The people in suits want to talk and nothing will stop them from listening to the sound of their own voices. COP19, the global climate-change meeting, might seem far away in Warsaw, Poland, this week but like a massive weather system migrating the globe its impact will be felt in Africa for sure. Africa knows […]
COP17
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Realising the potential of electricity
As the latest climate change conference in Bonn draws to a close today, the full implications of commitments made at COP17 are beginning to sink in. The nations of the world find themselves united by a challenge that is both eye-watering and conceptually simple: hold the global average temperature increase below 2°C versus the long-term […]
Posted inGeneral
Occupy Tshwane: behold the bourgeois revolution
You might think an ‘Occupy Movement’ would find fertile ground in a land as brutally unequal as South Africa, not to mention an economy virtually hostage to monopoly capital. Yet Occupy is primarily driven by an educated, salaried middle class, which has now found itself rapidly sinking into either economic ruin or, horror of horrors, […]
Posted inNews/Politics
COP17: Nothing to celebrate
By Alex Lenferna As COP17 finished on Sunday morning 5am, 36 hours into overtime, many celebrated the development of what is being referred to as the Durban Package. The South African lead negotiator, Alf Wills, among others, sees the Durban Package as a comprehensive deal that has taken into account the necessary compromise and has […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
If COP17 has to do with survival, why aren’t more people interested?
By Karuna Rana For those in the climate-change arena, the yearly UN climate-change negotiations remain an important event. The Copenhagen Summit in 2009 was a massive let-down. Last year, Cancun was unexpectedly hopeful and, this year, the climate-change negotiations have arrived to Durban, South Africa. COP17 is perhaps more crucial than previous meetings as the […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Durban’s dirty number: 2020
By Alex Lenferna Yesterday was an interesting day for climate discussions, however much of it was happening behind closed doors out of the reach of the negotiator tracker team, NGOs and media. Nonetheless, news of China’s potential willingness to take on legally binding agreements, and its possibility to be a game-changer within climate-change negotiations set […]
Posted inNews/Politics
If climate change didn’t exist, we’d invent it
Doesn’t it sometimes feel like we’re living a low-budget rerun of our parents’ era? They had the Beatles. We got Lady Gaga. They had Paris 1968. We got Occupy. They had Vietnam. We got Iraq. They had Marlon Brando. We got … George Clooney. But there is one thing we’re just as good at as […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Green Climate Fund at the COP17 negotiating table
By Alex Lenferna The largest ever financial vehicle for the distribution of climate justice is soon to be on the negotiating table at COP17. International delegates at COP17 are gearing up to discuss the Green Climate Fund, which requests of developed countries to provide developing countries with “scaled up, predictable, new and additional, and adequate […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle
Are Christmas gifts just a horrible waste of money?
December is almost upon us and Christmas is less than a month away. Already the malls are heaving with hollow-eyed wrecks ticking off mental lists of people on their Christmas gift lists (some of them fantasising, no doubt, about bombing a place that approximates Dante’s fourth circle of hell). Ernst & Young is predicting a […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
COP17: A critical look at SA’s role
By Alex Lenferna South Africa hosts the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17) — in Durban, starting today. But what about South Africa’s own response to climate change, and how coherent and meaningful is our response, really? Firstly, let’s look at South Africa’s emissions reduction […]