SA needs carbon copy of Aussie wheeze

Did you know that, a few months ago, when nobody was watching, Australia went and ditched its plans to introduce a carbon tax?

Having a go at the Diggers is not really the point of this morning's epistle (although, admittedly, I have ground axes on flimsier pretexts before) but, learning of this development just the other day, I couldn't help but think: if they could get away with it, why can't we?

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain that, until very recently, Australia was going to punish businesses that emitted too much carbon by charging them a special tax. And then, in July or so, the Australians decided: "Sorry, we've just relooked at the figures and it turns out we can't afford it, so bugger the carbon tax."

Meanwhile, in a little country far away, one that is not nearly as rich as Australia, we have a government that is hell-bent on inflicting on hard-working industrialists a carbon tax so that it can buy more Mercedes-Benzes for its cadres deployed to dysfunctional municipalities.

Back in the day (2009 to be precise) President Jacob Zuma went to Copenhagen, had a slap-up dinner with the Danish queen and became so determined to win friends and influence diplomats that he promised, hand on heart, that his poor little country was going to slash its carbon emissions by a third come 2020. And the Americans and the Chinese in the audience sniggered and thought to themselves, "Well, good luck South Africa, because we have absolutely no intention of doing anything similar ourselves."

And we were left wondering: where on earth did that one come from? How could the president make such a crazy promise? And then we remembered that, before Zuma, we had a president who thought too much and that, nowadays, we have a president who doesn't think at all.

So, suddenly, five years ago, we found ourselves saddled with an absurd carbon-tax promise that half the developed world wouldn't dream of enacting while we were shedding jobs left, right and centre, and a quarter of our people were going to bed hungry because some little pipsqueak policy-maker at International Relations had decided to curry international favour.

These days, thanks to a spot of hubris at Copenhagen 2009, we have legions of mandarins and apparatchiks going to endless meetings and seminars and overseas conferences to figure out how best to apply an impractical wheeze that has now, at least, been postponed to 2016.

In terms of current official thinking, not only will companies that emit carbon have to pay new tax bills that will put half of them out of business, those that aren't necessarily big ugly smokestack polluters will be saddled with what we clever people call Scope 2 emissions.

In a nutshell, Scope 2 emissions refers to the electricity that businesses consume to produce and sell the gewgaws and thingamajigs they employ people to make. And that electricity comes from dear old Eskom. And how does Eskom generate almost all of its electricity? By burning coal, a substance that the Good Lord in His infinite wisdom bestowed upon us in great abundance.

The harsh reality is that we are such a poor country, with such daunting developmental needs, that (next to Amcu, and Riya Phiyega VC) a carbon tax is the last thing we need and can afford. Meanwhile, we have as much coal as you can poke a Greenpeace activist at.

If any of the zealous rocket scientists at the Department of the Environment or the Treasury can explain how we're supposed to make stainless steel without emitting carbon, or generate enough solar energy to keep the lights on for 50million people, I will eat my hat.

Maybe our government betters could send a fact-finding mission on business-class Down Under (on what is commonly known as a taxpayer-funded junket) to figure out how the Australians got away with their deft bit of backtracking.

But actually there is a more elegant way for us to quickly undo this tangled web of carbon promises and that is the caveat we spun at Copenhagen in 2009: that we would go as green as the world wanted us to go if the rich nations paid us to do so.

They haven't. So we're perfectly within our rights to walk away from the whole looming disaster, just like the Australians did.

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