Thursday was the day that Climate Scientists announced that the world had made it a whole year with an average global temperature >1.5oC above pre-industrial levels. And if you click through on that link, you’ll be able to read about many of the other records that have recently been broken as mankind does its best to trash what’s left of the planet.
It probably wasn’t the best day that the UK Labour party could have chosen to announce that they were dropping their £28bn a year “Green Prosperity” plan, halving the funding due to “the economic climate”. The actual climate isn’t the only climate that is struggling, then.
When you are an opposition party, it’s easy to make grand statements about how much you are going to spend, and all the plans you are going to carry out once you’re in government. No-one can hold you to them, because you can’t do them anyway, because you’re not in power. But suddenly, with Labour surely almost certain to win the upcoming election in the UK, they’re having to backtrack on their promises.
But with the world experts crying out for more funding for environmental and ecological issues, more buy-in and more commitment from governments, the perfect timing of this climbdown was a disaster.
Talking of disasters…
During his 2024 State Of The Nation address on Thursday evening, President Ramaphosa talked up the progress that the government had made in tackling loadshedding, which was running at Stage 2 throughout his speech:
“Since SA’s renewable energy programme was revived five years ago, more than 2,500MW of solar and wind power had been added to the grid, with much more in the pipeline. More than 120 new private energy projects were in development after regulatory reforms enabled private investment.
These are phenomenal developments that are driving the restructuring of our electricity sector in line with what many other economies have done to increase competitiveness and bring down prices.
Through all of these actions, we are confident that the worst is behind us and the end of load shedding is finally within reach.”
About an hour after he made that statement, loadshedding was raised to Stage 3.
And three hours after that, it was raised to Stage 4.
And now we’re on Stage 6. No electricity for 12 hours each day.
Again, absolutely wonderful timing.
“…we are confident that the worst is behind us and the end of load shedding is finally within reach”
Utter nonsense. Any light at the end of the tunnel has clearly got nothing to power it.
