Skip to main content

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. Helping and giving without any sort of financial compensation. Yes, we feel good. We feel like we are helping. But we are putting a strain on our work and our families.

I believe now that we need to get together us activists, eg Muna, Marina, Jonathan, Mariette, Antony, myself, Ninette, and many others, and put ourselves into a team of people who trust each other and then offer our environmental services to people who wish to pay for these services.

So far I have spent R4 million of time and money on this venture over the past 5 years. I've had a lot of fun, spoken at many conferences in Cape Town, Joburg and Durban, including in parliament, and met political leaders and mayors. But I haven't made any new friends, amazingly. And getting to meet business leaders is proving impossible. I know not why, except I have a hunch that they want to be charged and we don't charge anything.

I look forward to working with you all on solving our planet's problems and at the same time earning enough to put food on the table without having to get further and further into debt.

Love and respect,
David.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Designing your own electricity system - part 7 (fridges)

Here are some specifications regarding energy saving fridges. Tafelberg sell some of the Ardo range of fridges. The Ardo rating is: 130KWH rating per year. Even if it really uses 165KWH per year, that will be amazing as an A++ energy star fridge is rated at 380KWH per year and a normal fridge much higher than that. My normal fridge (which I still need to replace) uses approximately 660 kwh per year which at 70 cents per kwh (my rate) is about R40 per month. Note that this is only based on one day's usage. After a few months, I will have a more accurate number. The Ardo fridge uses about 40Watts when it is on and is so quiet that a friend on mind has it in his passage outside two of the bedrooms. At 165kwh per year , the Ardo fridge costs R10 per month. A normal fridge is about R2000 and an Ardo fridge is about R8000. The difference is R6000, so R6000 / R30 (saving) = 200 months = 17 years. Not a very good payback period, but remember what I said in an earlier part of this blog s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Repair Your World: Solving the electricity crisis at no tax cost to the treasury

My latest letter to the Cape Times editor. Melanie Gosling's articles this week and NERSA today (24th February 2010) approving 25% increases (95% over 3 years) refer. My company has a number of clients who wish to provide their own energy. We don't believe that we can rely on Eskom energy. It isn't sustainable. It isn't clean. Not only is coal polluting the air, mining it is polluting our water resources and destroying our roads. If we weren't in a recession Eskom energy wouldn't be enough for our requirements, so there is no true security of supply, especially as Eskom has not got the increase they wanted. Lastly, in the medium to long term, Eskom's energy is not affordable for our clients and there are already affordable alternatives. However, most of the clients we consult to are too small to fit into the 1 Megawatt bracket which gets the feed in tariff (REFIT). And the REFIT itself is a farce because the government has implemented a tender system w...
5 comments
Read more

Jewish people have some secrets. Here are two of them.

One of these secrets is that we have one day off a week. Another of these secrets is that we welcome dissenting and opposite views. We  welcome Outliers. The Zohar and Talmud are full of opposing opinions and views, even opposing legal  views. I’m studying The Zohar, the Ancient Book of Kabbalah, which dissects the Tanach  and shows why things have been said the way they’ve been said and why things  happened the way they happened. There are many times when I read something, and I  don’t agree with it. I know that if I wait then at some point I will get an opposing view,  which I may or may not agree with. There are even discussions about why a word might  have an extra vav, or why a word doesn’t have a vav. Unfortunately, this internal strength in Judaism is used by our enemies to undermine us  as they will find a Jew who is against Zionism or who uses words like Occupation or  Genocide to say that this is how Jews feel generally. Yet if they...
Post a Comment
Read more