Carbon Copy

carbon tax policy for South Africa

South Africa's cabinet has adopted a policy that is planned to include carbon taxes and incentives for business transformation. While cabinet accepts there may be short-term pain, there should be long-term efficiency improvements and opportunities to improve South Africa's competitive position globally.

While it is predictable that business objects to the tax, their argument (at least as reported in Cape Business News) is flimsy. They say that government is unlikely to use the revenue efficiently. Well, maybe so, but what has that to do with the price of cheese? Business doesn't use energy efficiently because it is so unreasonably cheap in South Africa - should we ration their energy on those grounds? They also say that government should use incentives rather than taxes. Yes, I too would rather eat apple pie than broccoli, but that would make me fat, just as a high-carbon diet has made business dirty.

Presumably the businesses that object are proponents of a free market - at least where this is to their benefit - but targetted incentives are a more dangerous market intervention than a carbon tax that doesn't dictate how you should achieve carbon efficiency. Both are risky, but incentives depend heavily on government knowing what the solution is, while a tax doesn't make any such claim.

And for heaven's sake, business will benefit from reduced energy costs if they reduce their carbon diet, so it is quite possible that the increased cost of the tax will be offset by the reduced cost from improved energy efficiency. That would mean small pain for business, accompanied by environmental benefits and improved energy security. And continued access to global markets that will increasingly be excluding carbon-intensive products.

Note to Eskom: The CEO of Duke Energy, the US electricity utility that is the 12th largest CO2 emitter in the world, believes in the need to move to a low-carbon future. CEO James Rogers says "we need a sense of urgency, but not a sense of panic... a sense of hope, not a sense of fear." He says "energy efficiency is one of the five ways you generate electricity - it should be treated as a production option."

DIY electric cars

Ever wondered what it would take to convert your car to an electric-powered vehicle? A Finnish group is launching what it hopes will be the start of a global movement for retrofitting petrol-powered vehicles. eCars - Now is a forum for people wanting advice from experts, and to bring together buyers and sellers, and mechanics with the know-how to carry out electric car conversions.

And if you want to see what electric and other alternative-fuel vehicles can do over long distances, the Zero Rally Africa takes place in January 2009 from Victoria Falls to Cape Town, followed by a conference focusing on renewable energy and potential applications for development, especially in the context of Southern Africa.

gobsmacked

If we ever manage to reduce reliance on private cars to any appreciable degree, the benefit will extend beyond reduced emissions from driving and from making the car in the first place. There will also be less space dedicated to cars - on the roads, in parking lots and household driveways - and more for green lungs, play areas, community gardens or whatever tickles our fancy. Using that logic, conventional wisdom among progressive planners is that if we actually reduce the number of parking bays provided at offices, shopping malls and so on, we can encourage a reduction in driving.

But wait! North York, part of the City of Toronto, thinks paved driveways are a good thing. So good, in fact, that people have been stopped from ripping up driveways that they want to replace with greener alternatives. On their own private properties! Is this just plain dumb, or what?

Dabbawallas of Mumbai

Seth Godin wrote about the Dabbawalla phenomenon in Mumbai back in April 2007. This is a low-tech organisation that delivers food to hundreds of thousands of customers a day. The magic of this operation, and the reason that big western organisations are queuing up to hear about it, is that the employees deliver the right goods to the right destination with an error rate that is the envy of just about any other delivery organisation you can name: less than one error in 6 million transactions.

The 5,000 employees in the flat organisation build customer relationships, and also use a simple colour-coding system to maximize efficiency and minimize errors; but what really appeals to me is that they use a level of technology that suits who the employees are (largely illiterate) and where they work. There's more about it on the Dabbawalla website.

screw the spotted owl

Amateurs are more sincere than professionals. Rehad Desai, co-director of the film You Chuse: the future is free, reminded viewers at this month's Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, that a sex worker might deliver a technically good performance, but she will probably leave you less than satisfied. Why? Insincerity. Amateur sex - the kind that happens in the bedrooms of committed couples - might be less slick, but is likely to be more satisfying because of a greater emotional investment.

What has sex to do with the Spotted Owl? I'm coming to that, in a roundabout way.

You Chuse, which presents the case for the open source movement and restoration of the creative commons, makes the intriguing point that as intellectual property dominates more and more of modern life as a financially tradable commodity, there is less space for things to develop for reasons other than financial reward. The film suggests that science and most human endeavours advance by building on what went before. If "what went before" is copyrighted and unavailable for others to use, then advancement only takes place in the R&D departments of corporations, and is driven by financial returns alone. Individuals with little or no capital have no opportunity to contribute.

will real communities emerge from the new breed of ecocity?

Another sustainable city being planned from scratch is Ecobay on the Paljassaare Peninsula in Estonia, overlooking the Baltic Sea. Inhabitat raises an interesting point regarding these built-from-scratch communities:

While they certainly present an organized and efficient vision of modernity, some staunch critics (most notably Jane Jacobs) have raised concerns that they may limit the organic self-organizing capacity of a city left to grow of its own accord. Since these super-funded cities are currently in the process of creation, it has yet to be seen how their communities will grow and develop.

dancing against climate change

Just too late for my visit to London last month, a night club called Surya (Sanskrit for Sun God) opened recently at King's Cross. I am not one to regularly frequent clubs, but this one would have been interesting for its claim to be an ecological club, with an electricity-generating dance floor that developer Andrew Charalambous claims could supply about 60% of the club's electricity needs.

Even better news is that Charalambous plans to open Surya2 right here in Cape Town incorporating piezoelectric dance floor, wind turbines, rainwater harvesting and waterless urinals. [via Weekend Argus, 19 July 2008]

A similar club is to open in Rotterdam in September - Watt, by the Sustainable Dance Club.

growth of a monster

For many environmentalists, Walmart is the epitome of how a retailer can take low-density sprawl, accelerate it, and cause havoc by magnifying the trend towards increasingly car-dependent cities. Just for fun, here's a visual representation of how Walmart took over America between 1961 and 2007.

if you want to get somewhere - slowly

I'm not sure how this would work, but here's a post claiming that you can sail across the ocean on a wave powered boat: not wind power, wave power.

Hey, I'm back :-) no thanks to Telkom, the "dis"utility I have now ditched for leaving me without Internet access for a month :-( and blaming everyone but themselves ("Have you checked that the cable is plugged in?").

hydrogen economy is more hype than substance

I have said before that hydrogen's usefulness is more as a storage medium than as a source of energy in its own right. But here's a well-referenced assessment of the science by Alice Friedemann, suggesting it isn't of any value even for storage:

The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more energy than you can earn, because in order to do so you must overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, move heavy cars, prevent leaks and brittle metals, and transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn’t matter if all of these problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.

And the conclusion? The energy and environmental challenges facing the world are far too serious to spend effort on dead-end technologies. Policy needs to guide investment based on a firm grasp of both science and geopolitical realities. The risk is that lobby groups will sway government to create misguided incentives, such as the US corn subsidies aimed at ethanol production.