Protest homepage: https://www.risingtide.org.au/

“Worlds largest coal port” should be specific enough, surely.

It’s not the direct effect of delaying a few ships for a day, it’s the media coverage. Rising Tide has become a well known protest in Australia and it gets international news every year.

Also - possibly most important - it helps get on board the people who complain about climate protests disrupting “ordinary people” instead of the fossil fuel corporations directly. It’s much better PR to be seen to inconvenience the conglomerates.

Our (Australia’s) renewable power at the moment is bottlenecked by low storage. Once the storage is present to soak up excess generation during the day, investment in generation will probably pick up again.

We have so much solar power during the day that wholesale prices go negative and in six months they will be required to make it free during the day to try and shift usage to when the excess generation occurs.

In the 2025 summer, Climate change-driven summer heat caused 16,500 additional deaths across Europe, study estimates

The rapid analysis found that climate change was responsible for around 68% of the 24,400 estimated heat-related deaths this summer. Warmer conditions, amplified by human-driven climate change, increased daily temperatures by an average of 2.2°C, with peaks of up to 3.6°C.

The report highlights how even small increases in temperature can result in thousands of avoidable deaths – with older adults particularly vulnerable. People aged 65 and over made up 85% of the estimated deaths.

The formal report: Summer heat deaths in 854 European cities more than tripled due to climate change

Isn’t that when you give a pigeon a bit of food and it vocally thanks you?

Edit: No wait, that’s a bread coo

Thanks, that page also links to Wonderbag which is far more practical to DIY. The branded ones are rather expensive (although to be fair that price includes the charitable contribution).

In any case wrapping a stockpot in silicone (to protect the fabric) and then even more insulating material should be straightforward.

“Tomato” seems to be a component of a food bank logistics system called “Rootable” which may be fork of an older project called “Food Rescue Robot” (gitlab, github).

The purpose of these (and other projects like MEANS database) is to match up donors with recipients and schedule deliveries when they and the volunteer delivery are all available. This way food donations can be transferred quickly without having to have a warehouse full of almost expired food.

The tomato name collision is probably coincidental.

This seems to be a component of a system called “Rootable” and would be better to link directly to that.

https://rootable.org/

Cut and paste of my comment on another post about the free-three-hours announcement:

Australia wastes a lot of our renewable energy because of insufficient storage during the day. The data of our energy generation can be seen on OpenElectricity. The shaded section on top is the amount of renewables which are “curtailed” (turned off due to insufficient storage), and the little bit below the zero line is the amount that actually gets stored in batteries or pumped hydro.

Because coal power can’t turn on and off easily, we burn coal 24/7 for power and throw away 10% of our renewable generation. Hence this policy, to encourage more use during the day when we can use more renewable power. Some retailers have been already offering this as “happy hours” or “three for free” during the solar peak.

There are even a few retailers that vary their charges (pun intended) based on current (intended again) wholesale rates - because of all the excess solar, electricity through those providers is often completely free from 9-10am to 3-4pm.

I think there will be more appliances that come with batteries built in too. There are already fridges and induction stoves that come with dual battery/mains power.

This link should show curtailment on. There should be a white-shaded bit at the very top (if not, click on the box on the left side under “Curtailment” and next to “Renewables”).

PS: Australia wastes a lot of our renewable energy because of insufficient storage during the day. The data of our energy generation can be seen on OpenElectricity [edit: fixed link]. The shaded section on top is the amount of renewables which are “curtailed” (turned off due to insufficient storage), and the little bit below the zero line is the amount that actually gets stored in batteries or pumped hydro.

Because coal power can’t turn on and off easily, we burn coal 24/7 for power and throw away 10% of our renewable generation. Hence this policy, to encourage more use during the day when we can use more renewable power. Some retailers have been already offering this as “happy hours” or “three for free” during the solar peak.

There are even a few retailers that vary their charges (pun intended) based on current (intended again) wholesale rates - because of all the excess solar, electricity through those providers is often completely free from 9-10am to 3-4pm.

There are many sources of fabric that would be otherwise wasted - old clothes going to landfill, sheets and pillowcases, etc.

Some of the libraries around Melbourne now have maker spaces; many of these include sewing machines, and there are weekly clubs/groups and classes on how to use the equipment.

The best bit, about a third of the way through:

… and so we end up sounding like a nineties era sociology textbook and there’s this trope of like toxic masculinity. And every time you hear the word masculinity among people on the left, it’s usually. It usually comes with that toxic trope. Now, if there’s not another option about a non-toxic masculinity, then at some point you’re basically condemning a whole group of people. And if you don’t offer them anything, why is it surprising that they’re gonna go in a different direction?

AFAIK (I’m not a botanist) it’s true of many larger trees that they use more oxygen than they produce and emit more CO2 than they consume. It’s the biosphere that the large trees support that does a lot of the carbon sinking - mosses, ferns, vines, etc.

As a rule of thumb, the greater the ratio of woody mass to leafy mass the more the ratio tilts away from being a carbon sink, as the whole lifeform has to undergo aerobic respiration but only the leaves participate in photosynthesis.

Improved thermoelectrics would also be useful in reverse for harvesting otherwise wasted heat energy from anywhere hot and cold surfaces intersect. Instead of replacing active cooling on a CPU, use passive cooling and use the Peltier/Seebeck/Thomson effect to harvest some of the heat into power. Of course, the most effective use would probably be on engines and other devices that get much hotter than CPUs.

The word “farmers” is widely used to refer to Kulaks (people who own farm land, but employ others to do most of the hands-on work of farming it) as well as the farm workers themselves.

AFAIK most of the small scale solar systems designed for balconies and rentals aren’t intended to connect to the grid. They are designed to deliver power downstream only to a few DC appliances, falling back to a mains power adapter when there isn’t enough sunlight or battery power.