– • david ross macdonald • extras and journal

Alongside a quiet country railway track my ten year old mother Jill walked with her father Frank. The war had just finished and times in the small country town of Millicent five hundred miles west of Melbourne must have been humbly comfortable at best for the family of a dentist. Their ambling stroll along those tracks may well have been a binding ritual for the pair however the purpose of this excursion was for the company of a different yet vitally warming companion, coal.

Like some glistening, black easter egg the occasional vitreous block would reward the sharp and searching eye of a child and the brittle little prize excitedly seized and stowed into a hessian sack carried by my grandfather. The best place to find these nuggets was where the coal carriages jogged through the switches and turns nudging the occasional crumb to spill to the ground amongst the weeds and gravel that hug the sleepers. These orphaned small loaves, once spirited home, were placed around the fringe of the open evening fire to warm and dry and bask expectantly like christmas presents. Coal is patient, she keeps her secret for millions of years but once gingerly nestled amongst her burning brothers she eagerly recounts a most distant past with the unwrapping of her magical and confessional gift, heat.

Coal was once alive. Coal is born of million-year old swamps. Coal is the immortal embodiment  of leaves, branches, fallen logs and other dissembling organic matter that came to rest in the marshy and tannin rich waters of prehistoric waterlogged forests and deltas millions of years ago. Coal is epoch old solar power stored perfectly and exquisitely for a near eternity.

Coal is the messenger from our ancient sun and we burn it like books on a Copenhagen Kristallnacht. We cast it into distant and unseen furnaces with zero regard for what it is, where it came from, how long it took to be created and what are the deeper ramifications of exhausting this ‘cheap’ energy source.

Cheap well, just like a Walmart air mattress, cheaper ain’t necessarily better.

So, I got to thinking … and got out the back of my trusty envelope.

I read that Australians now own the largest homes in the world, 215 square meters, double the size of our British forbears, some kind of payback for shipping us off to ‘Terra Nullius’ as convicts I imagine. Anyways, on average each home requires about 10 tonnes of coal to boil water that turns a big wheel that makes Thomas Edison’s corporate prodigy happy while simultaneously heating, cooling and fully entertaining us with reality TV every year.

I made some very conservative approximations about the formation of coal via photosynthesis and considered the thought experiment on how much prehistoric solar energy an average home consumes by burning coal.

Now, by using the north facing slope of your average home (40 square meters) to either have solar panels or conversely to ‘grow’ coal here’s what I came up with. A home that uses coal fired power-stations for electricity uses at least 250 years of pre-historic solar energy EVERY year. The same roof with solar panels would produce about 9 000 kWh of electricity a year, which is on average about how much that same home would consume.

One of Oscar Wilde’s rippers goes, “the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. I believe that my grandfather and his daughter knew the value of those little fiery solar gifts freed from the coal trains during a frugal time when the world wrestled with the cost of a world at war and the trains of Auschwitz. What question do you ask of a system that puts a cost on carbon but not a value on humanity?