WHAT A COP-OUT! ONLY DESPERATE FALSE AGREEMENTS SAVED THOUSANDS OF FAT GREEN SALARIES AND EXPENSE ACCOUNTS...

It was a near thing...all that paper and energy expended. Thank Bill Gates and God that carbon-copies have nearly disappeared.

 Cop 17 threatened to be nearly as useless as every greeny conference since Kyoto.

I was reduced to tears at the prospect of all these wonderful people having to go back home without saving the planet. And then all those countries said they agreed that each owed a share of money for climate change --  just in time to claim progress.

But just try to collect the money from them. Never mind. More reliable help is on its way.

The two things that have cheered me most this year are the technological response to end-of-the-world threats and the latest generation of our university students.

The most impressive tech answer to our mutual planetary suicide pact by carbon is in fact a very old one. It was first demonstrated with primitive equipment but clearly convincing results back in 1913.

There’s a large and thrilling book to be written about the vested interests – oil and coal producers and their shippers and retailers for a start – who made sure it was swept away as an interesting but unrealistic answer to cleaner power.

This is what happened. An American engineer stood before a big-wig crowd of diplomats and military on the east bank of the Nile south of Cairo.

He switched on his invention and gallons of water began gushing from a pump. Behind the pump stood rows of curved mirrors directed to the sun’s daily track. As the suns rays passed the mirrors they reflected the solar power into a glass pipe containing super-heating river water turning into steam. The steam immediately started the pump. The pump started shifting huge amounts of river water into the irrigation channels that would feed the vast fields of Egypt’s new cotton crop.

Previous pumps depended on coal imported from Britain.

Now, almost a century later, near the same demonstration, a vast new version of the sun-powered pump is teamed with gas as a hybrid with a mirror area of 130  000 square metres to produce electricity. Lots of it. Enough, say the physicists and engineers, for areas such as the Sahara desert to produce enough clean power for all the world. The hybrid gas element is phased out as new storage systems develop. A  German physicist, Gerhard Knies, has calculated that in just six hours the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year. Just a part, a fraction, of the Sahara could power the whole of Europe.

In Australia, deep bore holes are tapping our planet’s vast molten core for cheap, inexhaustible heat to replace carbon-fed power. These are the sort of things which will make COP18 an effective planning organ when they stop talking and start demonstrating what is to be done.

And the sort of things that will actually replace the South Africa of political corruption are evidenced in the new National Student Movement, an offspring of the NFP known as Nasmo.

These young people are refreshingly clear-eyed when they look at what their elders have ruined. They believe that the ANC and the IFP are past reclaiming, now too corrupt to clean their ranks and leaders.

Already they have forced the ANC’s student cadres – “the Malemas” out of office in Durban’s Technological University, the University of Zululand and the Mangosuthu Technological University. They have already taken over one campus of the KZN University and are working on the others.

When President Zuma goes, they expect to expand into every University where a significant Zulu-speaking proportion of students exist. They want simple things: clean government for all, more money for education, a future.

They are the future.

A CHEAP SUMMER TREAT THAT WILL FIT INTO CHRISTMAS.

Quick and easy apple tarts (or with pears or seedless orange and naartjie segments).

If you cannot use brandy, make a  blended or processed thick fresh mix of berries or other soft fruits instead. Boiled down apple juices is also good.

Tarte Tatin Recipe. For 6. Get together: 500g puff pastry. 6 sweet eating apples.100g butter. 100g caster sugar. A vanilla pod or vanilla essence: 1 tsp. 1 scant tsp of sea salt. Juice of one lemon.100ml brandy.

Preheat the oven to 190C. Peel, core and cut the apples in half lengthways. Toss them in the lemon juice. Take an oven-proof pan roughly the size of a frying pan. Add the butter and the vanilla flavouring. Stir together well and fry gently until the sugar turns brown. Don’t burn the butter. Add the salt and mix again. Then add the apples and arrange them to cover. Place the pan in the hot oven for 10minutes.

Roll out disc of the puff pastry the will fit into the pan. Lay it over the apples and prick with a fork. Then return and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the pastry is nicely browned.

Put a large, warmed plate on top of the pastry and turn pan and plate upside down. Use a thick towel to do this and be careful not burn yourself as you do it.

Serve warm or cold. But first warm the tarte tatin with the little amount of brandy sprinkled over it. Serve with cream or ice cream.