| | End Game It has been snowing for 6 weeks in the US. The North American media, with typical restraint, have dubbed the season Snowpocalypse. read more ... |
| Water - Getting Tanked What got YOU conserving electricity? My bet is that it was a combination of the flood of publicity during the dark days of the 2009 load shedding and the simple expedient of being flayed with a 25 % increase year on year for three years. read more ... |
| Population - Too Many of Whom? I’m always interested by the overpopulation crowd. For reasons that I have never fully understood, every person who comes up to me after a presentation to pitch the idea that human population is the root of all environmental evil will always preface their insight with, “I know it’s taboo to talk about this but…” read more ... |
| Auditing for Fun and Profit One of the most illuminating things you will ever do in the management of your home is to take the time to fill out an energy calculator. read more ... |
| Coffee The Kilimanjaro ice cap has become a poster child for global warming. The glaciers are retreating daily and we are unlikely to be more than a decade or so away from losing them entirely. read more ... |
| The Environment Gets Personal What a month it’s been. At a time when the world’s leaders should be closely attending to events at COP17 in Durban, Europe’s leaders have had their hands full averting a collapse of the Euro. And quite rightly too. The spider in the bedroom requires greater and more urgent action than the hungry bear on the other side of the fence. read more ... |
| Betting Everything on our Ability to Adapt COP 17 is on its way and we have another opportunity to watch the human animal wrestle with its own nature. Here is a golden opportunity to look beyond short term disadvantage, and pull together to avert the environmental disaster that awaits us if prompt, decisive action to tackle climate change isn’t taken. Unfortunately, what will actually happen is not very much. read more ... |
| Little Solace There is very little solace for those who hope that we can appeal to humanity’s higher faculties. Looking back over history, we have made many startling about turns and changes of course but every single one has been forced upon us by external crises or has been driven forward by profit. read more ... |
| Gosh Until District 9, every UFO movie worth its salt had the aliens landing in the US. I personally think that this is an entirely accurate reflection of our interaction with extra terrestrial civilisations. Across the world, really, really big things can happen, but if a CNN camera crew isn’t there, we only learn about them weeks, months, maybe even decades later. read more ... |
| Think Again I recently spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around a completely ‘off-grid’ house, powered by a combination of solar panels and liquid gas. What continues to strike me about these set ups is the degree to which green energy solutions are about looking at every aspect of your power, not just at where your electricity comes from. read more ... |
| Take Control South Africans revel in their frontier mentality. We like to think of ourselves as tough, rugged and adaptable. It shows in our newspaper headlines, our holiday choices and our international ex-pats’ reputation as hard workers. It certainly shows in our driving. So, why the constant whinging around greening? read more ... |
| Climate Change 2008 will be remembered as the year in which two great strides forward were taken in enforcing more environmentally responsible behaviour in South Africans. The first kicked off around 10am one morning in late January with a decision by Eskom to institute emergency load shedding. read more ... |
| Chicken or Beef Forget carbon footprints. Water is the big bear in the woods for South Africa. Already, it seems like Cape Town barely needs a week of sun in winter to set them back for the rest of the year. Everywhere else relies on ingenious but massive projects to shift water over mountains and between reservoirs to ensure that our towns don’t run dry. read more ... |
| Driving There is a craze in Japan and the States called hypermiling. Petrol heads with too much time on their hands, and I suspect, not enough female energy in their lives, compete with each other and themselves to have the lowest possible fuel consumption in their cars. read more ... |
| Swiss Diss Last week, a Swiss friend of mine was outraged because she had just been nailed with a €1350 fine for straying a smidgeon over the suburban speed limit. Well, maybe I must clarify. If she was truly Swiss, I doubt she would have been that angry (or indeed have been fined in the first place).
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| Recycling Who’s got time to recycle? I mean, look at my life. I’m schlepping off before dawn to provide a report that no one believes on a TV channel that nobody watches. Then it’s a rush back home to clean up dog poo, make the wife tea, explain to my daughter that she can’t have chocolate for breakfast and explain to my son how income tax works.
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