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There are mistakes a country can recover from, and there are mistakes it cannot. The proposal to build a giant chemicals and fuel plant on the edge of Hopefield belongs firmly in the second category.

Hopefield is a town of fewer than 7 000 people, the oldest settlement on this stretch of the West Coast, and it sits inside the Cape West Coast Biosphere Reserve, one of the most ecologically sensitive areas anywhere on Earth. The fynbos that carries the town's name grows nowhere else. Around it lie pockets of critically endangered renosterveld, the spring daisy fields that draw botanists from across the world, and beneath it all critical aquifers. The Elandsfontein aquifer drains westward into the Langebaan lagoon, a wetland of international standing, and the Sout River runs north into the Berg estuary, another such wetland. This is not ordinary veld. It is natural capital that took millennia to assemble and cannot be rebuilt once it is gone.

What is proposed for it is an industrial complex the size of a small oil refinery: 61 hectares of plant rising 25 to 40 metres into the air, with flare stacks reaching as high as 60 metres, running continuously every day for the next quarter-century. It would suck up millions of litres of water a day, while to power it, 2.6 million solar panels would be laid across 3 000 hectares of farmland, encircling Hopefield to within a kilometre and breaking the horizon from Darling to Vredenburg to Langebaan. A landscape admired for hundreds of square kilometres would be permanently disfigured.

But the visual blight is the least of it. The plant would manufacture and store large volumes of flammable and hazardous material on top of a sandy aquifer, in a fire-prone region, between two world-famous wetlands that depend on that aquifer's clean inflows to survive. In Europe, in a similar context, a facility of this kind would almost certainly never be approved.

Yet every tonne of fuel produced is destined for Europe, to satisfy a mandate that exists only because Brussels willed it into being. Under European Union (EU) regulations, ironically motivated by environmental concerns, a rising share of the jet fuel sold at European airports must be of the type that would be manufactured at Hopefield. Yet aviation industry experts say the fuel is among the most expensive ways yet devised to move an aircraft, costing many times more than existing stuff, and that forcing it through will raise fares, cut routes, and weaken carriers already living on margins of a few percent.

This compelled demand is the only reason the plant may be viable at all and the evil in that is it is only coming to South Africa because the Europeans would never allow anything of its like in an equally sensitive area of Europe.

Hence, unable to honour at home the obligations it imposed itself, and unwilling to accept the environmental risks, the EU is exporting the burden to the developing world, where land, sun, wind, and, evidently, environmental scrutiny come cheap. This is greenwashing in its most cynical form: a wealthy bloc buying its own virtue by offloading the real damage onto a poorer country, which is left with the refinery, the solar desert, and the hazard while Europe keeps the clean conscience and the carbon credit.

Let's call it what it really is... eco-colonialism.