The Chaser Report - Who Would Win? A Trillion Solar Panels, or The Sun?

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

We're not depressed anymore, climate change is gonna be fine. 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. Dom. Yes. I've got good news. Wonderful. The planet is saved.

You look so happy. Well, how did you do it? Well, it's not me. Like, you know, credit with credits due. There's sort of scientists and people like that involved as well. This sounds very specific and detailed. thus far. Yeah, well, let's get into it after this break.

Okay, so the way it works is what we're going to do is we're going to blanket the entire Sahara Desert with solar panels. Oh, right? The whole of the Sahara Desert, like the entire thing, right? Yes. So, and because the whole point is pointless, useless desert. Yeah. Who fucking gives a shit.

There's nothing there for what I understand. Just a desert. Yeah, it's just a desert. Who cares? It's like Adelaide. Why don't we put solar panels on there? If we put solar panels across the whole of the Sahara Desert, that would turn Saudi Arabia into an energy superpower, right?

Oh. Why would they get control of the Sahara Desert? Are they going to fund this thing, are they? Yeah, yeah. They're funding the whole thing. Oh. And they'll pipe it into Saudi Arabia and then presumably, I don't know, ship it or so. I don't know.

They'll use the energy to build their insane, 160-kilometer long building, presumably. And, sorry, and it'll go out through Tunisia and Morocco as well. Well, presumably that they like cables, a bit like the Sun Cable thing, you know, that Mark Cannonbrook just bought from Twiggy Forest. Yeah, and also there's this company that's making tankers, Super Tanker batteries. Super Tanker batteries? Yeah, so they'll be able to ship.

They're like mega battery power plants. Floating batteries. Yeah, and that's right, it's a Japanese company, and it means they can ship electrons from, you know, where they're generated, say, you know, Saudi Arabia or the Sahara Desert, you know, wherever it's going on, or, you know, the Sun Cable Place, and they can ship them up to Japan and just park them off the coast of Japan and run Japan via these supertankers. I'd love to know what fuel the tankers run on. They run on oil? But I guess that's the kind of thing you would invent, Charles. If your country had recently been utterly fucked up by a nuclear power plant, say, leaking. Yeah, no, exactly.

No, and part of the whole reasoning is that actually, because everyone says to Japan, why don't we just cable in, you know, the electrons? And they go, but that's because we've got so many earthquakes, the cables keep breaking. Oh. We actually need a sort of floating power station to sort of stop, you know, the fact that, you know. Charles, you know, or any trade he knows, you lay a bit of cable, you put a bit of flex in there. Put a bit of flex in there.

What are you doing, Japan? That was the problem with all the cables breaking. Just a little bit of flex. Tire not in it, for a bit of flex. Well, that's interesting. So a floating battery. Charles, what happens if the supertanko that's a battery crashes and leaks? So instead of leaking oil, it leaks electrons.

Does that then electrify an entire ocean to kill all the creatures in it? To all the fish float to the surface. Fish and chips, yeah. No, no, actually, they do address that because it's sort of like a bomb, a floating bomb. I think so. But they said actually lithium batteries are really quite stable nowadays. And so there'll be a whole lot of sort of anti-fire retardant stuff on board,

but they don't think it's going to be a huge problem. I mean, what are the odds that while conducting a nuclear test, North Korea accidentally blows one of these things up? I imagine fairly high, in fact. Now, so getting back to... a Sahara Desert being blanketed in solar farm. I was going to check how big the Sahara Desert is

so I can get a sense of the scale of this. I think it's relatively big. I think it's bigger than my backyard. When people talk about deserts, they generally cite the Sahara as a relatively big one, don't they? It is the largest hot desert in the world. It's only if you don't. If you include Antarctica as a desert in the Northern Arctic,

which is, you know, is that really a desert? If not, Sahara's the biggest, the biggest sandy desert. So there's only a couple of problems that I now want to outline about this otherwise faultless problem. 3.6 million square kilometres, by the way. So, yeah, quite large. What are the, what are the floor? It sounds too big a dream, Charles, to have any flaws.

I just can't imagine you can find any. So it will solve the energy crisis, right? Right, for everybody. For everyone. Wow. I mean, obviously, because Saudi Arabia is going to be investing in it, you know, most of the benefits will go to Saudi Arabia. Well, so I should think.

But it will, you know, like there'll be more than enough energy for everyone. On the other hand, it will rapidly increase climate change. Oh, that little thing, okay. Because it turns out one of the key functions of the Sahara Desert at the moment is reflecting light. So you know how, you know, white surfaces just bounce the light off? Solar panels are dark. They are to absorb the light. Yes.

but they only absorb 15% of all light, which means that the other 85% gets dispersed as heat, right? So they heat up and then the heat has nowhere to go. So it's going to heat the globe, right? And so what that's going to lead to? This is honestly true is if this plan goes ahead, they're apparently it will sort of supercharge cyclones throughout Vietnam, like in that whole area of Vietnam.

So it'll sort of create this huge heatway, constant heat wave that then fuels cyclones, you know, several thousand kilometers away, just constantly turning that whole region into sort of a storm. But Charles, we won't care because we'll have very cheap Saudi air conditioners. No, exactly. It doesn't matter how hot it gets outside. I was reading the other day, Charles, following up the point you've made a few times, I was surprised to read it in a credible publication

saying that the way heating is going the north of Australia will essentially be uninhabitable as well much of the world because it will simply be too hot for human habitation. I hadn't heard that said by anybody other than you. So I was a bit shocked to... Well, it's in the pivotal book, The Uninhabitable Earth,

which is a great read, by the way, if you want to be incredibly depressed for the rest of your life. Because, and essentially, the uninhabitable earth was written about eight years ago now and every single prediction that it like it's you know it says things like by 2020 you know Australia will have these bushfires that are even more amazing than ever before and by the mid 20 you know and all this stuff 70 so so that's one of the consequences the cyclones in vietnam yeah for in the i'm just imagining

a giant solar array across the whole like the sahara is that i looked at it on the map here basically the northern sort of 20% of the african continent that in time The entire thing is a Sahara Desert, pretty much, except for a few little strips where there's cities. Yes, but dare to dream, Don. Yeah. Dare to dream. It will solve the entire world's energy problems, right?

And it keeps Saudi Arabia being energy super about. But the other consequence, which is not necessarily that good for global, you know, warming and stuff, is that if you put solar panels over the Sahara Desert, it will stop the wind taking the sand. Sand in the Sahara Desert is actually incredibly nutrient rich, apparently. Oh, yeah, I didn't know that.

Because it was until 5,000 years ago, it was actually a tropical rainforest or something. So it's got all these nutrients in it. And normally what happens is in the Sahara Desert, all the sand from the Sahara Desert blows across into Latin America and South America. Really? Into those nutrients. Into the Amazon. And that is what fuels the nutrients in the Amazon.

The reason why the Amazon rainforest exists is because of these winds blowing in from the Sahara Desert. Charles, you don't need to worry about that. That's not a problem. And so what scientists are saying is if we coat the Sahara Desert in solar panels, there will end up being, like, it will lead to a desert in the Amazon. Charles, that's going to happen anyway. They're clearing it. There's not going to be in Amazon rainforest.

So don't worry about that. And we can always just, if there's a desert in the Amazon, I suppose we could just build solar panels. But also, Charles, if there's a desert in the Amazon, I suppose we could just build solar panels. But also, Charles, even if that were a problem, all we do, all we do is during the 3.6 million square kilometres of solar panels, we just put massive fans underneath to blow sand, just driven by the solar panels. Yes, oh, that's much better.

It'll work very well. Charles, can I just ask, given that this is a batshit insane, absolutely massive scale idea, is this by any chance the brainchild of a certain MBS? I think, you're right. I think it's part of his. his sort of nation building, you know, like if you're going to build cities in the sky that cost, uh, trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, why not also, um, cover the entire

Sahara desert? And I note that they're not covering the bits of the desert around Saudi Arabia with panels. It's all going to be over there. It's a bit weird that I assume it's because there's cheaper labour in Tunisia and... Oh, presumably. I was wondering what, Morocco, how MBS would, um, kind of tie this in with his biggest passion. But I would just imagine, Any disruptive journalists, you just put them on one of those solar panels. That's fry. Fry in no time. It's even easier than dismembering them in your embassy, I thought.

That's right. None of the medical advice contained in the Chaser Report should legally be considered medical advice. The Chaser Report. I'm just looking at an article in the conversation about this plan, which, you know, typical conversation. All science. Poo-poo-poo's the idea based on its... There's actually several articles. Well, there's another one dating back to 2019,

which asked the question, this is, in the conversation, should we turn the Sahara Desert into a huge solar farm? And if you look at the summary of the article, the answer is, no, we shouldn't. God, look at this. So there's lots of people saying that we should do it. It's not just Saudi Arabia.

We would provide, no, but look at this. Saharan solar would provide 7,000 times more electricity than is generated for Europe. Seven thousand times. Far more than the world's current energy demands. Yes. I mean, couldn't we just, couldn't we just build a little on a bit of it? Charles, I don't know about you, but my theory would be,

I'm not a scientist, I'm not an expert, that you wouldn't need more than the world's energy demands. Like the whole total of the world's energy demands, you wouldn't need to generate like four times more, which is an estimate I've read about this. Right. Like, it was just one time the world's entire energy demands would be. what you'd need. No, but we would all

need, no, no, but under this plan, the whole planet would heat up enormously. Oh, we'd all need air conditioning. So we'd need, and we'd probably need to keep building. Oh, it all the time. Yeah, because then the Amazon rainforest would collapse, and that would mean there'd be more carbon, which would need

more air conditioning. You'd be living in a fridge, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Um, which would also keep the bodies that they were dismembered. So one of the, one of the interesting stats in this particular article says that in the shade, like underneath the solar panels on the Sahara, under the shade, it would be 45 degrees.

Under those solar panels. Who's going to maintain these things? Robots, robots will. Yeah, that's true. I guess Charles, another option would be that we not. I mean, that would be another plan. We not what? We not build solar panels across the whole of the Sahara Desert.

Could we just maybe not do that? I don't think, no. You don't think NBS will go with that. Wouldn't windmills be not as bad? But the windmills kill birds. So I've heard that from Donald Trump and Mark Latham. And also don't they affect your inner vibes or something? Yeah.

Yeah, because if you hate the environment and you see these things going around, it makes you very angry. Donald Trump was furious that the Scots were going to build them off his golf course. Yes. Which seems to be very short-sighted because what more fun game would there be in the entire world than can you hit a golf ball and hit the windmill? I do think that certainly what's going to happen in Australia is

all around our coast there's going to be huge wind farms off the coast of basically the whole of Australia I would have thought so which will be very cool and they look amazing have you ever driven through a giant wind farm yes my yes totally

they're awesome they look stunning I drove through the Coachella Valley not long ago a couple of years ago and on the way to Palm Springs from from LA it's stunning And that's just boring desert I mean the only other thing they use the Coachella Valley for is annoying music festivals

So really much better use to build solar there There's nothing there Why aren't we doing this in Australia? There's nothing in much of Australia Why don't we put windmills in it? Have we not thought of that? I don't, I suppose you could put solar panels But windmills are good

What are we going to then do with all our lovely coal But we need our... Oh, that's true, we're about to sell it. Could we build windmills out of coal Somehow sort of compressing it turning into carbon fiber or something. Or diamond-tipped. Diamond-tipped. Yeah, use all the carbon, like the coal to create diamond-tipped.

What we know what we need to do? If we log all of our old growth forest, we can have wooden windmills. Yes. Which would look much prettier than the metal ones. And the way to sell MBS on this whole plan, the guy who runs Saudi Arabia, is to point out that with windmills, you can chop people up a lot easier. You can. Yes.

Yes, they're basically sithe. They're giant sithes. You don't need to, you don't need a team of killers to dismember your journalist. You just use windmills. I love it. The natural sithing action. We're doing it. It's done.

We're going to do it. It's as good as done. Well, I'm glad we've solved. Because I think we've been a bit depressed on the podcast last year. We have. Yeah, yeah. But I think now turn the corner. We're going to solve it through bright green technologies.

We're going to, I think you're wrong about the Sara. I think we'd have to do the whole thing. That's gone, yeah. The job lot. Yeah. But the windmills, it's not going to be very hot under the windmills because they're vertical rather than horizontal like solar panels. Well, and also it gives you a breeze.

And it's a fan. It's a built-in fan. Yes. That could swirl the Sahara sands across. Yes, that's it. So you have solar panels and then you have some windmills. Yes. Okay, done.

Definitely done. Yeah. You're welcome, Planet Earth. And you know how we fund it? By making cool YouTube videos about all the cyclones in Vietnam. Otherwise, you just have a constant weather channel. webcam and make all the money off that from the views. I think if we can get rid of the world journalists, MBS,

we'll be willing to kick in a few bills, make that happen. Oh, yeah. He thinks big. No problem. Our Goor is from Roebate. We're part of the Iconoclast podcast network. See ya.