leslie dean brown

“But I don’t want to live on Mars”

September 21, 2017 — leslie dean brown

I’m hoping one or more of the 2000+ billionaires in the world are reading this…

Because even the richest people in the world, all the current billionaires –even future trillionaires– cannot afford to maintain their current lifestyles, as they do here so nicely, except on the planet Mars.

Where do all the rich and famous people go on holidays? I’ll tell you were they all go. They go to the one place in the world that literally “exudes luxury”. And I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Monte Carlo (that’s for people that spend money).

¹ – Bora Bora, in French Polynesia. They stay in overwater bungalows costing upwards of US$5,000 a night. That’s where they go. They take a few steps down a little ladder and snorkel right off from their little balconies. Isn’t that wonderful?

And call me strange, but all of those luxurious resorts encircling Bora Bora look absolutely nothing like… well, bloodywell anywhere on that dusty little shithole unfortunate sister planet of ours, Mars². It’s a completely vacant, crappy, dry, dusty monotone brown little shithole. And I think we have to ask ourselves “why indeed is Mars so vacant?”

And it’s going to be a L O N G time before it even remotely starts resembling somewhere like any 5+ star resort on the “just-the-right-size-mother-bear-planet-Earth”. If there’s one thing I know rich people can’t stand, it’s being in a crap environment. That’s why they pay extra to wait in lounges at the airport. Or why they have to be located in a different section of the plane. Or a different plane altogether. Because to do otherwise would be depressing. And if humans can’t stand one thing, it’s “not being happy”.

Then let this serve as an advanced warning to you, future trillionaire: the rest of us just aren’t leaving Earth so that you can stay and enjoy it around here with all your lakes, rivers, oceans and surf beaches.

I for one am not living on Mars, either voluntarily or forcibly. No. And neither are my non-existent children. This mass exodus of people in the direction of “Earth to Mars” is just not going to happen. There’ll be the bloodiest revolution in the history of mankind before that happens.

Why? Because far from thinking “Mars is going to be ‘fun’ “, I think it would be even more boring than a long-term jail sentence.

“We will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea”

September 21, 2017 — leslie dean brown

Do we have a choice? Do we? I think we have a choice.

North Korea street photography DPRK — Photography by (stephan). © 2017. Creative Commons.

Last month it was “fire and fury (they likes of which the world has never seen)”. See my artwork. This month it is “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea”. I for one don’t condone that kind of inflationary, intentionally divergent rhetoric. I may not be a lawyer, but both statements sound like threats to me!

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” – Donald J. Trump

And not just threats towards the leader himself, but threats directed against the whole nation! And that, my friends, is a type of collective punishment. Collective punishment on citizens who don’t even know any different because they’ve been indoctrinated from day one.

That’s not right. That’s not right because they are not really ‘evil’ citizens are they? If you believe that all 25 million North Koreans are ‘evil’, it’s more likely that it is *you* who is in fact paranoid. They are over there trying to grow rice and put food on the table. I think Americans should try to put themselves in the place of the average North Korean. And I think Mister Trumpet should tone down his language.

Is this how Trump does business? By verbally attacking his opponents? Is this how he does politics? This is like the level of a 5 year old child. Whatever happened to negotiation? Communication? I think he’s sending the wrong message. It’s quite obvious that it’s a bluff. You don’t just nuke an entire nation in the year 2017. Why doesn’t the “great leader” offer a more appropriate, measured and proportionate response? Does he know how?

(I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which “great leader” I’m referring to here, to highlight the fact that they are pretty much both as bad as one another)

One choice would be for Mr Trump to just shut his mouth and for us to continue on with our daily lives. That’s one choice.

The life cycle analysis of an automobile is more than just the battery

September 19, 2017 — leslie dean brown

In this article I’d like to talk about the life cycle analysis of a traditional car with an internal combustion engine compared to that of an electric car. I’m not actually going to perform any detailed life cycle analysis calculations, just talk about the number of additional parts that a petrol or diesel powered car requires compared to an EV.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. No one is saying that purchasing an EV car is ‘better’ for the environment than purchasing no EV car at all (and no petrol/diesel replacement either). Right? No one is saying that here, there or anywhere.

It’s nice that David Pilling has written about where materials come from when they buy an EV. But why not also write an equally-damning column on the materials that go into petrol powered cars? Likewise, it’s nice that Schalk Cloete has written about the hidden emissions of electric cars. But do the authors really think that petrol- or diesel-engined vehicles are any less exempt? That’s what pisses me off.

There are thousands of intricate moving parts that make up a conventional internal combustion engine. Thousands. In order that they function correctly, they require complicated electrical, lubrication and cooling systems. The first time I looked at my motorbike’s repair manual, I was shocked!

Let’s talk about how many individual parts there are in an internal combustion engine and compare shall we?

What about all the pistons, piston rings, driveshafts, camshafts, gearbox, valves, crankshafts, valve springs, fuel injectors, bearings, o-rings, timing belts, fan belts, flywheels, alternators, ignition coils, spark plugs, distributor, starter motor, fasteners, sensors, switches, relays, cables, wiring harnesses, oil pumps, water pumps, fuel pump, oil filters, fuel filters, petrol tank, radiator, exhaust system …I mean the list goes on and on and on and on!

My point is that none of the above mentioned parts are required in an EV. None. I will repeat that: none.

So fossil fuel driven cars are competing with a motor that has ONE moving part in it (well except for the ball bearings on the main drive shaft). So the internal combustion engine now is potentially at a huge manufacturing and environmental disadvantage.

The cost of manufacturing, moulding and machining all of those extra parts is huge! And they’re not made of crappy alloys either. What then is the environmental cost?

What about the lead in lead/acid batteries? What about the copper in the starter motor? And what about the aluminium in the radiator? What about the aluminium in the engine block and gearbox casing? Where do all these materials come from?

What about the Manganese, Molybdenum, Chromium, Vanadium and Nickel in all those hardened-steel moving parts inside the engine and gearbox? What about the energy that goes into mining, smelting, forging, forming, cutting, swaging, extruding, casting, injection moulding, machining, tempering, hardening, plating?

What about the environmental impact of building and maintaining all of the machines used in manufacturing, processing and production? What about the energy required by all of the machines on the assembly line? What about the energy required by the testing and tooling machinery to make sure all of the parts are within tolerance?

What about consumables? What about engine oil? What about the coolant? What about the battery acid? What about the transmission fluid? What about the gaskets? What about the grease? What about the air filter? What about the oil filter? What about the fuel filter? What about the environmental cost of changing those frequently?

None of those things are required with an EV either. None.

There are so many friggin’ parts, no one has even tallied up the environmental cost of them individually (instead they work out how much energy the factory or the entire transport energy sector uses). It’s a rough guess at best.

If EV cars were invented first, piston engined car would never have even been conceived, that’s how overly-complex they are to design, manufacture and produce. Of course EV manufacturers already know all of this, that’s why they’re all trying to jump on the band wagon now, because there’s potentially more profit in it.

Can you at least begin to see that it’s not just about the environmental impact of a lithium ion battery in an electric vehicle. And that it’s not just about where the electricity comes from? It’s much more ‘complicated’ than that.

Would fossil fuel proponents now like to sit there and calculate all of the life cycle factors and environmental impacts, taking into account all of the things I have just spoken about?

The bottom line is, you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me if you think combustion engines are more sustainable when everything is taken into account… and yes I really would hate to be the sorry bastard that gets lumped with all those calculations.

“Why do they hate us?!”

September 11, 2017 — leslie dean brown

“If they didn’t, there would be something mentally wrong with them.”

Climate change in Moruya, NSW, Australia.

September 11, 2017 — leslie dean brown

So today I thought I’d share this graph of my nearest weather station in NSW, Australia (well, the second-nearest weather station, because the closest one only has data since the beginning of 2000).

And here it is. Data is from the Australian government Bureau of Meteorology. Moruya heads pilot station. Minimum daily temperatures from 1910 superimpsed with data from 2016. The first year of data compared to the last full year of data. Graphs have been rescaled in the y-axis so that they line up (if they used a consistent scale I wouldn’t have to do this; I think it auto-scales).

Now I have roughly superimposed my own “line of best fit” through both curves (they are both the same height at the beginning and end, as they should be). Yes I eyeballed it. But you can clearly see that the red line is well above the blue line pretty much everywhere.

Now I know this doesn’t “prove” anything because it’s just one weather station of many. And some years are hotter due to the El Niño effect (according to google, both 1900-1901 and 2015-2016 were El Niño periods). But I was curious about something and so I thought I’d personally check it out. [I was originally looking up this very warm day we had on the 3rd of September, 2017 because it was 9°C above average]

Note:

I’ve seen other graphs where people draw their line of best fit and the end tangents don’t match for January and December. I don’t think that is technically correct, because we are looking at continuous trends from month to month and year to year. Where we take the yearly ‘chunk’ of data is kind of irrelevant.

I’ll give you an example: you wouldn’t expect that the temperature for January of 2017 to be significantly different than December of 2016. Likewise, you wouldn’t expect the temperature for December of 2015 to be significantly different than January of 2016. Indeed, we could include these two extra months if we wanted to and look at a 14 month span instead of a 12 month span. But if someone has drawn a wacky curve at the start and finish, and then we include the extra adjoining months, we see that it would be completely wrong.

Therefore, I have inserted the line of best fit through the data so that it matches up at both the start and end of the year. I inserted the minimum number of nodal points (three) and they are ‘symmetrical’. That way, we can expect the temperature fluctuations to continue on from one to the next year and precedes from the last one (without a huge slope at the beginning or end).