Desalination

Companies will increasingly have to be established in coastal areas owing to the desperate shortage of water in South Africa.

A new report by the international McKinsey consultancy says government needs to make an annual capital investment of $365m (about R2.8bn) in its national water infrastructure. If it does not do so, South Africa could experience a 30% shortage of water by 2030.

Johan van Rooyen, director of water resources planning at the Department of Water Affairs, says government is intensely aware of the situation and is working hard to avoid future water problems.

He points out that it is important for water to be used more economically. South Africans need to learn to employ it more effectively. Consumers in the metropolitan areas could, for instance, with little effort use up to 15% less.

The aim is to save more, but that is only a start. Some water borne toilet systems, for example, use up to 20 litres of water per flush. That’s 20 litres of water that needs to be re-purified. Toilets that use five litres work just as well, Van Rooyen points out.

Linda Page, spokesperson for the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, says the McKinsey report was compiled with the cooperation of various parties, including the department.

These include bodies from the private sector, such as SABMiller and Coca-Cola.

The McKinsey report indicates that, if South Africa experiences a water shortage, various industries – like the industrial, agricultural and mining sectors – will have to compete with each other for the available water sources.

This could considerably elevate water prices, Van Rooyen points out. He says it could result in industries’ increasingly having to settle at the coast.

Sea water would then be substantially cheaper to desalinate and use than fresh water.

Source: Fin24

Climate change

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

Source: Time Online

Al Gore

I am a fan of Al Gore. I do not doubt global warming.  But the wrong arguments have been made on renewables all along.  The current Climate Bill is, in fact, a jobs bill.

Whatever you think of climate change the fact is we’re subsidizing a market sector in hydrocarbons that is not growing, and not producing jobs.

Our Department of Energy still pays for oil and gas research. Corporate taxes are kept low in states with heavy concentrations of hydrocarbons. Energy companies still enjoy accelerated depreciation.

This despite decades of enormous profit, and increased efficiencies which mean that oil, gas and coal don’t really create many jobs. And the cost of using hydrocarbons, pollution and habitat damage, are never accounted for at all.

In contrast, our economic rivals are passing all sorts of incentives for renewable development. China now leads in solar cell production. Germans have used market incentives to construct nearly 24,000 megawatts of wind power.

Energy for the Sun, from the wind, and from the tides is a growth industry. It increases the self-sufficiency of any country that uses these resources. It creates thousands of new jobs. So Germany’s economy is recovering and China’s is back to rocketing along, while we deal with unemployment over 10%.

Source: Smart Planet

Powerful ideas, practical actions

Rebecca Adamson offers Native American views on scarcity, Wall Street, and how to thrive in hard times.

Indigenous peoples have known hard times. There are signs of drought, crop failure, and forced migration over the millennia, and of course these peoples survived centuries of colonialism. When we were looking for some wisdom on building a new economy, I immediately thought of Rebecca Adamson. Native peoples have developed societies that function within ecological limits and counter the tendency of societies to polarize between rich and poor, powerful and excluded. Adamson, a Cherokee, is founder of First Nations Development Institute and First Peoples Worldwide. She works globally with grassroots tribal communities, sits on the boards of the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Calvert Social Investment Fund, and is an advisor to the United Nations on rural development.

Sarah: When you look ahead at the coming months, perhaps years, of economic downturn, what do you see coming, and what does indigenous experience teach us about what we should be doing?

Rebecca: I’ve gotta say, it’s about time the bubbles burst. I don’t want to see anybody without a home or a job, but Wall Street had to come to reality sooner or later. I just wish they were taking the brunt of it instead of Main Street.

President Obama assumes that through more spending we can stimulate the financial sector. But why would we want to save something that had no productivity for human life? Until we move away from that paradigm, I don’t hold out too much optimism for the next months, or the next years, or even the next seven generations.

What indigenous experience tells us is that an economy is about fairness and equity. It should be for the well-being of your people and the sacredness of creation. You take care of your place because it provides for you. And the place provides for you because you’re protecting it. We have to begin to rethink our economic system so that it’s accountable for our place.

Sarah: So what is an economy for?

Rebecca: The economy used to be about livelihoods and the provision of a household, but we’ve lost that purpose. We have created an economic system with a goal of material wealth, rather than human development.

We need an economy that provides for people. It has to be fundamentally, radically brought back into control and harnessed for the well-being of society. Not for making money, but for making dignified livelihoods and for the betterment of community.

Sarah: It seems to me that there’s a tendency in any society for wealth to concentrate—if you have a little bit more than someone else, you can use that little bit of additional power to get even more than others. How do indigenous societies counter that?

Rebecca: An indigenous system is based on prosperity, creation, kinship, and a sense of enough-ness. It is designed for sharing. Potlatches, give-aways—these involve deliberately accumulating wealth as a person or as a family or as a clan for the sole purpose of giving it away. The potlatch or the give-away takes place at very specific times of life—birth, naming ceremonies, puberty. Often, if you receive a gift during a potlatch, you are then obligated, at some point in the future, to give a gift. That puts in motion a continual, ongoing requirement for redistribution.

Sarah: So someone with very high status can’t accumulate too much wealth?

Rebecca: You can’t get high status unless you give gifts. Here’s an example. We just got back from a visit with the James Bay Cree. I learned there that the very first ceremony that a baby undertakes is called a walk-away ceremony. James Bay is very cold and so the baby’s first days of life are spent inside the lodge.

Once the baby takes his first steps, they prepare for a walk-away ceremony. A hide is tanned, and an elaborate outfit is made for the baby to wear as he takes his first steps away from the lodge. The baby’s family and the clan gather outside. The baby walks away from the lodge as far as he can. Then everybody calls the baby back in. The child is carrying a bundle filled with food. He comes back into the circle of the family and the clan, and then goes from person to person sharing the food. By doing this, a child has learned to both become his own person and to come back to share.

Source: The New Green Economy

The New Green Economy

For a while, things were looking gloomy. The founders of Washington, D.C.‘s Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative had their hearts in the right place; they even had their paperwork in the right place. But they hit snag after snag as they tried to fulfill the dream of converting their neighborhood to solar power: Contractors who didn’t want to sell solar panels in bulk. Confusion over the role of the regional utility. And the inevitable red tape of local politics.

Eventually the group’s persistence paid off, and this month they’re celebrating their fiftieth neighborhood solar installation. We caught up with co-founder and president Anya Schoolman to find out how it all happened, what’s next, and what advice she’d give to other communities who want to follow the sun.

Q. Can you explain what the Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative is, and how and when it formed?

A. The Mt. Pleasant Solar cooperative emerged from dinner table conversation I had with my son Walter, then 12, and his friend Diego. They had seen “An Inconvenient Truth” and they wanted to know, if the Earth was going to overheat in their lifetime, “Is, um, anybody, you know … going to do anything about it?” The next question was, “Why don’t we get solar power in our neighborhood.” So we decided we would try to do something.

Our neighborhood consists mostly of rowhouses with flat roofs. We thought if we got enough neighbors together who wanted to adopt solar arrays, some solar contractor would offer us big discounts. We got the neighbors together and quickly learned it was going to be a lot more complicated than we originally thought. So we set out to to educate ourselves about all aspects of solar and to share that knowledge with as many people as possible. That’s where the “cooperative” concept really proved valuable. Read more at http://www.grist.org

Source: The New Green Economy