PlayPumps – a proudly South African invention

PlayPumps International’s mission is help improve the lives of children and their families by providing easy access to clean drinking water, enhancing public health, and offering play equipment to millions across Africa. It is an South African invention that was developed into one of the most innovative water solutions for poor families around the world.

In essence it is a children’s merry-go-round attached to a water pump, with a connected high capacity storage tank and tap.

The recipient of several international innovation awards, by 2010 the organisation plans to have 4000 PlayPump systems installed that will supply water to about 10 million people. The organisation’s funding model is also innovative. They seek donations for the installation of the system, and then sell advertising space on the water tower to pay for the maintenance of the system.

The design of the PlayPump water system makes it highly effective, easy to operate and very economical, keeping costs and maintenance to an absolute minimum. Capable of producing up to 1,400 liters of water per hour at 16 rpm from a depth of 40 meters, it is effective up to a depth of 100 meters.

Basically, the system works as follows: While children have fun spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round (1), clean water is pumped (2) from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground.
A simple tap (5) makes it easy for adults and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6).
The water storage tank (7) provides a rare opportunity to advertise in outlaying communities. All four sides of the tank are leased as billboards, with two sides for consumer advertising and the other two sides for health and educational messages. The revenue generated by this unique model pays for pump maintenance

Read more…

Google pushes for enhanced geothermal

In August 2008 Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, announced more than $10 million in investments in enhanced geothermal systems and put out the call for a big increase in federal funding for geothermal in the U.S.

Their investments are the latest rounds of funding under Google.org’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative, launched in 2007. But Google.org is going beyond cash investments and plans to push for a boost in funding for federal research and development, the streamlining of the siting, leasing and permitting process, the extension of tax credits, and the formation of a national renewable portfolio standard.

Enhanced geothermal doesn’t need the naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water used in traditional geothermal. Instead, it replicates those conditions by fracturing hot rock and injecting water.

According to a 2007 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on enhanced geothermal, just 2 percent of the heat below the continental U.S. at between 3 and 10 kilometers — depths within the range of current drilling technology — would be enough to supply more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.

In September 2008 Tata Power bought 10% in the Australian enhanced geothermal systems firm Geodynamics Geodynamics has geothermal exploration interests in three Australian states including a license for exploring 2,000 square kilometers in the Cooper Basin in South Australia. Tata Power said the Cooper Basin contains the hottest granites on earth, estimated to provide a thermal resource equivalent of 50 billion barrels of oil.

Original article: David Ehrlich. Cleantech Group. 19 August 19 2008. Read more…

Solar reaches low-income Indians

Bangalore, India-based social venture SELCO India recently raised growth financing to expand its program to provide renewable energy to low-income homes and businesses in India. The amount of funding was undisclosed and was led by an equity investment by Swiss-registered nonprofit Good Energies Foundation, which shares ownership with global venture capital firm Good Energies. The Lemelson Foundation and nonprofit E+Co also contributed.

SELCO India, short for Solar Electric Light Company, has sold, financed and serviced solar power units to 100,000 homes in India through microfinance and other models from a network of 25 rural service centres across the southern state of Karnataka. About two-thirds of its customers survive on less than $4 a day. The company is also working on cleaner versions of cookstoves, solar-powered water pumps and wireless communication.

According to India’s Central Electrical Authority, the country currently has the capacity to produce 130,000 MW of electricity every year but has a peak energy shortage of more than 15 percent.

SELCO was the recipient of the FT ArcelorMittal Boldness in Business Award for Corporate Social Responsibility.

Original article: Emma Ritch. Cleantech Group. 13 January 2009. Read more…

Video: Mr W

International Faculty for BEP seminar

The annual South African Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Senior Executive Seminar takes place from 11 – 14 May 2009 in Cape Town.

Once again the seminar boasts with an impressive line-up of international faculty that will contribute to make it an enriching and valuable experience:

Jorgen Randers

Jorgen holds a PhD in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1974 he established and directed a futures research institute in Oslo, doing early work on sustainable development. He served as President of the Norwegian School of Management from 1981 to 1989; worked in Norwegian business from 1989 to 1993 and served as Deputy Director General of WWF International in Switzerland 1994 to 1999.

Currently, Jorgen is a Professor in Climate Strategy at the Norwegian School of Management, where he teaches Climate Policy, scenario analysis and sustainability. He serves on a number of corporate boards, in Norway and abroad, including the environmental advisory boards of The Dow Chemical Company and British Telecom. In 2005–6 he chaired the Norwegian Commission on Low Greenhouse Gas Emissions who reported to the cabinet on how Norway can reduce its GHG emissions by two-thirds by 2050.

He is co-author of the infamous book: THE LIMITS TO GROWTH (1972).

Jo da Silva

Jo da Silva is a Director and leads Arup International Development which specialises in sustainable development in low income countries particularly in urban environments.

Jo originally joined Arup having studied engineering at Cambridge University. She has combined a career at Arup, focussed on building design, urban re-generation and sustainable development with active involvement in humanitarian relief and international development. She has particular expertise in shelter-housing, urban environments and disaster risk reduction including climate change adaptation.

As a structural/civil engineer has worked on a wide variety of technical projects both in the UK and overseas which have won major awards: Chek Lap Kok Airport, Osaka Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Geographical Society, Ideas Stores, Surestart nursery Mitcham.

She has been a RedR-IHE Member since 1991, and has provided expertise in post-disaster situations including the Rwandan genocide (1994), and as Senior Shelter Co-ordinator for UNHCR in Sri Lanka post-tsunami (2005).

She has considerable project management experience, and proven leadership skills. This includes: project/programme monitoring review, stakeholder consultation, assessment, evaluation and reporting; people and cost management; liaison with local and national government, funding bodies and key stakeholders.

Jo has extensive overseas experience, and has lived and worked in India, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Germany, Tanzania. She has travelled extensively in the India sub-continent, South-East Asia, Middle East, Central Asia and Europe.

Paul Gilding

Paul is an independent writer, advisor and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability.

An activist and social entrepreneur for 35 years, his personal mission and purpose is to lead, inspire and motivate action globally on the transition of society and the economy to sustainability. He pursues this purpose across all sectors, working around the world with individuals, businesses, NGOs, entrepreneurs, academia and government.

He has served as CEO of a range of innovative NGO’s and companies including Greenpeace International, Ecos Corporation and Easy Being Green. He has also helped to establish and served on the board of a number of new NGOs including Inspire Foundation, the Australian Business Community Network and Climate Coolers. His speaking and work has taken him to over 30 countries including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, South America, Europe, South Africa, the USA and Mexico.

Could energy success backfire in the end?

A very thought-provoking article from the New York Times that challenges us to think into the potential effects of success in solving our energy / climate challenge. The core question is whether we would be responsible enough in our attitudes and values to handle the consequences of abundant
(renewable) energy.

Original article: Andrew Revkin. The New York Times. 10 February 2009. Read more…

Benjamin Barber – A revolution in spirit

Original article: Benjamin Barber. The Nation. 22 January 2009. Read more…

As America, recession mired, enters the hope-inspired age of Barack Obama, a silent but fateful struggle for the soul of capitalism is being waged. Can the market system finally be made to serve us? Or will we continue to serve it? George W. Bush argued that the crisis is “not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” But while it is going too far to declare that capitalism is dead, George Soros is right when he says that “there is something fundamentally wrong” with the market theory that stands behind the global economy, a “defect” that is “inherent in the system.”

The issue is not the death of capitalism but what kind of capitalism–standing in which relationship to culture, to democracy and to life? President Obama’s Rubinite economic team seems designed to reassure rather than innovate, its members set to fix what they broke. But even if they succeed, will they do more than merely restore capitalism to the status quo ante, resurrecting all the defects that led to the current debacle?
—

The crisis in global capitalism demands a revolution in spirit–fundamental change in attitudes and behavior. Reform cannot merely rush parents and kids back into the mall; it must encourage them to shop less, to save rather than spend. If there’s to be a federal lottery, the Obama administration should use it as an incentive for saving, a free ticket, say, for every ten bucks banked. Penalize carbon use by taxing gas so that it’s $4 a gallon regardless of market price, curbing gas guzzlers and promoting efficient public transportation. And how about policies that give producers incentives to target real needs, even where the needy are short of cash, rather than to manufacture faux needs for the wealthy just because they’ve got the cash?
—

The convergence of Obama’s election and the collapse of the global credit economy marks a moment when radical change is possible. But we will need the new president’s leadership to turn the economic disaster into a cultural and democratic opportunity: to make service as important as selfishness (what about a national service program, universal and mandatory, linked to education?); to render community no less valid than individualism (lost social capital can be re-created through support for civil society); to make the needs of the spirit as worthy of respect as those of the body (assist the arts and don’t chase religion out of the public square just because we want it out of City Hall); to make equality as important as individual opportunity (“equal opportunity” talk has become a way to avoid confronting deep structural inequality); to make prudence and modesty values no less commendable than speculation and hubris (saving is not just good economic policy; it’s a beneficent frame of mind). Such values are neither conservative nor liberal but are at once cosmopolitan and deeply American. Their restoration could inaugurate a quiet revolution.

The struggle for the soul of capitalism is, then, a struggle between the nation’s economic body and its civic soul: a struggle to put capitalism in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants. Saving capitalism means bringing it into harmony with spirit–with prudence, pluralism and those “things of the public” (res publica) that define our civic souls. A revolution of the spirit.

Is the new president up to it? Are we?

George Monbiot – A self-fulfilling prophesy

Original article: George Monbiot. www.georgemonbiot.com. 17 March 2009. Read more…

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.
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Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up his hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through the options.

Yes, it is true that mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by Clinton(5), abandoned by Bush, attended half-heartedly by the other rich nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total failure. The targets they have set bear no relationship to the science and are negated anyway by loopholes and false accounting. Nations like the UK which are meeting their obligations under the Kyoto protocol have succeeded only by outsourcing their pollution to other countries(6,7). Nations like Canada, which are flouting their obligations, face no meaningful sanctions.
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The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt: the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the limits. As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is unlikely but “not impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human well being and ethics.”(19)

Yes, it might already be too late – even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow – to prevent more than two degrees of warming, but we cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true. Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot afford to surrender.

Herman Daly – Towards a Steady-State Economy

Original article: Herman Daily. The Oil Drum. 5 May 2008. Read more…

A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy are not the same thing; they are the very different alternatives we face. The Earth as a whole is approximately a steady state. Neither the surface nor the mass of the earth is growing or shrinking; the inflow of radiant energy to the Earth is equal to the outflow; and material imports from space are roughly equal to exports (both negligible).

None of this means that the earth is static—a great deal of qualitative change can happen inside a steady state, and certainly has happened on Earth. The most important change in recent times has been the enormous growth of one subsystem of the Earth, namely the economy, relative to the total system, the ecosphere. This huge shift from an ‘empty’ to a ‘full’ world is truly “something new under the sun” as historian J. R. McNeil calls it in his book of that title. The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That behavior mode is a steady state—a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth. Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of better stuff (or at least different stuff). The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one.

Jonathon Porritt – Prosperity without growth

At last, the Sustainable Development Commission’s magnum opus has landed. Prosperity Without Growth? was launched on Monday, representing the culmination of five year’s work. Tim Jackson, our Economics Commissioner has produced an absolute ‘tour de force’. And there’s a lot riding on this for the Commission.

Way back in the mists of time, through the 70s and into the early 80s, there was an extremely lively debate about the compatibility between economic growth and big-picture resource and sustainability issues. Heavyweight economists batted academic papers back and forth; party political conferences formally debated the pros and cons of economic growth. All this was nicely stoked up by the two Opec-induced oil shocks, and even the media were all over it. Then oil prices came plunging back down, Jimmy Carter got stuffed by Ronald Reagan, and free-market fundamentalists began their long march through the knackered ranks of superannuated Keynesians.

The consequence of which has been hardly any serious discussion about economic growth and sustainability since then. Unbelievable, in retrospect, as even a fool could tell you that if you continue to grow both the number of human beings and the volume of goods and services consumed by each of those human beings, on a planet with limited resources and stressed-out life support systems, then you are heading inevitably for a bust. Sooner or later.

Politicians of all persuasions have hugely enjoyed their 20-year leave of absence. But it’s an inexcusable dereliction of duty to go on avoiding this crunch point in the light of what’s been happening over the last few years – with oil going to $147 a barrel, food reserves at their lowest level for decades, chronic water shortages the world over, accelerating climate change and so on. Paradoxically, the collapse in the global economy gives us some breathing space – but not much. If it’s back to business-as-usual, growth-at-all-costs as the sole route to progress, then biophysical reality will not long be delayed.

Politicians have got used to using one get-out clause in terms of avoiding any intellectual encounter with that crunch point: decoupling. Just decouple the benefits of economic growth from its costs (or externalities, as economists call them) through technology-driven resource efficiency, and all will be well.

If only. One of the toughest messages in “Prosperity Without Growth?” comes in Tim Jackson’s clinical critique of “the myth of decoupling”. The reality is that even progress on relative decoupling (reduced environmental impact per unit of GDP) has been limited, whilst progress on absolute decoupling (reduced environmental impact, full stop – which is what we have to achieve) has been non-existent.

That isn’t to deny the critical significance of decoupling. We desperately need far more of it than anything we’ve seen so far. Which means governments have got to do it, rather than just talk about it, even as they come to the inconvenient conclusion that it won’t be enough on its own anyway.

Politicians may not want to hear these messages. But it’s our task to broadcast them much more loudly and much more clearly than we’ve done over the last 20 years. And “Prosperity Without Growth?” is what you need to make that happen.

Article by: Jonathon Porritt. www.jonathanporritt.com. 31 March 2008. Read it…

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