Lighting the world's dark places

[jpak]

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/features/20070510-16421.html

When night falls on Tembisa, only candles and kerosene lanterns light the shacks made from metal, wood and plastic sheeting in this township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. Here electricity lights only a few streetlamps, and power cuts are frequent. In the darkness, the shack belonging to Michael and Poulina Mohlala shines like a beacon: each evening two powerful lamps shed light that attracts many of their neighbours.

“It’s a small miracle,” says Michael. “Even when the whole of Tembisa is plunged into darkness, my lights are working.” Fitted with white-light-emitting diodes (WLEDs), the lamps are run from a battery that is recharged daily by a solar panel, and requires no conventional power supply.

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“The financial support from the Rolex Award made it possible for us to spread Solid State Lighting in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka, and gave us international credibility in the eyes of those who had never heard of us before,” he explains. Thanks to Light Up the World (LutW), some 20,000 houses sheltering 100,000 people in 43 countries across Asia, South America and Africa now have electric lighting.

In Andra Pradesh, India, for example, Dave’s group has been working with non-governmental organisations to light a village of 110 houses inhabited by 700 Dalits – a particularly disadvantaged group once known as “untouchables”. In the area around Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, solid-state lighting installed by LUTW has improved living conditions for about 100 craftswomen who embroider cloth at home. “They’re not straining their eyes working on very small stitches in dim conditions any more,” Irvine-Halliday says. And in the Chirripo region in the heart of Costa Rica, the group has installed lamps in 135 homes, giving 675 farm families safe, reliable lighting for the very first time.

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[hunter]

1. Sturdy LED lighting, cell phones, and small solar panels will change the world.

Those technologies and easy access to clean water and healthcare will probably be defining features of "middle class" in much of the world.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. OK, I'm repeating myself here, but ...

I am reminded of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's observation that the developing world does not need to recapitulate the path of development which led the industrialized nations to where they are ... they can skip over a lot of the 'trial and error' and smokestack phase and go straight to the latest technology in many cases. Huge power plants and utility lines would certainly lead to a new way of life for these people, but if solar powered lighting and cell phones can achieve the desired results (which are lighting and communication, not necessarily any particularly technology) then that is the appropriate technology to pursue.

[NNadir]

4. Well, I see it somewhat differently.

I've heard so many of these glowing blurbs about installing some device for 50 or 60 or 1000 people somewhere some how. Mostly though, it comes from well off self-congratulatory groups trying to assauge the guilt of doing very little.

There are 700 million people in Africa. The soil is depleted, the rains don't come and Westerners, since the 19th century, beginning with Livingston and Stanley - another team of self congratulatory apologists - still go off trying to redeem themselves by pretending to care about Africa.

I will be that the do-gooders consumed more energy flying themselves in for photographs and running links to their good deeds than the Africans themselves will see from this scheme.

The batteries ultimately will rot somewhere, and probably poison some future African.

And somewhere, someone will mutter like Kurtz on his deathbed: "The horror. The horror."

[jpak]

5. Kurtz was commenting on French exploitation of uranium resources in sub-Saharan Africa

http://www.wise-uranium.org/udec.html#GA

http://www.wise-uranium.org/umop.html#NE

and you won't be seeing any of this on those cutsie Areva Funkytown commercials...

On the other hand, the do-gooders ARE doing good and bringing modern western energy technology to places where nuclear power would be too expensive or could not provide power because of the lack of a functioning grid.

[NNadir]

6. Really, in 1899?

The literary information you get from the circle jerk of anti-nuclear sites is about as worthwhile as the scientific worth of these sites, which is zero.

Let me guess, the new "if you don't know what you're talking about make stuff up" anti-nuke religion/industry is now claiming that nuclear power was responsible for African imperialism in the 19th century.

Never let it be said that the anti-nukes have a shred of intellecual dignity, because they don't.

Now we hear from the anti-nuclear religion that the events on the Congo were the fault of nuclear energy, although the actual state of affairs in the Congo Free State involved something quite different.

The same assholes who make this assumption, couldn't care less that in fact, Leopold I's exploitation of the Congo, including cutting the hands off live people, involved a biopolymer specifically rubber.

In fact, the exploitation of the third world for stuff like this is going on today. For instance, the Brazilian Anselmo de Barros, trying to save the world's largest wetland, the Pantanal, from ethanol barrons - who probably are very, very, very, very, very much like 19th century rubber barrons including Leopold II, about whom trust fund brats in Greenpeace couldn't care less - committed suicide by self immolation with ethanol to protest the pieces of shit who wanted to convert the pantanal into a giant fuel farm for Amory Lovins' car culture.

http://www.natbrasil.org.br/Docs/biocombustiveis/sustentabilidade_etanol_ingles.pdf

I realize that illiteracy is on the rise, but we can find all about Kurtz in our short attention span world by access to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness

The story of Leopold II is similarly told:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

The Congo has historically been the source of uranium, and at one time, before it was recognized that uranium is a very, very, very common element, was thought to be the world's only supply other than the former Czechslovakia.

Today the world's largest exporter of uranium is that fascist police state to our north, Canada.

Note that when the mindless anti-nuke Amory Lovins' paymasters, Royal Dutch Shell, who pay the worthless slimebucket $20,000/day to give them the "environmental stamp of approval," trash Nigerians the members of the anti-nuclear industry couldn't care less.

In fact, the entire anti-nuke community couldn't care less about any facet of dangerous fossil fuels. The entire religion is devoted to destroying the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy, nuclear energy.


http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0102.html


And the goal of the anti-nuke industry, in case any one is wondering where the famous anti-nuke twit Gerhard Schroeder is working these days, is to displace nuclear energy with dangerous fossil fuels. Just count Germany's new coal plants and measure the size and source of the payoffs to Schroeder and Lovins.

All the bubbly little headlines, "world's largest solar this and that," and 50 little cute sockpuppets couldn't change the fact that the anti-nuke industry is attempting to destroy the biggest and most successful form of climate change resistant energy because of their dumb fuck religion.

[NMDemDist2]

3. why?

it's one of my biggest pet peeves that we light stores and freeways all night burning GOK (Goddess Only Knows) how much electricity for no discernible reason I can think of.

How much would we save if we just removed every other light on the roads at night?

:banghead: