Hot water for one family, hot debate at Copenhagen

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The shopping list includes wind farms, seawalls and even real estate — new homelands for flooded-out islanders. And poor countries want to present the bill to the rich at next week’s climate talks in Copenhagen.

How many billions of dollars it will all cost and who will pay will be sharply debated when negotiators from 192 nations meet in the Danish capital Dec. 7-18 to try to draft a new agreement to combat global warming.

The poor say they need help from countries that grew rich off polluting industries to buy the clean technology required to grow their economies without adding to greenhouse emissions, and to cope with the droughts, floods and other disruptions associated with global warming.

An example of what they’re looking for sits balanced on the tin roof of a tiny brick house north of Johannesburg, a solar water heater consisting of tubes attached to a white plastic tank.

When the Twala family moved from a one-room shack in a nearby squatter camp to the government-built house two years ago, their new home had a toilet in the bathroom, a sink in the kitchen and few other amenities. Still, said Samantha Twala, 26, a Johannesburg office assistant, “We were starting a new life.”

Twala said she, her two sisters and her mother used to boil water in an electric kettle for baths — two kettles- full each. Her mother, a maid, thought about buying an electric water heater and tank. But besides the initial expense, that would have added to monthly electricity bills of 80 rand (about $10) that the family already found difficult to pay.

Then, as part of a city project to install 600 solar water heaters in the Twalas’ neighborhood, a test unit was put on their roof this year. Their electricity bills have dropped by half.

Other rooftops await. South Africa announced in November it was receiving $500 million from the Clean Technology Fund, created this year with pledges from Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Sweden and the United States. It plans to use most of that money to convert a half-million households from electric to solar water heaters, and to build a solar power plant and a wind farm.

The 600 heaters being installed in Twala’s neighborhood, like the houses, won’t cost poor families anything.

Since apartheid ended in 1994, the African National Congress-led government has built more than 2 million homes for impoverished blacks whose needs had been ignored by white rulers. But millions more remain in inadequate housing, growing impatient not just for shelter, but for other basic services.

“While we insist on the right to develop, we will do everything in our power to achieve our goals in the most sustainable manner possible,” Buyelwa Sonjica, South Africa’s environment minister, told reporters at a briefing on South Africa’s hopes for the Copenhagen conference.