ModeShift - Part 20

Kusile and Medupi, Conceived in Resource-Rich 20th Century, Struggle in Water-Scarce 21st

by Keith SchneiderMarch 29, 20160

EMALAHLENI, South Africa â€“ Not far from Johannesburg, set amid the corn and sunflower fields of the Highveld in Mpumalanga province, stand two unusually thick and tall candy-striped smokestacks, dozens of stout concrete support columns, and the tangled steel superstructure of the unfinished 4,800-megawatt Kusile coal-fired power station. About 370 kilometers (230 miles) northwest, spread across a stretch of dry scrubland in Limpopo province, is the construction site for Kusileâ€™s unfinished twin, the 4,800-megawatt Medupi …

South Africa Locks Onto Coal Despite Water Risks, Grim Market Trends

by Keith SchneiderMarch 25, 2016March 29, 20160

VRYHEID, South Africa — The chilly highland valleys of northern KwaZulu-Natal province, where coal mining and agriculture have coexisted since the late 19th century, have never been a geography of unfolding uncertainty, mystery, and menace like they are today. South Africa’s allegiance to coal mining and coal-fired power generation in an era of rising concern about water supply and quality, and weakening national and global demand, is causing a furor in the country’s mining sector, …

South Africa’s Impending Crop Failure

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 18, 2016February 18, 20160

PONGOLA, South Africa — On the last Friday of January, payday on the sugar cane farms of northern KwaZulu-Natal province, a hot sun beat down on the red clay of Cobus Horn’s equipment yard. Nduku Msimanga, taut and muscled as a welterweight boxer, waited there with three other tractor drivers to receive unusually meager pay stubs. Msimanga, who is 33 years old, supports two teenage boys, a seven-year-old girl, and his wife on the wages …

Robben Island’s Long Shadow of Justice

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 15, 2016February 16, 20161

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Barack Obama, America’s first black president, twice crossed the cold and deep 9-mile channel that lies between this magnificent coastal city and Robben Island, where South Africa imprisoned its first black president, Nelson Mandela. The last time Obama stood in the stone cell blocks and peered out of the barred windows was in June 2013, during a presidential visit to South Africa. Before that, in his first visit in 2006, …

Parks and Promise in Emalahleni, South Africa

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 12, 2016February 19, 20161

EMALAHLENI, South Africa — There’s enough disturbing news in the world. I’ve reported my share of it. So when a story crosses my path that is part of the global garden of embryonic hope, I relish telling it. One of those stories, about two young guys here in South Africa who turned trash dumps into a program to build neighborhood parks, was brought to my attention by environmental activists living in Mpumalanga province, the coal …

Earth Pushes Back and Paris Climate Conference Responds

by Keith SchneiderDecember 15, 2015December 15, 20150

Like divers surfacing above a sea of noise and ambivalence, negotiators in Paris on Saturday reached an agreement that commits nations to develop new energy strategies that hold â€œthe increase in the average global temperature to well below 2 degrees C” and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C.” The Paris accord is momentous for innumerable reasons, not the least of which is because it recognizes, at last, that three …

Paris Negotiators Expected to Reach First Global Climate Pact

by Keith SchneiderNovember 26, 2015November 29, 20150

French authorities issued an alert on November 18 about the upcoming COP 21 Paris global climate summit that needed almost no explanation. Two big public demonstrations planned for November 29 and December 12 would not take place, French officials declared, because of the risk they would be terrorist targets. The Paris Climate Conference, which opens on November 30 and closes December 11, is the 21st United Nations-sponsored annual global gathering meant to â€œstabilize atmospheric concentrations …

Drought Influenced Syrian Civil War; So What?, Says U.S. Congress

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2015November 21, 20150

A paper earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States added fresh, peer-reviewed details about how a malicious four-year (2007 to 2010) drought in Syria played a role in touching off a calamitous civil war in 2011. The long rein of water scarcity ruined the farm economy, and drove over 1 million farmers and their families into unstable resource-scarce cities inspired by the Arab Spring to rebel …

China Joins Global Pivot Away From Carbon

by Keith SchneiderNovember 7, 2015November 19, 20150

SHENZHEN, China â€“ Although it is a distinctive way to view the world, to some extent the contemporary industrial age is a global narrative of substance abuse and recovery. Sixty years ago the basic elements at the center of political and ecological concern were uranium and plutonium. Reckless Soviet and American atomic bomb blasts put so much deadly radiation in the atmosphere that milk and water became contaminated. Nations heeded the warnings of scientists and …

Donghao Chung, Guangzhou’s Daylighted Refuge

by Keith SchneiderOctober 25, 2015November 11, 20152

GUANGZHOU, China — Can a polluted stormwater drain newly constructed as an urban park speak for a city? Can a place of refuge, where clear water slips past slick rocks and families gather near the sound and mist of fountains, be an extension of a nation? There’s always risk in heaping such rhapsody on a single example. Still, in the characteristically handsome Chinese design, and in the cooling embrace of its flowing water, the Donghao …