Coal’s executioners gather to plot the kill

Under the so-called Just Energy Transition Investment Partnership (or JET IP, as it is now referred to in the jargon-rich world of climate diplomacy) the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union agreed to provide $US8.5 billion ($12.59 billion) in grants and cheap loans as seed money for a fund to purchase and close South Africa’s coal fleet and replace it with renewables.

South Africa is the perfect laboratory for such a program because it has a some of the world’s best access to sun and wind. And because it has, even by a dirty industry’s standards, a particularly dirty coal fleet. As a result, a dollar spent greening South Africa cuts far more carbon than a dollar spent in, say, Europe.

The model is also in keeping with one of the Paris Agreement’s core principles, which recognises that nations have “common but differentiated responsibilities” in tackling climate change.

In simple terms, this means that poor nations agreed to take action if rich ones – which caused the problem in the first place – agreed to pay for it.

Due to generations of failure to properly address climate change, even this rapid progress is not fast enough, says Fenning. She hopes the South African model will be improved as versions of it are deployed in Indonesia and Vietnam, and then, hopefully, across the world.