The French, grateful for our former prime minister's contribution this week of ideas on how to solve Europe's migration problems, have leapt to thank us by drawing our attention to a bright idea of their own.
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A French invention the Wind Tree, a three-metre tall, tree-looking wind turbine (pictured), is imagined by its inventors New Wind as a relatively petite, pretty, softly spoken wind-power generator for urban places. New Wind noticed some French hostility to the giant wind turbines of wind farms, but says that people who have despised the giant turbines and never thought they'd warm to wind power are charmed by the wind trees.
They have gone into production and, for the moment, they are really rather expensive. A prototype is erected in the Place de la Concorde in Paris to beguile those potentates and boffins who will be in Paris for the looming (November 30 to December 11) United Nations Climate Change Conference.
This futuristic column pricked up its ears at discussion (on the BBC's World Business Report on ABC Radio National at dawn on Wednesday) of the wind trees. We have been much engaged in the debate about the big wind turbines (like the ones at Lake George), taking issue with the philistines (like Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey) who see no beauty in them and in the way in which they sometimes enhance a landscape.
But up to a point the French trees seem to be a response to French versions of Abbotts and Hockeys, to complaints about conventional wind turbines' size, noise and landscape-transforming looks. With enough of the little trees in neighbourhoods there may in time be no need for giant wind farms as we have known them, their massive forms arranged all along windswept hills.
New Wind was started by Jerome Michaud-Lariviere. He was taking a walk, the breeze perhaps ruffling his hair, when he noticed that same breeze rustling leaves on trees and imagined the possibility of turning that kinetic energy into electricity.
Online we read that the tree "has 72 artificial leaves [called aeroleaves] serving as micro-turbines spinning on a vertical axis". We read that the Wind Tree is designed to harness even gentle winds and breezes. This means the trees will be able to do useful work on most days of the year.
"The steel tree stands 11m tall," one online source testifies, "and is said to be completely silent, with all cables and generators integrated into the leaves and branches."
New Wind imagines that a single tree will be used to provide oomph for, say, a nearby home or to pep up the battery of an electric car.
You can read lots about the Wind Trees online – for example http://www.gizmag.com/wind-tree-fig-leaf-unsightly-turbines/35040/ – and with a little ingenuity you can find and listen to a podcast of the breezy BBC World Business Report story.
Meanwhile it is stimulating to think of what a special resonance the French idea is bound to have here in energy-progressive and tree-crazed Canberra. Here almost anything shaped like a tree, whatever it is and whatever it does, is bound to have appeal.
Australian, Canberran adaptations of the turbines might make sure that the turbines "leaves" have an especially eucalyptsy look (to our eyes the French "leaves" already do, a bit) so as to enable them to blend fittingly into our dinky-di places. Rich Canberrans living in their ostentatious McMansions (like the especially obscene ones in O'Malley) will be well able to afford them. In Europe they are presently about €29,500 ($45,000) each. What's more (for few owners of McMansions cultivate real gardens) McMansioners are likely to prefer non-deciduous steel trees with "aeroleaves" to real trees that make a mess.
We even, our imagination beginning to run away with this, begin to imagine the Northbourne Avenue route of the light rail lined not with the real Australian widow-maker trees but with these artificial wind trees that will not only generate power but also never drop a branch on anyone.
Meanwhile, our oblique reference above to Tony Abbott brings a pang of regret. It is that his awful prime ministership was never marked, as some prime ministerships have been, by the creation of witty products that poked fun at him. If only a fun-loving manufacturer had created rolls of Tony Abbott lavatory paper! This columnist would have bought them in bulk so as to use them on every day of his nasty, brutish and (thank God!) short prime ministership.
Reader Neal Gowen has long owned and treasured rolls of Malcolm Fraser and John Howard lavatory paper. The John Howard paper (this columnist has and treasures a roll of it) has each tissue embossed with Howard's despised likeness and the wrapper urged the purchaser to "wipe the smile off his face".
I would never part with my Howard roll (for I am an only child and never give up my toys) but Gowen has parted with both his rolls.
"I thought you might like to know," he tells me, knowing that we have collectibles camaraderie in this, "I have passed mine on so that future generations will see them, and gasp in awe at the antiquities."
His Fraser roll (an antiquity 40 years old) was eagerly accepted by the National Library of Australia and his Howard roll was pounced upon with equal eagerness by the Museum of Australian Democracy, Old Parliament House.
"I took some farewell photos of the rolls before they left for their new homes," Gowen reports, thus supplying us with the evocative picture we use today.