Workers install solar panels at the Karoo Fresh Produce Ltd. farm in Groenfontein, South Africa, on Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. Sun Exchange invites investors to buy solar cells at a project of their choice, where the solar energy customers pay a fee for use, with part of that paid back to investors in either South African rand or Bitcoin.
All this to say that my most recent foray into covering the renewables dilemma reminded me of one of the basics of journalism: follow the money. Adding to the climate finance quandary, governments, including South Africa’s, face fiscal constraints, with efforts to lower debt ratios hamstringing their ability to finance their transitions.
A recent working paper out of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies points out that global climate justice has been neglected in climate-related financial initiatives. One way that climate finance exacerbates climate injustice, the paper notes, is through attempts by private banks in the global north using “their structural power to exploit profit opportunities in climate mitigation and adaptation projects in the global south [through] the so-called Wall Street Consensus”.
“Government capacity to design autonomous policies, in many poor countries severely eroded by structural adjustment, will be further eroded by pressures to allocate scarce resources to creating the conditions for private development finance,” Gabor said in her conclusion. The minister has alluded to an upcoming report outlining how this will be done without encroaching on the country’s energy sovereignty — which would have probably required the awkward exercise of forcing necessarily dissonant values into a type of harmony, something the talk-left-walk-right ANC government is pretty good at. The minister has called for innovative solutions to the financing dilemma.