by Cecil Poole

I’ve been riding my bike quite a bit lately.  A push bike, not a motorised one.   The energy needed to accelerate is substantial, just as we were taught in elementary physics.  Starting off, climbing hills, are all energy burners.  Interruptions to a smooth constant pace are deplored, cursed at.  Just cruising along is so easy, the stop and starting is the killer – the fact that every ride is all uphill and into the wind is ignored, please accept that.  So I have gained extraordinary insight into the energy required just to get things going, to accelerate.  Travel is now looked at differently, smoothness of flow sought and where found, applauded.

By the by I’ve spent some time in a certain University Town in the USA where there seems to be a good understanding of the above and of the relationship of carbon emissions to environmental degradation, even to climate change.  In this town there is adoption of mitigation measures to such an extent that hybrid cars a highly popular.  Some say there is  in fact a plague of Prii*.  Now these highly educated environmentally aware and responsible citizens know that acceleration is deleterious to the environment.  So much so that if there is a Prius stopped in front of you at the lights it is highly unlikely that you will get through the intersection on the next change.  (There were reports a year or two back, of accelerators sticking on in these cars; unlikely in my opinion, as they seem in my experience to have no accelerator at all)

Quentin and Cecil have recently competed their mission to the South West of this great country of ours – you know, the one we stole from the Aborigines – Australia.

Quentin and I drove a rental car from Perth 270 km south to Margaret River and, despite this being one of Western Australia’s busiest rural highways we were faced with frequent changing speed limits and many lights.   Speed limits seemed to change almost at random.  80 km/hr on some dual carriageway, then just as it narrowed to single lane the speed limit would go up to 100.  The major town bypasses now seem to be arteries to the industrial and logistics areas, not bypasses at all.  Frustrating yet hardly worth writing about except that this is a fairly new road system, WA is a wealthy state, yet here is third world infrastructure that seems to be designed to profit land developers rather than help reduce emissions through smooth traffic flow.

At Margaret River we stayed with an artist.  The chosen medium was glass.  The raw materials need to be heated to around 1300 degrees C to transform into glass, then held at 1100.  Most glass blowing is done at between 900 to 1000 degrees C.   Could there be a more energy intensive art-form?  Maybe it was appropriate that they were doing a large commission for Chevron “Dedicated to Developing Innovative Energy Solutions to Power Australia”. (Oh dear, Chevron have been found guilty of causing environmental damage in the Amazon basin, fine $19bn, now halved on appeal.)

Another of our carbon related activities was helping prepare for the coming fire season, so fuel reduction was in order.  This was achieved with a wonderful flame gun that in time managed to burn even the greenest of grass.  We also helped burn a very large Blue Gum stump.  We felt suitably virtuous.

According to the Carbon Calculator we each added close to 1.5 tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere in our return flight to Perth.  (I suspect Quentin added considerably more, although that is still to be confirmed.)

So in essence the trip consisted of pumping large quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.  This seems most apt in light of our new government’s commitment to abandon the recently introduced carbon tax and with it any pretense at recognising that climate change is accelerated principally by the actions of western homo sapiens.

*Prii: plural of Prius