South Africa, the world’s 14th-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has good news: it is exceeding its goals for reducing CO2 emissions. The bad news is, the reason is that South Africa is so inept it can’t keep its power plants operating:

Blackouts will indeed reduce CO2 emissions, but South Africa isn’t doing it on purpose:

“It’s unintentional,” Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Monday.

Indeed. And of course, when you can’t generate electricity, everything else shuts down as well:

Regular breakdowns of the coal-fired power plants that supply more than 80% of South Africa’s electricity mean that less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere and daily rotational cuts of more than 10 hours a day are further limiting emissions from factories.

No power, no factory production–how “green” can you get?

What South Africa is experiencing “unintentionally” is a dry run for what the rest of us will soon experience, on purpose. Wind and solar facilities produce electricity occasionally, so advanced countries will be a lot like South Africa: no power and no industrial production, most of the time. I described the South Africans as incompetent, but what does that make us?