President’s Climate Report is “flawed, simplistic and inadequate”, and not in South Africa’s interests
An industry response.
“To appreciate and engage the benefits of nuclear energy, human society should overcome the fear of it, in the same way as it did when it accepted fire a million years ago. Then, by leap-frogging their animal instincts, humans became the dominant life form on Earth. Today, we acknowledge the drawbacks of carbon combustion – its tendence to propagate without control, the effect of the pollution that it spreads, and even its de-stabilising effect on the climate. In place of fire, physical science offers nuclear energy. Education for our children should explain how this energy is a million times greater than the chemical energy of fire, and that it is incomparably safer, too. They should be encouraged to study the scientific evidence – in medicine, in laboratory experiments, and in accidents. Then with our help, they should build their future on nuclear technology for the economy, for security, and for peace. This will take a generation or two, but those nations that grab the opportunity early and spread the benefits worldwide will have the advantage.”
Dr Wade Allison, Emeritus Professor of Physics and Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford
Please find the full report from the Truth in Energy & the Izwe Lami Freedom Foundation in the following link.
Please find the The Original Presidential Climate Commission - TECHNICAL REPORT SUPPORTING THE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SOUTH AFRICA’S LECTRICITY SYSTEM May 2023 in the following link.
Truth in Energy & the Izwe Lami Freedom Foundation
Media Statement
18 July 2023
For Immediate Release
President’s Climate Report is “flawed, simplistic and inadequate”, and not in South Africa’s interests.
An industry response.
Johannesburg
We welcome the invitation to contribute substantively to the final Report..
The recently released Draft Report of the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) (the “Report) is disappointingly flawed, simplistic and inadequate. A dispassionate analysis shows it as lacking depth, expertise and professionalism according to industry experts. This Assessment is a response to the Report and highlights the failures and omissions in the approach taken by the authors, who, curiously, are not named, which in itself is disturbing. We should know who is driving PCC thinking, which might become South Africa’s energy policy. Contentious responses to climate change concerns are driving energy policy, and therefore must be examined rigorously and tested by all who care about where the country and climate are headed. The focus must be on enabling the country to generate the electricity it needs to create growth and real jobs. Only then, can the laudable if flawed ideology of renewable energy sources take centre stage.
Despite worldwide hysteria and the adoption of “with us or against us” polarising positions, there is considerable and continuing scientific debate on the facts and causalities. However, there is no debate on the enormous sums of money on the table from the industrialised West to induce developing nations, such as South Africa, to abandon its wealth of natural energy resources to focus on foreign renewable energy (RE) sources. This pressure on us from international interests, is, in our opinion, short-sighted, counterproductive and unaffordable for the foreseeable future, although the appeal for many politicians. Industrialised nations became rich and developed on the back of coal and other fossil fuels. Now South Africa and others are being pressured to pay the price of forgoing that which these developed nations greedily consumed to become wealthy.
So that there is no confusion or obfuscation, deliberate or otherwise, we are not against RE, nor do we push coal or any other agenda, although we do believe nuclear power holds the primary key to future prosperity being clean, affordable, reliable and efficient. Nuclear ‘ticks all the boxes’.
However, our message is that South Africa will benefit maximally if it adopts a balanced energy mix using the appropriate energy in the optimum context.
Abstract
The PCC’s Draft Report supporting Recommendations for South Africa’s Electricity System (May 2023), does not use as a foundation, the economic and social well-being of the citizens of our country. Instead, it works from a basic assumption that it will recommend renewable energy because it ‘feels philosophically good’, not because it is the correct answer as determined by a sound engineering and economics investigation, or national interest. As a result, the Draft Report needs to be scrutinised rigorously, and all implications considered carefully, against the backdrop of South Africa's current and future energy needs, before we commit ourselves irrevocably to a non-fossil fuel and non-nuclear scenario in a developing country blessed with an abundance of fossil and nuclear energy resources.
Conspicuously missing from the Draft Report is any reference to any competent Socio-Economic Impact Assessment (SEIA) of the impacts of any radical change in the methods of the production of electricity.
Electricity is an absolute underlying foundation on which any economy is structured and subsequently functions. There is a direct international correlation between wealth and electricity; one of the strongest relationships in social science. As the saying goes, you ‘fiddle at your peril’. The tragic national experience of load-shedding has illuminated this reality starkly.
An additional concern inherent in the PCC Draft Report, is an apparent adherence to foreign political ideologies exerting pressure for the headlong implementation of what has been termed misleadingly a ‘Just Transition’. It is important to know who created this term and why.
Is any such transition really ‘just’ and if so, for whom and at whose expense? Who gets sacrificed to achieve a ‘just transition’ as required by amorphous others?
The citizens of South Africa must not find their dreams of economic prosperity, equality of opportunity, health and welfare curtailed by foreign desires to score political points by ‘taming’ South Africa in order to subject it to their commands, and what appear to be thought experiments.
Our energy sovereignty is supremely important, and it is essential for us to maintain control over it, in the interests of all our people.
The PCC Draft Report leaves critical and informed observers disappointed and uncomfortable.
This Assessment indicates a disturbing number of significant inadequacies and biases, which are indicated here in a brief manner. However, this Assessment reveals and presents a sufficiently illuminating picture to indicate to any thinking reader that the PCC Draft Report should not inform electricity policy.
See Assessment in full: Attached below.
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Freedom Foundation (Izwe Lami) is a newly established policy institute created by the old Free Market Foundation creator, Leon Louw, to continue and invigorate its work and values. Email: izwelamifoundation@gmail.com
Truth in Energy (TiE)
Truth in Energy describes a group of energy experts with wide and diverse experience whose objective is to present optimum solutions to solve the energy crisis in South Africa. TiE is not driven by energy source ideology but by the efficient mix to deliver sustainable, cost effective and affordable electricity for all citizens.
TiE is a policy unit within the Freedom Foundation, whose CEO Leon Louw, continues to be at the forefront of leading policy and economic ideas for over 45 years.
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