So much so that consideration is being given to either bringing the leaders’ debate forward by an hour, or delaying it until another evening so it does not clash with the series final of the hit show MasterChef.

I’m fine if you aren’t at the TV but given the choice and sitting at home stuffing your face with takeaway food while you pretend you’ll cook good food one day and you can’t pay a bit of attention to what’s going on in the election. Well…

Let’s be clear: Masterchef is big brother but without the shower and bedroom scenes. If BigBrother was entirely in the kitchen and the one on one interviews (completely and utterly staged post event I might add). Maybe with a bit of the apprentice thrown in (the drive away, low camera angle in the car). In 6 months no one will even remember it because they’ll be watching the next mind numbing but annoyingly addictive reality show.

Here’s the poll results so far:

Please tell me the public cares a bit more about the future leadership of the country than this!

Perhaps no one notices the bullshit

Perhaps Tony Abbott has a chance with his flat out liestatement that he can promise lower interest rates (for those not in the know: the reserve bank is independent of the government of the day and sets interest rates based mainly on inflation and other economic measures.. not on the whim of the politicians in charge). Perhaps both parties can overplay the significance of their “number one issue” and we will lap it up, just so long as it fits in the ad break of that TV show we’re watching!

The debate about the little things
The debate will hopefully revolve around the environment, jobs, education, healthcare, border security and immigration. You know, the “little things” in life. Obviously our future is not as critically important as watching these guys:

The hosts (image from the Age Newspaper)

• a pompous fat bastard (who needs to step away from the table more often and has to wrap his neck to keep his expansive jowls from exploding),
• a little bald English geezer (with small man syndrome and a knack for pointing out the blinding obvious in an urgent sounding voice) and
• a granite faced grump (I haven’t watched enough to know what he’s notorious for)

shovel a half billion calories into their already well stuffed gullets.

The meals are cooked by people who appeal to one of a handful of viewer-broad appeal stereotypes (e.g. the gay guy, the blokey clutz, the princess, the douche-bag, the “bit rough” tomboy girl, the ethnic “let’s keep this show from being a white wash” minority, the out of place awkward guy and the “jesus is my life” religious one that all the Hillsong cult mob will vote for). Not only are we dumb, we’re predictably dumb and don’t like seeing anything new it seems.

Step away from the cupcake fatty!
In a nation with over half the population overweight we shouldn’t be obsessing over food, particularly not the stuff on Masterchef.

MasterChef?

When “half a block of butter” and “a handful of salt” are in pretty much every dish: there’s a problem. Double problem because you’re watching the damned thing on TV and don’t get enough exercise. There’s perhaps a cross over opportunity for emergency room when they all (and they will) end up in hospital with a heart attack as their cholesterol encrusted arteries, basting in the umpteenth pork belly dish, finally give in. Or perhaps dig up “the biggest loser” hosts and get this mob to boot-camp.

Apathy is not a virtue!

It says a lot about the general apathy of people if they would rather watch a bunch of people chop up vegetables than take the slightest bit of interest in the policies and running of the country. One of my friends (Dave?) said that the ability to vote should require people to prove they have read at least two different papers in the week before the election so they’re at least somewhat aware of the issues. I’d settle for the average voter being able to put off watching some moronic cook off contest to watch just one political debate every few years.

Who elects these idiots anyhow?
In between elections there’s always plenty of moaning about how poorly the politicians are running the place: perhaps it is down to how poorly informed the voters make themselves by apathy and ignorant choices. Stupid voters deserve the stupid leaders they vote in.

Perhaps if people cared more about political issues than about which person goes on to the next round of the latest idiotic reality TV show of the moment: we’d demand something more from our elected officials. So we wonder why our politicians are a bunch of untrustworthy, back stabbing, gimmicky, slogan spouting twits! When they have to compete with reality TV shows to get elected: is it any wonder?

Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

Banish those bare rooftops says SA's premier!

The target set for SA is better than the national target, which is also good news:

Speaking at the Copenhagen climate conference, the premier informed that the South Australian government had came up with a new 2020 energy target that will generate 33 per cent power from renewable sources. The revised target is far higher than Australia’s nationwide 20 per cent Renewable Energy Target (RET).

Realistically though: we’ve truckloads of sunshine falling on Australia. The vast hoards of backpackers washing up bright red with sunburn on beaches over the summer is proof enough of that. So I can only hope that every government building in every country with half decent sunshine does this. Solving the global energy situation is like the eating an elephant concept: you have to do it one bite at a time. Government roof space is an easy win. I blogged some time ago about the nation building money going to good use on solar in Australia and how we should use the dead space for solar generation. I’ll post up some ideas in a separate post about some possible next steps Government could take.

The other thing that could fill some of that spare rooftop space, roof gardens:

Another use for that dead space: green rooftops.

I’ll leave you with the thought that if every government building rooftop was producing electricity: it’d be at least one thing in the building producing something worthwhile. Might even make up for the hot air coming out of parliament?

Left vs Right mindset on lots and lots of issues.

Though I’m a sucker for information visualisation I should disclose. Data and concepts such as this can (and should) be interesting.

As an aside, here’s a TED talk showing some pretty funky visualisation:

I posted that up earlier as one of my “ten wow must see TED videos“.

Australia plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday.

Finally! maybe this will be the boost that is needed to get solar over the tipping point from the niche “isn’t that a shiny expensive novelty” to something substantial. Or at least to the “isn’t that a shiny expensive widespread thing”.

Always good to compare things to the rest of the world:

“The government plans to invest with industry in the biggest solar generation plant in the world, three times the size of the world’s current biggest, which is in California,” Rudd said.

I think solar has enormous potential in Australia to cut down the amount of coal we’re burning for daytime things like air conditioners, factory equipment, aluminium smelters etc. Particularly when (as I’m still enjoying the novelty after the UK) we get so much bloody sunlight:

It’s a bit of a pity we’re also blessed with oodles of coal, which means Australia can afford to be lazy and polluting and still have enough electricity for everything.

As an aside: here’s an interesting quote from the long dead Thomas Edison from way back in 1931:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

Incidentally, he was talking to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

For practical solar hitting the mainstream: I’d like to see more use of dead space as solar collection areas. We’ve lots of roads/railway lines/rooftops that could surely be feeding back into the grid. Lots of space you can run strips of metre wide solar cells for long distances. All we really need is for the cost per unit and the ability to plug back into the grid without too many $$$$.

Anyhow, good to see a proven real technology like solar getting such a chunk of cash, rather than more bleating on about the hopes and dreams of a clean coal fantasy land. I’m hoping we get to a point where we just leave the coal in the ground and it becomes just another geological feature because we just don’t need it.

Bit of a longer, but most comprehensive coverage of the videos/slides here. In ten minutes you’ll know what happened.

A power point slide show with stick figures gives another explanation here:
http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

Nice clean, quick description of what’s going on.

The bounce of money (short intro by a news reader.. stick with it), so more of an “end result” type coverage rather than examining how we got here:

Oh and this one is worth mentioning:

How the unemployment statistics are worked out.

Might as well put something silly at the end:

I’ve heard suggestions involving burying, sticking in oceans, filling mines with it, blowing it into oil wells. While the oil well option sounds like it might work a bit (they currently pump salt water into a lot of ‘em to keep the flow going): I don’t really see how you can capture all (or even a significant portion) of the CO2 and stuff it in there (last time I checked the oil rigs weren’t exactly near to power stations either). None of these options sound like a particularly permanent solution or likely to be able to account for a decent chunk of the emissions.

Here’s a novel idea: if you want the CO₂ back in the ground so much: don’t dig the bloody stuff up in the first place! Yet still the politicians believe this will surely work, yes that’s right they have lots of faith in this energy industry quackery. It’s akin to the cigarette industry saying people don’t need to stop smoking because one day there’ll be a cure for cancer soon enough.

Whatever the solution it’ll most likely be expensive, require large changes to infrastructure and require quite a bit of energy to do. Yet it has widespread professed support from the energy industry, you know: the same industry that baulks at anything other than coal (e.g. solar, wind, tidal, nuclear) because of the above reasons (too expensive, requires new infrastructure and still requires energy to build everything).

A Time article by Bryan Walsh points out another issue with Coal fired power stations: the ash left over after you burn it (and have the goblins and fairies take away the CO₂ in little balloons or something) is pretty nasty stuff. In an accidental spill of coal ash/water a power plant in Tennessee Valley, USA has “released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster“, wiped out property and polluted the waterways with all of the nasty stuff that still lurks in coal after it’s been converted into airborne pollutants and power for those flat screen TVs and air conditioners we all know and love.

So not only do you have massive amounts of this toxic slurry to get rid of still but the information has been floating around for years that coal power stations release more radioactive substances into the atmosphere than nuclear ones, and the ash also contains the nasty radioactive stuff. To what extent that is true is a bit trickier to figure out due to the battle of misinformation that went on back a few decades ago. Given anything dug out of the ground tends to have radiation of some sort (e.g. household bricks leak small amounts of radiation) it stands to reason that coal would have that too, difference is that it is getting burnt (so would release that into the air in some quantities) but the real problem is the heavy metals and other “hostile to humans” stuff in the ash by the sounds of it.

I found a fact sheet that has an analysis of some coal from the USA and what it typically contains (from Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash:
Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance). Their conclusion:

Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm. The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks. This observation provides a useful geologic perspective for addressing societal concerns regarding possible radiation and radon hazard.
The location and form of radioactive elements in fly ash determine the availability of elements for leaching during ash utilization or disposal. Existing measurements of uranium distribution in fly ash particles indicate a uniform distribution of uranium throughout the glassy particles. The apparent absence of abundant, surface-bound, relatively available uranium suggests that the rate of release of uranium is dominantly controlled by the relatively slow dissolution of host ash particles.
Previous studies of dissolved radioelements in the environment, and existing knowledge of the chemical properties of uranium and radium can be used to predict the most important chemical controls, such as pH, on solubility of uranium and radium when fly ash interacts with water. Limited measurements of dissolved uranium and radium in water leachates of fly ash and in natural water from some ash disposal sites indicate that dissolved concentrations of these radioactive elements are below levels of human health concern.

I don’t think having the water/ash mix free and easy through the waterways would really constitute an environment that you’ll be able to control the pH or final destination of the particles much. Subsequent human/animal ingestion of said particles probably won’t be great either, but seems fairly upbeat about the danger it poses “below levels of human health concern”. So perhaps the radiation won’t kill you, but all the other nasty stuff might.

Regardless of how nasty and in what way the ash is, I think everyone knows coal is a dirty industry. Deadly if you consider how many people die in coal mines worldwide. We built our modern world on burning whatever crap we could (wood, dung, peat, coal, oil, gas) and now we need to clean our act up. While we continue to be stuck burning things to release their energy there’s likely to be stuff pumping into the atmosphere that we can’t sensibly prevent (at least not without using a significant chunk of that energy we’re trying to produce in the first place) so the best course of action is simply not commit ourselves to having to burn the stuff in the first place.

Containing and collecting gasses will always be tricky or require energy to convert them into something that won’t just float on up to mess up the climate so how about something a bit less aesthetically challenged and which we know works:

Renewable energy is much prettier huh? (in Germany, near border of belgium. )

Perhaps then we’ll spend less time on CO₂ pie in the sky solutions and more on something real,
Nathan