A simple guide to Cilmate Change and global warming
Saving the world can seem daunting. You say to yourself, "I am no Wonder Woman or Aquaman, what can I do?"
Lots, is the answer. And what's more you have no choice. It is a small world we live in. Easy to destroy and easy to protect. But you have no other place to go, literally. There's no where to run to any more, no where to hide. You have do something. That thing can be super easy though. So easy, it won't feel like you're really doing anything at all.
I wrote a thesis on hippy and surfie culture in the 1960s and 1970s. It's even published (chapter 3 New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies). The lifestyle of those surfies and hippies really appealed to me.
It was born of the days of fights against conservatism, racism, sexism, imperialism, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, challenging society's core values.
Part of the appeal, was the sort, fuck the world, I can go live in the hills, go down the beach, smoke some weed on occasions, have a few drinks, have a bonfire on the beach, relax, grow some organic vegetables.
That was not that long ago, and while 'going up the country' may have been a viable option in the days of the Vietnam War of American Imperialism, anywhere you go in the world, like literally everywhere, you're going to be affected by climate change. So even if you are running away, chillin by the beach, or in the hills and countrysides, you really have to participate in helping out the world.
All right, enough of that, now let me tell you how simple it is to change climate change.
I feel I should number this stuff because we're always doing lists in magazines and the like, like the 10 best sex positions. But you know, just assume the first one below is number one and work it out from there yourselves. But as with lists of sex positions, just know, there's others out there who can help you, so you don't have to do it all yourself.
Money
Money's worth something and it's worth you putting your money where it's most worthy.
If you have a lot of money, or even a moderate amount, buy yourself a 100% renewable energy. Fill your roof with solar panels or just buy it off your energy retailer, or change to one which is already going towards 100% renewable. And the next car you buy, make it electric, or hopefully hydrogen fuelled ones might not even be that far off in the future, at that stage, consider your options there. Nothing new so far, pretty boring, simple purchasing decisions.
If you have a little bit of money, enough to buy 2 cups of coffee a fortnight for instance. Well, donate just 2 cups of coffee worth to a worthy cause each fortnight. I'm currently donating $7 AUD a fortnight to Amazon Watch to protect. Nothing much you say, well yeah, exactly, I still get enough caffeine and the Amazon gets a bit closer to being protected and storing carbon and producing oxygen and the like. And what's more you can easily increase your investment. Write a post of Facebook, put a donate button on the bottom, I did that with my $7 and then it became $28. You might have more friends/ followers than I! But who cares, you do what you can, it all helps.
You can also think a bit bigger. Think of your investments. If you have enough spare cash to invest directly make sure you don't put a single cent, rouble, yen or peso into fossil fuel companies, start drying out their funds, slowly starve them to death. On the opposite side of the coin, do a bit of research and find a few on the cutting edge companies involved in hydrogen production, or solar panel improvements, or lithium mining to supply the raw materials for batteries to store the sun. Invest a little in them. They're the companies of the future.
You know what, any investment is a risk, but over the coming years renewables will keep improving in efficiency and, and the price will lower, and they'll keep tapping into a potentially limitless (at least in the near million years or so) energy source. You may be aware that Hydrogen is in fact the most abundant chemical substance in the universe. It is hard to come by on its lonesome, but hook up a massive solar array and you can just get it from water, and when it burns it happily connects back up with some oxygen and it'll go back to being water and you can do it all over again. Try that with coal, or petroleum and see how you go.
Coal, oil, well even if the price for these fluctuate, and that they can be relatively cheap at times, you still got to dig, or drill, the shit up, and sooner or later (like in the next 25 to 30 years) the price pressure will only end up being one way, up. Though I expect with efficiencies in renewable technologies (including hydrogen), coal and oil may be priced out of the market in the next 10 to 15 years.
But back to the hard cash (not sure if the list has got past 1 yet, you be the judge), if you don't have money for direct investment, and you're working, you're likely going to have money invested in superannuation (I hope!) which is invested in companies (this can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a decade). Write to your super fund and get them to commit to no further investment in fossil fuels. If they have investment options, insist none of your money goes into the fossil fuel industry. And just like with my cup of coffee, amplify it! Get a page going, start a campaign, get another 4 people, who might get another 4, and so on and so forth, to put more pressure on the super fund to invest ethically. In this way, in the next 10 years we could see money available for new coal mines, for example, diminishing, going extinct like the other fossils of T-rexs and the like.
Ok, you still don't think you got any money for these things. Fine, no worries. Well, let me ask, do you own a smart phone? If you do, you might have some idea of the amount of energy that goes into producing them. A new release of an iPhone for example is so massive, that it takes a huge proportion of China's lithium battery production to supply, to the point that it's difficult for love or money to get a battery for anything else. I know that's not energy, that's just to illustrate that we're talking about a major world event every time a phone gets produced. Now, whether you're and Apple person, or a Samsung or Nokia (LOL), it doesn't matter, what you can do though is get onto the social media before you purchase your next phone, or start writing to the CEO's of these companies and get them to commit to the next model being produced using 100%. I believe some are already going that way so they might need much convincing. These companies are soooo big and have soooo much buying power, just that simple commitment, which won't increase the price of your device, but will leave the world in a much healthier place.
So far, I only got one thing on my list Money. Not much of a hippy you think. Obsessed with money.
Well there's plenty of other things you can do that doesn't involve money. Like voting for change. Write to politicians, get them to commit to producing green power, investments in electric cars, hydrogen cars, renewable infrastructure. Point to examples around the world, get them to jump on the bandwagon.
The Australian state of South Australia, for example, now produces around 50% of it's energy from renewables. And cut out this 'we need baseload' energy from coal crap. Typically such 'baseload power' is needed at times like we get here in Australia (and increasingly in Europe etc) when it's plus 40 degrees C for days on end, which is also the time we're getting maximum efficiency from solar arrays, all we need to do is just improve the battery storage for that and there will be such a minimal requirement for other sources, like natural gas, to complement this, and totally zero need for coal.
Another example, Great Britain recently produced 100% of it electricity requirement with zero input from coal, the first time since the industrial revolution began!! They might have had troubles with Brexiting, but they sure as hell are going in the right direction there.
Again, the more countries that commit to going coal free, the less commercial imperative there is to invest in the stuff. It becomes too risk, and the market for it will diminish and collapse (at least as an energy source).
You notice I haven't mentioned trying to convince people that climate change is real or that it's leading to higher temperatures, and destruction of coral reefs etc. Well, there's good reason for that - it's a waste of time! It would be the same waste of time as arguing with people that the internal combustion engine doesn't work, despite millions of them driving around us every day, or that Santa doesn't deliver presents on Christmas Eve. If you want to believe either of these things, feel free. People can keep arguing those things for the rest of the lives, but at some stage, when they switch a light switch on, that switch is not going to be connected up to a coal fired power plant.
You don't need to convince anyone about anything, you just need to do a few simple things to help get rid of coal and petrol, just a nudge in the right direction. It's going that way anyway.
So in terms of lists, this one didn't turn out to be as sexy as some lists like the best sex positions. In my opinion, ranking such things is not that important. The important thing is that there are many good ways to do it, depending on your disposition, capabilities and desires. And they'll all lead to the same pleasant outcome (well you might have still end up with a few tried and true favourites, but you know, you can experiment!). Just don't let the problem of choices of what to overwhelm you, get in there and start doing it.
That's about it for today. I think my next blog might be about why I don't campaign for people to turn lights off or stop flying in airplanes, though there's a few clues to my point of view in this blog.
Get in contact if you like
Twitter https://twitter.com/greenpaddocks?lang=en
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Coal-exports-Australias-biggest-contribution-to-destroying-the-planet-395577511025781/notifications/
Lots, is the answer. And what's more you have no choice. It is a small world we live in. Easy to destroy and easy to protect. But you have no other place to go, literally. There's no where to run to any more, no where to hide. You have do something. That thing can be super easy though. So easy, it won't feel like you're really doing anything at all.
I wrote a thesis on hippy and surfie culture in the 1960s and 1970s. It's even published (chapter 3 New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies). The lifestyle of those surfies and hippies really appealed to me.
It was born of the days of fights against conservatism, racism, sexism, imperialism, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, challenging society's core values.
Part of the appeal, was the sort, fuck the world, I can go live in the hills, go down the beach, smoke some weed on occasions, have a few drinks, have a bonfire on the beach, relax, grow some organic vegetables.
That was not that long ago, and while 'going up the country' may have been a viable option in the days of the Vietnam War of American Imperialism, anywhere you go in the world, like literally everywhere, you're going to be affected by climate change. So even if you are running away, chillin by the beach, or in the hills and countrysides, you really have to participate in helping out the world.
All right, enough of that, now let me tell you how simple it is to change climate change.
I feel I should number this stuff because we're always doing lists in magazines and the like, like the 10 best sex positions. But you know, just assume the first one below is number one and work it out from there yourselves. But as with lists of sex positions, just know, there's others out there who can help you, so you don't have to do it all yourself.
Money
Money's worth something and it's worth you putting your money where it's most worthy.
If you have a lot of money, or even a moderate amount, buy yourself a 100% renewable energy. Fill your roof with solar panels or just buy it off your energy retailer, or change to one which is already going towards 100% renewable. And the next car you buy, make it electric, or hopefully hydrogen fuelled ones might not even be that far off in the future, at that stage, consider your options there. Nothing new so far, pretty boring, simple purchasing decisions.
If you have a little bit of money, enough to buy 2 cups of coffee a fortnight for instance. Well, donate just 2 cups of coffee worth to a worthy cause each fortnight. I'm currently donating $7 AUD a fortnight to Amazon Watch to protect. Nothing much you say, well yeah, exactly, I still get enough caffeine and the Amazon gets a bit closer to being protected and storing carbon and producing oxygen and the like. And what's more you can easily increase your investment. Write a post of Facebook, put a donate button on the bottom, I did that with my $7 and then it became $28. You might have more friends/ followers than I! But who cares, you do what you can, it all helps.
You can also think a bit bigger. Think of your investments. If you have enough spare cash to invest directly make sure you don't put a single cent, rouble, yen or peso into fossil fuel companies, start drying out their funds, slowly starve them to death. On the opposite side of the coin, do a bit of research and find a few on the cutting edge companies involved in hydrogen production, or solar panel improvements, or lithium mining to supply the raw materials for batteries to store the sun. Invest a little in them. They're the companies of the future.
You know what, any investment is a risk, but over the coming years renewables will keep improving in efficiency and, and the price will lower, and they'll keep tapping into a potentially limitless (at least in the near million years or so) energy source. You may be aware that Hydrogen is in fact the most abundant chemical substance in the universe. It is hard to come by on its lonesome, but hook up a massive solar array and you can just get it from water, and when it burns it happily connects back up with some oxygen and it'll go back to being water and you can do it all over again. Try that with coal, or petroleum and see how you go.
Coal, oil, well even if the price for these fluctuate, and that they can be relatively cheap at times, you still got to dig, or drill, the shit up, and sooner or later (like in the next 25 to 30 years) the price pressure will only end up being one way, up. Though I expect with efficiencies in renewable technologies (including hydrogen), coal and oil may be priced out of the market in the next 10 to 15 years.
But back to the hard cash (not sure if the list has got past 1 yet, you be the judge), if you don't have money for direct investment, and you're working, you're likely going to have money invested in superannuation (I hope!) which is invested in companies (this can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a decade). Write to your super fund and get them to commit to no further investment in fossil fuels. If they have investment options, insist none of your money goes into the fossil fuel industry. And just like with my cup of coffee, amplify it! Get a page going, start a campaign, get another 4 people, who might get another 4, and so on and so forth, to put more pressure on the super fund to invest ethically. In this way, in the next 10 years we could see money available for new coal mines, for example, diminishing, going extinct like the other fossils of T-rexs and the like.
Ok, you still don't think you got any money for these things. Fine, no worries. Well, let me ask, do you own a smart phone? If you do, you might have some idea of the amount of energy that goes into producing them. A new release of an iPhone for example is so massive, that it takes a huge proportion of China's lithium battery production to supply, to the point that it's difficult for love or money to get a battery for anything else. I know that's not energy, that's just to illustrate that we're talking about a major world event every time a phone gets produced. Now, whether you're and Apple person, or a Samsung or Nokia (LOL), it doesn't matter, what you can do though is get onto the social media before you purchase your next phone, or start writing to the CEO's of these companies and get them to commit to the next model being produced using 100%. I believe some are already going that way so they might need much convincing. These companies are soooo big and have soooo much buying power, just that simple commitment, which won't increase the price of your device, but will leave the world in a much healthier place.
So far, I only got one thing on my list Money. Not much of a hippy you think. Obsessed with money.
Well there's plenty of other things you can do that doesn't involve money. Like voting for change. Write to politicians, get them to commit to producing green power, investments in electric cars, hydrogen cars, renewable infrastructure. Point to examples around the world, get them to jump on the bandwagon.
The Australian state of South Australia, for example, now produces around 50% of it's energy from renewables. And cut out this 'we need baseload' energy from coal crap. Typically such 'baseload power' is needed at times like we get here in Australia (and increasingly in Europe etc) when it's plus 40 degrees C for days on end, which is also the time we're getting maximum efficiency from solar arrays, all we need to do is just improve the battery storage for that and there will be such a minimal requirement for other sources, like natural gas, to complement this, and totally zero need for coal.
Another example, Great Britain recently produced 100% of it electricity requirement with zero input from coal, the first time since the industrial revolution began!! They might have had troubles with Brexiting, but they sure as hell are going in the right direction there.
Again, the more countries that commit to going coal free, the less commercial imperative there is to invest in the stuff. It becomes too risk, and the market for it will diminish and collapse (at least as an energy source).
You notice I haven't mentioned trying to convince people that climate change is real or that it's leading to higher temperatures, and destruction of coral reefs etc. Well, there's good reason for that - it's a waste of time! It would be the same waste of time as arguing with people that the internal combustion engine doesn't work, despite millions of them driving around us every day, or that Santa doesn't deliver presents on Christmas Eve. If you want to believe either of these things, feel free. People can keep arguing those things for the rest of the lives, but at some stage, when they switch a light switch on, that switch is not going to be connected up to a coal fired power plant.
You don't need to convince anyone about anything, you just need to do a few simple things to help get rid of coal and petrol, just a nudge in the right direction. It's going that way anyway.
So in terms of lists, this one didn't turn out to be as sexy as some lists like the best sex positions. In my opinion, ranking such things is not that important. The important thing is that there are many good ways to do it, depending on your disposition, capabilities and desires. And they'll all lead to the same pleasant outcome (well you might have still end up with a few tried and true favourites, but you know, you can experiment!). Just don't let the problem of choices of what to overwhelm you, get in there and start doing it.
That's about it for today. I think my next blog might be about why I don't campaign for people to turn lights off or stop flying in airplanes, though there's a few clues to my point of view in this blog.
Get in contact if you like
Twitter https://twitter.com/greenpaddocks?lang=en
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Coal-exports-Australias-biggest-contribution-to-destroying-the-planet-395577511025781/notifications/
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