fossil fuel
oppression
Fossil fuels are a constant presence in most of our lives and whilst we know that they are responsible for large scale effects like global warming, we don’t feel the brutal and damaging effects of the fossil fuel production process equally.
From the destructive extraction processes to the actual production of energy, fossil fuels are incredibly dangerous to people living in their immediate surroundings. The populations of people who are forced to inhabit areas near to fossil fuel power stations are dominated by minority and low income communities who can’t afford to move or block their construction. It is undeniable that ending fossil fuel power is an issue of environmental, social and racial justice.
breathing fossil fuels
These marginalised communities, disenfranchised from the ostensibly beneficial fossil fuel-consumer relationship, are forced to live on the front lines of fossil fuel power: unprotected and vulnerable. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the towns of Middleburg and Highveld, South Africa where people are forced to breathe in some of the most polluted air in the world.
Environmental activist Thomas Mnguni used to live in Middleburg where he would wake up to find the windows and floors of his home covered in a layer of black dust. He lived between two Wolvekrans coal mines which thickened the air with a smog of particulates and harmful chemicals. After his 14 year old son was diagnosed with Asthma, a doctor recommended that Thomas move his family away from the highly polluted area to help his son’s condition. Now that he lives 6 miles further away from the mines his asthma is improving but other people who can’t afford to move are not so lucky.
The average salary in Middleburg is R190,000 per year, just under £10,000, but many of the lower paying jobs pay as little as £3,000. For these low income families moving isn’t an option. They are forced to breathe air that contains 10 times the levels of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide considered safe for human health. This level of pollution causes a range of illnesses from asthma to lung cancer but the large coal companies that provide the majority of jobs in the area do not offer any option for workers to move - instead making them live in the filth that their factories produce.
Thomas works for groundWork a Southern African environmental justice organisation. They recently filed a law suit with the Vukani Environmental Movement arguing that the air conditions around the coal plants violate the residents’ constitutional right to “an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being.” The suit hopes to set an international precedent for access to clean air to be included in the human right to a healthy environment.
GroundWork have been active in challenging the government on coal, shutting down the proposed 600 MW Khanyisa coal-fired power plant in the Mpumalanga province. The campaign started in 2018 when groundWork appealed the Khanyisa water use license to the Water Tribunal - a novel way to target fossil fuel plant construction. GroundWork are also part of the Life After Coal coalition whose protests led major investors to abandon the Thabametsi coal plant in 2020. The planned 557 megawatt power station would have caused extensive damage to the climate, local people, and scarce water sources in South Africa’s arid Limpopo Province. In winning these fights, groundWork protect people from living with fossil fuels and highlight other avenues by which to prevent or shut down harmful coal power stations and save people from breathing in polluted air.
But they face a steep challenge to establish this law in South Africa where 94% of their energy comes from coal. South Africa is the world’s sixth-largest coal exporter, seventh-largest coal producer, and thirteenth-largest CO2 emitter, with per-capita emissions twice the global average. Despite the imperative to reduce coal power both on an environmental level and to protect the lives of people in South Africa, the country’s state-owned electric utility, Eskom, is currently building the third and fourth largest coal-fired power plants in the world. Coal is deeply ingrained in South Africa politics through the African National Congress party’s funders who have financial interests in the coal industry. During the Apartheid regime, South Africa consolidated its coal mining operation and created Sasol, a state owned company that converted coal into liquid petroleum on a previously unseen scale.
