Peet Du Plooy

Just before Christmas 2006, the Independent reported that "global warming had claimed its first victim": Lohachara island in India was swallowed by the rising sea. On February 2, the International Panel on Climate Change, a gathering of scientists from around the world, published its latest report on the overwhelming evidence for human-induced climate change and the dire prospects for life on Earth.

South Africa is energy inefficient because we don’t value our carbon resource sufficiently. There are a number of perspectives that, together, make up the picture. One perspective deals with process efficiency — a technological issue — another with the structure of the economy — how much of our economy is fundamentally energy-hungry.