Tuesday, November 23, 2010

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Amy Witherden.

Making headlines:

Extraordinary measures are needed to prevent power failures, but Eskom will not enable this by letting go of its monopoly over power generation, a legal expert said on Monday.
Werksmans Attorneys director Happy Masondo stated that "Eskom is not prepared to let go of the power it harnesses as a monopoly in electricity generation. Yet Eskom is equally aware of its inability to produce sufficient electricity to avoid rolling blackouts."
The Medium Term Risk Mitigation (MTRM) project team established by the Department of Energy produced a national plan to deal with the shortage of electricity in the medium term, from 2011 to 2016. The MTRM project team has said that unless extraordinary steps are taken to accelerate the introduction of the independent power producers, there will be power failures from 2011. Masondo says that this declaration "provides very little comfort to South African consumers... who are acutely aware of the underlying problems of...Eskom, the national electricity utility, which continues to be characterised by contradictory or conflicting behaviour."

The costs of combating global warming will rise inexorably if the world fails to cap greenhouse gases by 2015, but new technologies can curb the price, said United Nations (UN) climate panel head Rajendra Pachauri on Monday, adding that he felt "reasonably optimistic" that the upcoming UN climate meeting in Mexico would make at least modest progress towards curbing climate change.
A scenario brought out by Pachauri's panel in 2007, said that world emissions would have to peak by 2015 to get on track to limit temperature rises to 2 °C above preindustrial times, widely seen as a threshold for "dangerous" climate change. If the 2015 goal is missed, then the world is "moving onto a more expensive trajectory," he said on the sidelines of a conference in Norway on Zero Emissions.
But Pachauri also said that technological breakthroughs could mute the costs of a strong assault on global warming, projected by the panel to cost about 0,12% of world gross domestic product a year until 2030. "It is entirely possible ... that the benefits might outweigh the costs," he said of efforts to avert more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels. "And the decline in costs might be far more rapid than expected."

African National Congress (ANC) veteran Pallo Jordan criticised his party's media tribunal plans at a debate where he was originally scheduled to speak in favour of the tribunal and the controversial Protection of Information Bill.
Speaking at a National Association of Democratic Lawyers panel discussion at the weekend, Jordan asked "How [the ANC managed to] paint itself into a corner where it can be portrayed as being opposed to media freedom?"
He went on to say that the ANC was creating a "lose-lose situation" for itself and warned that not only was a Constitutional challenge against the Bill possible, but also, that it was very difficult to keep information secret today.

Also making headlines:

Sudan's Agriculture Minister says that the country will prioritise agriculture to target food self-sufficiency within five years and diversify its economy away from oil.
New South African Communications Minister Roy Padayachie withdraws the controversial draft Public Service Broadcasting Bill pending further consultation.
Provisional results show that Madagascar's new constitution was approved by nearly three-quarters of voters in a referendum held last week, although voter turnout was only 52,91%.
And, former Democratic Republic of Congo Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba pleads not guilty at the International Criminal Court on charges that he allowed his troops to engage in sexual violence in the Central African Republic.

That's a roundup of news making headlines today.