About 2 months ago, I was sitting at Brisbane Airport having just finished a stint of 21 days straight of 12+ hour work days, living away from home at a remote construction site. I was fatigued and very much looking forward to getting home but I still had a two hour flight followed by a 5 hour drive to look forward to.
I’ve been working on this project now for about 3 years, on and off doing similar work for 20 years. Where FIFO (Fly in, Fly Out) work away from home, which is quite common in Australia nowadays, means extended periods in basic accommodation in a construction camp (most often remote from towns & civilization) and continuous days at work without a rest day. So I wasn’t overly happy that on the way home I ended up stuck at Brisbane airport for an extra 4 hours waiting for a major storm to clear so I could fly home.
This is the storm at 4:35pm
And one hour later at 5:35pm
This is what the storm caused, taking a number of lives in flash floods
Brisbane Weather Lives Lost in Worst Flashfloods of Moreton Bay Region
It got me thinking about climate change for the first time in a long time...
After four extra hours wait, I wasn’t the only one getting a little frustrated at the delay the bad weather had caused.
I found myself with plenty of spare time to do something I’d not done in a long time, that is to contemplate in depth just how extraordinarily short sighted, the media moguls, coal, oil and gas barons are to continue to do everything they can to ensure that no action is taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
That this terrible storm would be what they would refer to as the ‘we will adapt to climate change’ phase - unscheduled delays caused by lightning on the tarmac, even destruction & loss of life caused by severe weather events, are more often going to be the norm in years to come due to the impacts of climate change.
And that despite all the talk of adaptation, we are going to have trouble dealing with this and it will cost a lot of money (how many people missed connections/appointments on this Friday?).
The other thought was, why are people accepting ‘people in the future must simply adapt to climate change’ as the inevitable outcome of avoiding taking action?
It just so happened not all of us are….
This was the night of Elon Musk’s presentation on Tesla’s new business division, Tesla Energy, and their Powerwall and Powerpack products. I have to say, it was the most encouraging thing I have seen in a long time.
Elon Musk’s Tesla Energy presentation
Elon Musk wants to Power your home, your business, the world
So for the last two months when I have had the time, I watched pretty much every Elon Musk YouTube video I could find. In the past week, I’ve even finished reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance, and have to say, thankfully, for me, some of the cynicism which I’ve developed over the past few years where it comes to believing the world will get it’s act together to solve the energy systems engineering problem that is the predominant factor contributing to climate change, has been replaced with a renewed sense of optimism.
Although not a climate scientist, for the past few years I’ve felt parallels to what occurs with Climate Change PTSD. Which, according to this dkos diary/Esquire article, occurs despite best intentions and endeavors of trying to alert the world to the facts around the deteriorating climate outlook, the pressing need to do something about it and the amazing possibilities that may come to pass if we do address it. Climate Scientists have found themselves up against a vast media disinformation (& political) machine which pretty much does everything it can to deliberately confuse everyone about the issue.
An international disinformation campaign is being waged, led by Murdoch’s NewsCorp, (just as this media empire led the push into Iraq), intended in no small part, to maintain the very profitable business models that have developed based on fossil fuel exploitation, for as long as possible.
No matter the long term risk.
Excerpt from the book “After gaining security clearance, O’Connell also had access to a daily report that collected information from intelligence and military personnel on the status of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Every morning at 6 AM, the first thing to hit my desk was this overnight report that included information on who got killed and what killed them,” O’Connell said. “I kept thinking, This is insane. Why are we in this place? It was not just Iraq but the whole picture. Why were we so invested in that part of the world.?”
The unsurprising answer that O’Connell came up with was oil. The more O’Connell dug into the United States dependence on foreign oil, the more frustrated and despondent he became. “My clients were basically combat commanders – people in charge of Latin America and Central Command,” he said. “As I talked with them and studied and researched, I realized that even in peacetime, so many of our assets were employed to support the economic pipeline around oil.” O’Connell decided that the rational thing to do for his country and for his newborn son was to alter this equation.”
However, with the firming of the science behind AGW, it now appears that the leaders of this jihad to obfuscate, encourage as many people as possible to ignore, dismiss, marginalize climate science & the solutions available, is now one of knowingly accelerating humanities rush, as a species, to win the
Darwin award.
Intentionally propagated ignorance with the single aim of preventing action being taken to address the danger of climate change by transitioning energy systems to a more sustainable, less polluting footing, will most certainly not be viewed favorably in future by those having to deal with an unpredictable, disruptive, dangerous climate. More so as the cost curve on renewable technologies is coming down as the cost curve for ‘adapting’, doing nothing to reduce the chance we will see the worst impacts of climate change, increase at a frightening rate.
Renewable Energy Boom will mean vastly cheaper Electricity
I’m certainly not the only one, but like O’Connell, I had basically given up on the belief that the level of meaningful action required to address climate change accelerators by changing the world’s energy systems infrastructure to a sustainable/renewable footing, would happen in my lifetime (I’m 42). And if it did, it would be too little too late.
The lowest point, as it was for many, was around the time of COP15. Although the concocted Climategate was very carefully orchestrated by the likes of Murdoch’s NewsCorp, it was what happened in Australian political landscape that shook my faith in any chance we had to make to make a difference.
At the same time Murdoch’s media empire was mis-informing the world about ‘Climategate’, Australia was about to see the elected party (Kevin Rudd’s Labor party) sign an agreement with the opposition leader (Malcolm Turnbull) to vote to introduce a carbon emissions trading system (ETS) which would show the world at COP15, that industrialized countries dependent on coal as a major export, were serious and parliament united about addressing CO2 emissions. The Rupert Murdoch backed politician, Tony Abbott, challenged Malcolm Turnbull for the opposition leadership and won the spill (with the help of Murdoch’s 70% newspaper coverage of the Australian market) 42 votes to 41 https://en.wikipedia.org/... . The Australian Labor party went on to scupper the ETS proposal as they no longer had the opposition leader’s support.
What I had just witnessed was 49% of the opposition party members plus the party in power (who held 83 seats of 150) wanting an emissions trading scheme, a minority (less than 20 %) with Murdoch in their corner, did not. Murdoch got his way and any illusions that Australia was a Democracy were pretty much shelved for me from that time on.
The US House of Representatives also passed an ETS which died in the Senate, in no small part due to the Tea Party, another Rupert Murdoch Production.
A legislated ETS that both sides of Australia’s parliament had negotiated, was not then something able to be taken to COP15. In the end, COP15 appeared to many observers to have achieved little of consequence, but I do think it would have made a difference if the Australian ETS was legislated at the time, even if the US ETS was not.
Tony Abbott, again thanks to Murdoch, eventually became Australian Prime Minister and ever since has declared war on doing anything about transitioning from fossil fuels to embrace modern technological advances in energy generation and storage. He refuses to address the main contributing factor to CO2 emissions in any meaningful way. And, as expected, done everything in his power to destroy the renewable energy industry in Australia.
Wild & Wacky Government Changes Tune on Clean Energy Finance Corporation
War on renewables
The Coalitions push against renewables is bizarre, contradictory nonsense
Leading Tory MP calls Tony Abbott's Climate Change Policies Incomprehensible
A very effective team are Murdoch and Abbott. As was George W. Bush & Murdoch, Blair and now Cameron & Murdoch, John Howard & Murdoch.
As a result of this, since 2009/2010, I’ve pretty much ignored anything to do with climate change & renewable/sustainable energy systems as the ‘engineering solution’ to address it. Rather than believing that it was inevitable that humanity would embrace the challenge and opportunities a great energy systems transition would create – because of new industries, more & better jobs for young people, new hi-tech products, cleaning up pollution, changing the geopolitical balance (no more costly Iraq forays for oil), leaving a better world for your kids, watching the cost curve come down on energy costs (the sun & wind are free), giving the next generation a shot at shaping a better world with modern invention & new technologies like the previous one was afforded – for me, on trying to do something to make a difference, a terrible apathy, disillusion had set in. It seemed a lost cause, a hopeless case.
That was my Climate Change PTSD.
Prior to this though, to give you an example of how enthusiastic my belief was in our ability, through modern technological advances, different business models, to change the dynamics around our dependence on fossil fuels, please take a look at just one of the web pages I put together on Concentrated Photovoltaics (the rapid price drop in Si based PV meant CPV became cost ineffective, but that is not necessarily a bad thing).
Concentrated Photovoltaics
The responsibility to ‘pay it forward’, in my opinion, is ‘the’ single most important obligation of the current generation to future generations. IMO, it has not only been abrogated in large part by the baby boomer generation, but this responsibility has not been passed on, it has been effectively stolen from my generation, Gen X.
I certainly do believe many have tried, but those that want to maintain the unsustainable lifestyles we are used to based on ancient technologies they control and in the process destroy Earth’s stable climate for future generations, have been winning in their push us all to self destruction territory.
Musk’s story has helped me understand one significant point : that the likes of Rupert Murdoch are doing everything they can to ensure the entire human race wins the Darwin Award, yet Musk is doing what he can to help ensure the human race avoids it.
The ‘made up problems’ (Medicare ‘Death Panels’) that Rupert Murdoch’s minions manage to convince so many people are the most pressing, that we must throw unlimited amount of funds and resources at ‘solving’, to elect representatives that sing the same song from Rupert’s book, are based on… well… bullshit, not science/engineering/physics (watching Murdoch’s interview below a good demonstration of this).
That solving the problems Murdoch invents will not make life better, but make it much, much worse for future generations if we waste our time & money on them at the expense of dealing with real, scientifically proven risks.
“Why wouldn’t you want to make the future better if you’re going to be part of it?” Elon Musk, 60 Minutes, Channel 9 26 July 2015.
And it leaves an important question to ask of the denier brigade - Who do you think is most likely to take us down the path where humanity avoids, as Musk says, ‘Winning the Darwin award’?
Murdoch
“We should approach Climate Change with great skepticism.
Ummm… Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here. There will always be a little bit of it.
At the moment the North Pole is melting a bit, but the South Pole is getting bigger.
Um… Things are happening, but how much are we doing…. Ahhh with emissions and so on…? Well as far as Australia goes, nothing in the overall picture, China perhaps….
If we talk about environment & health & smoke and so on, of course we’re all environmentalists, we all want clean air.
Um… but in terms of the world’s temperature going up… the worst aspec.. arghhhh ahh the most alarmist things, they said maybe 3 per cent, 3 cents, 3 … sorry, 3 degrees centigrade in… 100 years. At the very most, one of those will come from man made, will be man made.
Now, what it means is if the sea level rises 6 inches, it’s a big deal. The Maldives might disappear or something. But, OK, we’ve got to learn to, we can’t mitigate that, we can’t stop it. We’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores. Umm and go back a little bit.
You know the world has been changing for thousands and thousands of years.
It’s just a lot more complicated today... because we’re so advanced”
Or Musk?
For my part, the guy that breaks it down to the basics, the physics, the Rocket Scientist, the guy who knows exactly what he is talking about because he has studied it, designed it, built it, the guy that is knowingly taking action to make the future better, is the one worth listening to.
Musk says he doesn’t encourage ‘cult like worship’ but in a word, I’d like to just say ‘thanks’ Elon for helping me change my perspective, get over my frustration at nothing being done by showing what is possible and for being genuine enough that I believe it.
200 Gigafactories Part 2
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