Geoff has written for publications as diverse as PC User and The Northern Star His weekly columns have been a source of humour and inspiration for tens of thousands of readers and his mailbox is always full.
Here you can find his more recent contributions.
After the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday night, Channel Seven was paid to screen an advertisement featuring a Tibetan woman asking ear-wax Kev to raise human rights when polishing his Mandarin on Chinese officials. The advertisement was paid for by the online activist group, Get Up, in conjunction with the Australia Tibet Continue Reading →
Last week’s column about harnessing human power rather than burning oil seemed to go down like an Iraqi shop front. Most weeks, I get a mixture of enthusiastic responses, scathing criticism and stony silence as most of you simply get on with your lives.
This week, however, the mail bag bulged with resentment. “So you want me to sleep in your spare room and do your dishes for nothing?†one upset reader wrote. Another challenged me to do the same at his place.
We are addicted to the egalitarianism of cheap energy, I guess.
So, the opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, wants to delay the implementation of a carbon trading scheme until China, India and the US sign a watertight agreement that they will come on board. He has repeatedly claimed that it will be economic and environmental suicide to “move firstâ€.
The government and metropolitan media have focused on the foolishness of his desire to delay the process, while completely ignoring the elephant in the room: The US, China, Japan and Europe are responsible for over 60 per cent of global emissions.
Here’s a relatively simple way to reduce your greenhouse emissions and unemployment at the same time. Hire a human. We all know that the energy we consume in our daily lives is what causes global warming, the problem is that a low energy lifestyle looks pretty drab and miserable when stacked up beside our push-button, Continue Reading →
Grain and animal farmers are clamouring to be recognised for the contribution that new (or renewed) cropping methods can make to burying carbon-dioxide in the soil. Organic matter is 57 percent carbon and industrial farming practices have halved the amount of organic material in the soil. Perennial grasses and crops planted into existing stubble instead Continue Reading →
The cut cable that caused communications chaos across the region last Wednesday is a gentle reminder of the vulnerable nature of our infrastructure. Rumours of terrorist attacks and crashed satellites rippled through the queues at manually-operated cash registers on Tweed City’s opening day. The reality, as is so often the case, was simple human error.
When 50 million people in the north eastern United States lost electrical power for more than 24 hours in August 2003 it was a similar, trivial incident that brought the whole system crashing down. Melbourne’s brownout in January last year was the result of a bushfire triggering a failure on a trunkline from the Snowy Mountain power generators.