Podcasts from the Edge

Gas is minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe’s New Big Thing. He can barely contain his irritation with the renewable energy lobby as it racks up legal successes against fossil fuel exploration offshore. We should, he told and energy symposium last week, avoid becoming “an island of angels” on the question of energy and fossil fuels. Listen though to senior UCT researcher Jesse Burton as she guides Peter Bruce through the risks associated with using gas as a transitional fuel as we move from coal to renewables by 2050 of before. The National Business Initiative has just produced a seminal document and proposals for a gas-based transition and the time for making decisions is tight. For gas power in 2035, a call would have to be made next year. Burton warns though that that new gas investments could quickly become “stranded assets” as technology runs away with the energy solution. Now is the time for cool heads.

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Valli Moosa, former environment minister and deputy chair of the Presidential Commission on Climate Change, tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts From The Edge that South Africa’s transition to green technology is inevitable. “Nobody wants to invest in fossil fuels,” he says. The Commission is charged with negotiating a “just transition” from our dependence on coal to a net zero carbon economy by 2050. Moosa is relaxed about the transition. “You’re going to need a degree of gas,” he says Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe is “only doing his job” by speaking up for the coal industry: the investors and workers are his constituency and the protests at offshore seismic surveys for oil or gas are passing shows. Very soon, he reckons, renewables will be clearly cheaper than fossil fuels and current debates will simply be academic.

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Former Eskom chief nuclear officer David Nicholls was once chief engineer on a nuclear submarine. So he isn’t scared of the technology. What does scare him is “renewable” energy technology. As he tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “If you’re going to tell me renewables are the solution then why do you need a policy document/“ His point being that no-one wrote a policy document for mobile phones. There was no need to. They just worked. To fix our energy future Nicholls, now chairman of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa, reporting to minerals and energy minister Gwede Mantashe, says we need more nuclear. The government’s plan is to extend Koeberg’s life from 2024 but then, he says, it must press ahead with another 2500MW of nuclear written into the Integrated Resource Plan, the famous 2019 IRP. That would mean two new units of around 1100MW each added to Koeberg and the return of some form of the old Pebble Bed Modular Reactor that South African scientists created and then abandoned. The energy fight may be only just beginning.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa's problem as he approaches ANC elections at the end of this year is which of the two horses he rides -- party unity and clean government -- does he get off? Listen as former Cosatu head and Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa colourfully educates Peter Bruce on the intricacies of the ANC's big election year. Quite frankly, Shilowa suggests, "we are better of leaving the ANC to worry about its own affairs". Somehow we have to fix the country ourselves. Opposition parties don't help that much. We all know what's wrong with the country, but where are the big ideas to fix it?

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Peter Bruce speaks to author and journalist Simon Mundy about his groundbreaking new book, Race For Tomorrow, gripping, real-time dispatches from the frontlines of the way climate change is reshaping our world. From Mongolia to California, Israel and Brazil to Ethiopia and Iceland, humans are suffering from events they cannot predict or control while others experiment with technologies to slow down rising temperatures or to take advantage of them. Mundy, now Moral Money Editor at the Financial Times, is a treasure trove of stories and while he is in no doubt the world is in deep trouble, he’s also seen enough to reassure himself that humans are smart enough to stave off the worst. That’s not to say nothing changes. In fact, everything changes. After the last Ice Age, at took 15 000 years for sea levels to rise 120m. Today our ice is melting much, much faster. Take a deep breath.

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Peter Bruce talks exclusively to Wits vaccinologist and Dean of medicine Prof Shabir Madhi about our response to the Omicron Covid variant. And there is good news and bad (beyond that fact that Japan has entirely closed its borders, including to the economies that have shut SA out). First, early outbreaks with the variant appear to be relatively mild, at least among vaccinated people. Madhi reckons it could take two to three weeks to see what kinds of pressure hospitals come under. The bad news is that we don’t know enough yet. Madhi warns people who have had just one shot of the John & Johnson jab need another one and that two shots of the Pfizer vaccine provide much greater protection. He hopes the government soon imposes vaccine mandates for entry into shopping malls, Post Offices and the like (but not hospitals). And, he says, get the hospitals prepared. One of the first ways of doing that is to clear your trauma unit, a move which always end up with restrictions on alcohol sales. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Is South Africa in a growth crisis or a debt crisis? Economists and experts wildly disagree. One important figure pressing the government to provide more social relief in the face of widening poverty and hardship is former investment banker Colin Coleman. Listen in to this edition of Podcasts from the Edge as Peter Bruce and Coleman, a strong supporter of President Cyril Ramaphosa, clamber over the rocky terrain SA and Ramaphosa find under their feet. Do we have a debt problem, a growth problem or a leadership problem? Coleman concedes Ramaphosa has been slow but insists real growth is within reach.

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If you’re on the Left, or trying to score quick political points, then President Cyril Ramaphosa is imposing a harsh period of fiscal austerity on South Africa. If you’re in the sensible middle, he is doing nothing of the sort. South Africa is already spending more than it earns, as our constant budget deficit proves. Listen as Peter Bruceasks his favourite economist, Thabi Leoko, why she responded so sharply last month to suggestions from former Goldman Sachs SA chief Colin Coleman that over and above current deficit spending, much more was required in order to stimulate the economy back into growth….

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Listen in as digital entrepreneur and former FNB CEO Michael Jordan joins Peter Bruce on Podcasts From the Edge to make an impassioned plea for Icasa, the telecommunications regulator, to stand up to local cellphone giants and retrieve extra digital spectrum loaned out at the start of the Covid pandemic. Telkom and MTN have gone to court to stop Icasa taking back the emergency spectrum it lent them early last year. But this, warns Jordan, threatens a a major economic reform — a planned auction of spectrum to the private sector by the end of the first quarter of next year and, he says, a competitive auction process could see a host of new opportunities open up in the market.

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The last election Jacob Zuma fought as leader of the ANC were the local government polls on 2016. The ANC vote collapsed to just over 54% nationally and set off a series of events that eventually saw him removed from office. Listen now as razor-sharp independent elections analyst Dawie Scholtz (@DawieScholtz on Twitter) tells Peter Bruce in this latest edition of Podcasts from the Edge that 54% at the 2021 local government elections on November 1 would be almost miraculous, so great has been the change in our political landscape. Scholtz and Bruce test the Democratic Alliance’s battle to bring out its base, perhaps especially the Afrikaans -speaking part of it, and the increasingly sophisticated strategising of the Economic Freedom Fighters as they try to plug the gaps in their constituency — women and the elderly.

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