Well, after a week's absence - I have been moving house and travelling on business - here's a feel-good Friday post. Wired presents five people who just might make you feel better about the future of humanity on this wonky planet of ours. News from the World Science Festival held last week.
This mobile solar cooker is on display at the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town. According to the display panel,
The Sustainable Energy Society of South Africa, in collaboration with the Soweto Information Centre in Johannesburg, has initiated a project to promote the use of solar cookers in urban and rural environments of South Africa.
Mathias Weber decided to make a solar cooker more mobile by mounting it onto a tricycle, which is used by the Greenhouse Project for Recycling Programme. His 'Solar Tricycle Pilot Project' has been active in Newtown, Johannesburg, since May 2005 and has created a huge awareness of alternative cooking methods.
The tricycle-mounted solar cooker can cook porridge, pop popcorn and heat up a variety of dishes, using only the energy of the sun.
Currently, street food vendors in South Africa use hazardous, unhealthy and costly methods of cooking, such as paraffin stoves, Primus stoves and Imbaulas (perforated paraffin tins with a fire inside). These cooking methods release harmful gases and ashes into the atmosphere and contribute to the development of respiratory diseases.
Solar cookers are clean, non-polluting, efficient and cost-effective and offer a very viable alternative for street food vendors.
For photos of the cooker out in the community, and a description of Mathias' work, have a look at the Solar Energy Project. The site also describes other solar food projects in a number of countries.
Four years ago, academic Bjørn Lomborg put together a panel of economists under the banner of the Copenhagen Consensus Center to come up with a prioritised list of projects to address a selection of the world's great contemporary challenges. Lomborg's assumption was that money allocated to address climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers could be most effectively spent if priorities were based on rational economic assessment. The resulting list put climate change strategies down at the bottom of the pile.
Lomborg's panel is meeting again this month for a fourth anniversary update, so it's worth considering why climate change fared so badly last time, and what might be different now. SourceWatch has noted that the Copenhagen Consensus "has been strongly criticised by NGOs such as Oxfam for drawing attention away from the existing consensus built up over several years and codified in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals." Given the political will needed to put significant resources towards any of these development challenges, this is a serious charge.
Today is Earth Day. Joseph Romm explains why he thinks our attention is misdirected.
I am happy to announce that Carbon Copy did not win "best green blog" in the SA Blog Awards last week (because, after all, Urban Sprout deserves the title), but thanks to everyone who voted. The main purpose of the awards is to raise the profile of blogging in South Africa, and I am sure that has been achieved. Climatologist Simon Gear mentioned the green blog finalists in today's edition of Redi's Green Tip of the Day on Talk Radio 702. (I think the podcast is only available for a day.)
With the UK government planning a series of eco-towns to act as models for zero-carbon urban development, there are a few objections. The Campaign to Protect Rural England says that the towns shouldn't be on greenfield sites. They could rather be "eco-extenstions", or other forms of development that are potentially less damaging to the environment by avoiding sprawl and improving existing urban areas. The CPRE suggests a number of tests by which the eco-towns should be judged before their plans are finalised.
Urban planner Nicholas Falk adds that some of the eco-towns are on sites that were previously rejected as locations for new towns on other grounds, suggesting that criteria for sustainability aren't being applied properly. The objections don't seem to be over the concept of eco-towns, but over appropriate locations for development.
But a DCLG spokeswoman said the policy would encourage “well planned sustainable growth” on brownfield and greenfield land.
“The statutory planning process will ensure that areas will be protected from inappropriate development,” she added. “These settlements will be designed to the highest standards, make the most efficient use of land, and be designed sustainably and to zero-carbon objectives.”
It's got skylights, natural ventilation, a grey water system, a car that runs on biodiesel... and it's a gingerbread house. That's right, the folks at bakeforachange held a competition to see who could come up with the most sustainable gingerbread house design. It's too late to enter, but you can view the results on Flickr. [via SCQ]
We all like lists, right? Here is a compilation of places vying for the title of "greenest community" - some built, some still on the drawing board. I guess a bit of rivalry is good for innovation. Courtesy of Wired:
There are a few others missing from the Wired list. Iceland and New Zealand have also pledged to achieve carbon neutrality as countries. They have joined the UN's Carbon Neutral Network, announced by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at its special session in Monaco last week. Costa Rica and Norway are also part of CN Net, as well as Sweden's Växjö and three other cities: Vancouver in Canada, Arendal in Norway, and Rizhao in the northern China province of Shandong. There are five corporate members, one being South Africa's Nedbank.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP executive director, says of CN Net:
This new initiative supports the formal negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Here governments need to navigate the Bali Road Map to a successful conclusion in Copenhagen in 2009.
The CN Net can assist in building confidence through demonstrable action at the national and local level on the art of the possible.
Sustainability is about performance, not about picking the "correct" technology. No individual strategy is right for every occasion - it's a question of what moves the world forwards instead of backwards. Responding to a Popular Science ranking of America's 50 greenest cities, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging raises the interesting challenge of how to define "forwards" and "backwards", and makes a few initial suggestions:
Unfortunately for the politicians, it's often the more mundane actions and low-profile strategies that make the biggest impact. They are also harder to measure, but I believe we'll have to try.
According to the American Lung Association, 55% of Americans live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. In South Africa, Johannesburg has vehicle emissions, dust from mine dumps and untarred roads, and excessive burning of coal especially in informal settlements. Cape Town contends with tyres being burned illegally to recover scrap metal. And even small rural towns have to deal with pesticides blowing through houses. But what are the world's dirtiest cities? [via Trash Media]
