A recent post by Donald Diddams prompted me to put this photo up and expand on my thoughts about it.

On a recent trip to the beautiful city of Newcastle, my wife and I kept noticing how many ships there were waiting to enter the port and load up with coal. Newcastle is the largest coal exporting harbour in the world and coal is loaded there 24 hours a day. One day we counted 37 ships along the horizon waiting for their turn to be loaded.

While I looked at the ships as the sun was going down, I thought about how much coal was going to be burnt and how much greenhouse gasses that will produce. The low, warm afternoon light seemed to be emphasizing the particulates in the sky and made it look as though there was a layer of a dirty looking gas, like bromide, hovering just above the earth’s surface. It was almost like there was a physical demonstration of the pollution the burning of coal creates. Of course this visualization is just a product of my own concerns and imagination. It’s only a trick of the light because greenhouse gases are invisible.

It enrages me when I think about it and how we in Australia contribute way beyond the size of our population to the degradation of the global environment when we have so much sun light that could be harvested for power.

Trouble is that’s it’s not as cheap as burning coal.

All the short term profit grabbing and thinking, by a relatively small group of people is selfishly destroying the only planet we can live on.

A pox on all their houses!