Still in the dark about Earth Hour?

Yes yes, I’ve been told that Earth Hour is all about “raising awareness” about “climate change”. I’ve also commented that I really don’t think it’s necessary to raise any more awareness about something we can’t get through a single Pistorius-free day without having rammed down our collective gullet.

In addition, I may also have mentioned that Earth Hour gives slacktivists the perfect opportunity to enjoy their favourite pastime, namely thinking that they’re making a difference without actually making a difference at all. In fact, as that article on Slate pointed out, lighting an inefficient candle (which most bunny-huggers and pseudo bunny-huggers will do this evening) is actually more harmful to our precious environment than using a fat incandescent light bulb for an hour (or, by extrapolation, any given period of time). But how much more harmful?

Well, I’ve found someone who has done some rudimentary calculations to find out exactly how much:

I know candles are nice and romantic – but you’re taking paraffin wax, in the form of a candle, and burning it, very inefficiently, at a low temperature. This stuff is pure hydrocarbon – it’s a heavy alkane fraction distilled straight off crude oil. This stuff is getting so scarce that nations are prepared to go to war just to secure it, remember?

A candle flame burns at a low temperature – so it’s a thermodynamically very inefficient source of energy – and most of the energy released in a candle is wasted as heat, anyway.

Even if 80% of your electricity comes from coal and fossil fuel fired power stations, as it does in Australia, burning candles is very polluting and certainly very greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions intensive, even more so than electric lighting.

Luke Weston then spoon feeds us through his calculations, just so that there can be no confusion as to how he reaches his conclusion. I’m not going to reproduce all those calculations here, but suffice to say that the results (standardised for the amount of light produced – apples with apples and all that) are as follows:

A incandescent bulb produces 1.11g CO2 for each hour that it is burned.
A candle produces 10.69g  for each hour that it is burned.

Therefore, for every candle that is burned to replace electric lighting during Earth Hour, greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the one hour are increased by 9.6 g of carbon dioxide.
If the light output from a 40 W light bulb was to be completely replaced by candles, this will lead to the emission of an extra 295 grams of carbon dioxide per over simply using the electric lights – if the equivalent of one thousand 40 W bulbs are replaced by candles, that’s an extra 295 kilograms of CO2 emitted.

I don’t know about you, but I can feel it getting warmer already.

Thus, if you really want to “make a difference” this evening (a positive difference, that is), you’ll be far better off sitting in the dark for an hour. And, if you want to DOUBLE the your contribution to saving the planet, you could do it for two.

But then we have to remember that there’s football and rugby in Cape Town tonight which you’ll want to watch on your dirty, still not ever so energy efficient flatscreen TV, dwarfing any potential benefits of switching off your lights and (not) firing up a candle.

Fortunately, this darkness and/or watching sport will (possibly) restrict the amount of “other activities” that some people have been suggesting might be an enjoyable and romantic by-product of an environment-destroying candlelit evening. I say “fortunately” because my wife is away this evening because each baby produced from those “other activities” will add so much to your household carbon footprint that you might as well stop washing out those Marmite jars and begin weeping right now:

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

So. Please spend your Earth Hour in the dark. No lights, no candles, certainly no TV and ABSOLUTELY NO HANKY PANKY!

And even then, please don’t pretend that you’re actually making a difference.

Out & Aboot

I took the boot out for some exercise this afternoon:

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Summer hasn’t quite left us yet, as you can see from this colourful but otherwise rather uninspiring pic from Wynberg Boys High.

This as Sheffield suffers in freezing temperatures and under heavy snowfalls. I still miss those sort of days, but I wouldn’t want to be on crutches in the snow and ice, believe me.

Market

I’m not even sure where I’ve been. Well, I know where I was, but I don’t know what was there.
Not by name at least*.

It was one of those trendy market places, which, you’ll remember I have a fair amount of disdain for.
This one was at Cape Point Vineyards in Noordhoek and it ticked all the boxes, including being cliquey, serving craft beer and plenty of free range, organic food served by small independent producers with cool names like ‘The Kitchen Cowboys’, ‘The Lamb Man’ and ‘The Ice Cream Ninjas’. Really.

Ugh.

Fortunately, they were accompanied by great company, superb weather and those views down to Long Beach.

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This was a special public holiday edition of the affair, starting at midday instead of late afternoon and to be fair, it was nice enough, with (just) enough space to sit and enjoy oneself. However, it was getting busier and busier, even as we left towards 5:30pm. I would imagine that it went rapidly from ‘wonderful’ to ‘not actually ever so pleasant’ judging by the traffic jam trying to get in.

But if markets are your thing, this was great. Even if they’re not your thing, it was really not a bad afternoon out.

Would I recommend it? Yeah, nice, chilled, but not too often.

See you next March 21st.

* OK, apparently it was the Noordhoek Community Market.
Ever so Lentil Curtain. 

Don’t Panic!

Great news from Gauteng: Pretoria Zoo’s 2 metre (7ft) black mamba has escaped. And no-one knows where it is.

Craig Allenby, the zoo’s marketing manager, said staff realised last week that the snake’s terrarium was empty.

“The area was immediately cordoned off, and stayed cordoned off for two days while we hunted, but in vain. We suspect the snake could have slithered into the roof, but we can’t get in there because of the angle and the narrow gap.”

There was no need for hysteria, he said, as the black mamba was in all likelihood preparing for hibernation, and was in a constricted area, with little chance of it reaching any member of the public.

No need for hysteria indeed, because herpetologist (or “snake expert” as IOL decribe him) Professor Graham Alexander tells us that black mambas are dangerous although not aggressive. Unless, of course, they feel threatened, in which case:

“…there’s a good chance that it will attack. Their poison* is neurotoxic, and a bite can lead to a heart attack within 30 minutes.”

So dangerous and aggressive then. And venomous.

No need for hysteria though, ok?

Ah, these experts and their contradictions: overall, it’s going exceptionally well.

As ever, it’s all Happy Days in Pretoria.

* Did he really say "poison" and not "venom"? Really? 

Own goal

If this interpretation of the new Cape Town Liquor By-law is accurate – and there’s no suggestion that it isn’t – then it’s an absolutely massive own goal by our supposedly liberal DA city council.

  • No alcohol can be sold for off-consumption on Sundays, except for wineries.
  • No alcohol can be sold for off-consumption after 6pm on weekdays.
  • No sale of more than 150 litres of alcohol to any one person unless they have a liquor licence or special permission from the Chairman of the Liquor Board.
  • No-one may keep more than 150 litres of wine in their home without a liquor licence.
  • No drinking alcohol in vehicles.
  • No drinking at school functions ever. This applies even if the function is held away from school grounds and on a licenced premises.

For starters, I do agree with the no drinking in vehicles and the school function thing makes some degree of sense on a basic level. But that’s where my support for this ends.

There’s absolutely no question that Cape Town – as with the rest of South Africa – has a huge problem with alcohol. But I fail to see how this new bylaw will help to solve that. Illegal shebeens currently operate with impunity across the city; why will this bylaw prevent them from continuing to do so, with such limited enforcement of the laws that already exist?

The nod to Sundays as being somehow special is backward and unnecessary. Again, exactly how that assists with reducing alcohol abuse is beyond me. Or are we planning on baby steps here – to reduce problem drinking by 1/7th? Is that enough?

And then the whole 150 litres issues. No buying for big parties and even if you could, no taking it home. No wine collections of over 200 bottles – if you have one, you will be breaking the law in a couple of weeks. Are they really going to do dawn raids on posh houses that they suspect may have a wine cellar? It’s pathetic.

And this is just on off sales. The implications for restaurants and bars – and with them, Cape Town’s vital tourist industry – are even more worrying.

I have nothing but contempt for these new regulations. They are short sighted and unhelpful and they risk alienating a huge proportion of the voting public. Without proper enforcement, any law is useless anyway and as we’ve point out with the traffic, there really is no enforcement of our laws here. So what’s the point?

The one thing with our city council is that they do have a history of actually listening to public opinion, so maybe there is some hope that the outcry that this stupid bylaw generates will result in it being changed to something more sensible in the future.
But in the meantime, on the 1st April, we in Cape Town will be living in a beautiful, but backward city. And that’s very sad.