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Dirty Durban’s manual for climate greenwashing

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, ZNet, Links, Counterpunch, 29 August 2011 Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, the COP17, clean up its act? Last Tuesday’s launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban – http://www.assaf.org.za/2011/08/durban-on-a-pathway-towards-a-low-carbon-city/ – offers an early chance to [ READ MORE ]

Leaving oil in the soil, from Durban’s coast to Ecuador’s Amazon

by Patrick Bond ZNet, Counterpunch, Links, Pambazuka, The Mercury, 3 August 2011 There’s no way around it: to solve the worsening climate crisis requires we must accept both that the vast majority of fossil fuels must now be left underground, and that through democratic planning, we must collectively reboot our energy, transport, agricultural, production, consumption and disposal systems so that by 2050 we experience good living with less than a quarter of our current levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Yasuni National Parkn[ READ MORE ]

At the heart of our wealth and our woes, the ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’

by Patrick Bond with Khadija Sharife, The Mercury, 19 July 2011 When Julius Malema proposes mining industry partial nationalization – and last week asks, quite legitimately, ‘what is the alternative?’ to those in the SA Communist Party and Business Leadership South Africa who throw cold water at him – a debate of enormous ideological magnitude opens, which [ READ MORE ]

The insider-outsider climate quandary

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, 5 July 2011 Think ahead five months, but first, back last month. For we’ve just witnessed a preview of critical differences between civilized society, trying its best to get into the COP17 summit in Durban to make some minor climate policy modifications at the edges, and uncivilized society trying to generate eco-social [ READ MORE ]

From Bonn to Durban, climate meetings are Conferences of Polluters

by Patrick Bond ZNet, 21 June 2011 Judging by what transpired at last week’s global climate negotiations in the former West German capital, Bonn, it appears certain that in just over five months time, the South African port city of Durban will host a conference of procrastinators, the ‘COP 17’ (Conference of Parties), dooming the earth to [ READ MORE ]

Climate finance leadership risks global bankruptcy

by Patrick Bond The Mercury, 24 April 2011 South Africa’s most vocal neoliberal politician, Trevor Manuel, is apparently being seriously considered as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund. On April 28-29 in Mexico City, Manuel and other elites meet to design the world’s biggest-ever replenishing pool of aid money: a promised $100 billion of annual grants by [ READ MORE ]

As climate summit approaches, SA industrial policy hits green wall

by Patrick Bond Southern Africa Report, 18 April 2011 Hosting the Durban COP17 – let’s rename it the ‘Conference of Polluters’ – starting in late November puts quite a burden on the African National Congress government in Pretoria: to pretend to be pro-green. Embarrassingly, last week’s US Export-Import Bank loan of $805 million to South Africa will [ READ MORE ]

South Africa prepares for ‘Conference of Polluters’

by Patrick Bond Sunday Independent, 8 February 2011 At the past two United Nations Kyoto Protocol’s ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COPs) climate summits, Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancún in 2010, as well as at prior meetings such as Nairobi, how did South African leaders and negotiators perform? Sadly, they regularly let down their constituents, their African colleagues as [ READ MORE ]

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