raining on the party

OK, now I'm pissed.

South Africa is in a party mood, with the bokke getting ready for the Rugby World Cup match on Saturday. Here in Cape Town, it seems like everyone is wearing Springbok colours. Spring is in the air, the match is on everyone's lips, and the excitement is palpable. Not quite a public holiday, but it might as well be.

Imagine my irritation, then, on opening the morning paper and finding that Eskom, our beloved provider of intermittent power, is pissing on the party. With acid rain. I have said before that we'll have to live with coal because it's cheap and abundant; we'll just have to bite the bullet and find ways to reduce the impacts in the short term and gradually wean ourselves off the stuff. But now Eskom is throwing sulphur in our faces - just because it can.

A new coal-fired plant being built in Medupi (near the Botswana border), to be operational by 2012, will not have flue gas desulphurisation technology installed, despite using low-grade coal that produces higher emissions than high-grade coal. It just happens, reports Earthlife Africa, that South Africa exports its high-grade coal to Europe so that their power stations can be cleaner.

Earthlife Africa said new coal-fired plants would increase South Africa's greenhouse gas emissions by about 25 percent. In 2003 South Africa emitted 379 million tons of greenhouse gases.

At 8.61 tons a person, this made South Africa one of the top 20 greenhouse gas emitters in the world, says an earlier Earthlife Africa report.

Maybe it's a good thing the Springboks aren't playing on home ground.