the vulturous rush of talons and teeth once again treating Africa as a carcass to be raided.

Net Zero is the largest mining boom in history. If you think about it practically, this shouldn’t be a surprise, given the sheer volume of raw materials required to carpet the Earth in solar farms and bird-mincing devices. Mining companies can parrot the ‘climate change’ line all they like, but at the end of the day, those who champion Net Zero might as well be driving the bulldozers themselves.

Mining companies, renewables manufacturers, their third-party production companies, and the parasitic layer of political handshaking continue to facilitate this free-for-all while conning Western societies into thinking they are the saviours of the world. It is astonishing that anyone believes it.