About Us
Traveling Geeks is a consortium of entrepreneurs, thought leaders, authors, journalists, bloggers, technology innovators and influencers who travel to countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public to educate, share, evaluate, and promote new, innovative technologies. The initiative was founded by Renee Blodgett and Jeff Saperstein in 2008.
Trips are funded by sponsorships from corporations, organizations and governments. The first tour was sponsored by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a trip that successfully marked the proof of concept that could expand to other countries around the world.
Read MoreSouth Africa Struggles With Carbon Footprint
South Africa’s growing economy may be slowing, but its appetite for energy is not. The nation has struggled to keep pace with its need for fuel and power and continues to expand its use of coal — and therefore its carbon emissions.
According to a new government report, South Africa is now ramping up efforts to at least account for and disclose its CO2 emissions without promising reductions. The country’s leading private coal producer also says emissions are on the rise, and is hoping for new technology to offset the continued expansion of coal used for electricity and transportation.
The government of South Africa just released its second Carbon Disclosure Report, which included more than double the amount of participating companies from the prior year. While more companies are beginning to track their carbon emissions and set goals, the data is far from complete, according to the report:
Relatively few companies (23 percent) have disclosed specific, company-wide GHG emissions reduction targets; and most of those companies that have emissions targets have focused on reducing their emissions-intensity, rather than striving for a reduction in absolute emissions.
Other South African companies that are expecting an associated cost for carbon emissions to be added in the coming years are starting to track their emissions internally.
South Africa has been slower to address climate change than other nations because of a lack of international obligations to do so, according to the report. While South Africa, signed onto the Kyoto Protocol, as a developing nation, it is not required to set or meet emissions reductions targets.
Energy company Sasol, which participated in the report, issued its own sustainability report this week that stated that greenhouse gas emissions grew from 69.8 to 72.7 million tons during the past year. Sasol is the nation’s leading producer of transportation fuel derived from coal (coal to liquids, or CTL). CTL fuel requires three times as much energy to produce than gasoline, losing 40 percent of the energy during the conversion process.
Sasol, one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases, is pursuing a new coal to liquids plant, saying it would create jobs and help to ease the country’s energy crunch.
Sasol hopes that new technologies will someday help to green its business. The company does not have wind, wave or solar power generation facilities because according to CEO Pat Davies, they are not part of its core competencies.
Coal provides 90 percent of the electricity and one-third of the transportation fuel in South Africa, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
State-run utility Eskom hasn’t been able to keep pace with electricity and has resorted to rolling blackouts while it ramps up the construction of new coal plants. South Africa’s growing economy has been slowed by the international financial crisis, but the power demand is growing as the nation modernizes.
In addition to its 13 coal plants, Eskom operates two hydropower plants, one nuclear power plant, and a small pilot wind farm.
Image courtesy of Flickr, DanielDVM.
(Matter Network’s John Gartner will be touring South Africa and blogging about sustainability initiatives starting on November 29 as part of the Blogging South Africa program. Sign up for the RSS feed here.}
Bafana take down Cameroon
photo: Alexander Joe, AFP
3-2 to Bafana Bafana. You know it.
Very short post but have to show my pride that Bafana has taken on Africa’s best and won. Great work.
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Get your South African and African initiatives on Muti
Yes, Muti.co.za is a submission site where anyone can submit content and have it voted up or down by the community.
But the Muti folk (Neville, Dave and Charl) have kindly placed the SA Rocks banner in the advertisement spot in the Muti sidebar.
I cannot express my gratitude enough to Neville for helping me […]
Mobile surpasses traditional web in South Africa
It’s what we predicted would happen. In fact it’s what we thought had happened sometime ago, but here are some authoritative figures that confirm it.
According to a piece in Bizcommunity, Rick Joubert of Vodafone estimates there are now at least 9,5-million mobile wap users (read: mobile web) in the country. These are combined user figures […]
Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article
SA innovation to be seen through eyes of top bloggers
I published the list of top US bloggers a while back for a local tour out here. We’ll be doing an event in Cape Town. Will announce that soon. But for the moment, here is some more info on the tour:
Blogger tour
Travelling with the group will be two of South Africa best-known bloggers, Thoughtleader’s Ndumiso […]
Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article
Sports Star of the year – Get voting
It is that time of year once again. The time of year when sports people that we all support throughout the year are rewarded. This years candidates have been announced, they are on the radio being promoted so what you need to do is go and vote for one of the following candidates for SA’s […]
DA’s online presence disappoints
I had high hopes for SA’s political parties and their use of the web. In an interview with Sapa on IOL my colleagues didn’t share my optimism. In an Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) presentation in Pretoria this year, I urged political parties to take online seriously and demonstrated the Barack Obama website’s innovative use of […]
Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article
Learning about the Q Fund
I ran into some folks tonight who know the founders of the Q Fund, an organization dedicated to ensure a free education for vulnerable children so they can realize their dreams and talents. Yes, education, but its about so much more as I geared up to hear more.
No surprise that the discussion came about as we were discussing my upcoming trip to South Africa. The founder was living South Africa in 1997, not long after I was living there the second time around. As she came face-to-face with the plight of millions of orphaned African children, she used photography to recount their courageous and heartrending story in her book, African Journal: A Child’s Continent, an inspiring narrative of how these children taught her the true meaning of love.
The Q Fund has developed partnerships with numerous like-minded organizations and individuals and is spearheading a collaborative effort to build the Mucinshi School – a world-class high school in Zambia which will become the prototype for a scalable, replicable model that can be used to help children and communities in need anywhere in the world.
I plan to dig deeper but didn’t want to miss an opportunity to introduce the organization to people who may never have heard about them. Introduce and of course share their core values:
Free education for vulnerable children.
To honor cultural differences and heritage of communities.
To design and build facilities and infrastructure that conserve, protect and enhance natural resources.
To empower individuals and communities to achieve financial independence.
To deliver measurable results within a specified timeframe with transparency and complete accountability.
To develop community-based businesses which become the foundation of thriving, sustainable economies.
To acknowledge through our mutual endeavors our growth and development as human beings.
WhyVote.co.za – why would you vote in 2009?
If crime isn’t a problem in SA and everyone has a job, if poverty doesn’t exist and everyone has food to eat, if every child is educated, not starving and has a roof over their heads and if South Africa is perfect…
then why vote?
The above statement is outrageous. At SA Rocks I have always maintained […]
Online discounts…why not?
Shopping online is growing in SA, people are becoming more comfortable with the thought of giving away credit card details to an invisible person across the world who just might defraud you out of the tens of rands that one might have in a credit card.
Well, I think that process would be a lot […]
