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Showing posts from July, 2012

Mad Activists

To all my activist colleagues: I humbly suggested that we activists are the stupidest people on the planet. Although we have the planet's well being at heart, we spend our hard one earnings and savings trying to help and most people just don't care, are myopic, are disinterested, apathetic, or worst of all, are simply in such a fossilised fuel mythology induced daze that they are simply dead people walking. We put huge efforts into commenting on new laws; into commenting on newspaper articles; into being on the radio; into going to conferences free of charge; into giving; but what do we get out? And how much financial debt is worth all this exposure? And why do we allow ourselves to be used? The government spends Billions on Consultants and then asks us activists to use our extensive knowledge to comment on what the consultants have said and written. We must be completely mad to do this for free. We are essentially doing the consultants work and filling in the blanks.

What's really happening in South Africa? Why are we in a recession?

So what's really happening? South Africa doesn't have enough electricity. Similar to Greece, Syria, Spain, some of the more than 40 countries worldwide whose energy imports either exceed their total exports or are more than 60% of their total exports. South Africa doesn't have enough electricity. Our capacity is around 35 GigaWatts, and was around 38 GW 20 years ago. Plus peaking power stations taking us to around 38 GW today. At 3.6% average electricity growth worldwide in the past 20 years, South Africa should be at 80 GW today and in 20 years time should be at 160 GW. To "solve" the problem, the South African government has had to be very inventive. Especially whilst giving another 2 million people electricity since 1994. It has closed the textile industry, moving almost this entire industry to China. It has closed several smelters, hence the reason South Africa's iron and steel exports have plummeted. It blames our problems on China, but China add