This is what it looks like when your government sells out the climate for votes

In a dispiriting political week like the one we’ve just had, it helps to keep things simple. Let’s begin with the organising idea of the week, where various politicians asserted, both in measured ways and unhinged ways, that it was inappropriate to talk about climate change while bushfires ravaged the country.

The history of climate policy in Australia is a history
 of self-interest, posturing and shameful inaction.

Let’s be clear about what this line of argument is.

It’s self-serving crap.

It is entirely possible to have a sensible discussion about climate change and the risks it poses, including the risks of longer and more intense fire seasons, and still do all the things that need to be done to protect lives and property.

We have that bandwidth. In fact Australia demonstrated amply over the course of the past few days our collective capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Read the story from The Guardian by Katharine Murphy - “This is what it looks like when your government sells out the climate for votes.” 

Invention will held build our storage understandings

Necessity being the mother of invention is becoming increasingly apparent as climate change worsens.

Our flagrant and inappropriate use of fossil fuels as an energy source has been a wonderful bonus to humanity, but equally it has seriously derailed life on earth.

Having applied that wonderful and relatively cheap and transportable energy source to fulfilling many of our aspirations, we now search about in an effort to keep alive much of what those aspirations produced.

Of course it was the exploitation of that seeming “free energy” that allowed for the achievement of many things and so although we understand the near endless supply of renewable energy, particularly solar, we now wrestle with understanding how we store it.

Subsequently, much effort is going into understanding storage and just this week greentechgrid: reports that the “US Energy Storage Market to Grow 250% in 2015”.

It reports: “The U.S. is on the cusp of a breakout year for energy storage, according to the inaugural U.S. Energy Storage Monitor report from GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association (ESA).

“The country is forecasted to deploy 220 megawatts in 2015, more than three times its 2014 total, and growth should continue at a rapid clip thereafter”.