The solar monitor has just ticked over 3000 kilowatts and we are about to stuff ourselves over Christmas and the New Year. So it's as good a time as any to give an update on our solar experience and the long-term effect of my five-two diet, and to ruminate on the public policy surrounding them.
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A little more than three years ago, I went on the five-two diet. I was deeply sceptical of all diets but this one was the result of BBC journalist and doctor Michael Mosely damning the diet industry and searching for something that worked.
Basically, you eat and drink nothing for two consecutive days a week, and the other days you eat what you normally would.
It took 10 weeks to get rid of the 11.5 kilograms needed to get me to a normal body-mass index. Remarkably, you don't binge when you come off the two starve days. By the end of the 10 weeks, you lose your appetite for big meals.
Combine that with avoiding, as much as possible, processed food and drink, which are laced with sugar, and, more than three years later, the weight remains gone.
In the past 30 years, policymakers have ignored the rising sugar content in our diets. Sugar, especially high-fructose corn syrup, may sound like a "natural" food but, because it is highly refined, it contains plenty of calories but absolutely no essential nutrients. As a result, it mainlines to the liver, causing fatty-liver disease.
The sugar industry has tried to divert the blame for obesity on too much fat in the diet. But fat consumption is not the problem, as blubber-eating Inuit on traditional diets attest.
Sugar is. It drives the current epidemic of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia and type-2 diabetes.
Our food-labelling laws are utterly ineffective. They simply do not tell us the percentage of sugar in food in an intelligible, legible way.
We should at least enable people to make an informed choice with tough labelling regulations. We should tie the font size of the contents information as a percentage of the size of the brand name on any product. At present, marketers employ a suite of artful typographical weapons to make the words unreadable.
Further, we should impose a hefty tax on sugar to discourage consumption, or at least to pay for the healthcare if it fails to discourage consumption.
Alas, nearly all the federal electorates in the sugar belt are highly marginal, so the next generation, for the first time, are likely to have a shorter lifespan than the previous generation.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Now to solar. I estimate that our 3000kWs of electricity was worth about $7000. Not much went back into the grid because we do dishwashing, laundry and run the pool pump in the middle of the day. So we will pay for our system well before our nine-year projection when we installed it four years ago – allowing for interest and so on.
Since then, the price of solar systems has fallen. They are more efficient. And the price of electricity keeps rising. Moreover, solar systems are becoming a selling point for property. It is a better investment than anything any financial planner can come up with.
Smart banks should be spruiking loans for solar to generate more profit. Smart governments (which we certainly do not have, at least at the federal level) would do more to encourage solar. The most important policy requirement is to address the 40 per cent of the market that rents, and address multi-unit sites.
On the former, landlords should be required to provide tenants with a basic amount of electricity as part of the lease, just as they must provide other things. Tenants, usually on short-term leases, have no incentive to put up solar.
Planning laws should require new strata developments to include solar. Strata laws should make it easier for apartment blocks to put up solar and distribute it among unit holders.
It is simply unfair to deny renters and strata-dwellers the benefits of this cost-saving technology, particularly as the federal government appears determined not to do anything intelligent or practical on the energy front. At least the ACT government has a solar-loan scheme for low-income earners.
This inequity will only worsen as electric cars become the norm – and they will with astonishing speed. Economists are already saying that, in Japan and parts of Europe, electric cars are cheaper over the car's lifetime taking into account depreciation and running costs.
My guess is it will take about the same time for practically the whole fleet to go electric as it took for the switch from film cameras to digital cameras – fewer than eight years. No one uses film now and all the film-developing infrastructure is gone.
It will be the same for petrol cars, mechanics and servos, which will incidentally accelerate the depreciation of petrol cars. So why should renters and unit dwellers miss out on free car battery top-ups?
Of course, smart governments would roll out fast-recharge stations across the country. Queensland has begun. It is not only a matter of carbon emissions but also public health. Emissions from internal combustion engines, especially diesel, contribute significantly to respiratory illness.
But with the major parties, particularly the Coalition, taking corporate donations from the mining and food industries, don't expect any action on sugar or coal from the federal government. We will need to rely on individual action, some state governments and some enlightened non-climate-denying businesses like BHP-Billiton.
