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Kavango River Separating Burnt Area from Swamps
Meanwhile South Africa, with its booming industries and manufacturing, requires energy but
has no oil, only some gas under the Karoo desert, and little hydroelectric power apart from that
from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho and possibly some from the massive 40,000MW
hydroelectric dam Grand Inga dam planned for the Congo River, dwarfing even the Three
Gorges Dams in China. It is dependent on generating electricity from its huge coal reserves.
Thus, of the 100 biggest power plants in the world seven are coal fired plants in South Africa
producing more than 3,600 MW each, with two more planned, producing some 4,000
megawatts each and of course also the carbon dioxide, sulfur, and particulate carbon pollution
to go with it. Currently in the USA 310 GW of power is produced from coal fired plants but is
predicted to decline by a sixth over the next few years. The total world potential for electric
power production is 23 million megawatts (Just over 1,000 GW electric in USA in 2010 and
45 GW in South Africa) and energy use 20 thousand Terawatts per hour per year of electric
energy (USA 4,369 TWh/year, China 3,457 TWh/year). Interestingly, approximately 40% is
from coal, half as much from natural gas (20%), about 15% each for hydroelectric and nuclear,
and 5% from oil and 5% from other sources. Obviously, much of man's usage of energy is in
the form of electricity as discussed above but the other large category of energy consumption is
the direct use of fossil fuels to convert energy into motion in the form mostly of transportation
such as vehicles, boats, trains, and airplanes, thanks largely to John D. Rockefeller's Standard
Oil team discovering a use for gasoline that used to be released into the rivers around
Cleveland. Before the extraction of gasoline from oil petroleum products, oil was converted to
kerosene for heating, displacing whale oil for lighting and also to some extent coal fired steam
based machines. Of note, increasing carbon dioxide levels, does appear to increase plant
biomass, somewhat offsetting the potential effects of climate change, maybe related to man's
energy needs, by increasing production of so called C3 grasses instead of C4 and offsetting the
effects of greater desiccation as a result of warming.
Alexander Merensky, a missionary from Witbank (White bank) on the upper reaches of the
Olifant's (Elephants) river, where one of the largest open pit coal mines is located, heard from
Adam Render, a hunter who had discovered the Great Zimbabwe ruins in 1868, of a fabled
city on a rocky citadel on the banks of the Limpopo river, called Mapungubwe (Place of
Jackals). Merensky told his friend Karl Mauch who searched north of present Pretoria, setting
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