The Chaser Report - Actual. Good. News. Finally.

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Dom has found a research paper that says climate change can be solved in a legitimately practical way. Meanwhile Charles has his own world-changing scientific discovery to share. Could this be the end of our Good-News-Drought? You be the judge and send us a review. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, I have genuinely great news. I know we've played this game a lot of times. Listen to getting sick of it. I've found a bit of news about climate and what we can do and renewable energy, which is so exciting. I had to bring it in today.

It's genuinely great news. Well, that sort of works out well because I have. have the most amazing scientific discovery of our lifetimes, which again is really good news for climate change as well. Oh my God, could this be possible? Two bits of good news in the one show. But first, I have to tell you about the biggest disaster I've ever pulled in the history of humanity. Oh, God, he's ordered more avocados, inflatable avocados for Christmas. It's worse than the avocados. Buckle in, people. It all starts after this. Thank you for your patience. Your call is a...

important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.C. So we will get, I promise it's good news. If it's not genuinely good news that I've got here with a slight catch, but I promise

it's generally good news. Email us a podcast at chaser.com.com and complain. Leave a review on Apple Podcast. I mean, obviously give us five stars as you always. I should, but mention that we keep pulling a bait and switch and that it's not fair. No, no, no, but the thing is that it is true. But before we do that, so you may want to just skip forward. The good stuff's coming.

But on the way, in Charles has been a goose, I presume, again. So, and in actual age, people have been emailing this morning going, oh no, this is another Charles debacle. So the thing is, but it all came about because I wanted to avoid a debacle this time. So as you know, Dom, I'm going on tour at the end of the year with lovely James Schleffel and Mark Humphreys and Gabby Bolt. It's the War on 2023, annual comedy gala. I was going to bet so much money. This was going to be an awkward segue into a plug for his fucking tour.

No, no, it's not a plug. All right. Because you can't buy tickets, right? So this is the debacle. From today, you were supposed to be able to buy tickets across the nation. But we had this whole plan, right? Because what we didn't want to do is have another tape. Taylor Swift-style infrastructure overload disaster, right?

Because we just saw it, well, everyone in Australia is going to be logging on at 9 a.m. On the day the tickets go on sale, which is the 7th of August, and there'll just be meltdown. Like, and we don't want to, I mean, maybe Taylor Swift wants to keep all her fans on computers all day with their browsers open, refreshing every five minutes, making you have a hard attack. You know, I did that. I did that. Yes. I don't want tickets. I just wanted to make it harder.

I just wanted to say what it was like Can you if you in the unlikely event There is any demand for your tool Which I think honestly let's not get ourselves The thing where it says you're in the queue Yeah And it isn't a queue It's actually just random

Oh is it It's no there was no cue It was complete bullshit Oh because I Because everyone was saying Like my sister rang me up and said Whatever you do Don't switch away from the queue

Because you'll lose your place in the key There was no queue I think they had to come at a minute that. I'll fact-checked that while we're doing this, but I'm pretty sure it was actually just random. What, Dicks! Anyway, so the point is, so we decided to do a staged release

of our tickets, right? Oh, how thoughtful. And it wasn't anything to do with also harvesting people's data. It was literally just, our thoughts were only with people who wanted to buy tickets to our shows. Well, from today, we launched this pre-sale campaign. So if you go to war on 2023,

com, then the deal is, you give us your email address and we'll send you a presale link, an exclusive link that allows, and we'll send you, you know, the links to all the different shows around the country, and you'll be actually able to buy a ticket, like the best seats in the house before anyone else. Are you aware you can skip forward windows? It's like when he hijacks this normally topical podcast to just plug some stupid shit that he's got. That's what this is.

But the thing is, half the links don't work. Oh, in that case, you're exactly like Tickey Tech. Now, can I just point this out? Yes, Ticket Tech has had to admit that it's a booking system. It's not a queue. It's more like a lottery. Oh, fuck them. No, it's not first come first served.

When you're in the waiting lounge, you get picked at random. That's what it was. It was random. I can assure you that there is no cue for war on 2020. Yeah, I'm aware. That's what I was expecting. But so, for example, this one person who wanted to get into the Perth show, I think.

So Perth pre-sale is very pre-sale. You can't actually buy the tickets, right? I consider this a Charles-level success. This is what he emailed to me earlier today. However, I do want to buy tickets, right? Why? And then, so I sent him the correct link. Like, I just got the links strong.

But why do they want to buy tickets? He's familiar with your shows. He's aware that you're hopeless. Why does he want to come back? Oh, it's Perth. No, it's Perth. There's nothing else to do. It's the pity tour.

Yeah. So then I gave him the correct link. He then emails back. I thought very impertinently going, well, I think I've failed because he's managed to buy tickets. And he considers that a fail. Oh, and they're good tickets too. Yeah, he got the VOP. Well, that's the thing.

If you go to war on 2023.com, you can get the best seats in the house. The audacity of you having VIP tickets for anything is absolutely staking. Although you did say Mark Humphreys was going to be there. He's pretty good. Yeah, Mark Humphries is good. Gabby Bolt's a star. It's your chance. to see Gabby Bolt for, you know,

cents on the dollar compared to what she'll be charging in five years time. Yeah, I mean, this is probably the last time she's doing the tour. Let's face it. She's the Taylor Swift of musical comedy, isn't she? All right, can we talk about stuff that's actually in New Zealand? Okay, let's do the good news stuff. Okay, okay. So this is, you skip forward, well done.

All the Charles's thing was just him basically trying to plug tickets to his tour. Again, I thought we were. I've got an email from someone this morning complaining about, oh, yeah, you fucked up the link. No, no, literally, Brisbane, you couldn't buy ticket. Like, it was all around the country you can't buy tickets to this tour that we've elaborately set up. That is quite funny. Okay, so there is a new study from Stanford, from Mark Jacobson, at Stanford.

It's been published in a journal called Energy and Environmental Science, which says that 145 nations in the world could switch to 100% renewable energy in just a couple of years using the technology, available now. You could do it basically now. And they say, we kind of want to get this done by 2035, right? If we did this by 2035 in the majority

of countries, let's say, for instance, the best case scenario, 80% renewable by 2030. So in seven years. Hang on. But that requires the political will to be there. Well, but let's

we can get to this. If you want to look at floors, we can get to floors, but look of the upside. This is what we have now. This is one of these Craig Genius solutions, isn't it? Which is like, we can do something by changing everything to everything and the only

floor being that that's not how the world works. But we don't need magic new technology, okay? I mean, I'm going to tell Craig this, because I don't know if he's seen this article. He probably doesn't need to do a series of war or waste anymore. These people have solved it. They looked at wind, energy, solar, geothermal and heat, hydroelectricity

and a little bit of tidal and wave. They used batteries. You didn't need more than four hours storage for the batteries for it to work. So it's today's technology. It's not miracles and you can get it done. Do you know, do you want to know how much it would cost to make this happen by 2030? One trillion dollars. 62.

62 trillion. $62 trillion. It would cost to do this. That's what the study says. $62 trillion. I feel like this is a bait and switch, Dom. Ah, but if you got your $62 trillion, it's pretty persuasive. I reckon, if you got it, here's the upside.

Here's what you have to try and convince the world's politicians, at least in the largest countries, the more technology advanced, you know, 80% of the planet. You spend your $62 trillion, but don't worry, because a bunch of pointy heads from Stanford have calculated the payback will only take six years. So it's actually good. Yes, that's a very good return on investment.

If you were going to be quite brave about it, not only would you save the planet, but you'd pay it to pay for itself in just six years. Well, the good news is that the stage three tax cuts that Labor has planned for next year, I think cost about $62 trillion. It's definitely more than half. It's definitely more than half. It just made me think, who is spending trillions?

I mean, are we talking about the US? So the US spends a trillion dollars, doesn't it? Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, no, they spend only about $7 or $800 billion on defense. Oh, so. Yeah. So, but a couple of years expending. you'd get to the trillions.

Yeah, yeah. So I've no idea where the money's going to come from, basically. I don't know how this is even possible. Well, isn't the point that, yeah, if we actually just tax the world's resources properly and didn't allow billionaires to sort of get away with murder, then, of course, it would love it would have enough resources. Like, it's not like the will doesn't have resources. It just doesn't have the will.

I mean... It's just, I feel like, Charles, for this to work, yeah. Billionaires have got to do it and make money out of it. Like, it's not going to happen otherwise. Oh, you're one of the... I wish it would. I wish it would. But Elon Musk

to lost $30 billion in a day later. I don't know you want to kill the billionaires. Billionaires are the problem. I hate them too. No. But we've got to sell this thing. Look, speaking is an expert. No.

Where are we else? They're going to stop it. No. You've got to get rid of the billionaire. No, no, because otherwise you end up with a really energy efficient society that the billionaires own. There's no point. There's no point in doing climate transition.

Oh, so you can't just. save the planet. You've got to fundamentally alter the entire economic structure society as well. It's not saving the planet. You can't guarantee the continued existence of humanity. That's not enough for Mr Socialist over here. Why are we in this situation in the first place?

Because the billionaires get in the way. They've got too much power and they keep on throwing sawdust into the media claiming that climate change doesn't even exist 30 years after everyone knew it fucking existed. That's the whole fundamental problem is the

inequitable ownership of the resources of the world, not the fucking, like, the technology's completely simple compared to the actual human problem. I mean, you say that they're not prioritising the right things, but I honestly think it was enormously important that most of them participated in a mini space race a couple of years ago. Do you remember that? You know, Richard Branson's given up now?

So that whole Virgin Galactic thing, you know how there's a thing Blue Horizon with Bezos and Virgin Galactic and they all had this little race and of course there's SpaceX as well and Branson did it and just went oh yeah I can't have done it now I'm going to shut that whole thing down I'm not going to do that anymore that business unit's closed

so he could have spent that money on renewable energy and saving the planet but instead they went into space he went into it wasn't even it was only space if you argued the toss on where like kind of the orbit began it wasn't even really space but that was more important than saving the planet

is my point Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca.

The Chaser Report. More news. Less often. Well, the reason why I would say we don't have to worry about the technology side is I have the most, like, mark this day, I've got some very good news, and mark this day, or in fact, yesterday, which is it, is it possibly better news than $62 trillion being all it costs to fix climate? I mean, well, can the two go together?

Can you save us money on that? I can, I can get it down to half with this, absolutely this technology. So, these scientists who are not really like, they're not theoretical scientists. They're not, you know, physicists who sit around. doing calculations. Like the people with the 62 trillion, right. Okay. They're actually experimental physicists.

So they literally sit in labs all day coming up with cool new materials and trying to see what properties, physical properties, those materials have, right? That's pretty cool. And so yesterday they published a peer-reviewed paper, they did it properly, claiming to have developed accidentally in a lab, they developed this material. and it turned out to have superconductive properties at room temperature.

Is it basically a room temperature superconductor? Now, for people who don't know what superconductors are, it is very simple. It is when you cool down something to say minus a few hundred degrees, right? Say, you know, iron or something like that. Then electrons start being frictionless at that. at that temperature, right? So what happens is electricity and, you know, particles can move along these materials

without losing any energy at all. So you know how a light beam can sort of go on forever? Well, that happens to electricity at those temperatures, right? Because there's no friction. Because there's no friction, there's nothing, there's no loss of energy. Is that what they have to do with the large Hadron Collider? They've got to kind of chill it down? I don't know.

I'm not sure. Anyway. Anyway, so. Point is. Point is. And, you know, over the years, They've found all these different materials and it's been getting warmer and warmer and warmer.

But it's still like, oh, we got it down to minus 120 degrees Celsius. Because I remember when we studied, you know, basic physics in high school, learning with a lot of surprise that nearly all of the power generated in a power plant disappears by the time you've gotten from the power plant to the home. Bingo. So like 99% or some crazy amount of the electricity generated. Yes. So this is exactly right.

So if you can create a material... So the funny thing about this material is it's not even that complicated to create. But in the paper, the scientists say you can create this material at home, basically, and it takes about 32 hours. If you've got the right material... I mean, I'm rewiring the house right now. We're going to have, like, honestly, our kind of Ethernet, it's going to be very vast. Very fast. But so 32, like, it takes 32 hours to, you know, you get... they need to get the materials, but basically you put it together and you can start

having a superconductor immediately, right? Wow. You know, the key is this is possibly the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough to have. If true, this is possibly the biggest scientific breakthrough of our lifetimes. Since you invented a system to get the war on 2020 three tickets up. Because what it means is, they were saying in the US alone, it generally, like if you you then applied it to all the power plans, it would be. the equivalent of three

mega nuclear power reactors extra efficiency into the electricity system. So that's cool. It means you need far fewer power generators to do that, right? But even better than that, there's things,

these applications where you just go, this is crazy, right? So say your iPhone circuit board and your chips were not made of silicon, they're made of this superconductor material. Wow. Suddenly, you don't, it's a super conduct a thing. You don't run into heating problems. So your iPhone

starts, you know, recording lots of video and gets really hot or whatever. It just, it never, no fans in any computers ever. No, like, there's no problem with any sort of, you know, like, you can run your computer as fast as you like all the time.

No fans, right? That's very interesting. I mean, Charles, I did look this up because I was interested in learning more. Yeah. The new scientist says there's a bit of skepticism. Yes, there's a huge However, every physicist I know who I've been in contact with in the last 24 hours says this is huge, if true. If true. But, you know, the cold fusion, I don't know whether you remember, but in the late 1980s, there was this huge breakthrough where the scientists thought that they developed cold fusion, which is essentially a nuclear reaction but done at room temperatures.

And what happened was over the coming months, the first few scientists to prove it correct, kept on proving it correct. kept on proving it correct, right? And it's because all the ones who couldn't make it work weren't publishing because they were going, oh, I've got the experiment wrong. We stuffed it up. Yeah, whereas all the people who got the experiment wrong were publishing because they were going, oh, yeah, this experiment does work too.

But can I tell you the most mind-blowing application for this material, which is batteries, right? Oh, of course. So, think about this. If you have some electricity and you want to store it, Previously, what you've had to do is you've had to convert it to a different type of thing. Like, you convert it to a chemical and then you store it in there. That is hugely inefficient.

You lose about two-thirds of your energy just by transferring it into a different type of energy, right? This one, what you do is you just put it on a circuit in a circle and you have the electrons. So you charge it up and you just get the electrons to go around in circles until you need them. Literally, the electricity can just flow around because there's no, there's no need, like, there's no friction loss, there's no energy loss. The electricity just stays on the circuit circling around. That is incredibly exciting. You know what?

This might actually be this second best accidental invention in a lab just mucking around in the history of humanity. I reckon this is number two. After penicillin? No, no, after Blu-Tac. Blu-Tac was invented entirely by accident. Of course it was. I mean, look at it.

And that, I mean, I'm amazed. that that can't be used, to be honest, as a superconductor at a room temperature. Yes. And in actual fact, it's sort of disappointing that it's not blue tech, isn't it? I mean, I think they need to do more tests on blue tech. Charles, is this podcast turning into people talking about science

who don't actually know about science? It seems to me... Well, I did think, should we get... We've got a good physicist friend who has a PhD in physics, who now lives in the US, but I'm sure we could get him on to talk about it because he's been very activated in the last 24 hours. Someone who actually knows about this might be good. It's clear that the comedy's long gone from this podcast.

Yeah, sure. We don't need comedy because we've got limitless energy that's completely 100% efficient. Now, you know Andrew Charlton, who is now the MP for Parramatta, right? Yeah. He wrote a quarterly essay a few years ago. I interviewed him about it. It stuck with me because it mentioned this theory.

I can't remember the name of the theory now. There's a theory that humanity constantly comes close to total disaster. And there was one example was the potato famine And various famines in the history of the world And at the last minute Someone invent something that completely saves everything And is a massive Like it's as though we're heading for a wall

And someone just at the last minute grabs the wheel and just, you know Necessity is the mother of invention Yes essentially So I've kind of been hoping for a long time That even though the planet is probably As in its dire position Has ever been in the history of our

You know probably since the last ice age that someone would, presumably by accident, fix it. And maybe that's what's just happened. Well, that also gives me hope about the Chaser's business model because that is roughly how... It's getting worse year or near, absolutely. It's heading for a walk. But, you know, at the last minute somebody comes up with an idea.

Didn't you do that, though? Like, didn't... Well, that's what... The avocados was the Hail Mary. No, I think when we started making TV shows, that was the thing where it actually became, you know, for a brief time profitable in a way that no one would have ever predicted.

No. We had that. The mistake was keeping going to this point. Anyway, your mistake was keeping going until this point. But thank you. We'll be back tomorrow with more poorly informed scientific mumbo-jamboy or something. No, no, I'm going to get James on and next week. Okay.

We'll get, if it only takes 32 hours, maybe over the weekend, what we should do is try and replicate the material and do it ourselves. Okay. Wonderful. Well, this has been the Jaster Report. Please leave us a five-star review for our... Excellent coverage of science on Apple Podcasts. Well, I think, you know, Robin Williams is going to die one day. I don't think so.

I think he's made out of some sort of superconducting material. We can take over his slot on Radio National on the science show, don't we? No. With this podcast? Probably not. Our Kears from Road, we're part of the Icona class network. Charles thinks he knows about science. I know I don't.

But, hey, at least someone's trying to save the world. I know. I know. I know stuff. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.