Friday, 16 July 2010

by Simon Gear

Last week, a Swiss friend of mine was outraged because she had just been nailed with a €1350 fine for straying a smidgeon over the suburban speed limit. Well, maybe I must clarify. If she was truly Swiss, I doubt she would have been that angry (or indeed have been fined in the first place). But she is a South African who moved to the green shores of Lake Geneva a few years back. The whole thing was a bigger shock to her system than her first northern winter.

The reason that this caught my eye was that the Swiss are surprisingly heavy hitters in the environmental world. Every other year, Yale University publish the Environmental Performance Index, ranking countries by their green performance across a whole range of factors. Switzerland are the current holders of the top spot on the list.

My gut reaction is to point out that the Swiss have it easy. Their economy is based on deadly boring but clean stuff like reinsurance and banking. Easy, indoor work, with no heavy lifting. Their population is squeezed into the valleys leaving their abundant mountain tops pristine. And they’re rolling in cash, what with forgetting such follies as fighter jets and submarines in favour of clean energy and apparently, overzealous traffic cops.

But there is something else going on here too. The Swiss enjoy a system of direct democracy. Power is decentralised and ordinary people have a real say in what decisions get made in parliament. In fact, if you and your mates think something is important enough, you can demand a referendum on the issue. So the Swiss spend a lot of money on popular but expensive projects that benefit a wide range of people. Think traffic safety and the environment instead of weapons and ministerial motorcades.

Green South Africa?

Contrast that with South Africa (we ranked 97th in the EPI, by the way). We have a much-vaunted representative democracy which means that we vote people into power, give them all our tax money and tell them to get on with it. And that results in … well… pick any story from the front page of the Sunday Times in the last year.

South Africans love to see themselves as frontier folk, bending the rules, making it up as we go along and generally living the hell out of life down here on Africa’s sunny tip. But the irony is that the only reason that we didn’t finish lower than 97th in the EPI was because of our environmental legislation. We have better green law than any other country on earth, the clean-nosed Swiss included. The folks at Yale loved that, until they looked at how that law was being applied and noticed that it wasn’t.

So perhaps if we want to start greening our world, a little Mzanzi humble pie might be in order.   Let’s drive a little slower, pick up after ourselves and generally just behave a little better. Maybe if we obey the laws of our country first, the folk in our parliament might start listening to us on the bigger issues.  Of course, knowing our luck, the first thing they’ll institute are massive hikes in the speeding fines.

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

by Simon Gear

The other day I sold a car. Well, not quite sold.  It stopped working and I asked a man to come and fix it for me. He took it away and informed me that I could either spend a large sum getting it back up to the point where it worked again, or I could sell it voetstoets to a mate of his for a wad of cash. Quite literally.

I had to drive round to the garage (in a car I had borrowed from my mother-in-law) and fetch a depressingly small brown paper bag full of notes. Once I had overcome the novel excitement of being payed in the same manner as our erstwhile chief of police, I got to thinking about this transaction.

This guy has driven to the bank. He’s withdrawn a decent sum of money, for which he has paid the bank a hassle fee of at least one of those notes. I’ve missioned over to fetch it from him and taken the bag, most probably back to the same bank, and deposited it into my account. The fetching and carrying part of this transaction alone has cost us the better part of an afternoon and the bank fees could easily have bought something with truffles in the recipe.

But none of this is as remarkable as the conversation that I had with my mechanic’s wife. When I suggested that an internet transfer of the money was probably the easiest for all concerned she casually admitted that neither their business, nor the guy that was buying the car was on ‘the email’. Nothing particularly remarkable about that. Most of the world doesn’t have the email. Hell, I was in my twenties before Wits finally hooked us all up.

And research has shown that even once you get people online, it takes about 5 years to build up the confidence in the internet to comfortably transact in most aspects of their lives. So being wary of internet banking is not exceptional, but not having any access to (or interest in) the digital world must mean a life curiously isolated from modern thought. Think about your life without Google.  True, we now have ways to waste time that hadn’t even been dreamt of a few years back, but at the same time we are aware of our place in a global society like never before.

The greenness of the digital age is debatable. Certainly we are now able to do things far more efficiently, offset largely by the fact that we now demand results instantly.  But being online also plugs you into the thoughts and opinions of a globe of fascinating people. In a hundred years, when we look back on what saved this planet, the answer is going to lie in information. Our ability to educate ourselves, work from home and maintain relationships will be at the heart of our response to our dwindling resources. And that means committing to being a part of the digital world. Oh. And before you ask? Facebook doesn’t count.

Thursday, 20 May 2010

by Simon Gear

Until District 9, every UFO movie worth its salt had the aliens landing in the US. I personally think that this is an entirely accurate reflection of our interaction with extra terrestrial civilisations. Across the world, really, really big things happen all the time, but if a CNN camera crew isn’t there, we only learn about them weeks, months, maybe even decades later. Take Iceland. The island is made of volcanoes. They are spewing out of the chilly rock year in and year out. But no one would have ever mentioned Eyjafjallajökull in polite company had the jetstream not blown the ash over Heathrow, and so onto Sky News.

Monday, 19 April 2010

by Simon Gear

I recently spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around a completely ‘off-grid’ house, powered by a combination of solar panels and liquid gas. What continues to strike me about these set ups is the degree to which green energy solutions are about looking at every aspect of your power, not just at where your electricity comes from.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

by Simon Gear

Every car manufacturer worth their salt these days is building a green car. Walking around the International Motor show in Geneva earlier this month you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting half a dozen hydrogen-, electric- or hybrid powered vehicles. Even Ferrari had a green painted car on their stand in a vague attempt to get in on the act.