Exposing the Secret Power of Our Superheros

I N order to be a superhero it seems there are two prerequisites – the ability to perform spectacular feats and anonymity.

The first is self-evident – I mean, derr, if you can’t perform spectacular feats the interview is over.  But the need for anonymity is an enigma. Sure, it is obviously convenient. The last thing you need when you’re a busy superhero is your “Bat Phone” running 24/7 with cries for help from people who really are just too lazy or stupid to solve their own problems.

However, “convenience” does not completely explain the mystery. There is something fundamental about superheros that shields them from public gaze. It appears to be linked to the suppression of ego and lack of charisma. In fact they tend to be anti-egotists – introverts.

Now I know what you're thinking – Batman, Superman, introverts? Have you seen their costumes, you dick?

But these flamboyant vigilantes aren’t real superheros, they’re fictional characters. They are caricatures of superheros created by egotists.

Egotists depict superheros as narcissists who feel somehow compelled to at least try to conceal their insatiable need to be the centre of attention. Hence their outrageous garb tends to include a mask. Like a string bikini, it’s a faint flag of modesty fluttering in a gale of rampant exhibitionism.

Real superheros don’t need masks or costumes, because they are actually invisible.

I discovered their existence quite by accident when I stumbled over the keys to their camouflage. When I peered behind their curtain I was astonished by what I found. Their influence permeates every facet of our modern life.  I suddenly realised just how dependant we mortals are on them. They are continuously performing spectacular feats, day-in day-out right in front of our faces and yet we just can’t see them.

We walk by, oblivious, humming to the tune on our ipod.

They are everywhere, controlling our lives. They regularly hold mass meetings right in the middle of our capital cities where they honour esteemed members and bestow awards for magnificence, but I guarantee you won’t read a word about it in the newspapers or hear a mention on the television.

By some mysterious conjuring, they have induced a somnolent, narcotic effect on the community – their camouflage cloaks their activities no matter how spectacular or astounding.

We called for their help recently when the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan crippling the nuclear power stations, and when BP’s Macondo well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, when floods and cyclones ravaged Australia in 2010 and an earthquake shattered Christchurch.

So powerful is their magic that when I expose their identity their spell will immediately kick in. You will be overcome first with a sense of disappointment. Feeling let-down you will not notice the veil quietly closing as your attention is diverted elsewhere and they drift back into invisibility.

These superheros are our engineers.

Throughout history, engineers performing spectacular feats have transformed the human race from a tribe of clever monkeys who poked sticks into holes to get the ants out into what we are today. It’s a process that continues at an ever-accelerating pace – yet how many of us could name just three of them?

It was engineers who built the pyramids, the Acropolis, the Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China, the steam engine, the combustion engine, aeroplanes, spacecraft. It was engineers who moved vast armies across theatres of war and delivered the devastating ordinance that changed the political course of history.

Yet when we think back over all these events, or read the historic literature, there is not a lot to recall these engineers. As a society we focus on the egotists – the charismatic political leaders, generals, admirals, or decorated heroes.

 “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender...” What was implied by Churchill but never stated was: “Exactly how we will achieve all this will be up to the engineers.”

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Again the missing quote: “Exactly how we will get there and back will be up to our engineers.”

We know who went to the Moon, we know who sent them, but who knows who got them there and back?

Every time we get behind the wheel of a car, step on to a train or a plane or into an elevator, or drive over a bridge we put our lives into the hands of these superheros with their algorithms.

Fictional Hollywood superheros have bi-polar personas. One is the charismatic, gaudy exhibitionist who uses super powers to save the world in spectacular fashion. The other is the opposite – a nerdy, introverted character who blends into the community with a bland, everybody camouflage, shunning like kryponite the limelight that we egotists bask in.

This logic would suggest that for a real superhero trying to blend into Hollywood, the modern egotists’ Holy See, these poles would be reversed.

Consider Hedy Lamarr – here’s a superhero who disguised herself as an egotistic megastar in tinsel town. Feted as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, her adoring fans were oblivious to the superhero who was busy trying to save the world and who had a hand in changing the future course of mankind.

In the dark days of World War II, Lamarr applied her covert electronic engineering skills along with a Hollywood neighbour, avant-garde composer George Antheil, to design something they knew the US Navy desperately wanted – a secure torpedo guidance system.

However, their frequency hopping communications design, US Patent 2,292,387, was ahead of the electronics technology of the day and so it did not see service during that war.

It first saw action 20 years later when the heat was turned up to boiling in the Cold War. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the world and the human race moved towards the brink of destruction, the Lamarr-Atheil anti-eavesdropping technology was used by the US Navy to develop secure communications between its ships, blockading Cuba.

The Lamarr-Atheil spread-spectrum communications system, originally based on the idea of synchronised pianola reels, lies behind a range of modern secure wireless communications applications in systems from US defence satellites, to radio transmissions, to mobile phones.

Lamarr helped save life on earth, including mankind, from destruction, yet managed to avoid being named along with other Hollywood egotists Oprah Winfrey, Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball on Time Magazine’s list of The 100 Most Important People of the 20^th Century.

Instead Lamarr is remembered for her beauty – and for being the first woman to get her tits out in a feature film.

So how exactly did she do it? (Remain invisible that is – not get her tits out.) How do these engineers so effectively hide their activities? How do they construct mammoth buildings, fly millions of people around the world, tunnel beneath our cities, put a man on the Moon, wrap the globe in an instant-communications network, span vast waterways with dangling steel without ever really being noticed? Given that drunken pop stars can have their faces splashed across news outlets around the world just by falling down outside a nightclub, or swearing at a photographer.

A s I said, I think I have discovered the secret to the engineers’ powers of invisibility – it’s the pencils they use. Those seemingly stupid little retractable pencils that look like pens. Only engineers, or people who think like engineers, can use these pencils. If an egotist like me tries we keep breaking the lead until we fling the contraption at the wall in frustration.

My father was an engineer.

As a child I recall how he used to correct my maths homework using his stupid retractable pencil. I was never any good at maths. When forced to do my homework, I would sit gazing blankly at the hostile sums my teacher set and try to remember a morsel of what she said in class.

But nothing would come. Instead my mind would wander off to some distant imaginary land where whatever I was doing would make me a superhero and the centre of everyone’s admiration.

Then my father, knowing I was making no progress, would fold his newspaper and place it on the coffee table and come over to help me. He would take his magic pencil out of his shirt pocket. “These sums aren’t that hard,” he would say while pressing the button on the end and focussing on getting it just right before releasing the button, closing the tiny jaws around the protruding lead.

“All you have to remember is that ...” After dragging me back from my imaginary land where everything I did was magnificent, he would then humiliate me by doing each of my equations with his pencil asking me questions along the way like “what’s 13 minus four?” I would look blank.

 “13 minus four?”

 Silence.

 “Surely you know what 13 minus four is!?”

What he didn’t realise was that whatever the question, I couldn’t hear it. Instead all my mind was processing was the situation of me sitting here being tested and judged by my father and failing on every count.

He would just persist doing my equations in the margin of my exercise book. His sums and his process didn’t match my teacher’s in any way. But surprisingly his answers were always right.

“That’s not how WE do it,” I would feebly suggest. “We use New Maths.”

“Maths, is maths, however you do it,” he would say before leaving me ashamed, as he went back to reading his paper.

My father never talked about his work.

With his slide rule, theodolite and magic pencil he changed the lives of many people in the UK, Africa and Australia. These people are not aware of his role in their lives. Engineers don’t cut the ribbon when their work is done.

In Nigeria he built roads and bridges. This was a time when there was very little infrastructure in the country. He had to improvise on a lot of the services taken for granted in a modern, developed country – services such as ready-mixed concrete. My father had to mix his own concrete for the bridges and culverts on site with local labourers. He was constantly getting out his little pencil and adjusting the formulas of the mix in order to prevent cracking in the piles under the variable wet and dry tropical conditions.

“How are the piles going Peter?” the other expats would joke back at the club, suggesting he may have had an unspeakable medical condition.  

When an engineer constructs an all-weather road to an otherwise remote town or village they profoundly change the outlook of that society and its people forever. The same goes for connecting communities to the electricity grid, train network, gas or water supply, sewerage or even broadband internet. But rarely are we who live in these communities aware of who these engineers are or of the incredible feats they have to perform and the perplexing problems they have to overcome in order to get us what we take for granted.

My father, Peadar, with my mother, Nadia, at one of his work sites in Nigeria. When an engineer constructs an all-weather road to an otherwise remote town or village they profoundly change the outlook of that society and its people forever.

I  discovered the powers of the retractable pencil quite by accident not long after the turn of the century. I was working as an “embedded” journalist in a large corporation that was run by, and dominated by, engineers. Their stationery cupboard was full of these pencils disguised as pens. Whenever I presented something I had written for them to review, they would take out their retractable pencils, triggering a visceral flashback to my homework days. They would correct my spelling and grammar and then explain why some of the intuitive conclusions I had cleverly reached were based on flawed assumptions. These engineers were always calm, gracious but never condescending and, like my father, always so infuriatingly bloody right.

I was constantly energising around “brilliant”, innovative ideas only to see them torn to shreds by these quiet engineers with their confounded retractable-pencil logic.

But eventually I grew to enjoy these clashes with logic.

With fellow journalists we could sustain a loud, complex argument for hours, fuelled by beer and what Barry Humphrey’s referred to as the authority of total ignorance. With engineers the energy behind the idea would last for mere moments. It was either a good idea, in which case they would suggest further reading – essentially all those who had developed the same idea down through history – or it defied logic and would fall crashing to the floor like an improvised flying machine.

Gordon was one engineer I particularly loved bouncing things off.

“Gordon, if the laws of physics are sound then everything is predetermined,” I suggested one day. “Molecules have no choice in how they react, their reactions are set. Therefore, at the molecular level, our destiny has been set since the moment of the big bang, just like the destiny of balls on a pool table once you break. True?”

Gordon commended me on coming up with such a big idea, then calmly explained Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” and introduced me to the world of quantum mechanics. This caused a brain explosion. I fell down a rabbit hole and met Schrodinger’s Cat, which is not alive or dead, but is alive and dead.

Coming from daily newspapers where everything was reduced to a “good yarn”, this confrontation with in-depth logic proved to be quite game changing. I had never had to face such due diligence on everything that I wrote. But after a few years I found this scrutiny reassuring. Delving into the detail of complex technical issues and then trying to find new ways of expressing these concepts in the everyday, emotional language of journalism can be quite an intriguing challenge.

It’s not unlike trying to learn a second language late in life. The hardest part is letting go of assumptions you have grown up with. For example, in English objects are inanimate, whereas in Italian, like French and German, you have to think of them as male or female – boy or girl, masculine or feminine.

It was while studying Italian on a train, travelling from central Victoria into Melbourne that I stumbled across the power of the retractable pencil. I read an Italian phrase that I wanted to remember. Reaching into my coat for my pen I realised that I only had one of those stupid retractable pencils that I had picked up by mistake. After breaking the lead once, I pushed out another tiny bit of lead and tried again, writing ever so gently and carefully: ci penso di quando in quando (I think of it from time to time).

Suddenly I was engulfed in an orgasm of awareness. Everything stopped. While the train continued through the wheat fields at about 160 kmh, I was floating in a sea of stillness.

So this is how they do it. This is how those with a technical mind can create clarity and wonder from what seems to an egotist like me to be a chaotic confusion of tedious facts and figures. This is the power of the retractable pencil – the kinetics of writing. What you write with can have a subtle or profound impact on what you write.

You can’t write thundering columns, angry notes, graffiti or placards with a retractable pencil.

When it comes to jotting down notes at an interview a ballpoint pen is perfect. Keyboards have taken over our written communications – emails, blogs, articles, books. Even thumbs for SMS, chats or tweets.

However, when it comes to dealing with the big issues, the really tough questions, you need a retractable pencil. Intractable dilemmas require retractable pencils.

When the numbers really count: After famously reporting "Houston we have had a problem" Apollo 13 Commander James Lovell reached for his retractable pencil and starting jotting down these sums that would help get his ship safely home from the Moon. When the going gets really tough, those who don't have retractable pencils call those who do.

W hen the going gets really tough, those who don’t have them call those who do.

When your house is on fire you call the fire department. But if a nuclear reactor is on fire we call the engineers. When oil comes spewing out from deep below the ocean, we call the engineers. If you’re lost in the woods you can call emergency rescue. But if you’re lost in space between Earth and the Moon, you call engineers.

Bringing the Apollo 13 astronauts home safely required a team consisting of hundreds of engineers stretching the limits of technology with algorithms, knowledge, lateral thinking and retractable pencils. In many respects this was as great an achievement, if not greater, than the first Moon landing. Controlling the Macondo oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was an engineering feat on the same scale.

To hear and read commentators urging our political leaders to step in and takeover the operation shows just how out of touch we egotists have become. It exposes a fundamental flaw in our democratic system – we have a system built on popularity that elevates the loudmouths and shuns the thinkers.

It alienates those deep, introverted thinkers we rely on to solve the big problems. The nice, polite retractable-pencil people whose names you can never quite remember.

We egotists are the communicators, we are the butterflies in the garden. Thinkers tend to live a cloistered existence – geologists talk to geologists, neuroscientists to neuroscientists, engineers to engineers. We ferret them out and expose their work to a wider world. We cross pollinate ideas. This crucial cross fertilization opens the way to new amazing developments that benefit us all. Such as MRI technology used by clinicians for medical diagnostics or geoscientists looking deep into the earth, or the wide-spread, eclectic use of isotope analysis technology.

Necessity may well be the mother of invention, but serendipity is the father.

So what?

Well the fact is, essentially we journalists, we egotists, are failing to fulfil our role in the garden.

As a result we find that at a time when technological advances are opening up new and increasingly complex horizons of knowledge, the gap between scientific knowledge and public perception is widening. We journalists are failing to raise the level of technical understanding in the community and this is seriously hampering our ability to take full advantage of technical advances and is leading to serious public policy mistakes.

We have governments that find it difficult to draft quality, long-term policy decisions in some of our most important areas. For example, trying to site a nuclear waste storage facility anywhere in a democracy will raise a barrage of outrage, fear and misinformation. Not to mention policy paralysis in areas such as genetic engineering, medical research, energy and environmental management.

As a species, we are heading down the road of populism. Rather than enlightening and educating the population, journalists, and as a result politicians, are being drafted into harvesting ignorance and prejudices by promoting what is popular. Experts are brushed aside in favour of opinion polls and focus groups when it comes to determining solutions to some of the most complex problems we have ever faced.

The result is photo-opportunities involving grinning world leaders signing up to future commitments that have no chance of being fulfilled. Commitments such as the Millennium Development Goals, Kyoto and Copenhagen greenhouse gas emission targets, and nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

We egotists are just as important as our scientists and engineers. We are the artists, the musicians, the poets, the chefs, the filmmakers, the politicians, the movie stars. But we need to be aware of what we can do and what we can’t do.

We need more engineers. But we also need James Joyce, Jane Austen and Jimmy Buffett.

Egotists make life worth living, engineers make it possible. It's about as hard to love a building designed by an engineer as it is scary to drive over a bridge built by an artist.

The time has come for us egotists to go back to doing what we do best. We  have to pick up the “Bat Phone” and call the superheros. The people who are in the best position to do this are the journalists – real journalists.

We are the ones who have to change the public discourse. We have to present more facts and less opinion. We certainly have to resist the urge to seek popular opinions to complex issues. Please don’t ask any more pop singers for their views on climate change or world politics.

The role of the journalist is to narrow the gulf between what is known selectively and what is known collectively.

We have to drag more superheros into the limelight to help raise our overall awareness of what we face on the road ahead and what our realistic options are. We need facts that we can climb up on.

My advice to any journalist who feels they may actually have the answer to any of our big problems is try it out on someone who uses a retractable pencil – find your Gordon.

We all know what needs to be done. We all know the mission. We all know where our “Moon” is. We now need to get behind those with the knowledge to develop the algorithms that will get us there.

Letter to ABC's Mark Scott

Mr Mark Scott AO

Managing Director

The ABC

Dear Mark,

Please do not be too discouraged by the failure of the ABC’s first bold “data journalism project” looking at the coal seam gas industry – Coal Seam Gas: By The Numbers.

I think the ABC should be applauded for attempting this ambitious project. As the issues facing the human race become more complex we desperately need reputable news organisations like the ABC to guide us through the technical complexities and the noise of vested interests so that we, as a democratic society, can make informed decisions.

The intent of your data journalism project is just what we need. Its failure was due to problems plaguing journalism across the developed world.

I’m sure that Wendy Carlisle and her team are all excellent journalists. With your help and guidance I’m confident they will be able to learn from their mistakes and have another go and this topic.

But first, Mark, they will have to realise who they are. They are journalists, and all journalists – including you and I – are egotists. We are very good at talking to and about other egotists and this all makes very entertaining media and is the bread and butter of journalism.

Commercial media are forced to dance this dance. If a newspaper like The Age wants to talk about coal seam gas, it will seek a celebrity like Olivia Newton-John.

But Mark, the ABC is free from many of the commercial realities faced by other media. You can make a difference to this paradigm and you tried with this data journalism project.

However, in order to succeed in such a technically complex area, your egotists are going to have to speak to experts. It’s not good enough just to read the data put out by experts like Geoscience Australia, bureaucrats and energy companies. Egotists like us journalists do not understand the complexity – the algorithms – behind this data, as Wendy and her team, I’m sure, now realise.

As a daily newspaper egotist who wandered off into the energy industry about 20 years ago I can assure you, Wendy, and all the journalists at the ABC, that the experts aren’t so bad. In fact they are truly amazing and always more than willing to help. With issues like coal seam methane I strongly suggest you find an engineer to help you through the numbers. I always do this now and I wished I’d started 40 years ago.

I’m not involved with the coal seam gas business, but I am aware of the magnitude of what our Australian engineers are attempting here. They will be the first in the world to produce LNG from unconventional gas. This is a huge technical challenge, but if they succeed they will have achieved far more in the world’s efforts to combat climate change than any Canberra polices aimed at our domestic energy consumption.

This is a very important topic, Mark, and as a huge fan of the ABC I am looking forward to Wendy’s efforts to do it right. This will be a great milestone of modern journalism.

Yours sincerely

Leonard McDonnell

PM is right. We are being fed crap on climate change

The most effective way for me to reduce my domestic greenhouse gas emissions would be to kick my family out of the house and live alone. Then I could walk up and down the street waving my greatly reduced energy bills and proclaiming what a wonderful greenie I am.

It would be a fraud, of course, just like most of Australia’s attempts to tackle climate change.

Australia is shirking its responsibility in this global challenge because our policies are dominated be ignorant egotists who have deluded themselves into believing they are greenies.

We are not leading the world on climate change – far from it.

Ignorant, loud-mouthed, egotistical ‘greenies’ and deluded journalists and politicians are keeping this country splashing around in the kiddies paddling pool instead of assisting with the big issues in the deep end.

The climate change policies of both major parties are stuck in our domestic electorate. Climate change is a global problem. Australia is a minor energy consumer in this world, but we are a major energy producer and this is where our efforts should focus.

We are a major energy producer in the fastest growing region of the globe – Asia Pacific. There are hundreds of millions of people living in poverty across the Asia Pacific region.

I recently visited communities that have infant mortality rates that make even our worst Aboriginal communities seem like Shangri La. The reason is even remote Aboriginal communities have access to medical care when their children get really sick. In many communities in our region of the world there is no medical care, there is no Flying Doctor, no ambulance, no ‘intervention’. So parents regularly bury children, who die of routine illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhoea, or malaria.

But, the good news is things are improving. Countries are working hard to raise their living standards to levels we take for granted. The bad news is achieving this requires capital and energy – lots of it. As a result Asia’s energy demand is growing at roughly the equivalent of a new ‘Australia’ joining the region every 18 months.

Naturally these countries are going for the most affordable energy and that is coal. Australia, being the world’s largest coal exporter, is therefore doing OK out of all this humanitarian endeavour. It helped us dodge the GFC.

When I hear the Australian Government pledge to reducing our domestic greenhouse emissions by five per cent, I say ‘so what.’

We are going to increase the amount of renewable energy in our power generation to 20 per cent – big deal. We might as well pour money into Morris Dancing – at least it would create more jobs.

If we really believed that climate change was serious, if we really believed that it required urgent action, we would stop wasting money on mirrors and propellers and instead concentrate on trying to improve coal-fired power generation.

If we could develop a one percent improvement in the world’s future coal-fired power generation this would dwarf anything Australia did in our puny domestic market. Yet the Gillard Government’s latest climate-change policy had nothing in this area.

And when a company in Victoria, HRL, embarked on an ambitious project to build a pilot-plant to attempt to prove technology with the potential to reduce emissions from coal-fired power by 30 per cent, so-called “environmentalists” turned on them like rabid dogs. Where were our politicians or journalists who could have put this outrageous attack into perspective?

If this project has been killed, then it is not beyond credibility to say that those responsible have dealt a severe blow to the world’s efforts to combat climate change. They clearly believe that their own egotistical agenda is more important than truly tackling climate change. They have no awareness of the real challenge and are quite content to just ‘kick their family out of the house’.

Climate change exposes a fundamental flaw in our democratic system – policies are formed by egotists. However, tackling climate change requires technically sophisticated collaborators – engineers.

They are essentially excluded from the debate.

This is a multi-faceted, complex, technical problem -- we won’t get the answers from focus groups.

Greenhouse Myths and politicians

Twenty years from now we Australians will be getting 0.3 percent of our energy from solar power. Says who?

 Says the Government.

But they don’t say it out loud because the Greens might hear. Instead they talk about our bright green, renewable energy future and all the jobs that will be created as we “switch over” to “clean” energy.

Such energy myths have destroyed the world’s ability to make any credible attempt to deal with climate change.

We Australians have pledged to reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by five percent of 2000 levels by 2020. Both major parties agree on this goal – yet it will not be met. Australia has no chance of reducing its GHG emissions at all in the next nine years.

If the Government seriously pursued this goal, we the people, would turf them out of office.

The only way we will meet this commitment is by buying credits from overseas. We will find a way to buy licences to continue business as usual.

Again, this is another fact you will not hear the Government – or the Opposition – saying out loud.

The Gillard Government has announced (ever so quietly) that we will be getting 13 percent of our electricity from wind and solar in 20 years – one percent of this will be solar.

But haven’t we got bi-partisan agreement on sourcing 20 percent of our electricity from renewables in just nine years time? Yes we have.  But this is just more myth and spin.

As the current Government, like those before it, make clear – if you ask quietly – wind and solar, geothermal, wave energy, these are all extras on the renewable energy set and will be for the foreseeable future. The stars are wood and hydro dams – but, again, don’t say that out loud or the Greens might hear and there will be hell to pay.

The Government’s carbon tax is, sadly, dead. It has drowned in this sea of myth and spin. The only question for Julia Gillard is how to get back to what Kevin Rudd has led us to believe was her original position without getting the blame.  If she cans the tax the Greens will throw a tantrum and her fragile Government will collapse.

However, if she lets the Greens have a big input into drafting the legislation it will become political poison for the other independents who will vote it down in the House. She will get away Scot free and will be able to claim the high moral ground going into the next election. Brilliant politics!

But, once again, a sad day for the future of the planet and our attempts to tackle climate change.

So let’s kill a few more persistent myths in the hope we can apply CPR to this “CPRS” and get the tax over the line.

Myth: Corporations are the “Big Polluters” and the tax will make them pay.

 Fact: We are the big polluters – we the “working families”.

Corporations have been working hard to become more energy efficient since the oil shocks of the ‘70s. That’s when there was a step change energy costs and so reducing their energy consumption has meant big bucks for big business.

The carbon tax is not designed to make big corporations pay – it’s designed to make us pay more for our energy in the hope we will use less. Any corporate costs will be passed on to us, the consumers, one way or another – just like the GST.

Making us more energy efficient will achieve a great deal more than our solar pipe dreams.

For example, if we can improve the efficiency of our car fleet by just one percent, that would be equivalent in terms of GHG reductions to our entire national solar power generation.

Running our cars with the right air pressure in our tyres would improve the fleet by about 3 percent. Improving our driving habits – that is less speeding and accelerating – can deliver improvements anywhere up to 33 percent.

Myth: The carbon tax will lead to a revolution in renewable energy.

Fact: The Government says that all renewable energy will account for only 8 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption in 20 years time. The other 92 percent will still be fossil fuels.

The tax will, however, tilt the scales back in favour of the planet so that over the next 100 years or so, we will improve the impact of our growing energy use a little sooner than might otherwise be the case.

We journalists, politicians, economists and academics will never produce the solutions to our energy challenges – these will have to come from our engineers and scientists.

The best we can do is work towards creating the political and fiscal environment that will support and assist our engineers and scientists. For starters we can certainly encourage more of our youth into the maths-science stream.  We desperately need more engineers – as opposed to more models and rock stars.

Now is the time to start getting real about this climate challenge.

The Pope Blesses Rubber Dingers

The Pope's recent comments regarding the use of condoms must have prompted an almighty Alleluia! from all those who own shares in condom-making companies (I hope someone checked for any pre-announcement plunges on such stocks from the Vatican Bank).
At  last the Catholic Church is moving into the 18th Century. This is just another step towards ridding ourselves of all the stupid edicts in this world centered around sex and obsession.

There are about six billion of us on earth right now. We’re all individuals with varying views, attributes, hopes, wants, needs, expectations, flaws and talents.

Yes, we come in two varieties, those with a penis and those with a womb -- tackle in or tackle out.

Just to be absolutely clear, those with the gear hanging in space are male, and those with the gear tucked away are female.

Women can do things that men can't – give birth, breast feed, collect shoes, have multiple orgasms.

Men can do things that women can't – piss up a wall, write their name in the snow.

Throughout history there has been continuing debate about how men are better at this and women are better at that. You know the stuff – men are more physical, men can read maps, men are stronger, men can run faster blah, blah, blah. But in reality we are all individuals with varying abilities and talents.

Remember, I’m a man, yet Florence Griffith Joyner would have no trouble whatsoever in thrashing me over a hundred metres, even if I had an eighty-metre headstart.

The majority of this “better than” bullshit has traditionally come from men, because let’s face it guys, it’s really just pissing up a wall.

Should women be allowed to be priests. This, and pretty much any gender-based argument, is phallic bullshit.

Unless the job description specifically includes tasks that require the use of genitals, or a womb, there is no place for gender arguments in the 21st Century. Therefore, unless the priesthood involves some secret rituals, like pissing up walls or inseminating altar boys, there is no reason to even discuss whether or not women should be allowed in.

I use this priesthood issue, but it is not an exception. It empitomises the millions of fallacies that handicap humanity. Just look at how much time, energy and emotional angst goes into this question even today. And for that matter all the similar bullshit questions of the past – should women, be allow to vote, get equal pay, should slavery be banned, is apartheid OK, should blacks get the same rights as whites, is the earth flat or round, should we allow same-sex marriage. We could fill libraries with the reams of these, at-the-time all-important fallacies, not to mention the physical and emotional energy, the suffering and pain, that has been wasted on them. There is one vital ingredient common to all such debates, and that’s ignorance.

For example, let’s examine this ridiculous “why priests must have a dick” argument.  Like so many fallacies wasting our time today, it relies on a misunderstanding of scripture. It’s an argument perpetuated by people who assume that old books are closer to the truth than today’s writings. The older the book, the more important its messages, so ancient scripture must therefore be venerated.

Whereas I say if the printing press had pre-dated Christ, we would have a very different sense of Christianity today. We would have a much greater understanding of how people thought and how they communicated at the time. We would have a plethora of books espousing all kinds of pluralist views. We would have critical reviews of the books of the day, including the Old and the New Testament.

We would understand what Jesus really meant when he said, “This is my body”.

 “This is my body” is bullshit. Beautiful bullshit, certainly, just like Ich bin ein Berliner.

We know Kennedy was not a Berliner because of mass media. Therefore we understand what he really meant.

Could you imagine if the Bible was published today. Would it outsell Harry Potter? I doubt it.

Although the Bible has many authors over many years, imagine – as many Bible “experts” still do – if it was written by one person. How would it stand up to peer review? How would the author go, for example, facing media questions?

“So Mr God, are you expecting us to believe that Mary was a virgin? And if so, what exactly did she and Joseph do on their wedding night?”

“If she gave birth to your son, doesn’t that mean you must have committed adultery, that is, broken one of your own commandments as referred to earlier in the book? What exactly do you mean when you say you did not have sex with that woman – Mary?”

“What terrible sin did Joseph commit to deserve a wife who doesn’t put out?”

“If the marriage was not consummated doesn’t that mean it’s annulled?”

“If you are in all living creatures, doesn’t that make you personally responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world?”

The Bible is littered with contradictions from cover to cover – and remember the Old Testament is fundamentally the Koran and the Tora.

But they are only contradictions if you take the text literally. The fact is the Bible was never written to be taken literally – it’s beautiful bullshit from cover to cover.

Scholars today understand a great deal about these documents and the people who wrote and edited them. But this information is unfortunately more ignored than understood by those with a vested interest in forming their own interpretations of scriptures.

It’s these ignorant views that form the basis for most conflict and debate about things religious. That’s the Cuckoo's Egg.

Churches are often far more preoccupied with their own preservation than their purpose.

Why is Australia still waiting for a fast, reliable train?

It’s a sad fact that if you live long enough you will eventually get cancer. And that, I’m afraid, is what has happened to Australia’s railway systems. We have entered the 21^st Century with a 19^th Century rail system.

Everything about our railways from our rolling stock to the way we treat our passengers is Dickensian. The system has cancer and it’s dying.

Meanwhile rail travel in the rest of the world is enjoying a renaissance, with fast trains competing with airlines for inter-city passengers. They can be faster, they are much more energy efficient and they reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I’m sitting on a Victorian regional inter-city train listening to the all too familiar barking rage of the conductor blasting a passenger for being late and not having time to buy a ticket at the station. The conductor can sell tickets on the train, but he doesn’t like doing it. Like Basil Fawlty, he is angry because the passengers won’t get their lives organised to suit his agenda.

The “customer service” woman at head-office is totally on side. “Oh I know, we really wish they wouldn’t talk to customers like that. There is absolutely no reason they can’t sell tickets on the train – they have the facilities. It’s just some of them are lazy – it tends to be the ones who live in the city.”

She leaves the impression that this problem is as old as time and there’s not much she can do about it, because it is and she can’t. It’s an infection that has spread into the bones of our rail system. It dates back to the 1800s, the heyday of rail travel when there wasn’t much else. Rail travel was a privilege – but not anymore.

The same sanctimonious conductor who was blasting the passenger for his poor punctuality is now on the PA delivering the ritual, canard apology on behalf of the railway. Today it’s because, even though we have arrived at our destination only 10 minutes late, it will probably be at least another 10 minutes before we will be able to get off the train. You see someone has parked another train in our spot.

It’s the same the next day – different conductor, same apology, same excuse. The fact that most of the 14 platforms are empty at our brand-new metropolitan station doesn’t seem relevant. To allow us off on “another” platform would require a change in “procedure”, some lateral thinking, a morsel of concern.

Day three, same outcome only this time the excuse has changed – it’s that old reliable “signal fault”. You see the fault, the problem, the reason and, therefore, all the responsibility for this terrible recurring situation lies with “the signal”. If only those damned signals would get their act together.

For every awful conductor, ticket seller, ticket inspector on the railways there is one who is polite, courteous, helpful and extremely efficient. Sadly they are swimming against a tide of institutionalised incompetence and inconsistency and a culture of apathy.

To all those Australians who like to brag about how we “punch above our weight” on the world stage, I say take at look at our railways.

My thoughts drift back to a particularly pleasing risotto I had with a fine glass of woody Chardonnay in an exquisite restaurant in France almost 10 years ago – and bear in mind I’m a risotto purist. In this restaurant the waiting service was impeccable, the table decorations were pleasant, the wine list, although a tad limited, nevertheless included only quality. But what really made this meal special was the view. You see, the restaurant was on Eurostar, travelling through the green fields of France at around 300kmh on its way from Paris to London.

Eurostar today can cover the journey carbon-neutral in a little over two hours, even though for safety reasons it has to slow right down to the speed of the fastest trains in Australia as it travels under the waves of the English Channel.

In Australia we consider 160kmh wow-speed for a train. But in the real world 160kmh was considered fast for steam trains 100 years ago.

Today world-class trains are getting close to the 600kmh mark.

China, which remember is still a developing country, is rolling out fast train lines like spaghetti. It already has the longest fast-train network in the world.

You can now go 968km from Wuhan to Guangzhou in three hours. That’s around the same distance as Melbourne to Sydney, a journey that takes our ambitiously named XPT (Express Passenger Train) over 11 hours.

Shanghai’s 30.5km airport link – that’s around the distance of Melbourne to Tullamarine or Manly to Mascot – takes seven minutes and 20 seconds, with a top speed of 431kmh.

Oh we have tried to join the 20^th Century.

Back in the ‘80s some of Australia’s leading companies – BHP, Elders IXL, Kumagai Gumi, and TNT – got together on a bold plan to build a fast-train network linking Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane. When all the sums were done, the investors considered it a goer provided they could get some tax concessions from the Government.

When this was put to the Government, the answer was “computer says no”.

In 2008 a world-class fast train service was proposed for Melbourne’s metropolitan area, running from Geelong right around to Frankston. But once again the answer from government was “computer says no.”

Victoria now has a new Transport Minister, Martin Pakula. After his swearing in January he said: "The public of Victoria expect a public transport minister who’s going to get in, roll his sleeves up, and work as hard as I plan to work, to do everything I can to improve the system as much as possible."

Those in their salad days might take this as a message of hope. But experienced punters will recognise it as the traditional call of the new minister. It’s not so much a statement as a noise they make just before leaning back in their chair and putting their feet up on the desk.

The cure for our rail cancer is simple, brutal, but costless to the community.

All we need to do is bundle up our railways – infrastructure, rails, rolling stock and real estate – and give it to Richard Branson. Just imagine what Virgin Rail would look like in 10 years time. For starters it would have staff who would, to quote from V/Line’s Customer Commandments, “provide friendly personal service and the information I need to make my journey enjoyable”.

So that would mean the end of the historic Barking Conductor Corps. They’d just have to retire and go home to kick their dogs and watch TV.

Valē Peadar (Peter) Joseph McDonnell, 1930-2010

Eulogy delivered by his eldest child, Stephen, at St Jude’s, Langwarrin, Australia, April 9, 2010

Some of us are dreamers, we have a fantastic, creative imagination and can believe anything is possible. Dad was an engineer, they’re the ones who turn dreams into reality.

He didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. He dealt in algorithms,

disciplined planning, correct procedures. But at the age of 22 he fell in love with Nadia Cooperman, a dreamer straight from cloud nine.

They were married in London in December 1954 and the magic-carpet ride began.

Dad provided the stability that gave mum the freedom to indulge her imagination.

Peadar (Peter to most) Joseph McDonnell was born in Leenane, Ireland, in October 1930, the 5th of Captain Peadar and Tilly McDonnell’s eight children. The family later moved and settled in nearby Galway, where Dad served out much of his youth and schooling. He continued on to Galway University where he studied Civil Engineering.

He was also mad about sports – Gaelic football, hurling, rugby and rowing; He was selected for the Schoolboy fifteen to represent Connaught against Leinster in the Rugby Interprovincial one year. He also represented Galway Uni in the All Ireland Rowing Championships.

Like his mother and father before him, Dad was a devoted Catholic and in his diary at this time, every entry starts with ‘I went to Mass’.

After graduating he worked in England for the British construction company Wimpy and Co. and the Crown Agents office, seconded from the British Government.

However, adventure and travel was in Dad’s veins. Before long he and his young wife headed off to a life of adventure in Nigeria where the first of his 10 children was born – that would be me. When my sister Katie confronted Dad one day on why he went to Nigeria of all places rather than the more genteel Kenya with its established community of expatriates, he replied: “I fronted up at the civil service office for overseas postings and said you can send me anywhere.”

When an engineer constructs an all-weather road to an otherwise remote community they change the fortunes of the people in that community forever.

With his slide rule and theodolite, and of course his cinecamera, Dad built many roads and bridges connecting communities in Nigeria. These were primitive times, remote from the modern world. There was no ready-mix concrete to call on, nor a phone book of tradesmen to lend a hand. Concrete for piles and struts was mixed and moulded on site using teams of local labourers with improvised facilities. It's a task

that required exceptional innovation and ingenuity. As did the task of raising a young family in a primitive, tropical country, rife with exotic diseases and increasing political turmoil.

Two more children later, Mum and Dad finally left Nigeria just before the British colonial rulers did the same. Another short two-child retreat in England and Ireland our now, family of five children with one on the way, set our sights down under.

Dad must have wondered what he was thinking when he brought his young family to the wilds of the Pearcedale bush surrounded by wildlife and sword grass. There were many failures and triumphs in those early years, like the orchard he planted where the family home now stands, or the failure to catch a wallaby he had by the tail – an event watched repeatedly with much mirth on many a family movie night, or the failure to burn the sword grass, or even the failure to keep our horses fenced

in, none of which deterred Dad. But then there was the triumph of building a limestone house and successfully raising a family of 10 kids. A family I knew Dad was very proud of.

Many would agree that mum ruled the roost but Dad always had

the final word.

Dad continued his career providing utilities for the community. First it was water with the State Rivers and Water Supply and then it was homes for those who needed them most with the Victorian Housing Commission.

As I mentioned, Dad was deeply religious and caring and gave much to the community and asked for nothing in return – unless you happened to be eating some chocolate around him.

He was always a very active member of his parish. When St Marys Primary School needed some new classrooms Dad did the drawings and supervised the building work. When Hastings Parish needed a church, Hall for Pearcedale Dad once again did the drawings and plans and helped in the building work. You can always tell Dad's churches, they're the ones that look like they were designed by an engineer.

Dad was one of the founding members of the St Vincent De Paul Society here at St Judes attending regular meetings to help out the needy and the poor of the Parish.

There is no question that Dad touched the lives of so many people in Africa, England, Ireland and Australia through his work. And there is no doubt that most of them would not be aware of who he is or what he has done. He never talked about his work or himself. We had to do quite a bit of research so we could tell you what he actually did at work all these years.

He was not one of those married to his career – he was married to Mum and his family. At home with his kids, that's where Dad really lived.

He was a very quiet, gentle and caring man, but never-the-less there was a side to Dad that would surprise many. For example, his adventurous, fearless spirit.

It must have come as a great shock to Mum when he took on the gruelling Murray River Marathon with some of his sons. Ironic that by the same river I was playing Nigerian rhythms on Congo drums at the Down to Earth Festival. Or the time he agreed to accompany Rory on a flight in a light plane to Queensland and back. Rory had just got his pilot's licence and was keen to give it a try. Or the time he went hunting razorbacks on the banks of the Lachlan River. Not with guns – with dogs and knives.

Dad was never a horseman, but his daredevil spirit compelled him to occasionally saunter out to one of the children on a horse declaring it was his turn. On one such occasion, at the age of 55 the spirited horse took off and dumped our poor Dad, leaving him with a punctured lung, six broken ribs and a broken collarbone. He never got on a horse again.

His strength and belief in standing up for what was right came out in unusual ways.

Like the time Mum opened an antique shop in Frankston when Joanne, her youngest, started school. With no allocated parking space and surrounded by two-hour parking zones, Mum had a constant barrage of parking fines which she would occasionally appease with a cheque. Fed up, she went to the police station and demanded all outstanding fines which she would pay, and did. When, in the next few weeks another summons came for some fines they had missed, Dad said “Enough”. He would go to jail rather than pay another cent. Off he went with his book under his arm to the Dandenong lock up. Mum was in the shop that day. She rang home to see what was needed. Jackie answered: “We need milk and bread – and Dad’s in jail”.

Around 1975 when I was working in the city, dad suggested we both do a public speaking course the Knights of the Southern Cross were running, to help me overcome my fear of public speaking.

Dad introduced us to current affairs and British comedy. News and AM in the morning on the way to school, PM in the evening then This Day Tonight, Monday Conference, Point of View with Bob Santamaria and the comedies, At Last the 1948 Show, The Frost Report, Monty Python and others.

Another surprising side of Dad was his eclectic taste in literature – He was never without a book but also read his Catechism, The Catholic Advocate, The Nation Review, National Times, and how can we forget, Harry Potter. In recent years, no book was safe. When visiting his children, he would take any book he happened to find handy. Often frustrating when he disappeared with the book you had nearly finished.

Dad’s legacies to his children and grandchildren are many. Like his father before him, he always had a camera and we have home movies going back to the early days in Africa. He was always a playful tease, delighting those around him with the ‘whiskers kiss’, 'Gee Up a Guppolin', his constant urge to tickle, and tease, particularly the dreaded ‘horse-bite knee tickle’.

Many of you that knew Dad realised that his mind was deteriorating over the past few years and deteriorating rather exponentially. Even though he knew us all and his cherished grandchildren, 32 in all, this period has been punctuated by some rather comic and bizarre behaviour, too numerous to mention here. But when family members would continually lose their keys only to find them clutched firmly in dads right hand after a frantic search we really started to worry.

Dad never had a bad word for anyone. He had a genuine love for everybody he met and he had the ability to make everyone feel special and welcome.

Barrister John Styring captured this perfectly in a tribute he sent to Sally. He wrote:

"I have the fondest memory of Peter sitting in a comfortable chair in your log cabin just across from the open fire, cradling a baby, and smiling at me with a look of utter contentment. There was great noise and movement in the cabin, but for Peter, it was just him, the baby, and by his smile, me."

His Grandson Oscar – also grandson of his best friend in Galway, Mossy Power – said it all when asked by his father “Do you want to be a doctor like me when you grow up”, he answered: "When I grow up I want to be just like Grandpa."

We all miss you so terribly, Dad.