tell your friends!

Recently, a powerful magnitude 7.3 earthquake jolted Japan's north-east coast off Fukushima – in the area of the defunct Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.  Initially a tsunami warning was issued, but thankfully no tsunami eventuated and warning was cancelled.

This earthquake is a reminder of the risks associated with nuclear energy, and the vulnerability of even relatively modern nuclear energy facilities. 

There’s an important article on the ABC news about the response to intergenerational imbalance as a result of millennials and gen Zers progressively replacing boomers in government.

There's a great article by George Monbiot about mechanism for social change. The article wanders around a bit, but it eventually gets to some good points.

The point of the article is that new ideas can reach a critical level of penetration that causes the whole of society to suddenly “flip” to a new ideological position.

I’m a regular user of public transport.  I haven’t owned a car for over five years, so I get around by using public transport (mostly buses), walking, recently cycling, and the occasion use of a hired or borrowed car, but I’m not a great fan of trams.  

While I’m a fan of public transport, as it has potential to reduce greenhouse gas production and reduce the use of resources, I find that trams have some serious disadvantages when compared to buses.

Here’s an interesting quote to consider:  

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” 

This sounds flippant enough to have come from Oscar Wilde, but it’s actually attributed to Albert Einstein.

The Financial Times ran an article recently, called The billionaire boom: how the super-rich soaked up Covid cash, that analyses Forbes magazine’s annual rundown on what the world's billionaires are up to.  The Forbes rundown comes out on April 6 each year, so this year it’s about how the billionaires are weathering this devastating pandemic.  The bottom line is that they are doing very well. 

Americans are starting to get the idea about preferential voting! (They’re calling it ranked-choice voting.)  If they took to it, they'd have a more representative electoral process.  Choose the future! has added a comment to a Washington Post news article about ranked-choice voting.

Recently, the ABC (Australia Broadcasting Corporation) News website presented an advertorial article promoting a David Attenborough documentary called The Year Earth Changed, which expounds the positive effect the global slowdown of human economic activity due to the pandemic has had on the natural world. 

If this documentary only references the short-term advantages that the natural world gains from the pandemic, and doesn’t reference the long-term negative effects, then it is misleading, as the long term disadvantages will be much more important than any short- term advantages.  

You may have heard that free, globalised trade enables each country to focus on the products that it does best at making, that is, the products with which it has a comparative advantage.  The international competition to achieve a comparative trade advantage results in a ‘race to the bottom’ of reduced human rights, environmental damage, and disregarded moral values.  How can we fix this?

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News ran an article a few days ago about the proposed Newcastle Waters solar power farm in the Northern Territory, Australia.  If the solar farm goes ahead, it will be world's largest with a power capacity of 10-gigawatts, and will cover an astounding 12,000 hectares.  Are renewable projects like this going to save us from our energy and climate-change problems?

This comment was written in response to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the premise of which is that Australia is in “deep strife” because our population has not grown during the pandemic, which will damage our economy.  

A few weeks ago there was a spate of articles in the news media about how the coronavirus was helping to save the environment.  The reports generally had a positive flavour, and yet the pandemic will almost certainly be an environmental disaster when, or if, we come through it.