Abstract
In September 2021 at a United Nations climate summit in New York, Xi Jinping announced that there would be no further Chinese coal-fired power plants along the Belt and Road Initiative, which stretches as far as South Africa. Instead, the Chinese operator of South Africa's single largest Special Economic Zone proposal - in rural Makhado - and his local allies suggested that solar power could supply energy for the $10 billion project, including high -emissions industrial projects. This raised the question of whether firms engaged in mining, smelting, processing and other carbon -intensive activities would pick 'low -hanging fruits' within the renewable energy sector (instead of that power going into the grid for broader consumption). Their incentive is to do so, in order to safeguard the so-called Minerals -Energy Complex from Western climate sanctions - threatened, on grounds of high CO2-inputs to export products including steel, aluminium and petrochemicals. In spite of a 2022 United Nations Development Programme endorsement of the project, social and environmental resistance has intensified, but the introduction of solar power for high -emissions metal manufacturing presents a special challenge. Two techniques associated with ecological modernisation - natural capital accounting and the Social Cost of Carbon - may prove relevant to civil society critics of 'extractivism', in shifting the narrative further across space, time and scale.