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/ 18 December 2007
Home for Jon Adams is a Randburg suburb no different to hundreds of thousands of comfortable northern suburbs residents. There are even a couple of solar collectors on his roof that provide hot water for the house. But here the similarities stop, because the roof also has 36 solar panels each generating 80W peak power to provide electricity for his home.
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/ 12 November 2007
If there’s a vehicle that is red-hot in our globally warming world, it’s the plug-in hybrid. The best-known hybrid, Toyota’s Prius, is now 10 years old and has sold more than 800 000 units worldwide. It is available in South Africa, where about 20 vehicles are sold on average each month.
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/ 26 October 2007
The only green reference in the budget was Finance Minister Trevor Manuel bemoaning the fact that it did not contain a pro-environment stance. He indicated that he was looking for his colleagues in the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism to play the lead role and promised that the next Budget would include a green component.
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/ 20 September 2007
My doorbell rang last week. They had come to collect the garbage. I trundled out one of those plastic bins with lid and wheels that are omnipresent across Johannesburg. It was full to brimming. But this was no ordinary bin. Blue with a green lid, it belongs to Resolution Recycling, which takes away your recyclables twice a month.
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/ 14 September 2007
Government has gone into the carbon trading business. The state-owned Central Energy Fund has set up its own carbon trading operation. Headquartered in London, the operation is intended to ensure that South Africa maximises the benefits for the country from the rapidly growing trade in carbon credits. Carbon credit projects already in the pipeline stand to earn the country about R900-million.
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/ 7 September 2007
A 12-year study by the World Bank using new technology has found that African countries flare enough gas each year — 40-billion cubic metres (BCM) — to power half the continent’s electricity needs if put to productive use. Just one country, Nigeria, flares 23 BCM annually.
Eskom and Sasol are among the companies that will be reporting under the carbon disclosure project in 2007. South Africa is the first developing nation, alongside Brazil, to participate, says a report by global wildlife fund WWF released recently.
”Eskom will in all likelihood rate as the highest greenhouse gas producing company to report from any country, with 200million tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to Shell’s 105million tons.
Go by bike from Pietermaritzburg to the Cape and no end of people will express surprise at your undertaking. Some will offer an opinion on your sanity. On day 13, in the part of the Karoo known as the Camdeboo, this fellow stops his car and does just that. Now he gets out and introduces himself, writes the Mai & Guardian’s Kevin Davie.
Eskom will decide by year-end whether it will proceed with a new 100MW facility powered entirely by the sun. Concentrated solar power is a relatively new technology worldwide, but it has the backing of the World Bank because it is the only zero-greenhouse-gas-emission technology that has the potential to rival coal-fired power as a low-cost solution to the energy crisis.
As a country we do not do too well on the green front. We are generally energy inefficient and wasteful. But we can take a small measure of pride next month when the first solar panels resulting from South African taxpayer-funded research and development come out of a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant costing upwards of R500-million.