South Africa is exceeding its goal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions — thanks to regular blackouts that have become a daily feature of life in the country and have become a serious obstacle to economic growth.
“Load shedding,” the practice of controlled blackouts by the state-owned power company, Eskom, continues to plague South Africa …
Two decades ago, Eskom had excess capacity and generated the cheapest electricity in the world. But the company was undermined over time by aggressive affirmative action policies that forced the departure of skilled engineers, and by “black economic empowerment” procurement policies that enriched a small group of corrupt, politically-connected entrepreneurs without delivering value to the company or to its consumers.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that South Africa has exceeded its goals for emissions cuts. Bloomberg NewsOutput 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.
“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.
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