Walmart Starts the plug-in Smarts.

Electric cars are all about the batteries.

An electric car costs about 10% as much to run as an equivalent petrol car, has virtually no maintenance and is cheap to make. So why are they so expensive?

If you want an electric car that does 200KPH and goes 200Km between charges, get a Tesla at $200K+. I f you want an E-car that does 0 to 100 in 4 secs, a Mercedes is for you, price to be announced but it will be hefty. If you need to replace a Tesla battery you  reportedly need to fork out $50,000. Now wonder so few are sold!


But if you want a town car to take you to work, shopping, or the kids to school, get an Indian built Reva for about $15,000 or wait for the Australian designed, Chinese built E-Day for under $10,000


But whatever car you choose, the price is about the batteries and the batteries are about range.
With weight not an issue, on our ketch Heavy Metal we have 600 amp hours of storage for under $1,000 but in a car, lead acid battery power is less attractive because of range for weight. But what if you could double the range and do it at no cost? Walmart in Columbus Ohio has done just that! Simply by running a few cables and installing some plug in points, your e-car is charged while you shop so your range has to take you only one way. The cost to them of a full recharge might be 60c, but the average top up might be more like 10c.

Now compare that with the Coles-Woolworths 4c per litre reward scheme here in Australia, where the average reward payout is about $1.20. If they offered free charging at 10c their rewards payout would reduce by over 90%. It is a no-brainer, but will they?






You have to be joking! The big duopoly has cornered the petrol market with its 4c/litre supermarket spend reward system, so why would it want to undermine that? We need a third player to get in here and attract the electric car commuter and that will probably be Costco, with its US roots and Walmart philosophy, or German based Aldi with its innovation and established chain of outlets. Then again, it could be done on a whole Shopping Centre or Mall basis with shared cost and even pay-as-you-go card activated spaces. So even if we pay, it is still attractive at 10c per top up!

Who will be first? Aldi, Costco, Franklins? Perhaps we need a Walmart here!

Cockroaches and digital watches

I don’t often utter the name of Einstein, mathematical genius and social rascal. The most recent time I did was when I ordered a beer in a bar in Munich. There I attempted to ask for a beer in an accent that left the barman wondering and my origins in no doubt.

“Einstein danke!” I said, which apparently means ‘one stone thank you’. But frantic waving of an empty stein in his face did the trick and a ‘bier’ was duly placed in front of me and a huge number of euros changing hands was my penalty.

However, idle minds will wander and so mine did in the early hours of this AM to pose a question that has serious implications for watchmakers and timetables, so dear friends, I share it with you.

I am presuming sea levels will rise because we are too dumb to take climate change more seriously than repayments on our shiny new digital plasma TV’s, so let’s presume it will happen for the sake of the exercise. Put aside for a moment what sea level rise will do to our coastal cities and land, and come with me on a short foray into Einstein’s playground, Academia. Here we can share a bit of irrelevant research.

Most researchers and activists seem hell bent on writing papers on the sulphur crested long toed purple tongued tit or what planting the equally threatened daggy barked acacia in someone else’s back yard will do for the speckled bummed laughing frog, but we are serious. We are about to solve one of the last BIG questions still unanswered. Viz, ‘How much slower will the earth rotate when sea levels rise by one metre (projected to occur between the years 2050 and 2100’)?

Disclaimer: If you can’t follow the math, don’t look to me for erudition. I have no idea what I am doing or even if the premise has merit.

However, here is the raw data:
Diameter of Earth (average) = 12742 km.
Diameter is increased by 1 m sea level rise, but as surface is 2/3 sea, average increased diameter is 1x2/3 m or 0.0067 km (rounded).

The math.
Ratio of amount of change to old diameter: 0.0067/12742 = 5.258201224297598e-7
So to express that in time change per day in seconds, we convert to circular motion by dividing by Pi, then multiplying by 24x60x60 giving us longer days by 0.0144552731838872 seconds.

Now, that might not seem like much, but if you added up a whole year's worth it would come to 5.279788530414806 seconds. It is about how long it takes to exclaim ‘Well! I’ll be damned!’ But if you are serious about being on time, you are probably already on E-Bay looking for a digital watch that automatically adjusts for climate change. Apart from cockroaches, watches are one of the pitifully few things that can.

Electric town cars

I have been banging on about electric cars for yonks and bemoaning the fact I could not buy one here that was in my budget range, ie, zero to not much. The Zenn is priced at about AuD $10,000.

So, here is the ZENN courtesy of Helen Dehner.
They do not mention running costs, but other electric cars cover the equivalent of 250 MPG or 100+K per litre, ie about 10% of the cost or runnng an equivalent gas car.
Apparantly top speed is limited by legislation(40 KPH), not the car's potential and many do get their controllers modified to the higher speeds (60KPH) permitted in some states of the US.
It will go much faster so why are limits set so low? Conspiracy theories would do well here, so constuct your own!

In Oz, with all energy providers paying for home generated power, in some states paying gross feed-in tariffs, running costs are reduced to zero (after establishmet costs, that we are told are recovered in three to five years), one would be crazy not to consider one as the second car!
For the First Car, I am still hanging out for H/fuel cell cars to hit the streets here. They promise highway speeds, more range than a petrol or diesel car, no battery bank and zero emissions.
Of course the zero emnissions part depends on the source of power to run Electroysers used to generate the H! But even if coal fired or nuclear is the source for now, at least we do get cleaner city air.

Run your car on water!

We all learn something new every day.

Yesterday I learned that I am getting too old to cramp myself into the chain locker where rust lurks for a whole day without suffering the consequences. But but but…

While checking on stuff I found in your comments on recent 'electric car' posts, I came across two exciting facts that made me forget the twinges.

The first is that Israel’s battery exchange stations charge their batteries on site. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? Why? Because I was brought up with drilling rigs, the Exxon Valdez, oil refineries and road tankers, not to mention toxic in-ground fuel tanks, all potential disasters and all have been. Damn! In a place like Israel where clouds almost never darken the sky, solar arrays anywhere will do the job and the recharging electrons travel along wires that already exist!

Solar panels don’t catch fire and destroy oceans, don’t sink, spew muck into the skies or crash like petrol tankers. They just sit there, pumping out power. And the added bonus, like in the Super Station concept, battery exchange repositories can be charged when the sun is shining. OK, that’s all fixed so what was the second one?

Did you know that in LA, there are gas (petrol) stations offering Hydrogen? California, that uses 20% of fuel burned in the USA, has embarked on a project to build a ‘Hydrogen Highway’ from BC to LA. That is great news for anyone who buys a Hydrogen/fuel-cell electric car. The advantages of fuel cell cars are range, far greater than a regular car. Emissions are pure H2O and they need little more battery power than the average flashlight. You can even buy a H fuel RR or a Beamer! Too expensive yet for me, but that will change.

Batteries are heavy, chew up rare metals, are expensive, representing about half the cost of the cheapest electric car available, use a lot of energy to manufacture, do not produce full power for more than a few years and can be difficult to dispose of. However, I still had a problem with how to get Hydrogen to distribution points. There is a case for pipelines to power houses and factories. And pipelines do offer the advantage of acting as a windkessel. (don't be lazy, look it up). Pipelines might still get the nod, but Hydrogen powered houses are a long way off if ever. Much easier to go all electric if we can solve the base load power problem.

But I was wrong. LA Hydrogen outlets generate their Hydrogen on site using Hydrolyzers.
Again, no oil wells, no coal mines, no tankers, refineries, or road tankers. Hydrogen generation can happen ‘while the sun is shining’. But they do have Hydrogen storage tanks on site, so we will still be warned against smoking while filling. Remember the Hindenburg!

PS. Just around the technological corner is a super thin wafer home roof array/Hydrolyzer that fills your car at home. Here in OZ, research is advanced that will allow us to paint our roofs with solar collector paint. No twinges today, just excitement and hope.

By the way, if you have a few spare minutes, Google Hydrolyzers and read the scams.
Did you know, by buying a book for $39 (cheaper on e-bay) you can get DIY plans to make your own Hydrolyzer from stuff you can scavenge from the dump? Then you can run your car on water!


Well, most don’t claim that. What they do claim is a significant saving (25% and up) saving in fuel consumption by converting water to a mix of H and O as you drive which supplements your gasoline or diesel.

Of course to believe that, one must discard one’s science that states ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed’. Such a shame. It would have been really nifty to run my car on water!

Car pics courtesy http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com

Clichés and Climate Change.

Don’t you just love talk about paradigm shifts?
I put that in the same basket as ‘moving forward’, ‘game changer’ and ‘breaking the nexus’.
OK, so here is a game changing paradigm shift moving forward that breaks the nexus tying cars to fossil fuels.

We all lurve our cars and have painted ourselves into a corner by our dependence. So how can we get out of that one? First, what is stopping us from dumping the petrol/diesel engine and taking to public transport? There are a thousand answers, but here is mine.

Public transport based on rail, light rail and buses does not work for enough of us. If you need to carry stuff, rail is of limited value, even if you live within a short walk of a train station. Light rail ditto. But even more difficult is the in-betweens, where distance increases the further out you live.

Infill is done with buses. But only the desperate catch buses for reasons of comfort (weather), time, ignorance of timetables, distance from gate to bus stop, perceptions of danger etc, and buses are impossible if one carries more than a lunch box and an umbrella.

So we get into the car and put up with traffic as we commute, shop or play and blame the government. Problem is; there is no money for double and then triple-decker roads in economies that are already in deficit big time. Catch 22!

But wait! Try this idea.
Cheap electric cars free ‘Super Train Stations’ and renewable base load power.
Do not panic. Read on and all will be explained.

Electric cars need a huge investment in infrastructure before they can replace gas (petrol/diesel) cars. Right now, Israel is the only state that has decided to install a nation-wide all-electric car ‘refuelling’ network. Good for them. But how does that apply in the US, Canada, South America, Africa, Russia, China, India and Australia for example, where we move stuff and people vast distances with huge gaps between population centres? It doesn’t.
Rail works fairly well over long distances and high speed rail promises non-polluting inter-city express services for people and freight. But it is commuter traffic that is causing the headaches.

If we can overcome the infrastructure problems, electric cars offer huge advantages. They are non-polluting, quiet and very cheap to run. They would also be cheap to make with only one moving part in a motor that needs as little attention as your refrigerator.

If only we were not trying to force them to fill the gas car slot! So unless someone is prepared to fund nation-wide infrastructure to support it, the gap is too wide. Then there are batteries. They are heavy and expensive.

While ever manufacturers insist we need to match the performance of a standard car/truck/ship/plane, we are stuck with high cost batteries. Actually, to fully match gas cars, such batteries do not yet, and may never exist. So to break the nexus requires that paradigm shift and this two-part game changer.

1. We start with a basic electric commuter car with choice of battery pack starting as low as 50Km (30 miles) should cost between US $5,000 and $10,000
2. A ‘Super Station’ rail network that uses existing infrastructure and costs government zilch to build.

What is, and why a Super Station?
Step one:
On any (surface) rail network in a city, pick the most outlying dormitory suburb and declare the space above, below and beside the train station vacant and available free to any developer who will build a Super Station then invite expressions of interest in building a complex that consists of:

Parking to accommodate commuter electric cars within a 7Km (4 mile) radius.
Conditions:
1. Parking is ‘free’ to owners of all-electric vehicles (and bicycles).
2. Electric cars plug in to the grid. Commuter cars are recognised by the complex’s computer that also registers expected exit time so batteries are charged to a satisfactory level before departure. But it is the hours in between that provide a unique opportunity.

When the system is mature, in between the time of arrival and departure, millions of cars across the city (and nation) remain plugged into the grid with millions of (privately owned) batteries providing storage for renewable electricity generators, solving their base load power problem. Power can be drawn out and pumped in as required. At home, cars are reconnected, so the only time their batteries are not available to the grid is while they are at neither home nor parking station. Neat? It gets better.

Moving forward;
1. Such complexes are offered to developers at planned locations , nominally about 12 km (7miles) apart, cutting the number of train stations needed to about a quarter or a fifth of those now existing, so with less stops, all trains become “express”.
2. Roll out. Development is started furthest out to most quickly reduce car-miles. The rate of roll out is controlled to provide continuity for building contractor, time for uptake of electric commuter cars, infrastructure adjustments etc.
3. Each Super Station is a discrete entity. It is immediately usable by electric vehicles from its feeder area (and further afield) and is not dependant on any wider support network.

So what’s in it for investors?
There is detail on station design, retail mix, uptake patterns that would fill pages, but suffice to say they make their money from retail shop rent and fees charged for access to their electricity storage capacity.

Two dreams are realised.
• Generators solve their base load power problem and
• Developers get a captive clientele. And what clientele is more captive than commuters coming off trains within their building, with their cars an elevator away and the next stop home!?

The cost of running an electric car to and from the station for a week is about 50c, and if the kids are dropped off at school and the car is used for sundry trips to sport, music lessons or the local adult shop, you might be up for $1 a week. And if it is used to drop people off at the station so the car is available for other family members, make that $2 a week!

Let’s have some fun with this!
We all say we need to fix climate change but we feel powerless to do anything effective. Maybe this won’t work, but it might prompt some better ideas. So, if you want the full article, e-mail me and I will send the whole 6 pages. Then you can tell me why you think it won’t work and together we can hone it up and start pestering politicians. We need that paradigm shift moving forward and maybe we can create the game changer that breaks the nexus!

230 million tonne coal loader for Barrier Reef

Open Cut Coal.



Caesarean section
of Ancient Earth.
Torn from its womb,
the monster within.

Tiny fingers
flick switches.
Machines reshape us
as flabby minds watch.

Equal and opposite…
Isaac’s third law.
Climate change backlash
The extinction Tsunami.

Save the children!
Save the children!
Not yet, not yet.
We can’t afford it right now.



"Coal is Nature's Hazardous Waste Dump". From the 1990 play '20-20 Vision'.
Pics courtesy safecom.org and National Geographic.

RR Greens.

Last weekend I attended the inaugural meeting of the Rural and Regional Greens at Beachmere, SE Queensland. The reason such a body was formed was to educate the public about the dangers of coal seam gas but specifically to warn of the consequences of accessing coal seams by drilling through Australia’s priceless underground water resource, the Great Artesian Basin.



Water in the Basin starts its journey in rainy Papua New Guinea and travels thousands of kilometres south through permeable rock to underlie 22% of the continent, or 1,700.000 Sq Km. It is estimated to hold 65,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water and is crucial to the viability of dryland farming in Central Australia. That natural wonder is under immediate and dire threat. click here for ‘Potential depletion due to coal seam gas’. Here is revealed that leaks have happened and 48,000 such gas wells are planned for the agriculturally rich and irreplacable Darling Downs alone. This is a big deal.



Coal seam gas extraction contaminates ground water and causes its confining strata to be breached. Are we risking permanent destruction in exchange for thirty years of gas extraction? We are, apparently!

Coal seam gas- Water contamination.

We know it is not ‘if’ but ‘when’,
So we asked the gas miners again.
They answered; “Of course,
It de-stroys the source.
But we will be long gone by then!”

Sigh!

The Nth Decree.

Our world.
Can never be as it was once.
Attacked on too many fronts,
by corp’rate high flyers
and climate deniers,
suffers death from a thousand cuts.

Sorry, I'll read that again!

Pic from the web.

U 238.

Uranium, buried deep,
as old as Earth itself.
Lurking,
awaiting E=MC2

Tested on Humans.
Its power unleashed.
Unprecedented,
protracted destruction.

Japan, of all nations
should have resisted
its sinister benefits
and reminded us…









‘Nuclear revenge
Awaits those
Who dare
To seek its exhumation’.

................................

More current affairs poets at Poetry 24.
Pic Chernobyl revisited.

“Ginge” drops the other shoe.

On ‘Q and A’ (Australian ABC TV) last night, Prime Minister Gillard admitted she did promise ‘...no carbon tax…’ before the last election. Fortunately, moderator Tony Jones (pic) gave her the opportunity to explain her ‘backflip’. In a nutshell, she would have preferred to go straight to a cap and trade system, but the political reality of working in a coalition with Independents and Greens offered her a choice of a compromise plan that included a temporary carbon tax, or no plan. I breathed a sigh of relief.

For an agonisingly long time, she didn’t admit a change of mind. Journalists are so fond of accusing politicians of ‘backflips’, that I wonder how we got to the position where to change direction in the light of more information or political reality is seen as weakness, gleefully pursued as such by sneering shock jocks like Alan Jones and ‘policy free zones’ like (Opposition Leader) Tony Abbott!

However, it will be interesting to watch Oakshot and Windsor to see if they have the guts to risk the ire of their nominally anti-socialist electorates and continue to support what their consciences know must be done. There are some things, like the environment, that cannot be left to an unregulated (free) market. Surely that is the ‘take home message’ from the GEC and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, both direct results of a shonky corporate culture that demands ‘profits now; the future be damned!’

If we continue to treat nature as a ‘market’ and we continue to plunder environmental capital, we will eventually face the reality of a ‘market correction’. That correction can come in two ways and there are only two. We continue to pollute and let Nature adjust as it always has by forcing massive depopulation, sometimes to extinction, or we intervene to slow the process and perhaps, given time, reverse it.

We have the technology, but will we defer gratification to pay for it.

God at work.

More mysterious ways!










Jeff says God sent this oil well to make him rich.

Jeff's Oil Well.
While this fundamentalist rants
“God’s oil well has fixed my finance!”
We must ask for whose sake
He sent this big earthquake?
And see that it's all down to chance.








As Forest Gump said: (quote from the movie).
Young Forrest Gump: Mama said not to be taking rides from strangers.
Dorothy Harris: This is the bus to school.
As God said: shit happens.
As I said: Sometimes wisdom awaits a paradigm shift, Jeff.

This post more or less continues on from the previous two.

Murder of Artesia.

Ancient land,
the monotreme ark.
Her underground sea
older than life.

Coal seam miners,
Untouchable caste,
their Lethal Injections
Fraccing her heart.

........................

Inspired by a comment from Madam Morgana.

Cyclones and other Acts of God..

Most of us would reject the proposition that recent extreme weather events in Australia were initiated by God in retaliation for (then Australian prime minister) Kevin Rudd advising Israel to sign the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty or any similar self-serving nonsense. However, scientists predict that such events will become more frequent and more extreme as climate change accelerates weather systems, so it may be time to really take notice of what science is telling us.

Tropical cyclone Yasi was spawned in the Pacific when the Coral Sea registered its highest water temperature ever, as did the Gulf of Mexico before Katrina hit New Orleans. Here, eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.

Now, even if we think Frank may be a bit off with his timing, and some would argue that it could happen sooner, with many thousands of nuclear warheads waiting for someone to become paranoid enough to launch a few, a peaceful transition to lower populations, nil carbon economies and world peace is certainly not assured.

Now I take you back to Danny and his delusion. (If you took the link, thank you) Danny can be dismissed as a schizophrenic who went off his medication, but far more dangerous are the less extreme who put their faith in a middle-of-the-road religion, simply believing God is taking care of it when 'He' clearly isn't. Then there are those who quote Biblical accounts of creation, origin of man and his fellow creatures and who tell us 'God will destroy the universe by fire and climate change is the start'.

That prediction, cherry picked from hundreds made and failed, certainly fits a simplistic interpretation of climate change. However, the truth is that climate change or even a nuclear holocaust will not destroy the world nor will it have any substantial effect on the universe. As soon as Man is gone, the biosphere will adjust, life will go on and the survivors will evolve to fit the new paradigm. But what will be missing (among many others) is Mankind.









Comfortable untruth, embraced in our youth
Myths, stories, ritual, exempt from proof,
Once thought reliable,
No longer viable.
Time to admit the uncomfortable truth.

So my plea is to all people of good will, and that includes people of any of the thousands of belief systems humans have created over a hundred millennia, please consider the evidence, check the credibility and motivation of your sources then push for change. This is a unique and beutiful planet. Let's not totally stuff it up for ourselves.


Picture of Cyclone Yasi borrowed from here.

Planet bites back.

If, like me, you thought the current Pakistani flood was a natural disaster, think again.

This arrived today from my friend and Green activist Elizabeth Perey in Tasmania:

“I did not know about the deforestation of Pakistan, so assume at least some of you did not know either.” (Take the link).

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/a-land-left-to-drown-by-the-timber-mafia-1.1051230

Greed, and the corruption it creates, poisons everything. I posted this limerick a few weeks ago, but figure it’s worth another run!


"It's only one tree," so they say,
"It really is quite in the way!"
But, permission given
To every one livin',
Would leave the world bare in a day!

‘Think globally and act locally’ was never more urgent!

Pic: Clearfelling in Australia, 1905, when to not clear land of trees attracted a tax.

Day in the life of a WHO activist.

.
So tell me, what year were you born?
I was born in 1924, two years before they opened the new power station at Bunnerong.

I see. Now, do you remember where you lived as a child? What sort of house you lived in?
Yes, I remember Dad building it when I was about four, but it wasn’t finished for almost ten years.

So, he was building it as you grew up. What was it made from? Do you remember that?
Yes, he used old timber from the Tempe tip and Fibro. It had a tin roof.

Asbestos cladding?
Yes. He had a special Fibro cutter, but he sometimes hammered the edges to make them fit.

Do you remember breathing any of the dust?
I remember what it smelt like, a sort of a wet cementy smell.

OK, so did you grow up there?
Yes, we grew up there, swam in the Cook’s River as kids, fished and made canoes out of old corrugated iron and …

OK, so was that in Marrickville, near the Tempe tip?
No, we lived in Earlwood, just up river from the tip and across from Marrickville Golf Course. I remember it being built. That was in 1941, the year I had my tonsils out. They said it was infection from the river.

Tonsils out. OK, so did you stay in that house long?
I moved out after I left school, but Mum had to sell up when Dad died from lung cancer about the time of the first Maralinga tests in 1955.

Mesothelioma?
Yes, probably, but they said it was lung cancer. Mum couldn’t get compensation.

OK, so when did you first start having kidney problems?
That would have been about the time we built Vales Point, 1964.

You worked at the power station?
Yes, I started at Wangi as a stoker, but they needed more and built Vales Point then Liddell then Munmorah and Wallerawang. Eraring and Bayswater were the biggest. All coal fired.

So what did you do there?
Most of the time I was in the coal yard driving a loader. They sprayed the heaps but the dust still got through.

I see, and did you smoke?
Yes, we all smoked then, but I quit the year the Torrey Canyon ran aground in 1967.

OK, now when did you first have difficulty passing urine?
It started at the time of the first oil shock, 1979.

Right, and when did you have the kidney out?
Later that year, same week as Three Mile Island. 1979.

So you started dialysis then?
No, not right away, the other kidney hung on until the Chernobyl meltdown, 1986

OK, so when was your prostate cancer diagnosis exactly?
I had a normal range PSA reading about the time the Ozone Treaty was signed in 1989, but a bad one when the Exxon Valdez ran aground. That was 1989 too. Then I had it out at the start of the first Gulf war, just as Saddam set fire to the Kuwaiti oil wells in 1990.

So how did it go?
What the war?

No, the op.
Not good. I lost my erection.

But you were already over sixty-five by then!
So? Do you think it all stops when you retire? Good heavens man! That was the best time for sex. No pregnancies, plenty of time, no kids around. We miss it more than anything!

Is that still a problem? We could prescribe Viagra.
Four tablets a hundred bucks? That’s over fifty bucks a week! Mate, we’re on the pension!

So you have sex twice a week?
I wish. Used to; we always had great sex.

OK, OK. So tell me. What about the incontinence?
That’s a lot of fun too. Ha ha! I got out of diapers when Kyoto was signed in 1997. It looked good for a while, but I started to leak again after Copenhagen in 2009.

Right. So when did the first secondaries show up?
The headaches started at the time the oil rig fire off the W A coast. That was later in 2009.

OK, so how did the chemo go?
No good. Began the day the Gulf spill started and stopped the day it was capped but it was all too late. Accumulated damage… No chance of a full recovery now.

So do you want the surgery? We can fix it for a while, but there will be more events and of course in the end…

I know. The old body can only take so much. No, I think I’ve had enough. I’ll just take the morphine and go.

In the lifetime of a tooth.

Growing new, erupting gums,
Invention, mass production comes.
Baby teeth, come loose then fall,
Oil and coal, great fortunes call.

Playing children, careless brushing,
Manufacture, progress rushing.
Fluoride, flossing? Do that later.
CFC’s? why? Does it matter?

Caries, bone loss, gum disease?
Species loss and falling trees.
Change the diet, brush with vigour.
Natures’ gaps becoming bigger.

Root nerves out, replace with filling.
Deep sea wells, expand the drilling.
Cap and polish, smiling pleasure.
Coal-seam gas, a temp’ry measure.

Abscess pain, remove the teeth
Valdez grinds on rocks beneath.
Plastic dentures, foreign things.
Deep sea wells leak oily rings.

Loss of taste, a life less rich.
Smothered wetlands, ‘just a hitch’.
False teeth moving unintended.
Regulations, laws extended.

Dentures soak, regress in dreams.
Spud new gushers, virgin seams.
Tired and old, a dying flame.
Spills and spoiling, who to blame?

A man gives up, eternal rest.
But what of we, the people left?
We will quibble over cost,
Procrastinate ‘til all is lost!