I’m pleased to see that recriminations over the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum have finally been pushed off the front pages of the news. Having said that, I’m hoping things are still happening behind the scenes to do something about the Aboriginal Industry to make sure much-needed funds actually get to the people who need it.
Israel’s war with terrorist organisation HAMAS continues on. I’m sure we all regret the human suffering this is causing in the Gaza strip but sorry, HAMAS has itself to blame. Some of the horrifying details of what was done by these ‘fighters’ in the name of Allah are coming to light in the public media and it makes what ISIS did seem tame. And the chant of ‘from the river to the sea’ effectively means exterminating Israel and all the Jews.
Here’s a quote from journalist Gemma Tognini. (paywall – sorry)
“A family of four. Two young children, a boy and a girl, six and eight years old. They sat at their breakfast table and were made to watch as their father had his eyes gouged out in front of them. Then someone cut off their mother’s breast. The same savages turned then to the little girl, the eight-year-old, and cut off her foot before turning to her little brother. Just six years old. They sliced the fingers from his hand. Only then was this family killed. After their execution, the Hamas terrorists sat down and helped themselves to a meal.”
I studied Nazi Germany at university. The rise of antisemitism horrifies me. Surely not again?
And although it, too, has been pushed off the front pages, Russia’s war with Ukraine goes on. In the north the days are growing shorter and the temperatures are dropping. Not just for the soldiers but for the unfortunate civilians caught in broken cities and still suffering relentless bombing while Putin and his mates party on in their dachas. War sucks.
Now the Voice is receding into history we’re turning to the issue of climate change and the march to ‘net zero’. I came across this interesting perspective in an email. It’s talking about the USA but it’s easy enough to extrapolate the situation to Australia.
Imagine Florida with a hurricane coming toward Miami. The governor orders an evacuation. All cars head north. They all need to be charged in Jacksonville. How does that work? Has anyone thought about this?
If all cars were electric and were caught up in a three-hour traffic jam with dead batteries, then what? Not to mention that there’s virtually no heating or air conditioning in an electric vehicle because of high battery consumption.
If you get stuck on the road all night, no battery, no heating, no windshield wipers, no radio, no GPS (all these drain the batteries), all you can do is try calling 911 to take women and children to safety. But they cannot come to help you because all roads are blocked, and they will probably require all police cars to be electric also. When the roads become unblocked no one can move! Their batteries are dead.
How do you charge the thousands of cars in the traffic jam? Same problem during summer vacation departures with miles of traffic jams. Yes, AAA is starting to prepare tow trucks to charge electric vehicles. How many can they charge before returning to home base and
recharge the trucks?
Food for thought.
I also read an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled The Earth is warming but is CO2 the cause? Here’s a taste.
“The authors ask a simple question: Are computerized climate simulations a sufficient basis for attributing observed warming to human CO2? After all, the Earth’s climate has been subject to substantial warming and cooling trends for millennia that remain unexplained and can’t be attributed to fossil fuels. As statisticians, their conclusion: “With the current level of knowledge, it seems impossible to determine how much of the temperature increase is due to emissions of CO2.””
More food for thought.
And here’s a bit more, again from the Australian.
” Australia faces a $1.5 trillion riddle. After big business flocked to a vision of net-zero emissions by 2050, reality has set in. The country must now find this enormous sum by the end of the decade to meet mid-century green targets in an effort that experts say is on a par with the rebuilding of Europe following World War II.”
And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that we need oil even if we don’t use it to power our cars, we’ll need hectares of land for solar farms and wind farms, and if they’re not built on what should be fertile, arable land near the cities, they’ll need massive infrastructure to get the power to the cities. Then there’s the real environmental cost if we look at solar panels or wind generators as an end-to-end proposition. Where do the spent blades and used batteries go? Land fill?
By all means find cleaner forms of energy (nuclear, anyone? – all the other countries are doing it). Clean up the oceans, find alternatives to plastic, maybe think about how we live in a warming world.
The new book is going well. I have written ‘the end’. Which actually means let the rewriting begin. Fortunately, I like editing.
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