December 2023

Towing, something very few people do in % terms, is another anti-EV favourite. (Electric motors are much better at pulling weight than ICEs, and towing impacts range for both.) Engineers have already solved it. They add electric motors and batteries to the trailer too, as in the one shown here. The vehicle is no longer towing a dead weight, so range is unaffected. As a bonus the trailer is then fully charged (if it’s a camper trailer) to offer lighting, cooking and other comforts at the campsite, and has solar panels to recharge while there.

Look at the number of EV models out there already, and how many are from Asia. Tesla doesn’t even make the top 20, in number of models.

What happens when solar panels are upgraded. Nearly everything is recycled.

There’s an oppressive social framework hidden in our passion for music. The economy of ‘cool’. Musical acts are central to the way people shape their social hierarchies. You can see it here in Luka Bloom’s fun take on Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Outta My Head. His and the audience’s chuckle reveals that oppressive social framework, like ‘wow, this is a Kylie Minogue song at a Luka Bloom gig’. Actually his rendition shows the beautiful chord structure of the Minogue song. But it’s not really culturally allowed, to like Kylie in the same way as you may like Luka. Ironically maybe, at best. Similarly some acts who are dripping in cool can produce pretty much musical garbage, but it’ll be worshipped regardless. It’s about social positioning. There are acts very high in the hierarchy of cool that I think have less musical talent than many high school bands. Even ‘all music is subjective’ points to this same social mechanism, people will not tolerate having their favourite acts challenged. It’s not a musical thing, its a social/cultural thing, You’re challenging their social hierarchies.

If you listen to this short clip, the focus will nearly always be the lead vocal. But there are 2 lead vocals here, Brian May’s guitar parts are playing counterpoint lines to the main melody. It’s that contrapuntal play between May and Mercury, both ‘singing’ the lead vocal, that is extremely rare in rock. Why May uses a sixpence as a pick too, to create a level of articulation or splutter that gets closer to a voice. It makes him a far more interesting guitarist than pretty much all the other legends, because he’s doing something much harder, and which is rarely even recognised for what it is. Counterpoint is fiendishly hard to do, you have to be able to invent melodies in real time, and not just any melodies, but ones that resonate with the main melody in surprising ways. It’s also a model for societies, where instead of having one belief that everyone harmonises with (or not), you have different viewpoints all coexisting, but creating a surprising interplay.

New EVs now in local car yards. The invasion has begun 🙂 Quite cute that one too, like an early VW.

Have a peek into where we’ll be in just a few years. Worth remembering Australia doesn’t make a single vehicle in this country, so what happens overseas will happen here. That’s where we buy our cars.

For Doctor Who fans who haven’t seen this first of the new specials, no spoilers. But in terms of personal impressions - it’s appallingly bad. More a crusading piece for trans culture than a Doctor Who episode. I grew up in the androgynous 1970s, people played heavily with gender roles. They didn’t turn each variety of that play into an actual identity. It’d be like Harrison Ford living his life as if he actually is Hans Solo. It’s a role, not an identity. Social media creates a universe where people collapse that distinction, turning every fantasy into a reality.

These guys were playing with established male roles, each character a famous way of ‘being a man’, which they made fun of in gentle, funny ways. They didn’t think they were cowboys or bikers or policemen, they were reclaiming the right to define being a man any way they liked, by taking established ‘macho’ roles and parodying them. Trans culture goes in the opposite direction. It tries to overcome oppressive gender roles by multiplying them. Each role is then even more rigid than before, there’s just a lot more of them. Rather than dissolving the rigidity of gender roles it makes them define who people essentially are. We’re going backwards.

A new trick the anti-EV crowd use is to compare costs of charging an EV at the most expensive public charging infrastructure with the costs of petrol or diesel. As this petrolhead influencer explains well, this misunderstands that EVs won’t use service stations most of the time. Service stations only exist because you can’t keep petrol or diesel easily at home. But you have electricity. The public chargers will also get cheaper as the network expands.

These plans are becoming more common, with the huge amount of renewables in the middle of the day pushing wholesale prices below zero, to negative. OVO still makes money from this, giving you electricity for nothing, because the network pays it to take the electricty, wholesale. You could charge a battery for 3 hours for your evening use, and the charging would cost you nothing. You could also charge an EV and get free motoring.

Consent fails time and again in law because it’s as nebulous as a fart in the wind. It’s a fad, a fashion. It will fail, because it already has failed, always, for years. It misunderstands the problem completely. This is social media at work again, generating a powerful wave of emotion behind a cause, rather than trying to understand something.

People are getting sick much more now with a whole variety of things because Covid is damaging their immune systems. If you’re lining up to get multiple Covid infections because you don’t want to miss holidays or gigs or eating out, there will come a point where it’s possible (nobody knows yet) your immune system will just collapse. Like it does with AIDS. That’s some risk to be taking. It took 8-10 years for HIV to lead to AIDS. We’re seeing immune damage inside 3 years for Covid.

An EV will run a heater for 60 hours or more if a car is frozen in place like this. It doesn't need to waste any energy keeping a ridiculous combustion engine idling to generate heat, for starters. You'd get about double the length of time using the heater in an EV, than you would in a petrol or diesel, if both were stranded in the snow. You may also become sick and even die from the fumes in a constantly idling petrol or diesel.

6c/kWh to charge your EV overnight. That’s the equivalent of paying about 10 cents/litre for your petrol or diesel at the pump.

Watching Torah Judaism sing and dance, and seeing that a mosh pit isn’t something that was invented in the 1990s. And hoping whoever put that temporary grandstand together knew what they were doing.

The reason fossil fuels appeared cheap for so long is that they’ve never been forced to pay for their pollution. This sort of thing, in the picture, has been going on for over 250 years, completely cost-free. An astronomical ongoing subsidy from taxpayers. The latest estimate for Australia is that this free pollution costs us over $65 billion per year. Add that back to the cost of using these fuels, and their price would at least double.

This bus from the 1950s had a novel form of battery to power it. It used a flywheel. Flywheels are a mechanical battery, you can store a lot of energy in a rotating heavy disk. NASA designed a space probe with a flywheel storage device, F1 have used them for kinetic energy recovery, etc.

This is why popularity (elections) is destroying democracies. We know exactly what to do to fix the housing crisis - to get governments to build a LOT more public housing - but we won't do it. Because doing that would be unpopular with existing property owners, who would worry about impact on the value of their properties. https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2023/12/06/michael-pascoe-national-hopeless-housing-plan?ahe=662efd944398edbb2d8f4d85736c4bb830fa6116abf076eb6d8317fd70698f95&utm_medium=email&lr_hash=&acid=3260892&utm_source=Adestra&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020231206

Oh dear, oh dear. I dunno, these petrol cars. You'd think after more than a century they'd have figured out how to stop them catching fire.

Here's a cost of living I'm sure many didn't see coming.

Those who work with presence, such as in mindfulness practice, often rightly point to the need to accept the moment for how it really is. And then commence some often incredibly elaborate process for 'accepting'. Which is not accepting, it's trying to get to a better moment than they're in right now. You see it in meditation practice, where people become still and withdrawn, trying so hard to achieve a certain state, which nearly always (for some reason) means refusing what they're feeling right now. They want to relax, to withdraw from what they perceive as an undesirable situation. To become less tense, less tight. And what do they achieve? A new level of tension and tightness, of 'trying to be less tense and tight'. Mistaking what they feel in their bodies as the problem. The problem is the trying to do anything. There is no separate mind and body, not trying in what we call the mind will automatically become not trying in the body. Lightness, ease.

High electricity bills are caused by high prices for coal and gas. Like Yvonne, you can be free of them in about a day. For those who can’t, the sooner we can get those parasitic fuels out of our energy system, the faster energy prices will come down.

lol, over $400 each to see a show. Fools and their money.

It's on these hot days when you can run the air conditioning all day at zero cost that solar really hits home runs.

20% of men wear the same underwear for a week? Seriously?

Oops.

Solar is even more of a revolution than is realised, why I talk about it so often. The prices are in free fall worldwide, it’s now so incredibly cheap to use that even if the world decided to do nothing about climate change, about half the world’s electricty would come from solar by 2030. It’s that cheap. And every projection for how much prices for it will drop ends up being a vast under-estimate, check the first graph. At the same time battery prices, for ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’, are also in free fall. Companies are falling over themselves to install both.

A new record for rooftop solar in Australia in November this year, over 330 MW of new installs in a single month. I invented a new unit of measurement, the ‘Mount Piper’, after Lithgow’s remaining coal power station. Rooftop solar in Australia is already the equivalent of 25 Mt Pipers, and is adding another 2-3 Mt Pipers every year. And is still accelerating. And costs of panels are predicted to halve again.

PepsiCo’s factory in Australia. Rooftop solar doesn’t just mean homes, it means businesses. Many businesses are doing this not because they have a single ‘Green’ bone in their bodies. They’re doing it because it saves them shit-tonnes of money. Councils are doing the same.

Broken Hill is getting a new type of energy storage, using compressed air. It already has over 250MW of solar and wind farms, which are often switched off because the grid can't cope with the extra power. Now they'll be able to store it, using compressed air. Seriously, what's happening in energy is more interesting and exciting than any movie. (250MW is enough to power 125,000 homes. The population of Broken Hill is under 18,000. They have oodles of spare energy.)

Happy birthday Pen :)

Upstairs can be a hot place in this sort of weather, as heat rises in a home. Tried an experiment last night, ran the AC all night upstairs. Still had well over 50% of battery remaining this morning. Cost nothing, and we’ll run the AC today in the whole house, with the heat coming. Which will also cost nothing, and recharge the battery at the same time. I put the AC on a timer when we’re not here to cool the house for much of the day, so it’s cool when we get home and during the evening. It cools the actual fabric of the building down, not just the air.

Happy Birthday 🎈🎉🎂

I realised the reason I’ve become so bored with rock gigs is that they’ve lost their theatre. Plenty of acts use big light shows and effects, but they’re not coordinated into a show in the same way. A great rock show is like a great piece of theatre, with constantly shifting mood and an interplay of band, crowd, lights, sound, darkness etc. A sense of surprise, of moments of shock and awe and then suddenly total delicacy. Stadium gigs have some of the most astonishing equipment in all of performing history. But the scale is much too large to work as theatre, it’s more like a huge dance party. It’s an impossible space for nuance, for drama or theatre. It’s more like a Nuremberg rally. This pic is the sort of gig that used to excite me. Not some guys on a huge stage that you could only see on a big screen. A theatrical/musical event.

Decorating the Christmas tree last weekend. I do occasionally appear in person on FB.

Many use France as an example of how nuclear power might save us. It has 56 reactors. It’s government owned and run, because no business will touch it with a stick, it’s in astronomical debt. And estimates just of costs of repairs of existing nuclear reactors there is over $100 billion. And they need to build more, which will be at least that much again. Plus de-commission old ones, which is about that much again. To show how the ‘debate’ in Oz is entirely political, we have the small-government opposition promoting this, which would lead to a Soviet-era type centralised State industry requiring vast amounts of public spending. They’re not serious, they’re just trying to win votes by starting an argument. None of it adds up, it’s delusional.

My favourite part is when she gets to the dangers of ‘emf, infrasound and nanoparticles’. From windmills. Good on FB, providing a mechanism to allow all of a community’s most stupid people to obstruct important things.

Happy 🎂 Birthday

The reason live gigs are trending more and more towards huge stadiums. Hint: it isn’t anything about music.

Thanks to Trevor for the link. ‘Range’ is a total furphy when talking about cars. It can be as little or as large as engineers design it to be. EVs were the first proper cars, you can see Thomas Edison standing next to his early Bailey Electric here. Even in those earliest days of batteries, it had a range of 160km. That’s more than 100 years ago, when there were barely that many km of road available to drive on. If the world hadn’t been sidetracked by rubbish combustion engines, when Rockefeller flooded the world with cheap oil at about the same time, imagine where we’d be with EVs today. Today’s ICE range of 600-1000km isn’t a feature of ICE technology. It’s an entirely arbitrary figure, which evolved to prevent the need to build lots of expensive service stations. You could engineer an ICE or EV to have a range of 10km, or 10,000km. It just depends on the context. Not on the technology itself.

Some say that you need to ‘balance’ things like climate change or Covid, against ‘the economy’. It’s a myth, have a look here. The Panama Canal is drying out, due to climate change. Huge parts of the world ‘economy’ are reliant upon that canal.

Happy Birthday!!🎂🎉

I share this stuff not because of a particular love of EVs or renewables. But because these shifts are shifts across our entire societies, everything links back to energy. An energy system that allows you to generate energy more or less for free, anywhere, is going to be a fundamentally different society to one where a tiny handful of people sit on and control all of the energy reserves, as we have now. Also there aren’t two sides here, renewables/EVs versus fossil fuels. Even the fossil fuel companies are rushing to renewables, because they’re so much cheaper. Only social media creates an illusion there’s a contest here.

“There is a complete obsession with range, and the assumption that unless they can go 600kms without stopping for a recharge, they are not much use for anything. The early adopters of heavy-duty electric trucks are, however, turning these misconceptions on their head…”

The thrill and pain of love isn’t in what you see and feel in another person. It’s in them validating (or not) who you are, as worthy of their attention.

And here comes battery storage, galloping into view. Reality has little resemblance to the fairy tales on social media.

Again it's not a particular interest in energy that makes me post about it. It's because energy is the centre of societies, everything they do. The black line is the US. Australia (not shown) is close to that black line. Europe is below the Chinese line. The main cause of our outrageous energy use? Transportation. Highly inefficient vehicles, and far too much flying. About 80 gigajoules per capita is sufficient for a good life. We're running a society using almost 4 times that, per person. And have the hilarious hypocrisy to accuse places like India and China of using too much. Asia and Africa will dominate this century and next, and we're pissing them off mightily.

Watched this. Keanu is a lovely guy, but these movies are rubbish. One continuous fight scene from beginning to end, gratuitous splatter, I found myself reading a book waiting for the fight scene to end and something else to happen in the movie. That never happened.

It’s an international embarrassment that the LNP went to COP28 and advocated for Australia to do nothing, and just wait a decade or more for nuclear power to be built. Reactors that don’t even exist, that nobody wants in their community, and which would cost astronomical amounts of money if they did exist. Producing waste nobody will want to store. Our existing coal plants are falling apart in the meantime, so they’d have to build new ones too, at taxpayers’ expense, costing tens of billions and taking years. All to provide power that is dirty and much more expensive, while the cheapest power in human history is already being rolled out at record speed right now, and is still getting cheaper. There isn’t a better example of how dumb popularity-based politics makes a society.

I was laying in bed this morning looking up at the ceiling fan, and realised it’s been running non-stop, for days, to provide gentle airflow. Completely silently, without fuss, using hardly any power at all. And it made me think again about how beautiful electric motors are, and how crazy humans were to sideline them over a century ago for combustion engines. Imagine a 2-stroke ceiling fan, as a contrast.

Michael Pascoe nailing it again. Australian business is lazy and entitled, and mostly because we own hardly anything so can’t apply pressure to firms to do better. Both we and the UK have had idiot political leaders who have sold the farm over decades, leaving us at the whim of foreign businesses, who milk us dry.

Big Oil will not be denied. I doubt most know how much they run the world. Everything in the world, energy is at the centre of everything we do. The only thing likely to stop them now is the continued explosion of solar, which can cut them off at the knees, and take down their power hierarchies in every facet of our lives, at the same time. It's why I talk about energy so much, its the key to changing everything.

It's a bit amusing that 'stop the migrants, there aren't enough houses for them' doesn't realise that without them, we can't build the houses. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/12/massive-worker-shortfall-threatens-plans-to-build-12m-new-homes-infrastructure-australia-warns

The famous Le Mans 24 hour race introduced hybrids just over a decade ago, thinking it would just be a good way to say they were doing their bit for climate change. The hybrid won, and hybrids have won every race since. F1 cars are also hybrids. I’d never buy a straight petrol or diesel car again, I couldn’t bear the clunkiness of them. All that ridiculous gear changing to try to keep the engine in its best power band, by revving the crap out of it. Hybrids glide along the road, with power and torque on tap at every speed, effortlessly. While burning half the fuel.

The US, land of gas guzzlers and climate denialism, will install 55% more solar in 2023 than it did in 2022. Solar is the disruptor, so cheap even the biggest sceptics are forced to move in that direction. 

I find it hilarious that so many wind and solar projects are being held up because of communities complaining about the 'visual impact'. Coal-fired power stations are butt-ugly, and I bet weren't delayed when they were built because communities didn't find them pretty enough. This is a combination of people being morons, and deliberate obstruction. Just build the bloody things. Let people whinge on social media, and then ignore it.

Telstra has now finalised all of the energy it uses being renewable by 2025. Day and night. This is one of the solar farms. Some people don't like the look of solar farms, but nearly always they're on land that's been cleared for agriculture, a wasteland baking in the heat. It's the first shade and shelter this land has often seen in generations, and both stock and plants love it. It protects them from heat, sunburn and frost, and also helps keep stock dry when it rains. Australian farm animals are some of the worst treated in the world.

You can be free of all of this.

Can see here why AEMO is nervous tonight, this is NSW. Green line is demand, purple price. That’s huge demand. People with batteries can sell electricity into the grid right now at nearly 70c/kWh. Next post shows something about why this is really interesting.

The even more interesting bit. The current spot prices in mainland States. Negative prices mean retailers are paid to use the electricity. NSW and Queensland both at huge positive prices. I’ve circled in red the proportion of renewables being used to supply each State right now. I’m sure you can see the pattern there. The States with lots of renewables have by far the cheapest electricity, even at this critical high demand time. Not just cheap, they’ll pay you to take it. And South Australia, who cop so much criticism from anti-renewables morons - have a look. Smashing everybody.

Real change doesn’t come by convincing everybody it’s needed. It comes by pushing them out of the way, making them redundant. That’s what solar is doing right now, smashing fossil fuels and everything in our culture that’s reliant upon them. Which is EVERYTHING.

AEMO's latest projections say all of Australia's coal-powered electricity will be gone by 2038. I'd place a bet it will be even earlier. Given the speed of the decline, for all intents and purposes it's game over even before 2030, in this decade.

AEMO also modelled the charming German concept of 'dunkelflaute'. Meaning long periods with no sun or wind (night times are already not a challenge, except for people who see the world through empty slogans). The outcome? No problem.

Like I say, I wouldn't be expecting a lot of resale on ICEs people buy in the next 5-10 years.

Solar capacity in Europe has grown by more than 40% per year for 3 years in a row. Graphs like this ram home what absolute fantasy most of what you read on social media is. (Except my posts, of course.)

Happy Birthday!!

Got my Covid booster. The government hasn't ordered enough but I guess they're factoring in that many haven't bothered in a while. Here's a sweetener.

The UK isn't very sunny, like much of Europe. So a greater emphasis on wind. Wind blows 24 hours a day, often even stronger at night. They're still faster than us at getting rid of coal. Our 10 years 2013-2023 of doing sweet f-all have been rightly called 'the lost decade'.

The word ‘economy’ comes from ancient Greek, where it meant ‘management of a household’. The economy is just households. Instead we’ve said it’s business, a terrible mistake. Business was invented to serve households, not the other way around. Any business can make money if you have cashed-up households (customers). Cashed-up business on the other hand doesn’t create customers. You can see it now with energy. It’s households who are revolutionising Australian energy, not business. They should be subsidised even more, to get batteries for example.

Another chapter of ‘how crap combustion engines really are.’ Using a new petrol mower for one hour produces more air pollution than driving a car 70km. Garden tools like mowers produce 5% of the air pollution in the US alone. And it’s dangerous air pollution, very bad for your heart, lungs and brain. The US EPA also estimates 65 million litres of petrol is spilled every year while refuelling mowers and other garden equipment, much of which ends up in the soil and waterways.

Happy Birthday!🎂🎉🎈

Happy Birthday🎉🎊🎂

Had another person say this week ‘why are you still wearing a mask?’ They asked in the way I know very well, what they mean is ‘nobody else is wearing a mask, why are you?’ Their measure of what to do is what other people are doing. They’re more worried about looking different to other people, than they are about letting this bastard virus take up residence in their bodies. This is the high school culture we now have, from cradle to grave. Also featuring gems like ‘we can’t live like this forever’. Meaning they’re bored with it. Like reality cares if they’re entertained or not. This virus has already killed more people than died in World War 1. And it’s still killing, at record rates. We didn’t stop fighting World War 1 because we got bored.

I never warn people of speed cameras or radar traps, because I’m so sick of people paying no attention to speed limits that I think they deserve every fine they get if they ignore them. To me it’s not just about safety, speeding drivers also destroy traffic flow. One of the main functions of speed limits that isn’t well known is that they’re designed to keep traffic well spaced out.

The amount of energy humans use in an entire year from all sources is the equivalent of 90 minutes of sunshine. Oil, gas and coal are also sunshine, just stored over millions of years. Never bet against sunshine.

Germany has been trialling hydrogen trains to replace diesels. All now shifting to battery-electric instead, because it’s so much cheaper. The people who back hydrogen do it for one reason only. Team sports. They’re the disappointed old fossil fuel crowd who can’t bring themselves to admit renewables are the obvious way forward. So they back a third candidate, hydrogen. It’s a dismal failure, ludicrously expensive.

Brilliant idea out of the UK, where polluting firms pay (as a form of carbon offsetting) to retrofit social housing with energy efficiency changes (like insulation), solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps for heating and hot water. The residents are understandably elated, much more comfortable homes, at a fraction of the old cost. Many use meter-based electricity, where they pay as they use. Now they often get credits on the meter instead.

Happy birthday to you!!

Race cars rev like crazy at the start of a race because petrol engines have zero power except at high revs. It’s exciting, goosebumps, the sound. Though that’s just the cars farting, literally. Some equate the sound with grunt, but it’s the sound of 70-80% of the fuel energy going straight out the exhaust. I love car racing, but the V8s are in a bind, nobody really drives Mustangs or Camaros. They could convert Supercars to hybrids, so we can get some real grunt. Major race formulas overseas have already done it. Or even better, put the hybrids in the race, with the Mustangs and Camaros. Carnage.

The sheep love the shade, and why wouldn’t they.

It’s so accepted now that friendship is a vitally important thing that nobody really questions it. And it is a vitally important part of life, but it has its time and place. It’s also the most powerful way to stunt a person’s growth to adult maturity. It’s a training ground for kids and early-20s to learn to live with non-family members, in wider society. One of the most famous TV series of all time, Friends, is about that life stage. After that, friends are mostly acquaintances attached to work and schools, the parents of your kids’ friends. People to socialise with because you’re doing things together anyway. It’s very common for these friendships to be transient, as you move through life. People interpret it though as some terrible thing, and there’s talk of ‘epidemics of loneliness’. That seems more like adults pining for an earlier stage of their lives. Friends will hold you back if you’re constantly self-monitoring to not put them offside, because your beliefs and desires may come into conflict with theirs. It’s very common for friends to actually not have a lot in common, because friendship is a fairly surface-level interaction. It’s why it’s important for kids and young adults to have friends, to learn that people are different, but you can still get along. Proper adult maturity is being comfortable on your own. To still socialise, sure, but not to NEED it. To come to the maturity of who you are, individually, with fewer and fewer compromises with how that might make your friends feel. To have ‘besties’ in adult life is a bit of an embarrassment, I think. To need that sort of close connection seems a type of arrested development. But then as I post about a lot, culturally all adult life is really still high school life now, with the different parts just renamed to disguise it.

It’s much better to tell a lie, than to live one.

Alan Kohler pointed out last week that the biggest story of the year was one nobody covered. China became the world’s biggest exporter of cars, in March. It was already the world’s biggest producer of cars - it has such a huge domestic market - but now it’s also the greatest exporter. Like Haval, seeing a lot of these now here. China has learned extremely fast, as the Koreans did with Hyundai and KIA. They’re producing superb quality cars, much cheaper than Europeans and Americans can. China is also investing hugely in EVs, so will own this space unless Western carmakers pull their fingers out. I don’t think many will. They can kiss their cosy market positions and even existence goodbye.

Watch all of this play out in real-time. BYD (another Chinese manufacturer) is less than 12 months’ old in Oz. Only Tesla now sells more EVs than it does. The different Chinese brands are competing with each other here now, on price (Teslas are also often made in China). This will drive prices down fast, and these cars are already orders of magnitude cheaper to run than petrols or diesels. And have much better performance. It’s game over.

Happy 50th Nancy!!

Alan Kohler is so consistently brilliant. Like here, pointing out that the US (and the wider Anglo world) is handing total domination of the next century (or two) to Asia, because of our ridiculous culture wars on climate. The Chinese are racing ahead to fill the gap, and if Trump's elected again, it'll be game over. Another hilarious twist in this tale? One of the biggest users of our iron ore and lithium exports, and therefore what makes us rich, is China building EVs. So at the same time as China is taking over that whole technological revolution and making us buckets of money, morons here in Oz sit on social media repeating slogans about how bad EVs and renewables are.

See the purple light at the back of the room here? That's germicidal UV light, used to sterilise the air. It would likely be invisible to people there, but the digital camera picked it up. Lots is done to protect prominent people from Covid, the same people who tell the rest of us to get infected and get on with life. It's a con. Even rock stars are having expensive medical procedures used to protect them on tour, while filling stadiums with millions of potential Covid victims.

The MG4 Xpower is the hot hatch version of the MG4. It’ll do 0-100 in 3.8 seconds, roughly the same as a V8 supercar. And I reckon it looks hot too. Just one of the many amazing EVs now available here for sale, and like all EVs will need almost no servicing, and cost you almost nothing to fuel.

The pace of change is so fast there’s almost a new announcement like this every single day. All of these projects will be completed inside 5 years, some inside 2. It’s very quick to install a big battery, remember Tesla promising South Australia’s original big battery would be completed in 100 days? It took them 63 days. It takes 8-10 years to build a new coal-fired power station.

Germany’s health minister really tries. Germany is facing its greatest wave of the pandemic so far, making a nonsense of the idea that Covid is over. And he points out at that people shouldn’t be catching Covid over and over. It won’t make them immune, it can cause lasting damage to their bodies.

It's the hottest ever start to summer on record. Those who still deny climate disaster talk about the Earth being this hot in the past. Yes it was, when dinosaurs were alive, tens of millions of years ago. Reptiles ruled the Earth. We're not reptiles. We only exist because it cooled down.

Less than 15% of new energy in 2022 came from fossil fuels. Look at the tidal wave of renewables. There are no debates, the debates are hot air on social media. A revolution is underway, we’re living in it.

VOX has done a great job with this. Less than $100 for the full AC30 + treble booster, plus effects, plus standard VOX sound plus delays etc. Fits in the palm of your hand.

The owners of Iowa’s last nuclear power plant are turning the facility into a solar farm. You can’t get a clearer picture of the global shift in play. And incidentally, it takes 20-30 YEARS to decommission a nuclear plant. And a decade or more to build one. They’re ridiculous technology for today, in places like Australia. You can build a solar farm in 8 months, and decommission it in 8 months too.

In this last week leading up to Christmas, where people will want to be socialising heavily, a quick story about the current Covid variant. One of Sydney’s elite schools, which has invested in clean air technology and other measures to protect kids from Covid (private schools do that), had 80 students go down with Covid last week. And that’s only the ones they know about, who tested. Whether Covid joins us at Christmas lunch this year is heavily up to us, right now.

Adding to my list of scalps, same orange colour too. The Ranger Raptor, smoked at the lights by the Corolla Hybrid :) In a safe fashion of course, no need to race. Left it well behind just accelerating normally away from the lights, while it was revving like mad trying to race.

I've been a critic of hit and giggle cricket. I also saw today cricketers buying homes worth $25 million. At the same time most games of cricket now, except T20, struggle to get any sort of crowd, unless they're signature games like Ashes tests. India v Pakistan games used to draw similar numbers, but the last one of those I saw looked near-empty too. Bradman was an opponent of professionalised sport, he was thought of as a fuddy-duddy. And to be fair, lots of sports that still attract big crowds pay sportspeople millions of dollars. But I wonder if one generation of cricketers are milking every last cent out of populist formats now, while the rest of the game collapses.

Covid is a vascular disease. Not like colds, or flu. It will go wherever you have blood vessels. And once it arrives, if you can pardon the technical French phrase, it will fuck you over. https://www.miragenews.com/covid-19-causes-vocal-cord-paralysis-in-teen-1147140/

I love when people experience EV performance. Quite honestly, there will come a day in my lifetime when everybody will wonder how we put up with petrol and diesel cars for so long.

One of the most bizarre anti-renewables stories is that renewables only work because of big government subsidies. These graphs are from the International Energy Agency (IEA), and show the astronomical subsidies fossil fuels receive from governments, and it’s getting larger. And not only directly, it’s also costing governments hundreds of billions in ‘cost of living’ fuel relief, the second graph. Meantime solar and wind have ‘negative subsidies’ i.e. they actually make governments money, and push power prices down.

What used to be called our civic life is now being replaced by social media groups at the local level. The pathetic adolescent trivia that leads to is worse every day. These are adults, this is the shit that now passes for adult life. It maybe wouldn’t matter as much if it stayed on social media, but these groups increasingly disrupt and take over important parts of town’s operating systems. No thing going on in a town escapes their tidal wave of dumb.

Happy Birthday Graeme :)

Oops. https://reneweconomy.com.au/coalitions-nuclear-smr-poster-boy-cancels-flagship-project-due-to-soaring-costs/

Queensland's Chief Health Officer (CHO) was a political appointment, to replace their previous CHO, who often told embarrassing truths about Covid. (They made her Governor to shut her up.) Have a look how it's going. December 2022 on the left, December 2023 (now) on the right.

Like talking to a brick wall.

Huge. South Australia will be able to feed its huge and growing renewable energy into the national grid. Companies will now add lots of extra solar and wind farms and batteries all the way along this connector.

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. The modern test of ‘faith’, where you’re ‘religious’ if you believe in things like an afterlife, and God up in the sky, is a nonsense remnant of debates from the Enlightenment. The leftover fragments of a past cultural war. I am religious. But not at all in the way that word has come to be used, I’m not a church goer or adherent of any faith. Those again are historical remnants of past ways of being religious in the way I actually am religious. Church services were the rock concerts of their day, a way to cement and reinforce the Good Word through music and colour and awe. The much older process I’m talking about was quite simple. It was focused on one thing only, making *present* again, every day, the ideas and deeds that led to a a good life. To continuously create the desire to do good things, through persuasion and inspiration. That’s what churches were doing, in their earliest days. Taking the teachings of people like Jesus, and finding a way to sustain them, across thousands of years. Or as Bruno Latour said, in the most beautiful analogy possibly ever. To be religious is like being in love. We say ‘I love you’ every day to the people we love. Not because they’ve forgotten from yesterday, but because it re-makes that love anew, every day. Forget all the baggage of historical religion if it offends you. Instead focus on what it was actually about. The production of joy. Joy is not happiness, happiness is a cheap emotion. Joy links understanding to life. We’ve forgotten about joy, we have a lot to re-learn.

Many have said over the years that what I post to FB looks negative, or not much 'fun'. It's important to me to clarify that. Spinoza is a hero of mine. The only real purpose of adult life is understanding. And that's also the only path to joy. The happy and fun times that dominate FB aren't joy, people can be abjectly miserable underneath all that curated fake positivity. My passion and what gives me joy is understanding things. The curated positivity of FB and other social media is fake happiness. And a million miles from actual joy. Many who curate the stuff are miserable, slaves to a social comparison process that makes them ever-more anxious. I know a lot of the people who look they're living 'fun' and happy lives on FB. Their lives are often in the toilet. The curated toxic positivity is a deflection from that, it allows them to avoid confronting that truth.

Seeing lots of Christmas parties right now. The beauty of them is they can all meet up again, in Emergency, over Christmas.

Is very good.

Another anti-slogan thing. For the people who say renewable energy is just as environmentally damaging because we need to mine so many new minerals.

70% increase in public chargers in 2023 alone. The NRMA is contracted to install these every 150km on key long-distance routes. It’s critical to remember most EV charging will happen at home, these fast-chargers are for the minority of drivers on long trips. Plus a huge surge in EV sales this year. We’re living inside a revolution right now, it saddens me so much of it is spoiled by the circulation of vile propaganda. Why I post so much about it, to counter some of that filth.

As a local government worker I always appreciate the advice from this FB group on how to run the town. It’s a powerhouse of insight.

Again, it’s a shame not to be allowed to comment on specific things in Bathurst, because of my job. But I can observe the 2 FB groups that are assuming quasi-leadership of the town. And isn’t it inspirational.

Seems worth a try for some cleaner, more powerful cars, almost free electricity, and clean air.

One more inspirational insight, if only Council had thought of it. (Most of the bats left weeks ago.)

Christmas is sometimes described as being too materialistic. But gift-giving is a fundamental character in the Christian story. In fact the whole Christmas story is about materialism, about not just gifts, but about the material embodiment of God, in human form. Jesus. Michael Tournier, the late French novelist, made the beautiful observation that the world would be a far happier place if we focused on our material well-being, and ditched all of the horrible idealisms which cause our fights and wars. Most of the world would love the luxury of being able to feign disdain for material goods.

I’ve had a few people ask me why I’m so critical of social media. There are many reasons, one of which is that my work takes me into places where the direct impact of social media on real world things happens. Like the current red alert at Chifley Dam for blue-green algae. Standard practice around the world, to prevent recreational use of public water with blue-green algae present. It’s a highly toxic organism, responsible some researchers think for motor neurone disease, amongst many other things. Read the pile-on in the comments at this Council post. This is now standard, for everything councils do. And much of it is getting increasingly aggressive and violent. In the US the parliament of the country was invaded and looted, using social media mobs. These platforms look like happy and friendly places, where we can share endless photos of ourselves ‘having a good time’. But their impact in the real world is a disaster. People doing a lot of essential work are subjected to constant daily abuse by morons.

What made Eddie Van Halen the best rock guitar god of our era was that he was the greatest musician of all the rock guitar gods. Others would try to play flashier things, but that’s like the Eveready Bunny musically. Sometimes you need to dig into little heard things to hear the musicality of EVH. Like this backing riff from Mean Streets, the GROOVE. You might hear this and think ‘hard rock’ or even ‘heavy metal’. Nah, it was pure groove. Nasty. (P.S. for those not familiar with EVH, this is not him playing, just a YouTuber playing one of his riffs.)

One of my kids gave me a stern look and warned me not to share pictures of them on social media this Christmas. I almost never do that anyway, so it was never going to happen. We’ve raised them well! Transacting everyday life through social media is the thing destroying our societies faster than anything else. Driving comparison and imitative rivalry into every corner of our lives. Turning all life, at all ages, into the relentless peer pressure of high school. Happy Christmas. Live your Christmas off these platforms, not on them.

These red letters were in a local museum for 13 years, and nobody could figure out the words they’d originally formed. They put them out to the crowd to solve, and somebody did it in a few minutes. The clue that set them on the path to solving it was that the letters were stored at the Tweed Regional Museum.

Nod to the garbos out early on Christmas Day on their usual runs. No doubt social media will find fault in something you’re doing, like the other 364 days of the year.

Too. Much. Food.

There are times you can really feel living at the arse end of the cultural world. Like when cricket commentators ask touring Muslim cricketers how they plan to celebrate Christmas.

Peppermint tea suggested in a news story for Christmas bloating/indigestion. Turmeric is better though, mixed in water. Some serious research backs that up now too. And my own experience agrees.

Scrolling through Christmas messages is a fascinating cultural exercise. Like this photo below, wouldn’t know these people from a bar of soap, but their personal lives are here, shared far and wide. The problem for me isn’t just oversharing or privacy though. It’s that much of our social lives is now transacted on social media platforms. These platforms are owned by businesses, usually US businesses. They take your social life posted on here, and they monetise it. Our social lives are being privatised. That matters because they will then do everything possible to increase the revenue from the sharing of your social life. And most of the ways they do that will damage that social life itself, off these platforms. You can look at all the Chrstmas photos for example and get a feeling it’s just a community living its lives and sharing with others. Cosy and cuddly. But the more dangerous thing, and how the platforms make most of their money, is that they turn this social sharing into a competition. Like those terrible skite-letters people sometimes send at Christmas, bragging about everything their family did in the past year. That’s what social media turns *everything* into. Endless comparison, because comparision drives posting and likes, which in turn drives revenue. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ is the business model, driven now into every part of our social lives, by these platforms. People curate their posts to project an image, in competition with others’ images. Are you comfortable with our social lives being driven onto these platforms, captured there, for the revenues of the platform owners? While simultaneously feeding back into our lives off these platforms, turning how we live into new fodder for the endless games of comparison? It’s insidious, these platforms are addictive becaue they tap into some of our most dangerous psychologies and behaviours.

Whooping cough, Denmark. A combination of immune system damage from Covid infection, and anti-vax loons getting real traction in society now, via social media.

The untold story of this distribution of global energy is the efficiencies. Say this pie chart was in kg instead of percentages. So 100kg of energy used by the globe, and 64.2 kg of that energy comes from fossil fuels. But fossil fuels burn with only 10-20% efficiency. So over 600kg of fossil fuels was needed to produce that 64.2 kg of energy. The just over 25% of renewables needed only about 30kg of fuel. We don’t need to replace that 600kg, with renewables. We only need to replace the 64.2 kg.

Watched a short series on Prue Leith and husband John Playfair, building the garden in their new home. But what stayed with me more was something about love. They’re elderly now, and watching them together the word I’d use to describe their interactions would be ‘measured’. Older couples are often like that, they seem a bit boring next to the love we see in younger couples, the romance. But I think it’s a much more sophisticated understanding of love, a measured caution, respecting the distance between you and the other person and living in that distance, rather than trying to close it. Separate bedrooms too, so that life becomes more a series of encounters, rather than an oppressive attempt to force two people into one entity. What attracts us to people when we first meet them is the distance between them and us, their otherness. Smart couples maintain that distance, so that their daily encounters remain more like those when they first met. Love is always an encounter, not a feeling.

This would have been the perfect gift for some of my friends :)

Meanwhile millions of tonnes of coal ash sits unused, a real disposal problem. And nuclear waste sits in drums with nowhere to go at all, and has done for decades. All the slogans people use to oppose renewables are fantasies.

Bodybuilding or any sort of deliberate ‘exercise’ use a model of saying your body just sits there turning to flab, unless you’re working it out regularly. Ignoring that all of your body is working in every tiny thing you do. It coordinates your sitting or standing or walking or stirring a cup of tea. There’s easily enough forces in play in the most basic of activities to maintain body strength and agility. What we’re lacking isn’t work-outs, it’s the understanding of how to use ALL of our body when doing our most basic things, rather than trying to use it just a piece at a time.

You may have seen John Campbell online during the pandemic, with lots of videos encouraging people to be less concerned about Covid. Now accountability is coming for him, and he’s running away. Social media influencers can be extremely dangerous, many peoples’ health has been permanently damaged due to their work.

Our obsession with flying will need to change, with climate change. But there’s no sign the industry itself is paying any attention at all, look at the massive surge of new airport building. Many of these could become stranded assets. And who’s paying for these airports? As always, it’s mostly the taxpayer. That industry, like all fossil fuel-based industries, is a master at fleecing the public.

Electric and hybrid aircraft are already on the market. They may represent a boon for flying, for ordinary people. Right now the aviation industry is heavily centralised at massive airports, which have access to the huge amount of fuel needed. But electricty is available nearly everywhere, and regional and remote airports could even generate it themselves. So instead of you needing to travel to a major airport to transfer to a flight to where you want to go in the country, every town could potentially just fly directly to any other town. Right now people travel to Melbourne or Sydney for example, if they want to fly to the Gold Coast, or somewhere else in Oz. That won’t be necessary with electric planes. When you decentralise the fuel, it decentralises the whole business model. These planes will also operate near-silently, which will be fantastic both for people living near airports, and also for people on planes, which right now are extremely noisy (very rarely mentioned). They’re also much safer, as electric motors almost never fail, and need next to zero maintenance. Two of the biggest costs for airlines are fuel and maintenance. Electric aircraft reduce these costs to almost zero. As always, follow the money, not the slogans.

If you want to see the sort of wonders a new electric world is already bringing to us, check out this BMW-designed electric boat. So beautifully quiet. Thanks to @[801418628:2048:Nancy]! https://www.facebook.com/reel/275506055501902?fs=e&s=TIeQ9V

In only a handful of years, Uruguay transformed its electricity production to between 90-98% renewables. How? They asked a nuclear physicist to lead the change. His first action was to abandon any use of nuclear as a total fantasy, and focus heavily on wind turbines. It’s transformed the country in multiple ways, read in the article. (The slogan ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow’? The wind blows 24 hours a day, and more at night.)

Home battery prices should fall significantly again in 2024. Renewables and EVs/batteries are about the only thing acting in consumers’ favour right now. Because fossil fuels own the world and couldn’t care less about you and me. Renewables are going to remove that dominance.

Probably has good suggestions for how to run the town too.

Thanks Dorothy :)

Kaboom. Game over.

We need to stop the fantasy of living with the most lethal virus in the world. Notice that several years of allowing everybody to get infected hasn’t created immunity, except to common sense.

Covid prevalence is about the same in Australia as in the US. So this US guide is probably pretty accurate for here too. Every Covid infection can be the one that sets you up for years of chronic illness. There are no treatments, and no resources for patients.

The Shetland Islands for decades has been powered by diesel generators, the top picture. In the middle of 2024, it will shift to being powered entirely by wind. So much wind power that they will export nearly 10 times as much electricity as they use themselves, back to the Scottish mainland. The Shetland Islands Council drove this change themselves, in partnership with wind engineering companies.

Happy 21st!

Happy Birthday :)

A great friend loves Peugeots. He kept an entire farm shed full of old Peugeots, so that he’d have a supply of spare parts, as many were no longer supported. This will become the only way to keep your ICE running. Resale values will collapse. All that might save ICE vehicles is Western governments putting their EV policies into reverse to try to screw China, which is winning this race by miles. It’d be like us going back to horses and buggies.

People who are close to these accidents know the lifelong trauma they cause. I’m on that road every day, it has average speed safety cameras installed, and has done for years. And the NSW Government is too gutless to use them for cars. There’s no excuse for that.

Tradies can buy as many petrol and diesel Hiluxes as they like. They’ll just have to find somebody else to build them.

For those who don’t follow US politics. Project 2025 has been set up by ultra-conservative Republicans for Donald Trump, and is a plan (if he wins) to sack tens of thousands of key civil servants and replace them with hand-picked conservative zealots. If this were ever to happen I think the US would be disqualified as any sort of democracy. I think it may already be pretty close to that right now.

Wanted to share this about HIV, because this is the huge risk we’re taking with Covid. On the left, the ‘primary infection’ (both graphs) is the point you catch the disease. Like when you get Covid right now. But the real story is only just beginning. I’ve circled in red the ‘clinical latency’ period where the virus takes up residence inside you, sometimes for years or even decades, and you don’t even know it’s there. What it can do during that time though is destroy your immune system, the bottom graph shows the disastrous destruction of key immune cells during that latency period. The outcome of that of course for HIV was AIDS, and death. We have plenty of worrying signs that Covid is doing something similar, causing enormous stress to the immune system and hanging around long after you catch it. It took 8-10 years for most people with HIV to start to notice this damage. We’re seeing it inside a year, with Covid. And notice the huge surge in other infectious diseases, some not seen much for decades. That’s immune system damage. And people are piling on infection upon infection. Most people with HIV caught it only once.

JN.1 is the current variant of concern for Covid circulating in the community. XBB1.5 is the new vaccine (I got mine before Christmas). Here’s the data on protection. I’ve circled the following scenarios in red: - didn’t get an XBB1.5 booster - got the previous ‘bivalent’ Covid booster - got 3 doses of the original Covid vaccines in 2021 - got 2 doses of the original Covid vaccines in 2021 - unvaccinated. All of these permutations have ZERO protection against hospitalisation with JN.1. People are playing with fire.

The urban cowboy travelling the country, protecting Australians from the evils of wind and sunshine. I guess it resonates better than ‘Nukes for Port Stephens’. Don Quixote attacked windmills. He was unhinged.

Truck and train crash 70km from Broken Hill. The truck driver is 75! The two train drivers died.

We drove to Wang to see the fireworks. I love fireworks, and they never had them at the scale we do now in regional areas when I was a kid. They’re also a Chinese invention, it makes me chuckle that in this time of the apparently new Yellow Peril, we all take videos and photos on our Chinese-made phones as we gather under a display of Chinese pyrotechnics.

I can retire in 5 years so this stuff doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But I feel for the people who work for local government who are subjected to nothing but a steady stream of ignorant abuse, day in and day out. It’s a part of our culture, to sink the boot into the local council. And Council staff get no right of reply, because they’re not allowed to make public comment. Whenever you see a local topic debated, I can promise you though pretty much everything you see about it on social media will be bullshit. And that Councils face the same challenges funding basic services, across the world.

I reckon quite a few in the second group are going to start the year with another assault on the immune system, courtesy of NYE.