RANT: Eskom the Water Hog

Much ado is made about how coal-fired power stations around the world are deemed by climate change scientists to be the number one contributor to global warming and, therefore, potential climate change. 

Much ado is also made about the obvious related air pollution issues resulting from coal-fired power stations.

Much ado is also made about the fact that, give or take a hundred years or so, coal is simply not a renewable source of energy and, therefore, cannot be considered a sustainable source of energy. 

Much ado is made against coal as an energy source for all the right reasons.

Simply put: it's a dirty, unsustainable source of energy for humanity going forward.

But another huge ill befalls the environment when coal is used to power energy: water.

The Blue Gold of the 21st century is used in phenomenal, almost unfathomable quantities in order for coal to be generated into electricity. The amounts of water needed are nothing short of stunning - and not in a good way.

I have read an excellent study released by Greenpeace Africa, who have their headquarters here in Johannesburg, and entitled "Water Hungry Coal: Burning South Africa's water to produce electricity." It's a scathing and detailed exposé of just how much water is used by the South African government-owned electricity utility, Eskom.



Below is a brilliant (and scary) graphic from this PDF article showing just how much water is consumed when coal is used to make electricity (save and then click on to enlarge if needed):

It's frightening. And this in a country that is considered 'water-scarce' by the World Meteorological Organisation and other expert groups.

Ah, yes, Eskom - the bête noir of all environmentalists and green energy activists in South Africa, myself firmly included amongst them. Firmly in the pocket of the coal and nuclear lobbies in this country, it is all-powerful and do-very-little in South Africa's energy efficiency and sustainability stakes. 



A greenwasher of note, with token efforts thus far at a solar farm, a wind farm, and energy efficient geyser and bulb replacement initiatives, Eskom is said to emit more CO₂ than the countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland combined! Makes me very proud to live (and use electricity) in South Africa.

With this excellent article, Greenpeace Africa makes the final point that all of us who care about the environment make all the time, again and again: the future can only be in renewable energies. It is not in 19th-century technology like coal or (heaven forbid) nuclear. 

Never mind that electricity from coal pollutes our air and puts the climate future of this planet in peril, it can literally make us die of thirst.

Do you get my point? 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Tom Lehrer

In light of the EU-Nobel Peace Prize debacle, the following quote by American singer-songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer seems particularly prescient:

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."



This he famously quipped when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1973, i.e. as the heinous Vietnam War dragged on and in the same year in which Kissinger connived with the CIA to overthrow Salvador Allende and replace him with Augusto Pinochet in a violent coup in Chile.

How very fitting these words are nearly forty years later...

Do you get my point?

IT SAYS IT ALL: The EU Nabs Nobel

The EU being awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize continues to irk me...more so with each passing day it seems.

I went looking for cartoons online that I felt were the funniest, smartest and even arresting (sorry, an irresistible pun) in capturing the sheer hypocrisy of this Nobel debacle. Here are some of the best I found: 


Cartoon by mackaycartoons, courtesy of Toonpool



Cartoon by Rafa Senudo, courtesy of Public Service Europe



Photos from the Occupy movement, courtesy of Richard Brenneman

And perhaps my favourite thus far:


        Cartoon by Kianoush Ramezani, courtesy of Cartoon Movement

They really do say it all.

LOL: Scottish Fiction

I have just posted on how I sincerely believe that Lance Armstrong deserves to see his career crash and burn and get stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.

Then I came across an amusing article by Jay Busbee on Yahoo!Sports on a Scottish titbit he picked up via Reddit, as quoted here:

"Of course, the lawsuits are flying, with Armstrong charging that there is no merit to the USADA's accusations, and other entities, including the federal government, looking for their pound of flesh from Armstrong. Still, you can't just come right out and say Armstrong is a doper without risking incurring his wrath; he has filed suit before to protect his name.

So a Glasgow bookstore has taken a hide-in-plain-sight step: filing Armstrong's autobiography under the heading of "Fiction." Effective statement, isn't it?"

I'll say - very effective! As this photo published on Reddit clearly shows:

It's telling that this was published almost a week ago, i.e. almost a week before Armstrong finally had his seven Tour de France titles stripped by the world cycling federation, the UCI.

You have to hand it to the Scots - they can be a dry, wry bunch. ;-)

RAVE: Cycling World Lances Armstrong

Today the big news in the sporting world was the final death blow to what was once the glittering career of cyclist, Lance Armstrong: the International Cycling Union (UCI) has stripped him of his seven Tour de France wins due to his doping over the years. 

It is a scandal that has threatened to rip professional cycling apart.



As reported online by the BBC today:

"Lance Armstrong has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles by cycling's governing body.

The International Cycling Union (UCI) has accepted the findings of the United States Anti-Doping Agency's (Usada) investigation into Armstrong.

UCI president Pat McQuaid said: "Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten."

McQuaid added Armstrong had been stripped of all results since 1 August, 1998 and banned for life for doping.

On what he called a "landmark day for cycling", the Irishman, who became president of UCI in 2005, said he would not be resigning.

"This is a crisis, the biggest crisis cycling has ever faced," he said."

I don't even much care for cycling, to be honest. But there is something about the Lance Armstrong scandal that really gets my teeth gritted and, yes, makes me want to (metaphorically, of course) kick him now that he's down.

It is now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that professional cycling is one of the most doped up, strung out and corrupt sports on the planet. And we all know that Lance Armstrong was certainly not the only one taking hits of 'Edgar Allen Poe' (the slang term used by cyclists for the performance-enhancing drug, EPO) during the 1990s and well into the 2000s. Nor is he the only cyclist who has been caught out and who has been stripped of their titles. Far from it.

Yet no one else has remotely commanded as much baying for his blood and stripping of his very legacy than that against Lance Armstrong. And I'm all for it.

Why?

I could say it's perhaps because I never warmed to the guy, and always found him remote and quite arrogant in his public demeanour. And I was always deep down suspicious of how he never quite enjoyed his phenomenal success as much as I thought that much success would warrant...where was the joy, I niggled?

But that would be churlish of me. No, it goes much deeper than that. 

It's because of all that he stood for - the hero worship by so many, the incredible wealth and celebrity and all the entitlement that goes with that. 

It's despite the fact that he had cancer and came back 'to win' that I hold him in contempt, not because of it that I can excuse his actions. The former is how one judges those who have failed in their character, not the latter as hackneyed redemption. 

There is nothing redeeming about what Lance Armstrong achieved either pre- or post-cancer, because the way in which he did it should never be considered redemptive. His lies and deception and cheating must degrade his accomplishments, otherwise where is the moral imperative to do the right thing? 

And, no, it is simply not good enough to excuse him because 'all the others were doing it.' That has nothing to do with it - their time and penalties will come. He must be even more vilified precisely because he was so lionized - the notoriety now directly correlates to the adoration that once was. And that is most fair.

He reaped the rich rewards of his so-called success, now he must pay the dues of his most-definite deceptions. 

Is he the scapegoat for the actions and omissions of so many others in his team and the cycling fraternity, including even the UCI? Of course he is. So many others were his accomplice, his enabler, his benefactor. But he was the lead man, the most ardently supported and respected, and therefore the target on his legacy will be the largest. As it must.

So it goes, Lance. You are not like me and millions of others. In many ways, you were far better and stronger and able than any of us could ever dream to be. And for that very reason you must be held to the higher standard on occasions such as these. That is the price of such sporting talent and all the glory that comes with it.

In the end, I am quite sure that international cycling and the Tour de France itself will recover and even be stronger than ever. The Tour and France deserve at least that.

Sometimes it is indeed good and very necessary when the once mighty fall. And fall hard.

Do you get my point?

SITE OF THE DAY: Wordsmith

Wordsmith or wordsmith.org: I was under the impression that I had already raved about this site before, but, it seems I may have not (an unpardonable travesty, I humbly admit). So I must do so today. Post haste.

One would be hard-pressed to find a less pretentious-looking, less fussy or less 'flashy' website on the entire Internet, yet even the purveyor of possibly the most famous crossword puzzle in the world enthuses about the site:

"The most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace."



The site doesn't even have a viable logo for me to place here and pump its name!

I subscribe to the daily newsletter from this golden nugget of a website, which means that every day I am treated to the pronunication, meaning, etymology and usage of a given word. Hardly an example-a-day goes by where I am not in some way educated, amused or even astounded by words and where they come from and what they mean to us. All because of this little, wondrous site. 

In an Internet filled with a mind-boggling web of flash, glibness and shallow titillation, a simple, unfettered site like Wordsmith is reason for unwavering support because it exults in that most simple of thing that binds us all: words.

Rest assured, these are three of the most comforting bylines for any lexiophile on the Web:

A.Word.A.Day

Subscribe

It's FREE.

Or should that be 'lexiphile?' I'm sure Wordsmith would let me know.

IT SAYS IT ALL: Nobel Da Paz?

I came across this terrific cartoon today which effectively and tellingly lampoons the ludicrous recent decision by the Nobel committee to award the Nobel Prize for Peace to the European Union:


Cartoon courtesy of Antero (Portugal), as cited at keeptalkinggreece.com

"Nobel da Paz?" is "Nobel for Peace" in Portuguese, and the bruised nations of Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are depicted. 

As the blog www.keeptalkingreece.com scathingly commented:

"This must be the joke in the history of Nobel Prize. Crisis-torn European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012,  ‘for its historic role in uniting the continent’. Unless the Nobel Prize committee members had a sudden attack of a cynicism, KTG would say that Barroso, Van Rompuy & Co deserve to win the prize for a single reason: Living peacefully in their bubbles while many European Citizens, especially those in the South, live in conditions that violate the EU human rights standards and conventions.

In Greece and Portugal, in Spain and Ireland in the North, where social cohesion is breaking apart, the social welfare is collapsing, the needy cannot cover basic needs and the poor with less than 6,000 euro annual income get taxed. But that’s history on the making and ‘social peace’ has nothing to do with the Nobel Prize standards."

Again, it has taken me this many days to finally summon the anger I have with this outrageous award to the EU.

For cartoon and commentary alike, it's a case of enough said.

RANT: The Nobel Prize for What?!

Yes, it has taken me almost a week to fully digest what must surely be one of the most astounding and most revolting pieces of news for the whole of 2012:

The European Union is awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Peace...


Image courtesy of Russia Today

Yes, I still can't believe it...

The EU wins a prize for PEACE?!!!

The European Union won the much-coveted peace prize for its efforts to promote peace and democracy in Europe. This, as we all know, whilst the EU is in the midst of its biggest crisis since the creation and establishment of the-then European Economic Community and earlier incarnations since the 1950s.

"The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace," according to the committee.

Uh-kay...

The evidence is here, folks, plain to see:

The world has indeed gone well and truly mad (suspected for some time now)...

Armageddon is indeed upon us (that's what you get for not hedging your bets, Vittorio)...

The Mayans were right after all (I didn't see that coming)...

Aliens are about to invade (thank goodness, at least that)...

After all, if the Nobel panel could see fit to award a prize for peace to a bloc of nations as collectively (some more than others, it should be noted) destructive and war-mongering as the European Union, then one can only assume that the end of the world is truly nigh. 

Not to mention that many of the world's top ten sellers of arms are comprised of EU nations (with Germany 3rd, France 4th, the United Kingdom 5th, Italy 7th and Sweden 9th, as ranked in sales of 2001-2012, as per stats given by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

"A continent of peace?" Are they for real?

How can one even begin to take such news seriously and somehow attempt to deconstruct it in a meaningful, sober manner? 

When something is so patently absurd, it deserves nothing but derision and ridicule.

However, this is, after all, the same Nobel committee that saw fit to award Barack Obama of all people the same prize back in 2009. And we all know what a champion for everlasting peace he has been for the world.

Nobel Peace Prize? This year, unfortunately, it's more like the Nobel Dreck Prize.

Shameful.

Do you get my point?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was particularly struck by this brilliant quote by German philosopher Goethe that I came across today:

"Where the light is brightest, the shadows are deepest."



Has this ever been more relevant than today? The world may be full of light but, my word, are there plenty of shadows out there.

Do you get my point?