GREENer HOUSE

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.