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as TotalEnergies and Shell. The government has issued 20 exploration licenses on tracts along much of the country’s 1,740-mile coast- line, according to the South African Oil & Gas Alliance. Not counting Prince Edward Island, 5 percent of the country’s oceans are protected by 41 marine protected areas. TotalEnergies last year shelved its drilling plans. “We will talk to Shell and con- vince them to come back,” said Mantashe, the minister. “Every mining and oil project is subjected to environmental assessment. I don’t know what the court has based their decision on. We will respond fully and put experts in the boxes.” On April 20, TotalEnergies said it would hold consultations that would cover geophysical data, exploration wells and subsea infra- structure for production. TotalEn- ergies said it wants to pursue two “significant” discoveries of light liquid hydrocarbons it made in 2019 and 2020. Kenneth Creamer, an economist at the University of the Witwa- tersrand, said that other interna- tional companies are running into trouble in South Africa. Recently, Amazon halted a sizable investment in Cape Town after the de- scendants of the Khoisan people asserted that the Amazon facilities were being built on their ancestral lands. In both the Shell and Amazon cases, “the South Africa economy, which has been flagging for the past 10 years, sorely needs the growth, investment and job crea- tion that would likely flow from these business activities,” Creamer said. Eventually the project might be given a “green light,” he said, “but there is always a risk that by that time investors might have moved on to less litigious jurisdic- tions.” Zukulu, the activist and tour guide who was the lead complain- ant in the court case against Shell, said he was not going to celebrate the court ruling, which was temporary and governed only the right to consultation. “We say you don’t celebrate while you are still in the forest,” he said. “The reality is this is an inter- im interdict, and Shell has the sup- port of a party that is not going anywhere. This government is try- ing by any means to take the coast away from us — our government, our very own Black government, doing this, year-in year-out. They would trash our ocean for short term gain.”

Impact Oil and Gas, that it had also acquired Impact’s permits, which were issued in 2014. Seismic blasts took place for a month before a court ordered a stop. During that month, Cole found fish on the shore with their nostrils flared out, and a type of beaked whale that he’d never seen in the flesh before on a beach. Most whales, one of the world’s least studied animals, live almost entire- ly in deep water and rarely wash up on shore. Cole does not think it was a coincidence. The seismic work temporarily blocked by the South African court is common, but still controversial. It comes before actual drilling. Ar- rays of air guns are attached to cables and dragged behind boats. The air guns then fire compressed air that creates sound pulses that reverberate off the sea floor and provide subsurface images. With new technology, these images are three-dimensional and reduce the chances of drilling dry holes or wells with quantities so small as to be not economically worthwhile. In 2020, there were 325 surveys done worldwide, Shell says. Shell’s Langin said the company takes precautions. Each seismic ship working for Shell has a 500- meter exclusion zone (or about a third of a mile) so that if any marine mammal is seen inside that zone, the seismic shots stop for an hour after the zone is empty. Moreover, he said, Shell does not acquire data during breeding or migrating times. “We avoid those in all areas where we work, and it’s no different in South Africa,” Langin said. But environmental groups have not been persuaded. “For whales and other marine mammals, life is a symphony of sound,” said the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is oppos- ing seismic tests off U.S. coasts. “They use sound to find food and mates and generally navigate the vast ocean. To them, a seismic blast is like a bomb repeatedly going off in their home every 10 seconds.” “For marine mammals that de- pend on sound communication for their social interactions and sur- vival, seismic surveys are the equiv- alent of blinding entire human communities,” said Enric Sala, a conservationist and explorer-in- residence at the National Geo- graphic Society who has led a Pris- tine Seas campaign. It remains unclear what will happen here, especially since so much of the South African coast has been leased to companies such

however, came on May 26, 2021, when a Dutch court said that by 2030, Shell must reduce its reported worldwide emissions by 45 percent over 2019 levels. The court — responding to a class-action law- suit brought in 2019 by Friends of the Earth Netherlands, six other Dutch nongovernmental organizations and about 17,000 individuals — said Shell’s climate plans were insufficient to prevent serious climate change, leaving the company in danger of “imminent breach” of the reduction order. “This decision marks the first time any court in the world has imposed a duty on a company to do its share to prevent dangerous climate change,” said a memorandum by the respected law firm Cleary Gottlieb. Although Shell plans to appeal the decision, it was required to start complying immediately. “Similarly situated companies should expect to be bound by the same rules,” the Cleary Gottlieb lawyers warned. The information data provider IHS Markit, a subsidiary of S&P Global, said in a research note that oil companies in Africa “faced in- creasingly insistent challenges from civil society and constraints on financing due to climate con- cerns.” Friends of the Earth, an environmental activist group, last December challenged British government’s financial backing of Mo- zambique’s liquefied natural gas facilities. A letter signed by 263 civil society organizations last year called on banks not to finance Uganda projects. In South Africa, local activists won a temporary stay of Shell’s seismic survey by declaring that they must be properly consulted and their consent given before any large-scale economic project can take place. The judge said that costs to Shell as a result from a stay could not outweigh the importance of the constitutional right to consultation. “I stay here, I belong here, I have a right to responsibly live here as a person,” said Ludude, echoing a sentiment the courts here ulti- mately found compelling. “If Shell wants to come here, they have to consult us on everything they do. That must be the basis for economic development, not a decree from somewhere.” The political argument for oil development on the Wild Coast put forward by the South Africa’s gov-

planes in the air, well over a billion
automobiles on the roads and plas-
tics in the kitchen — the underpin-
nings of the contemporary econo-
my. When prices rise and consum-
ers suffer, however, the oil industry
thrives; in 2021, Shell earned
$19.3 billion, and it still trailed
ExxonMobil.
The fight in South Africa echoes
a larger debate about how fossil
fuel companies should reduce and
eventually eliminate their carbon
emissions — and the implications
for regions that have benefited
from drilling. Climate activists ar-
gue the companies can still make
plenty of money without drilling
for new resources.
“Shell can make money. No one
is stopping them from being a good
citizen,” said Desmond D’Sa, coor-
dinator of the South Durban Com-
munity Environmental Alliance,
which has been training unem-
ployed people to fish. “We just don’t
think they should be drilling for oil
and gas.”
But Shell’s chief executive, Ben
van Beurden, said activists over-
look key factors in the current pe-
troleum arithmetic. If Shell is go-
ing to reach net-zero emissions by
2050, he said, it will need to use
money from its oil and gas business
to fund a transition to a new type of
enterprise based on renewable en-
ergy and carbon capture and stor-
age.
Van Beurden also said that dur-
ing that transition, demand for oil
and gas will remain high. “We see a
significant struggle for supply to
keep up with demand. And I think
that is going to be with us for some
time to come,” he told shareholders
on the company’s last quarterly
earnings call.
Yet Shell and other companies
are facing mounting legal and reg-
ulatory challenges in a growing
number of countries.
Shell still has nearly two dozen
major exploration and production
developments worldwide, but it
has dropped plans to invest in the
Cambo oil field off the Shetland
Islands in Scotland for regulatory
reasons. It has solicited bids for its
onshore oil fields in Nigeria, a rich
vein for more than six decades. In
2017, Shell sold its interests in Can-
ada’s oil sands, considered among
the most greenhouse gas-intensive
oil grades in the world.
The most jarring setback of all,

SOUTH AFRICA FROM A

Drilling resistance grows

donation in the third quarter last year from the Batho Batho Trust, according to the Electoral Com- mission of South Africa. Ten other political parties received dona- tions that quarter. The trust owns 47 percent of Thebe, founded by ANC leaders in 1992 to start buying up chunks of a wide variety of companies just as apartheid was end- ing. One of Thebe’s many invest- ments in 2008 was a 28 percent stake in Shell’s refining and mar- keting operations in South Africa. Recently, South Africa’s deputy chief justice, Raymond Zondo, re- ferred Mantashe for criminal in- vestigation into alleged miscon- duct including the acceptance of security upgrades at three of his properties. Mantashe has rejected all allegations, local newspapers reported. “The ANC is a sellout party,” said Wanda Ludude, 33, Zingisa Ludude’s son. “For them, this coast is just a beautiful deal. We don’t want to be used by them or by anyone. It is like being colonized.” Scientists were up in arms, too. Kevin Cole, who has studied the Wild Coast’s marine life for four decades, obtained a copy of the environmental assessment Shell commissioned and said he was as- tounded by its lack of detail. “It was basically a rubber stamp,” he said. “It used whaling data from the 1960s to approxi- mate current populations. It didn’t mention the strong current we have here, whose constant upwell- ing means you could never contain, maybe never even access the catas- trophe of an oil spill here. The whole ecosystem could implode.” Shell says that last year when it bought half interest in offshore blocks held by a company called

erning party, the African National Congress, was simple: Shell will bring economic development to a place that badly needs it. The hills here are dotted with impoverished villages and split by rivers that gush through ravines to the sea. Most of the coast is hours from a paved road. This is not a common holiday destination, like the rest of South Africa’s coast. But this region is famous, too, for bucking against power. Its people rose up against the apartheid government in the 1950s and won a homeland, Transkei, that did not abide by the most oppressive stric- tures of White rule. That inspires Sinegugu Zukulu, 51, a tour guide, local plant expert and activist who has led movements here against strip mining, a toll road and now Shell. “This is one of the last coastlines in the world that belongs to Indig- enous people,” he said on a recent morning while visiting a remote stretch where the Msikaba River empties into the ocean. “Poverty is being used to impose unwanted development on us. Big, extractive projects do not lift people out of poverty — you can look at anywhere on Earth and that is proven. These projects are about shareholders.” When Mantashe came to the region, he was booed and heckled, part of a broader controversy roil- ing South African politics. The former president, Jacob Zuma, is on trial for corruption so egregious it has been termed “state capture.” Vast swaths of the economy were allegedly signed over to cronies or companies who outbid on contracts through both legal and under-the-table means. The ANC received a $1 million

RODGER BOSCH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES A giant puppet of a snoek, a type of local mackerel, is displayed in Cape Town as hundreds of people take part in a 2021 protest.

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