Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

The Long Emergency: Roast Koala

Australia is now experiencing the hottest weather ever recorded there. For those of you who don't grok Celsius, the average temperature across the entire continent was about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's predicted to get even hotter. Temperatures on Wednesday in some places reached 119 degrees. (It's Wednesday here as I write but still the wee hours of Thursday there.) As you may already know, this baking heat is accompanied by a lengthy drought and raging wildfires. Sydney is enveloped in smoke while some 70 fires are burning in Queensland forcing evacuations. The worst fire season has been in New South Wales where fires have burned an area larger than, well, Wales.

If this continues gets any worse, much of Australia will simply be uninhabitable. Despite all this, a poll finds that the average Australian is willing to spend only $200 a year to combat climate change. Nevertheless, that adds up to a fair amount of money -- about $4 billion -- but that's still only 10% of what the country spends on its military. (Note that this is an island nation that is threatened by exactly nobody.)

Still, it's enough to put rooftop solar on 1 million houses -- each year, which means that every Australian house could have rooftop solar in a decade. And BTW that means everybody gets free electricity for 20 years. (A few more years and you could give everybody energy storage systems.) And it's enough to do a whole lot more, which you can read about at the link. And obviously, if people chip in $400 they could do everything twice as fast.

Do you think Americans can afford $200 a year apiece? To save us from disaster? And even get the money back from the investment? It doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.


1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

Of course, it seems that the changes made in Australia won't save Australia unless people in the rest of the world make those same changes--and the benefits won't occur for decades, correct? The negative effects would still go on even if all the cars in the world stopped running tomorrow and we shut down all the power plants. The reversal of climate change wouldn't occur for years, right?