Category: economic issues

Breakfast & Baboons & Buffoons at the Porter Estate Market

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It’s been a while since we headed down to Zwaanswyk and the Porter Estate Saturday Morning Market. Lots to see and do here, but first, it was breakfast time and while the kids amused themselves in the sandpit and on the jungle gym, I amused myself with bacon, egg, veal sausage and onion. Which was nice and exceptionally good value at R40.

Add to that an enamel cupful of the local Moer Koffie:

Now, Moer Koffie is a strong, dark brew. The kind of stuff you want to drink after you’re had a moer se nag out on Long Street, like we had. I’m not even sure what type of beans are in there and honestly, I don’t think anyone really cares because the senses are far too intrigued by the enamel cups and condensed milk condiments. Please promise me that you won’t try it with the illusion that Moer Koffie is going to effortlessly win any awards, because I really don’t think that’s the point. Even still, it’s still worth the experience of drinking something other than the usual brands that ferry their wiles through the mainstream.

You have to be a bit careful at fresh produce markets like these. The produce is good and rather difficult to resist – olives, bread, olives, sausage, olives and olives – but it’s also often expensive. The lamb chops at R98 a kilo are a good example.
Oh, and this morning, you also had to be careful to avoid mountain bikers cycling through the market. There’s actually no sign saying that they can’t cycle right through the middle of the couple of hundred people (and kids) there, but I think that’s probably because it should just be common sense. After all, it’s not like there are signs in multi-storey car parks telling you not to jump off the top floor or at Spur telling you to slap the kids in the playroom – it’s simply reasonable behaviour.

Cyclists claim that they get picked on a lot, but in my opinion, they deserve it.
This guy is the exception that proves the rule:

One further issue at the market this morning was the troop of about 40 baboons which was heading towards the market when we arrived. Fortunately, they stayed away, as they would surely have ransacked the place and eaten all the pricey lamb chops.

Do baboons like olives?

Missed by blitz, but…

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While I drove all around the city this week, I didn’t pass through a single roadblock in the supposed traffic blitz that was an attempt to rake in the almost R600m that the city drivers owe in fines. We all heard about the roadblocks though. Especially the big finale on the M5 on Friday afternoon, which @capetownfreeway sensibly described as “Congestion”, rather than “Police trying to catch fine dodgers”.

Colour me unimpressed. Although I have never had a traffic fine in my life, how many drivers who did owe didn’t have to pass through a check either?

What has impressed me more, however, is the adoption of the new Cape Town Traffic Bylaw, which means that (amongst other things), repeat offenders will be fined more (and we’re assuming that they will pay up?) and that they may have their cellphones taken from them if they are seen using them at the wheel.

“They can’t do that – it’s illegal!” whine the whiners, but they’re wrong. There’s a long-term precedent for impounding of property – vehicles and animals are good examples.

YES, THEY CAN IMPOUND YOUR CELLPHONE. READ IT AND WEEP, IDIOTS.

Just as you would if your motor vehicle were towed away, you will now need to visit the pound in order to redeem your phone.

“This is obviously not a step we were keen to take,’ says JP Smith, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security “but the reality is that distracted driving, mainly due to talking or texting on cell phones while driving, is one of the four major causes of death on the road.” The other three are speed, alcohol and not wearing safety belts.

Distracted driving, as it’s known, is a well-known cause of road fatalities; this includes changing radio channels and talking or texting. At the moment, notes Alderman Smith, the fines for these offences are too small to make an impression and there are insufficient traffic enforcement resources to ensure that offences are dealt with often enough to modify offender behaviour.

“We have also created tougher sentences for driving without a safety belt – another big cause of fatalities. Of course a seatbelt doesn’t prevent a crash, but in the event of such an event, it can be the difference between life and death.”

At last. I hope, as Alderman Smith suggests, that they are serious about using the new bylaw. My kids and I nearly got wiped out at the traffic lights on Waterloo Road today.
We were stationery, since the light was red, the daft cow in the Opal Corsa Lite “S” (seriously, it’s a Corsa Lite – don’t attract further attention by adding a big red letter) came up behind us doing [cough] “sixty”, saw us VERY late because she was texting on her white BB and just missed us, finally skidding into the kerb about 50cm behind us. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, incidentally. So that gives her at least three out of four of the major causes of death on the road.
Anyway, I got a fright, she got a fright (and probably BBM’d her friends about it as she drove away), the kids were unaware, unperturbed and therefore unmoved by the entire incident.

Which is just about the best result I could have wished for, save for her phone being impounded, like her brain obviously had been.

A call to action

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Last night, in Cecilia Forest, in Cape Town, 7 trees, died, from the, cold. The soil that they are planted in drops to -60 at night. There are 130 trees left.

Today, this website, 6000 miles…,  will make sure that every single tree in the forest has a blanket. Once we have enough money for that forest, we will move on to the next one and not stop until we have exhausted our resources.

This is not a goal or a wish or a hope. This will happen. Possibly anyway: have you seen the size of some of those trees? Pretty tall order. Pretty tall trees.

You can help in one of two ways. But whatever you do, you mustn’t do both. You can make a donation based on the number, of commas, I used, in the first sentence of, this post. Donations should be made to my private bank account, and may well eventually be used for the purchase of tarpaulins to wrap up trees.

The second is simply by spreading the word.

Right now, the ‘Social Media World Forum Africa’ has finished in Cape Town, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to annoy people by using the hashtag: #smwf. God knows they’ve annoyed the rest of us with it enough this week. The conference was full of people, from the corporate world, with money, and commas.

We’re going to get their attention for a while. If you can, please choose one (or several) of the following tweets and keep tweeting them. Flood them. As long as you include the #smwf hashtag, they’ll see it, and it won’t even be called spam. Probably. All you have to do is copy and paste one (or all) of the following into twitter.

___________

Last night 7 trees died of the cold in Cecilia Forest. Can you help? #smwf http://u3.co.za/xl
__________

Is it warm where you are? Wood burning stove? Trees are dying, please help. http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Trees can’t ask for help because they don’t have mouths, so I’m asking for them, please read: http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Wouldn’t a good use of social media be to help the trees dying of the cold this winter? http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

You want people using social media to like you? Be nice. Help the trees dying of the cold this winter – http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

How much money did your company make last year? Not being nosy, just asking. http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Dear Social Media World Conference, can you spare a moment and some money for a Douglas Fir that might die tonight? http://u3.co.za/xl #smwf
__________

Thank you,

Me

PS. This message won’t disappear once we’re done.

===================================================

With apologies to I wrote this for you.

On a more serious note, if you wish to donate to the Cape of Good Hope SPCA, their banking details are:

Bank: Standard
Branch: Constantia
Branch Code: 051001
Acc no: 063 002 167
Acc name: Cape of Good Hope SPCA

Please fax a copy of your deposit slip together with your name and address details to Frances Dorer on 021 705 2127 or email dbadmin@spca-ct.co.za so that they can send you your tax certificate.

Stay warm, peeps.

No energy

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Ah, electricity. The elixir of the Gods.
It remains a touchy subject here in SA, with the constant threats of load-shedding as we approach winter. (And believe me, we’ve been doing some serious approaching today.) At the heart of this is the fact that while we want to use lots of electricity, we don’t have a huge amount to spare.
In addition, apparently we also want to be “green” and to reduce our combined carbon footprint.
Oh, and we don’t want anything done in our back yard. That’s very important too.

All in all, it adds up to bad news. We’re buggered. (Technically and metaphorically, anyway.)

“Shale gas could end SA’s oil dependence” says Professor Philip Lloyd, who heads the Energy Institute at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, in a wonderfully rational, fact-filled and unemotional article on the Karoo fracking saga.

If Shell should succeed with its exploration, said Lloyd, jobs would be created on a scale never before seen in South Africa. It would also bring about a large decline in greenhouse gas emissions in this country.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which maintains global surveys of energy resources, Karoo shale gas is the fourth largest resource in the world. It was originally estimated that there was about 1 000 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of shale gas in the Karoo, but geological data collected over the years have reduced this to about 450 tcf.
The tcf unit is an abbreviation used in oil and exploitation to indicate the size of gas resources. It represents a million, million cubic feet.
This is enormous. Mossgas was built on the supposition that there was at most 1 tcf in the undersea gas resource feeding that plant.
If the Karoo resource is even close to the amount indicated by the USGS, South Africa would be able to erect gas turbines for electricity generation all along the coastline. This would end the country’s dependence on coal to generate electricity.

And that’s not all:

Shale gas is also the best available reducing agent for iron ore. New steel works could be created on the Sishen-Saldanha iron ore route, as “beautiful steel” could be manufactured using it, said Lloyd.
More than 40m tons of iron ore is exported along the Sishen-Saldanha route to Asia and Europe. Lump iron ore from Sishen is some of the most sought-after iron ore globally, but cannot be processed into steel here because of the cost, particularly that of energy for heat for the reduction process.

But Lewis Pugh says that it’s not a very good idea.

And now there is celebration as struggling German Chancellor, Angela Merkel pulls the plug (geddit?) on Germany’s nuclear power plants “due to Fukushima”, but probably much more likely “due to lost votes”:

The decision in the early morning hours today by coalition leaders in Berlin underscored Merkel’s flip-flop from a 2009 re- election promise to extend the life of nuclear reactors. She did her about-face after the March meltdown in Japan as the anti- nuclear Green Party gained in polls. Her party lost control of Baden-Wuerttemberg to the Greens in March and finished behind them in a state election for the first time on May 22.

Ironically, in order to address the energy shortfall that it faced when Merkel shut down seven reactors in a post-Fukushima kneejerk reaction in April, Germany began importing electricity from France: a country that produces 78% of its power from… er… nuclear energy. Oops.

But perhaps the local greenies shouldn’t be too happy, as Minister of Energy Dipuo Peters stated today that SA was not considering any German-style nonsense:

“We in South Africa have to understand that nuclear is not a quick-fix solution but a long-term method to address the energy crisis and climate-change challenge,” she said in a speech prepared for delivery at the second regional conference on energy and nuclear power in Africa, held in Cape Town.
Nuclear energy forms part of the integrated resources plan (IRP) that sets out the country’s energy mix up to 2030. Nuclear would contribute 23% of the energy supply.

I hope no-one has asked Lewis Pugh.

Lewis, of course, would surely be delighted were South Africa to adopt wind power. But probably only if he doesn’t live near a potential wind farm. Because wind power may be clean and green, but those big turbines are ever so invasive, aren’t they? And they whine constantly. And they kill birds.
That’s why the residents of several West Coast villages are up in arms about having wind farms erected in their back gardens.

West Coast properties owners are dismayed by the prospect of having a new wind farm in Parternoster, Western Cape and are determined to prevent the huge turbines from being erected near the town.
The wind farm – known as West Coast One – is just one of several that have been planned for the West Coast region and it has been given environmental approval by the Department of Environment Affairs.

The developers, Moyeng Energy, jointly owned by Investec Bank and French group GDF Suez, plan to build 55 turbines near Paternoster. Each turbine is about 80 metres tall and once complete the wind farm will cover an area of 55 square kilometres.

Residents in the small town are trying to mount an appeal against the environmental approval and if this is unsuccessful they intend to take legal action to prevent the development from going ahead. According to Andre Kleynhans, chairman of the Paternoster Ratepayers’ Association the wind farm will destroy the natural charm of this fishing village.

Yes, just like the residents of the Karoo and their objections to fracking; just like the residents of Bantamsklip & Thyspunt and their issues with having a nuclear power plant just around the corner, there are problems with siting even the cleanest and greenest of power generation methods.

So. What now, my eco-warrior friends? Must we produce our electricity by magic?
Because I think Isaac Newton might have something to say about that.

We have to come to terms with the fact that we need electricity and that we need to produce electricity. It’s time to realise that no matter what method we choose to produce it, someone is going to be unhappy.
Who then, is to say which method we should choose, where it should be and whose back yard it must be in? How are the (proven) problems of wind turbines worse than the (alarmist) problems of fracking? Who decides?

And where are Lewis Pugh and the Kelvin Grove protest meetings about the Paternoster wind farm?

Double standards, anyone?

Disclosure: 6000 banks with Investec and buys his petrol at Shell. Deal with it.