South Africa Beats Climate Goal as Blackouts Slash Emissions
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South Africa emissions are falling, ahead of a 2025 target
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Power plant breakdowns are reducing industrial activity
Output of the climate-warming gases from the world’s 14th-biggest emitter is already falling even though its Nationally Determined Contribution, a target adopted by the cabinet in 2021, only forecast a decline from 2025.
Regular breakdowns of the coal-fired power plants that supply more than 80% 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.
“It’s unintentional,” Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Monday. “We reckon we are well within the range” of meeting the 2030 target, he said.
If the decommissioning dates of some coal-fired plants are pushed back it will make little difference to emissions as they produce little electricity in any event, he said.
Keeping them open for another “year or two is neither here nor there,” Olver said on an earlier webinar. “It’s very difficult to recommend the decommissioning of power stations in the middle of an energy crisis.”
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Flashback: Rutgers U. Professor: ‘To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity’ – David McDermott Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Energy without Conscience: “For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism…What applies in the pandemic also applies—and also with desperate urgency—in the climate crisis. We can live with some intermittency and rationing—at least until batteries and other forms of energy storage are up and running everywhere.”
The Daily Telegraph – March 2, 2011: ‘Era of Constant Electricity at Home is Ending, says UK power chief’
Excerpt: ‘The days of permanently available electricity may be coming to an end, the head of the power network said yesterday. Families would have to get used to only using power when it was available, rather than constantly, said Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid. Mr Holliday was challenged over how the country would “keep the lights on” when it relied more on wind turbines as supplies of gas dwindled. Electricity provided by wind farms will increase six-fold by 2020 but critics complain they only generate on windy days.
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“We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.”
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Swiss president warns nation to prepare for electricity shortages lasting weeks or months
British publication The Times ran one of the nuttiest bits of climate change babble in a Feb. 20 story headlined: “How to fix global warming? Bring back rationing, say scientists.” The first sentence of the piece dripped with brain-melting nonsense: “Second World War-style rationing of petrol, household energy and meat could help to fight climate change, British scientists have recommended.”
The newspaper cited “researchers” – whom it does not name until the end of the article – from the University of Leeds who published climate propaganda disguised as analysis in the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment. The Times quoted the study, which also suggested giving citizens a “carbon allowance” and creating a “scarcity of fossil fuels.” …
Of course, what The Times was selling was massive government intervention. “The researchers argue that, as a first step, governments would need to regulate sectors such as the oil industry, with the importing of fossil fuels ‘banned or restricted’ in certain areas.” In effect, said The Times, “[t]his would create a scarcity of fossil fuels, with rationing then introduced to ‘manage the scarcity’, they explain.”
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Bloomberg News: ‘South Africa Beats Climate Goal as Blackouts Slash Emissions’ –
‘Unintentional…power plant breakdowns are reducing industrial activity’ | Climate Depot https://t.co/ajC8tSdDnJ pic.twitter.com/8e5SFp1qgs
— Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) May 16, 2023
