Climate change, leaded petrol and making an educated choice.

DMS Energy while primarily an electrical contracting company before anything else has always centred its products and designs around energy efficiency and renewable energy.

As such, some of what we do is always in the news.

That may be solar or battery systems. It may be the rising power bills that is the engine that is a big part of what drives our business. It might be rolling blackouts or even arguments over where we source our energy from.

Out of all this day to day maelstrom we have a young girl from Sweden called Greta Thunberg. Who has once again dragged topics others would like to leave in the shadows out into the light. The impact has been so huge I think it’s worth a mention.

What’s interesting is her message. It’s very simple. Don’t listen to me, listen to the scientists. While others are attacking her for being young or being on the spectrum and others are holding her up in messianic light her message is a good one.

But let's look at what the scientists are saying. The clear and vast majority are saying human accelerated climate change is a thing. The earth's climate has changed numerous times over the past millennia but these changes have taken many many thousands of years and as such the majority of the flora and fauna through ongoing natural selection and adaptation has basically kept on chugging along.

Along came the industrial revolution and in a few centuries we have done to the climate what would normally take thousands of years. It's a complicated subject and we are not going to cover all the bases in 5 minutes. But if you care to look, it's all spelled out.

Interestingly enough fossil fuel companies knew this was going to be an issue in the 70’s and they had a clear and obvious choice to make. Either do the right thing and transition from their core products and their obscene profits or deny, lie, obfuscate and put up barriers to protect their profits and core business.

I will leave it up to the readers to decide which direction they go.

But here is a quick story about fossil fuel companies.

Do you remember leaded fuel? We used to call it Super. Disappeared in the 90’s from the bowsers. In the 20’s there was a problem with petrol causing pre-ignition. When you accelerate your engine would knock. It sounded terrible and shortened the life of engine components. A solution was found using ethanol which is basically distilled from plant matter so in a sense renewable. By mixing 20% volume of ethanol you could stop this pinging in the engines.

The fuel companies were aghast with this idea that their product could be diluted by 20% with product that wasn’t theirs. Basically all they could see was a potential 20% reduction in their sales volumes. Madness looking back as petrol consumption has done nothing but rise.

So instead they discredited ethanol and developed adding lead to their product to stop pre-ignition or pinging. They knew it was dangerous as a couple of their people were killed during the development of lead additive. It must be mentioned that lead is very, very toxic to human beings and most animals in general.

It’s estimated around 600 million ton of lead has been pumped into the global environment which has now entered our food chain, water etc and its not going away. This is lead that was underground, been mined and processed and spread quite effectively by exhaust pipes. It’s caused numerous birth defects, neurological and development issues where ever leaded petrol was used. It’s worth looking up and checking for yourself

While I’m not a raving greenie by any means, I am a student of history and a lot can be learned about how certain issues will be dealt with in the future and by how similar issues were dealt with in the past.

Deny, lie, obfuscate and block.

So the message of the day is not everything is always as it seems. Sometimes we are better off not shooting the messenger but actually listening to the message. The other reasons why I bring this up the fallout from the arguments of the bigger issues affect the smaller ones hence we see a lot of our products in the news for better or worse.

Keeping things simple. More solar energy hits the earth in one hour than the whole of humanity can consume in one year. We have never ever had an energy problem, we have an invested interest and a weak global governmental leadership problem.

What can you do? For starters take control of your energy needs yourself and DMS Energy can help you with that, but maybe more importantly, keep talking about these things amongst family and friends and shape the discussion.

After all, even if global warming was the biggest hoax ever populated by scientists the world has ever seen the worst case scenario is we just made the world a better place for nothing.