Dr Lehohla’s condemnation of the official embrace of renewables is premised on an incontrovertible reality: the economically illogical abandonment of the country’s ‘black gold’—coal—in exchange for expensive, imported so-called renewables.

Expanding on that, Lehohla points out that the costs of the so-called just energy transition (JET)  are what is driving up Eskom’s new, unaffordable tariff charges. In that regard, he dismisses as a false narrative Eskom’s claim that load shedding was mitigated by the generation of 6,000 megawatts by renewables.

Indeed, the entire JET exercise is based not only on false science but on utterly disingenuous economics, which is why Dr Lehohla brands JET as a “Trojan horse that will further damage our energy security.”

It is deliberate, educated ignorance to premise decarbonisation and its corollary, de-industrialisation, on the falsehood of human-driven global warming. But unfortunately, the Orwellian agendas of global power elites which have captured all but a few political leaders like Donald Trump and Javier Milei of Argentina, prevail in South Africa.

A superb example of the Trojan horse direction of which Dr Lehohla warns features in the Business Report of October 15. Deceitfully, the report claims the newly formed Investment Forum will “unlock funding for renewable energy.”

The key word in that is “lock” because its meaning is ambivalent. For the investors, it promises an unlocked cascade of financial returns from its captive client, South Africa. But for South Africans, it means being locked into ever-higher electricity costs and state indebtedness to global controllers.

The projection that annual investment in renewable capacity will have to triple every year until 2030 to reach the false, unscientific target of staving off a 1,5° C temperature increase, makes it clear that financial enslavement to an oligarchy is what the future holds.

This direction is more than an exercise in stupidity, as Dr Lehohla states. It is brazen betrayal and treason. The absolutely unaffordable 36% tariff increase that Eskom is demanding is largely the result of JET madness and carbon tax.

The effect of a 36%  tariff hike is going to result in terminal impoverishment as the prices of everything will become unaffordable for all except the elites and the politicians. Unless the GNU wakes up to the JET Trojan horse, whatever else it may achieve will be worthless.

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The reasons listed by Thungela CEO, July Ndlovu, for this R4,1 billion investment provide a catalogue of what ails investment in South Africa: Transnet’s inefficient rail system, erratic power supply due to load shedding and what he euphemistically calls “infrastructure bottlenecks.”

The positives Ndlovu cites for investing in Australia are its well-established mining jurisdiction with support infrastructure industries and handy access to Japanese and other Asian markets.

But perhaps the most telling reason for Thungela’s Australian acquisition is the need “to de-risk our underlying business and to bolster the resilience of the company [thereby] creating value for our shareholders.”

Thungela’s faultless reasoning exposes the credibility of the ANC’s mantra that South Africa is open for business. It also reflects how history repeats itself when in the 1980s hundreds of international companies disinvested in South Africa not only because of apartheid but because of the ANC’s rolling mass action and strikes which wrought havoc with production.

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If the decision-makers at Standard looked beyond the Paris Cop26 agreement and distinguished between propaganda and science they would note that there is no global warming and that climate change is a natural, historical occurrence. They would then note that in the past 2,000 years there have been two global warming periods – one in the late Roman period and the other between 800 and 1400AD – when fossil fuels were not in use as they are today. Thus, there is no science in Standard’s intended coal policy.

Standard Bank should note what President Obama’s former Under-Secretary for Energy, Dr Steven Koonin, has stated. Koonin, a physicist at New York University, is one of many scientists who regard the claim of global warming as sheer alarmism. In June 2021, on Fox News, he emphasised that there has been no change in the warmest temperatures over the past 60 years. Data also shows no shrinking of the ice in Antarctica or increase in hurricane activity.

Dr Frank Schnell, author of The Age of Stupid, points out that climate alarmists base their predictions on less than one percent of data. Their selective extrapolation of weather extremes from the UN’s 3,949 page Sixth Assessment Report, provide emotional impetus for their agitation propaganda. Schnell, Koonin and a host of independent scientists have posited that if all fossil fuels were abandoned the difference that would make would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius. Global warming caused by fossil fuels is a falsehood.

South Africa has an abundance of coal which needs to be exploited if the economic growth Standard Bank envisages is to occur. Failure to exploit those resources is going to aggravate unemployment and diminish economic growth prospects. Since 20% of Standard Bank is owned by China which builds coal-fired power stations and ignores the propaganda of the Paris Climate Accord, how does Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala intend to explain his coal policy to his Chinese shareholders?

Sent into The Business Report and published, March 2022.

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