Paying for free housing

Minister Tokyo Sexwale has announced that the scheme to provide free housing for the poor will soon come to an end.

We were all poor once - and no-one offered us free housing once we had left home. Another answer to provision for the poor must be found.

Perhaps the German solution merits deeper investigation. From the 1870's onwards, when the German peasants wanted to move to the city, they could sell their 'tribal right' to land. This gave them cash to house themselves in the city. Those who did not wish to move could buy land with a state-funded mortgage. Germany never had shacks.

We need to allow people to sell their tribal rights to land - and use some of the money generated to pay the chiefs for their losses. That way some of the tribal land which is exceedingly arable can be brought under modern farming and make a contribution to our well-being, while those wishing to move to the cities would have the funds to do so.

Ecoterrorism is rife

In the runup to COP17, the horror stories are flowing thick and fast. The latest to cross my path came from a recent capacity-building workshop on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+) . "Deforestation and forest degradation produced about 20% of total human-caused GHG emissions on a yearly basis."

There is absolutely no basis for this statement. It is typical of the horror stories dreamed up to coerce us into foolish action.

Total consumption of timber is around 1400 million cubic metres a year, most of which comes from sustainable forestry. Total consumption of fossil fuels is around 10 500 million tonnes oil equivalent. Burning oil produces far more CO2 than burning wood. So the "20%" figure is more like 1%.

You can lie for only so long before you are found out. These ecoterrorists need to learn that simple lesson.

The Law of the Engineer

As an engineer, I had to learn that Murphy’s Law really is a Law, not some wishy-washy rule. For the uninitiated, the Law says that if something can go wrong, it will. Note, “it will”, not “it may”. There is an awful finality about the Law. It is inescapable.

So when we engineers design something, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that it will almost certainly fail. Its failure will be unexpected – a ‘black swan’ event – but fail it eventually will.

Fortunately we learn from our mistakes. What we design gets better and better all the time. My first car was a Morris Minor. It had a hole in the centre of the front bumper. When the starter motor failed, you took out a crank handle, put it through the hole, and turned the engine by hand until it started.

When the starter motor failed, not if. In the 1950’s the starter was expected to fail. Over the years, starters have become more and more reliable. No longer do cars come with crank handles.

This simple example is repeated over and over. I once travelled fast in a 1926 Bentley. Its chassis was positively alive, and the slightest bump would send the car off course. The Bentley had been the finest machine of its day. It won at Le Mans several years in a row. But today its road-holding would make it impossible to sell. The designers of cars have learned from their mistakes.

The result of this continual improvement is that unexpected failures become rarer and rarer. In the motor industry, there are occasional ‘recalls’ when an error appears in one of the many systems that make up the modern vehicle. They are rare, so rare that they are newsworthy.

Much of modern life benefits from the continual improvements we engineers have made. However, we can never forget that Murphy is peering over our shoulders. The latest example was Fukushima. The designers knew that if cooling was lost, it would be a disaster, so they designed backup pumps that would keep cooling water flowing. Then they recognised that the power to the backup might fail, so they installed generators to supply power if the normal power supply failed. If the generators should fail, there were batteries to keep things going until the generators could be restarted.

When one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded struck, the reactors shut down as expected. The power lines failed, so the generators kicked in. For an hour, all was well. Then Murphy arrived, in the form of a wave that was twice as high as anyone had conceived. The generators were flooded, the batteries battled on until they had run out of energy, cooling was lost and the reactors were destroyed.

Everyone has learned from this disaster. It will not happen again. Nuclear reactors will become safer. But they will never become perfect. Perfection is impossible. At best, accidents will become more and more infrequent, and lower and lower in their impact.

But whatever we do, Nature will invent more ways to defeat our best-laid plans. Murphy is ever present. That is the Law by which we engineers are ruled.

Misplaced passion

I am a passionate person. I am happy to share my passions with others, which is why I write here.

However, passion is a dangerous emotion. The passionate have to take care they they use the force of their passion constructively. It is all too easy to be destructive.

I have long felt infinitely sad for those in the animal rights movement who have expressed their passion by violence. People work with animals to try to find ways of alleviating human suffering. If you don't like them working with animals, then you should strive to find another way of curing human ills. That is the constructive use of your passion. The destructive use is to attack those who work with animals, because ultimately you are hindering their attempts to relieve human suffering.

One of my many passions is a belief in an open society, one in which we should be free to express our beliefs without fear or favour. Thus I have a hatred of propaganda. I like the definition "Propaganda is -- a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual)" [Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States (1996) pp. 232-233]

When I saw the video Gasland, I soon realized it was a good example of propaganda. Finding out that it really did give a one-sided message which in many places was anything but factual took a little time. Fortunately my quest was aided by others who had reached the same conclusion. An epiphany came when I found a You-Tube of Gasland's producer, Josh Fox, admitting that he had known that the "flaming water" was a long-standing phenomenon that had nothing to do with fracking. Since then I have been passionate about revealing the propaganda for what it was.

The debate has generally been fruitful. My opponents have been courteous, knowledgeable in their own way, happy to share their concerns, and willing to consider that their concerns could be addressed. The debate has therefore come down to ways of ensuring that fixes could be achieved. Once the concerns had been reliably addressed, exploration via 'fracking' was reasonable.

I, for my part, have had to stress that no fix is perfect. Murphy's Law is alive and well. But one of the beauties of engineering is that it does get better and better - we do learn from our mistakes. So the risk of the fixes failing is likely to diminish with time. As one concern is addressed, another will be found to take its place. Ultimately the de minimis rule will kick in, and all will accept the tiny chance of failure that remains.

But there is O'Toole's rider to Murphy's Law - he said "Murphy is an optimist!" I said that the debate has generally been fruitful. There are exceptions to this rule, point blank refusal even to discuss concerns, outright rejection of the possibility of another view.

The latest example of this has been an invitation to a musician to play to a group of us. Negotiations proceeded slowly, but finally we agreed a significant fee. Then, with a week to go, came a surprising email "Since my last email I have read some of your blogs. I do not wish to be associated with you or your crew. I am vehemently against Fracking. I will also not support the pursuit of profit without regard for its humanitarian and environmental impact."

I was not previously aware that 'my crew' would be deemed to share my passions - in fact, I am certain that they share a few, and equally certain that they hold contrary views about many others. I don't mind vehemence - some of those with whom I have debated have been quite vehement, and it expresses passion well.

However, passion can blind, and surely it has in this case. One of my passions happens to be music, and that is one which I share with the musician - and with many of 'my crew'. The musician has allowed one of his passions to get in the way of another. That is as good an example of the destructiveness of passion as I know.

Shakespeare, how now your Romeo and Juliet?

A Nuclear Cape Town

Twenty-seven years ago Cape Town was full of wonder at its first nuclear reactor. Since then, the station at Koeberg has performed magnificently, only missing a beat when some idiot left a piece of metal in a generator during maintenance.

However, the City of Cape Town is, mysteriously, anti-nuclear. The Cape Times municipal reporter, Babalo Ndenze, recently did an excellent job of capturing the City of Cape Town’s nuclear fears (Cape Times, August 17^th). He reported that the City even believes that Koeberg has a negative effect on economic growth.

It amazes me that our City Fathers should have such short memories. Have they already forgotten that moment in 2007 when the generator failed, and Cape Town was brought to its knees? How supermarkets went dark, and millions of rands’ worth of food was spoiled? How we ate by candlelight, and laughed in gloomy cafes while we waited for our meal to be cooked on temporary stoves? How we went to bed early, bereft of our television? It was all a marvellous demonstration of the fact that not having Koeberg has a really huge negative effect.

You would think that, after 27 years of co-existence, the City would have come to value one of Cape Town's finest assets. The two reactors have churned out energy with remarkable reliability. Today their electricity is the cheapest Eskom produces, but Capetonians have to pay more, to subsidize the unfortunates in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KZN who must still rely on coal. We are also helping to pay for the huge new stations of Medupi and Kusile, whose costs are so far above international norms that it is amazing that no-one has yet called in the Auditor General.

Instead the City is whining about how its nuclear fears have been ignored – an EIA “had not provided sufficient information on population, health and spatial planning.” Note, in someone’s judgement, there was not enough information. The topics weren’t ignored, they just didn’t get the thousands of words the City thought they needed. Instead of being constructive, and supplying any missing information about the City, our leaders copped out and whined.

Rationally, the City should now own at least one nuclear reactor. It would be the cheapest way of providing its 4 million citizens with reliable power. Instead, our leaders are putting high hopes on wind and sun, which are far more costly and not sufficiently reliable or continuous to allow the City to grow.

Should we support a carbon tax?

Last year Treasury put out a Discussion Paper on a carbon tax. Discussion was muted in the extreme. Indeed, Government may have been left with the idea that a carbon tax is positively desired. Recently the WWF and others have argued that business should meekly lie down and accept the tax. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Most arguments for a carbon tax start with the assumption that it would be possible to reduce the impact of climate change if we as a nation reduced our emissions. This would be true if all nations agreed to reduce their emissions, but that day is far off. Carbon emissions have dropped in a few European countries, to be true, but globally they have risen. Indeed, since the Kyoto Protocol came into force in 1998, emissions have accelerated, not declined.

Moreover the present trend is towards further increases. Many optimists speak of ‘the transition to a low-carbon world’, but it is presently a truly fruitless wish. There is no transition. Instead we face a world with ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In 2010, South Africa’s emissions were about 400 million tons per annum, which amounts to less than 1.5% of the global total. At present China emits about 8 000 million tons, growing annually by over 600 million tons. Whatever we did would be insufficient to offset the annual Chinese growth.

That being said, South Africa has a policy which seems reasonable. Our Climate Change Response Green Paper commits us to “making a fair contribution to the global effort to achieve the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that prevents dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

However, the Green Paper also gives a rider. “South Africa …. is committed to reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions in order to successfully facilitate the agreement and implementation of an effective and binding global agreement, together with all the other countries responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions.” So Government recognises that it would not be effective to act alone. If we are to reduce our carbon emissions, it can only be as part of a global agreement involving all other significant emitters.

IRP2010 showed that any significant reduction in our emissions would increase our energy costs significantly – and already it is clear that the recent increases in prices are causing closure of industries, such as our only zinc smelter, with attendant job losses.

An argument for a carbon tax is that we could face trade sanctions unless we act to reduce our emissions. There are few nations that would be able to impose such sanctions, for the simple reason that there are few that have managed to reduce their emissions. Thus the threat is more imagined than real.

Those in favour of a carbon tax argue that we cannot continue on our present path. They claim that business-as-usual is not an option. The trouble with this view is that our present path is not working. We are not creating jobs at the rate needed to drag ourselves out of poverty. We need an environment conducive to growth, not one littered with artificial constraints and bureaucratic traps. We certainly do not need new taxes, particularly a tax like the proposed carbon tax which will achieve nothing except further slowing of our growth (and even the Discussion Paper accepts that).

A problem with growth is that it comes at the cost of greater demand for energy. There is a very direct relation between the domestic product per capita and the energy used per capita. Nearly all the wealthy nations have emissions of over 9t of carbon dioxide per capita per year. Nearly half the world’s nations have emissions of less than 3t, and they are all poor.

The supposed solution to this dilemma is to grow the renewable sector of the energy economy. This presumes that renewable energy technologies are a replacement for our existing fossil fuel technologies. Unfortunately, that is not yet true. The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change has just released its latest figures. It has been working hard to reduce Britain’s carbon emissions, and they have definitely fallen. Nearly 10% of its energy comes from low-carbon sources – but nuclear power is two-thirds of that, and wind energy is less than 5%, or 0.4% of the total supply.

Analysis of the reasons for the drop in the UK emissions soon shows that it is due to the decline in coal use, which has more than halved since 1990, and an increase in natural gas, which has nearly doubled over the same period. However, this has come at a cost – nearly 40% of the gas is now imported, so Britain no longer enjoys the energy security it has had historically. Its demand now exceeds what it can produce.

There are high hopes in South Africa, expressed in the IRP2010, that we will soon be able to resolve our energy supply problems via renewable energies. But renewable energies have not provided Britain with a sustainable solution to growth with a reduction in carbon emissions, and they seem most unlikely to provide us with an answer. If the British experience is anything to go by, our best hopes are to rush to nuclear power and to hope that the Karoo will yield its shale gas to fracking. The recent proposal by WWF and its lobby, that we should rush into a carbon tax to achieve low-carbon growth, seems very misguided.

The Chief Justice

Chief Justice Ngcobo has always been the epitome of integrity. His action in withdrawing his acceptance of the probably illegal extension of his contract is a further illustration of this.

Will some of our leaders who have become mired in controversy kindly note and resign honorably, rather than brazening things out and hoping it will all blow over? Sadly, that includes our State President, whose apparent involvement in the arms deal is not something that has been brushed under the carpet by his appointment to the high office.