New oil & gas movie has locals aghast

November 12, 2024

DAILY DISPATCH

It was honest, objective and accurate, says energy sector viewer

Mike Loewe

Mesmerising seascapes showing the vast rainbow of our marine animals and a revelation of the deep connection people of the Eastern Cape feel with the ocean appeared to resonate more with a Buffalo City Metro audience than the business-as-usual behaviour of powerful fossil fuel renegades seeking to turn SA into a petro-state.

They had come to see film-maker, artist and activist Janet Solomon present her new film, Burning Blue, in Buffalo City at the weekend.

Brought to the city by the post-Shell seismic protest group Green Ripple, Solomon. from Durban, cut a diminutive but eloquent figure against the likes of Green Ripple mentor Dr Div de Villiers, at her show in the Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer hall at the East London Museum.

About 90 people attended the three showings, one of them at the Coastal Education and Visitors Centre in the Nahoon Point Nature Reserve. The comments were positive

Dr Mandy Uys, of the Gonubie Estuary and Marine Community group, said it was "ex-cellent - gather all your family and friends and don't miss it*

A viewer, who asked not to be named because the person was involved in the energy sector, said: “No matter where you are on the green/climate spectrum, this is a brilliant movie. It was honest, objective and accurate."

The 90-minute film, submitted as an exhibition for Solomon's PhD dissertation, tracks two themes:

• The recent oil and gas rush being pursued by mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe and opposed by a broad array of public groups and individuals led by the Oceans Not Oil alliance which Solomon helped found, and layers for environmental NGOs: and

• A long journey from the start of time tracing humanity's ancient intimate relationship with the sea and coastline and how the oil and gas industry threatens all of this.

Mantashe, the ANC-alignedImpact Oil & Gas and Shell's oil drive to make billions of rand, and the "imaginary" Solomon calls it — of local jobs and a positive spin on -de-velopment, do not find favour with a plethora of sources in the film, who range from sangomas, indigenous and public activists, artists, and environment and climate organisations to a number of highly qualified marine scientists.

The illegal and barely pub-licised journey of Shell's exploration right on the Wild Coast is carefully unpacked, explaining how the critical role of holding thorough environmental impact assessments (ElAs) was stripped from the department of forestry, fisheries & environmental atlairs and given to the rampantly pro oil-and-gas exploration mineral resources & energy department at the time when Operation Phakisa was launched in 2014.

In its place emerged an "environmental management plan" which has been disparaged as being devoid of proper science and designed to avoid this science from happening.

At this point, exploration was escalated and it became apparent that the SA oceans had been carved up into a puzzle of rights and offered for sale to oil majors for oil and gas discovery and extraction.

Amid an array of layers of contrasting images of oil vs nature, the film takes viewers through to the High Court case in Makhanda where Mantashe and Shell lost.

The granting of the right was found to have been unlawful.

Much of the case, which has gone on appeal all the way to the Constitutional Court where the oil lobby has been defeated but for a small crack at starting the application from scratch, hopefully with proper science — centred on the paltry attempt of the government and Shell to consult people who would be most affected by oil and gas exploration and ex-There is some dramatic courtroom argument in the hilm from advocate Tembeka Ngeukaito-bi, who accuses the energy department of unilaterally changing the law to let the oil drillers through the door.

Activists, among them fishers and homestead farmers on the Wild Coast, describe how they were fobbed off or not informed at all about oil and gas exploration licences- a situation which has now changed, with every attempt to exercise the right now being challenged from the announcement of intent to start blasting up to the High Courts

Operation Phakisa is bluntly described by one activist as merely a policy tool to cut a road for oil and gas exploration and not about the ocean economy and conservation.

Activists also pointed out the dangers of drilling at extreme depths of 5km in an area where the steamroller Agulhas current barrels through, and of ever stronger storms and swells, themselves a result of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels.

Drilling would be disturbing deep water-systems of life that had been there since the start of time and would probably never recover.

Spilt oil would be washed by the Agulhas current southwards, spilling in loops over the Agulhas basin and would find its way into the Atlantic and spread north.

The shocking story of Shell's destruction of the environment and livelihood of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta and the military tribunal-ordered execution of activist and Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders in 1995, was vividly told. There were dreadful statistics and images of how often oil wells on the ocean floor around the world blew and leaked, and the many days it took to "cap" or turn off the leak.

SA is ill-equipped to cope with a major oil spill.

SA Maritime Safety Authority Captain Ravi Naicker, senior manager of navigation, protection services & environment, says: "Do we have sufficient resources to look after our coastline if we have a major spill? No, we don't. The country does not have a stockpile of dispersants.

*We have no surveillance air-craft.

"With the new technology. called synthetic aperture radar, if there is a spill you can identify the source of the spill.

"It is available but we don't have it."

Aside from the locked-in struggle of environmentalists and oil miners, the film delves into the history of the Khoi people as the first to emerge as gatherers and hunters who lived off the ocean and at how their rights were taken away from them under apartheid.

They suffered further under the new regime, with smaller fishers saying their catches plunge for two to three years after a seismic ship has blasted their fishing grounds.

There are a number of interviews that explain the spiritual relationship between indigenous people and their ancestors who have made their way through the streams and rivers into the ocean where they are not to be disturbed.

Moments after a sangoma says: "The ancestors were very cross. there is a big big storm coming, the film cuts to the June 3, 2024 tornadoes in KwaZulu-Natal which killed 12 people and destroyed 7,000 houses. The footage is taken in the storm and is dramatic.

While the film delves into local social issues about the environment., the overarching role of climate change in the picture is anchored by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres who says: "We can all do the maths. At this rate, the entire carbon budget will be busted by 2030. We are burning through the budget at reckless speed, spewing out about 40-million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The difference between 1.5°Cand 2°C of warming will be the difference between extinction and survival."

Wits University climate professor Francois Engelbrecht fears SA could experience double the warming, even as high as 6°C, crushing maize and cattle farming.

The film ends with a source saying: "The oil energy system is dividing the community."

Another source said: “Right now, there are monopolies at play and that doesn't work. We know that, even in the wild, if one species dominates it's a very unhealthy system. It requires system change."

The challenge was "to advance an agenda for a better world".

*We can all use renewable energies but there is no political will.

Climate change for the good required holistic thinking from people with incredibly differ ent views about the future" who needed to sit down and think about what was needed to make the changes.

We need to make it tangible in a new way. That fine, closely woven understanding of nature and human interaction - is going to help us find the solutions to climate change and global warming"

The film is being shown selectively ahead of being offered to film festivals so is not available online, but Solomon's first film. Becoming Visible, can be found at https//www.becomingvisibleafrica/the-movie

• Listen to Ted Keenan's Dis-patchLIVE podcast interview with Janet Solomon at https://www.dispatchlive.co.za/daily-dispatch-podcasts/