South Africa is clearly trying to have its cake and eat it too. Demanding climate finance from the international community, while wanting to continue destroying the climate through new fossil fuels. It’s for this reason that South Africa’s Climate Justice Charter Movement is petitioning the international community to make an end to new coal, oil and gas investments a condition of financial support for South Africa.
There is something morally peculiar about a rich white South African demanding reparations. Yet, that’s what happened at COP27, the 27th annual UN Climate Summit, which took place in Egypt 2022. There, Environment Minister Barbara Creecy took to the global stage demanding climate reparations from wealthy nations most responsible for climate change.
In all fairness to Creecy, she is a public official representing a majority poor and black country, so it’s not that she is claiming reparations for herself as a white South African. Creecy argued, rather, that wealthy nations most responsible for causing the climate crisis must pay reparations to those least responsible yet most harmed.
Yet, her demand still raises a perplexing question:
In a country as deeply unequal, polluting and unjust as South Africa, who really deserves climate reparations, and who should pay for them?
This is not a mere question of woke identity politics gone wild (as Helen Zille might rant about as she descends further into reactionary right-wing, colonial apologetics). Rather it goes to a core question about what it means to serve climate justice: who are the victims of climate change, deserving reparations, and who are the perpetrators of the climate crisis, who owe victims reparations?
South Africa: victim or perpetrator, or both?
On the global stage, South Africa often likes to sneak itself in with other African countries, claiming that the Global North owes it climate reparations and climate finance. However, unlike other African and developing countries, who have mostly done very little to cause the climate crisis, South Africa is one of the world’s most polluting countries.
South Africa is the 12th-biggest climate polluter in the world in absolute terms and the worst in Africa. When measured by the amount of climate pollution produced per unit of GDP, it is worse than China and ranks behind only a handful of countries including Turkmenistan, Palau and Mongolia. Of the major economies, our energy sector is the most polluting of all G20 nations, thanks to our incredibly heavy dependency on polluting coal.
Being such an awful climate ...