24 01 17 1 a Inertia and change 1 a

24 01 17 1a Inertia and change

New doors open. Old doors , unused, get rusty hinges, freeze shut and are ignored to crumbling collapse. Look at the old ruins all over the old world. Once were vibrant. Time. Always time passing.

From my adolescence – time passes, hour glasses, each and every one.

Time passes hour glasses, then all, for you, is done.

So new doors open. An unexpected chance to do a drive over to Perth, Western Australia. I tried going there in the early 1970s with a mate, his friend, and a utility. Three young blokes on a bench seat in an old ute for weeks on interminable weeks, by the time we got from Melbourne to Adelaide, just wasn’t going to work. We whooped it up in Adelaide for a week – fun city if you know funsters who live on the inside of Adelaide – then got a plane back to Melbourne and recovery. My mate survived the round trip, the other fellow …?

So, the (car) door opens for a road trip in a couple of months to Perth. I’m Keen. With my closest mate, my partner, Fondgrin. I’m in. But … seethegoodfutureandgoforit.com? Minimise your ecological footprint? Use half a tanker of petrol?

And there is the scale, the personal scale in the everything’s a fractal world view, where my desire clashes with my environmental and ecologically sustainable values and knowledge.

I’m doing the trip. I want to. I can. I will. No reconciling. Knowledge, a deep sense of personal responsibility – what each of us do each day, in all things MATTER!

I’ve dragged out an old suitcase.

I’m sharing my worldview with you, dear reader. Life experience. Nothing about consistency or lack of internal dissonance.

We are built, most of us, on internal dissonance. Bits of our internal value systems are in conflict with each other. We make our decisions. We choose, within choice, to act in certain ways. Welcome to our human contradictions. Perhaps all we can do is shift the dial, as best we can, toward what is going to work long term.

A dear friend, Bohny, brought an all-electric car and drove it from Cairns to Brisbane and back for Christmas. Reality is, if you charge in the middle of the solar day, 10 – 2, once you have the machinery, there is no ecological footprint. All that surplus solar rooftop energy just being surplus to mid-day use (until the authorities – with whom I worked closely with in the 1990s – enourage us all to shift big electrify uses into the middle of the day, away from morning and evening peak demands [demand-side management]). This is the future. I want to retrofit my petrol Subaru to solar electric. In 5 years, when THAT is all the rage.

The embodied energy in all our squillions of ‘good’ petrol and diesel vehicles is going to foster a sophisticated global fossil to future vehicle retrofit to battery electric. Mark my words and buy lots of shares in lithium and copper. And rare earths and poison mining. That is part of the price. Eggs and omelets. Internal dissonance. There is no harm-free future if we just acknowledge that we love mobility. Travel for us and goods.

Lots of services and communications – we love communicating – can be done ‘remotely’ – the internet and various ‘facetoface’ platforms for meetings. But we love to travel. Think macrotourism. Global to local. Visiting, shopping, outings. Mmmmm travel.

We love to travel. We may want to do ‘the right thing’. I normally do – trip planning on a fortnightly basis – get all your driving chores done in one big, well planned trip of supermarket, shops, chores, hardware. Social.

But Eden to Perth and back. gobbling up petrol. Shoulda been a Catholic, so I could do action, guilt, forgiveness. I just have to live with my Protestant shame. Nobody knows but us.

Ding 18/1/24