GREENer HOUSE

This blog is about practical changes that you and I can make in our daily lives to tread more lightly on the earth. It is not about broader environmental issues and policies. Still, I can’t help digressing a bit to touch on the explosive comments made by Tony Leon at Oxford University yesterday:

Rich people are good for the environment: they have fewer children, they can afford cleaner, efficient technologies, they use resources more efficiently, they don’t chop down trees for firewood, they don’t kill wild animals for food, and they have the time and the money to enjoy and protect nature.

I feel a little bit sorry for the Democratic Alliance leader. He has taken a lot of flak for the comment, and it was not in the context of arguing for the nerve-gassing of South Africa’s squatter settlements. He was pleading for business investment to uplift the poor of Africa. If you look at the rest of what he had to say, there was much to agree with.

Climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge that my generation and yours will need to grapple with in the 21st century.

The possibility of an increased incidence of extreme and massively disruptive weather events have the potential seriously to undermine the developmental goals of my country and the continent.

Yet we require rapid economic growth to meet the challenges of the Millennium Development Goals.

Does growth for us mean greater carbon emissions?

Almost certainly yes, at least in the short to medium term.

Does it mean we must not be mindful of our current, admittedly small, contribution to climate change? No. . . .

. . . I am not arguing that the developing world must aim for the ecological footprint of, say, the United States. That would compound the impending climate catastrophe, and hasten our collective demise.

Naturally, as we aim to improve the livelihoods of those in Africa, we must not bypass the goals of sustainability, and enter into the path of what is termed “overshoot”. . .

. . . South Africa now gets most of its electricity from coal, but in the future there is no reason why the whole of Africa could not get all of its electricity, and have much left over to export to Europe, without burning one ounce of fossil fuels.

It seems rather clear from these, more complete, quotes that the South African media once again has been quoting out of context. The only thing I can disagree with in these comments is the part about South Africa’s “current, admittedly small, contribution to climate change.” South Africa ranks 10^th in the world for greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis.

But I cannot ignore Leon’s comment about the rich, not because it is so extreme, but rather because it is so commonly held. I have heard it all before, from rich, complacent South Africans who believe that because they never directly snare antelope, shoot rhinos, or chop down trees, they are innocent of any environmental damage. There are several other variations of this pass-the-buck mentality: “I can’t do anything about the environment because its the big corporations that do the polluting;” or “It’s the Americans;” or the latest variation, “It’s the Chinese.”

I would love to show these people, just for one day, what South Africa’s air would look like if each poor person riding in a bus, train or minibus taxi was suddenly driving a Range Rover instead. And where would there be room for forests and animals if every shantytown dweller on a 6m x 10m plot was moved onto a half-acre garden? How many rivers would run dry when they started to water their lawns year-round? How many fynbos plants would wilt in the greenhouse heat after all those former shanty-dwellers switched on the electric underfloor heating in their 250 m² houses?

Yes, the rich have the potential to tread very lightly. Their wealth allows them to make choices about how they get around, how they eat, and how they heat their homes. The problem is that they rarely make the right choices.

To twist these facts into an argument for keeping down the poor for the sake of the earth would be even more ridiculous than Leon’s statement that rich people are good for the environment because they don’t eat wild animals. We must help the poor escape poverty not to save the earth, but to save our humanity, to save our souls. And we must create a world in which wealth and waste are no longer synonymous.

This is a momentous day for the environmentally conscious in South Africa for two reasons: it’s Car Free Day and it’s the South African premiere of “An Inconvenient Truth.”

So far, I’m handling Car Free Day pretty well. My children caught the spirit and walked to school. They even phoned four neighbour children to join them. It’s a 12 minute walk, and I’m embarrassed to admit that we drop and fetch by car far more often than we walk. But that’s what Car Free Day is all about—spurring people to look for ways to break old, car-dependent habits. Whenever we do walk to school, I find that everyone arrives at school in a good mood. I’m sure we’ll walk more in the coming weeks.

I managed to accomplish my only other away-from-home errand today by bicycle. So far, I haven’t been in a car. My wife, however, has driven today, and I know that it’s easy for me, with an office at home. We both commuted by subway when we lived in Washington, DC, but there is no comparison between the modern Metro system there and the public transport available where we live now in Johannesburg. I do have one neighbour who travels to his job at Wits by bus, however, and he doesn’t complain.

Carpooling is another option. I shared a ride to a choir concert this week with a fellow chorister and we vowed to continue our carpool during weekly rehearsals. The Johannesburg government is encouraging carpooling by setting up a database of people who are willing to share rides at RideShare or RideSmart. (They don’t seem to have made up their mind what to call it.) If you give them your home location, work location and work hours, they will tell you who else works similar hours and lives and works within 1.5 kms of you.

I would love to hear from anyone who had an interesting experience going Car-Free or who has tried RideSmart. I also would like to let people know about what similar efforts other cities are making, if any. Click on “comment” below to add your thoughts.

An Inconvenient Truth opens today at Cinema Nouveau theatres in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town. This documentary explores the issue of global warming, largely through the eyes of dogged environmental campaigner Al Gore. In the U.S., this film was one of the most successful documentaries in years, and received very positive reviews. Yazeed Kamaldien in the Star today dismissed the film as “boring.” Shaun de Waal of the Mail & Gaurdian warmed to it a little bit more, and made it his Movie of the Week.

I can’t judge yet, not yet having seen the film. But it’s worth contrasting Kamaldien’s review with that of Roger Ebert, perhaps America’s best known and most popular reviewer. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert wrote:

When I said I was going to a press screening of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a friend said, “Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor…ing!” This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore’s concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

In other words, you owe it to yourself to ignore Kamaldien and make your own judgement.

I was returning from a wonderful trip to Mapungubwe National Park yesterday, and hit a terribly boring stretch of the N1, north of Pretoria. To stay awake, I played with the fuel economy gauge on my Honda Jazz. I usually reset this only when I fill the tank. (Average consumption 6.4 l per 100km if I’m driving, 7.1 if sharing the car with my wife.) Every 15 km, I reset the gauge, and changed the way I was driving.

At 120 kph with the air conditioning on, the gauge said the car was using 7.0 litres per 100 km. With the air conditioning off, this fell to 5.6 litres. This confirmed my habit of rarely using the air conditioner except for hot days on the highway. Even then, I switch it off for uphills—a procedure that I have not vetted with any automotive or air conditioning experts, but it makes sense to me. Keeping the air conditioning off, I tried another 15 kms at 110 kph. Consumption fell to 5.3.

Finally, I tried 100 kph. This was the shocker. I was using only 4.3 litres of petrol per 100 kms. I need to try this again to confirm this result, but if true, I could have saved more than 14 litres of petrol by driving at 100 rather than 120 on a hypothethical highway trip of the same distance. That would spare the atmosphere 35 kilograms of carbon dioxide. (Actually, it’s far more than that, because a third of South Africa’s petrol is derived from coal, so it results in more carbon dioxide, but I haven’t figured out how to calculate that yet.)

Yes, the trip would also have taken just under an hour longer each way, but I was having a pleasant time with my son, working on his history project on Mapungubwe. If I had been listening to a book on CD, I would have been in even less of a hurry. I wouldn’t drive 100 on a busy two-lane highway signposted at 120. Traffic would back up and drivers might start overtaking dangerously. But on a multi-lane, divided highway, 100 is a reasonable—and safer—speed. When I first learned to drive in the States, the legal limit on all highways was considerably lower than 100 kph. (55 miles per hour.)

Try this experiment—or a variation of it—on your own car, if it has a consumption guage. Let us know the results by clicking on “comments” below.