The break-up of the SASOL AGM last week by green activists demonstrates three things: that big corporations such as Sasol are cringing political cowards; that green climate alarmists know nothing about climate science and are a positive danger to the environment and poor people; and that corporate “ethical shareholders” such as the Old Mutual and Ninety-One are ignorant hypocrites.
I should state my own interests and ideology. I have no formal education beyond school, except for degrees in physics and engineering. My assertion that rising CO2 is having no effect on the climate is based on facts, data, evidence and hard science. I believe strongly in the capitalist system, which has delivered most of the world into unprecedented prosperity and freedom. I own 534 shares in Sasol but otherwise have no interests in the company.
On Friday 23 November, the Sasol AGM was invaded by a green imperialist group called Extinction Rebellion, which is based in England. I turned to its website and read this: “Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time, and our governments have failed to act.” All complete nonsense.
There is no climate crisis. The Earth’s climate now is healthy and benign. The recent slight warming is perfectly natural and is much less than predicted by the climate models. World food crops are getting better and better. There is no threat of mass extinction because of rising CO2. Quite the opposite: rising CO2 will promote plant growth and increase biodiversity. However – and this is an extreme irony – there was once, not long ago, a huge threat of a terrible mass extinction caused by falling CO2. I shall explain.
Sasol decided to cancel the AGM after the invasion. Maybe they were a bit too quick to do so. I was actually rather pleased because I had wanted to attend the AGM online but got completely baffled as to how to do so and anyway probably left it too late to apply. But now I’m going to try for the postponed AGM. I want to criticise Sasol loudly but from the opposite point of view. I want to condemn Sasol for not telling the truth, which is that rising CO2 is not causing climate change, and for caving in to mass ignorance. Sasol has made some crazy commitments to reducing its CO2 emissions, of which the craziest is to achieve net zero by 2050. For the world to actually achieve net zero would cause catastrophic human and environmental harm, and would do the planet no good whatsoever. CO2 is too low now. We need more.
CO2 is a safe, clean, natural, life-giving gas, essential for plants, upon which we depend. Over the last 550 million years, it has averaged about 2,000 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, but with huge fluctuations. During the greatest-ever proliferation of life forms, about 500 million years ago, in the Cambrian Period, CO2 was over 4,000 ppm – nearly ten times higher than it is now. But 150 million years ago, something very frightening began to happen. CO2 began to drop. It dropped and dropped, heading towards disaster, threatening one of the greatest mass extinctions ever. The reason was probably a huge increase in shell-forming marine organisms, which take in carbon from the air dissolved in the sea to help build their shells, but don’t release it when they die.
About ten million years ago, CO2 dropped to the alarmingly low level of about 280 ppm. Then came the ice ages, which made it even worse. Cooling seas absorb CO2, warming seas release it. The cold seas of the ice ages sucked more CO2 out of the air. At one stage it dropped to the terrifying level of 180 ppm. Below 150 ppm, most plants die. The ice ages ended, the seas warmed, and CO2 rose to about 280 ppm, far too low for a healthy planet but out of the danger zone. From the 19th Century, mankind, by burning fossil fuels, bumped it up to about 430 ppm now. Still far below optimum but a welcome improvement.
CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas, with only one significant IR absorption band, at 15 microns. In the laboratory, CO2 has little warming effect above 150 ppm. In the real world, none has been seen. If you look at the pre-industrial period, which you can define as the 9,000 years before 1700 AD, when the Industrial Revolution began, you can see that for most of that time global temperatures were higher than they are now.
So much for the ridiculous Paris accord that wants to restrict temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial period. The only major exception was the Little Ice Age (LIA), about 1300 to 1850 AD, when temperatures were the lowest in the last 10,000 years. This was a time of exceptionally low electromagnetic activity from the Sun. There has been no increase in extreme weather events since 1900 AD.
Sasol is a great asset to South Africa, a wonderful South African success story. It has brought great benefits to our economy and our people. It is a world leader in coal to liquid fuel (CTL) technology. By a huge margin, it is the most successful company in the world for converting coal and gas into liquid fuels and chemicals. Sasol produces about 28% of South Africa’s liquid fuels and saves R29 billion a year in foreign exchange. By helping to bring modern energy to poor people it has saved countless lives.
In Africa, the most terrible harm to people and the environment comes from the use of traditional energy, the chopping down of trees for firewood and the burning of wood, dung and coal inside dwellings. Sasol reduces the use of this harmful traditional energy. But Sasol does cause large-scale pollution. I spent a few days in Secunda in about 1986 and was disturbed by the pollution, the smoke and the smell of sulphur. The sulphur and nitrogen oxides, and the smoke from Sasol’s CTL plants are dangerous pollutants. CO2 is not. Sasol should try to reduce these pollutants, and I think is doing so. There is also a way Sasol can greatly reduce its use of coal while making the same quantity of liquid fuels.
Only about a third of the carbon in the coal entering the Sasol process ends up in liquid fuels and chemicals. The rest is used for energy to drive chemical reactions and produce electricity and heat for the processes. This energy could be produced by nuclear power – much better than by solar or wind. Nuclear power is affordable and reliable, running all the time, day and night. The ideal such nuclear sources would be Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), of which South Africa is a world leader. Our Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) was discontinued but would have been ideal for this purpose. The Chinese are now running a commercial version of it. Our new SMR designs are even better, simpler and smaller. It so happens that nuclear reactors in operation release no CO2.
Sasol is also a world leader in making liquid fuels from natural gas, and wants to move more to gas and away from coal. That’s good. Gas is very clean, apart from nitrogen oxide emissions (produced by any combustion in air), and much easier to work with than coal. The problem is access to gas at affordable prices.
Why does Sasol not dare to tell the truth about CO2 and climate change? Why does it bow to all the nonsense of climate hysteria that floods us through the mainstream media and international political propaganda organisations such as the dreadful, scandal-ridden International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? The answer, I’m afraid, is that large corporations tend to be political cowards. “Hard-headed businessmen” are actually as soft as putty. They kneel to whatever is the political orthodoxy of the time. Lenin didn’t seem to realise this and so felt bound to outlaw private enterprise in order to realise his ideology. Hitler did realise it. He knew the leading corporations in Germany would cower before him and do whatever he told them to do. So he kept private companies, knowing that they could run themselves much more efficiently than his Nazi ideologues ever could, and told them what he wanted. This is why the economy of Germany under National Socialism performed so much better than that of Russia under communism. Around the world, big corporations, including oil companies, bow to the unscientific nonsense of climate alarm.
I see that Extinction Rebellion and a similar organisation called Just Stop Oil have been responsible for violent demonstrations in England, for sabotaging works of art (such as by Van Gogh) and disrupting the lives of ordinary working people. What worries me more are their activities in Africa, where they seem determined to stop poor Africans using modern fossil fuels to develop their economies and clean up their environments. The greens are horrified at the idea of poor black people achieving the same standards of living as white people in Europe, who became rich and healthy by using fossil fuels.
In 2002, Greenpeace activists from Europe, arriving in an expensive, high-tech boat with sails and diesel engines, demonstrated against Koeberg Nuclear Station. They applied to Koeberg for permission to visit. Once permission was granted, they pretended to invade and hung a big sign saying, “Nukes out of Africa”. It seems to me that Greenpeace hated the idea of Africa having clean, safe, nuclear power as much as Extinction Rebellion hates the idea of Africa having the world’s most advanced plant for converting coal to liquid fuels (including the fuels used by the Greenpeace boat).
What they want is for poor Africans to stay poor, to be denied modern technology and to be forced to chop down trees for firewood, and perhaps to suffer a few useless but expensive wind turbines and solar arrays imposed upon them by Europeans at nice prices. Besides being useless for providing baseload electricity, solar and wind have many serious environmental problems, such as their use of toxic materials like cadmium and arsenic, which remain dangerous for millions of years. Terrible harm has been done to poor people in poor countries mining for these toxic materials. However, Extinction Rebellion will be pleased to hear that there is no such mining in England.
If Sasol has betrayed itself with its cowardice, what the hell are Old Mutual and Nine-One doing with their snivelling green shareholder activism? Instead of interfering in other company’s shareholders, Old Mutual would do better to try to serve its own shareholders by improving on its dismal performance in recent years and trying to avoid another awful, expensive mess such as the one it got itself into over the dismissal of its CEO, Peter Moyo.
Capitalism is simply the economic system that allows everyone to trade and do business with everyone else as they wish, in a free market, provided only they obey the rule of law. It is perfectly suited to human nature. In a free, competitive market, pure greed forces the capitalist to provide the best goods and services to the people at the lowest prices. Otherwise he won’t make profits. This explains its sensational success.
The rule of law includes acts and regulations to protect the environment. The capitalist might engage in philanthropy and good works if he wishes, but his first job is to make as much money as he can. This should be the first priority of Sasol and Old Mutual. The rest of us voters should try to use democratic means to persuade the lawmakers through science and evidence that rising CO2 is not doing any harm at all, and that laws to reduce it should be scrapped. We owe it to our planet and our people to do so.
[Photo: Video screenshot]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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