Repair (Heal) Your World

The South African Reserve Bank finally started reducing interest rates by .5%. You can read the full SARB report at http://www.reservebank.co.za/ Here is some food for thought: (perhaps a conspiracy theory?) THE SUBPRIME CRISIS: During the past decade the United States firstly told Freddie and Fannie, their two biggest mortage lenders to lend money to people who shouldn't be loaned money, i.e. people with bad credit records; people who couldn't get credit; bankrupt people etc. This money to be used for buying houses. These people are called sub-prime borrowers. On March the 8th this year I wrote a detailed Blog entry called: Sub Prime Crisis; renewables; the price we pay; what you can do. Then they reduced interest rates to 1%. At 1% people bought houses and maybe were paying $83 per month on a $100,000 house. (Compare that with South Africans who would have been paying $1250 per month at 15%). Remember these people are already on the edge. Then the government increases in...

Dear all There are a few very simple ways of preventing load sheeting and potentially preventing the building of any more power stations in South Africa: 1) Switch off all appliances at the plug including computers, tv's, etc, when they are not being used. If it is inconvenient to get to the plug, use an extension cord from the wall and plug the plug in the wall into the extension cord. You can then unplug the plug at any time. 2) Don't run more than one of the following appliances at the same time: washing machine, dish washer, iron, lawnmower, kettle, microwave, kitchen mixer, oven/stove. 3) Switch off your playstation when it is not in use; same with your DSTV decoder. Both draw almost as much power when they are on standby as when they are on, so if you only watch 3 hours of TV a day, you are wasting electricity for the other 21 hours. 4) Try to use a laptop instead of a PC. Laptop's can save up to 95% of the electricity that PC's use. 5) If you use air-conditio...

Dear all The recent articles and letters in our local newspapers re water quality have all dealt with one individual and seem to be missing some facts. On the 5th June 2008, our Ward Forum was presented with a "Cape town Catchment, Stormwater, River Management: Coastal and Inland Water Quality Report" for the 12 month period ending March 2008. Here are some of the findings: Coastal: "The long-term trend still indicates a decline in water quality. The significant low compliance for the False Bay is again noted" and "Reasons for non-compliance of [various] bathing areas include sewerage water ingress into the stormwater system due to aged infrastructure, and the spate of load shedding that has led to power outages and sewerage spillages." Inland: "Overall compliance remains unacceptably low." For example of our 14 rivers in greater Cape Town and with regard to E-coli measurements, 4 are over 80% compliance with government guidelines which is cons...