2007
US wildfires throughout summer and fall caused huge losses. Drought on the Great Plains resulted in further losses of over five billion dollars.
Parts of the world’s rivers and oceans were becoming dead zones, starved of oxygen. Mass fish, bee, insect and bird deaths were being reported worldwide. Two words were becoming spoken more and more often when describing these events: climate change.
In Southern Bangladesh, Cyclone Sidr, with winds of over a hundred miles per hour, killed close to three thousand five hundred people. The UN reported that one million people were without homes.
Twenty-one lives were lost and seventy-seven were injured during two earthquakes in Sumatra, causing buildings to sway in the capital of Jakarta. Buildings collapsed in Bengkula, causing power and communications to fail. Violent tremors were felt as far away as Singapore.
In the Solomon Islands a magnitude 8.1-earthquake and ensuing tsunami left over thirty-four people dead and thousands homeless.
An 8.0-magnitude earthquake south-east of Lima, Peru, killed at least three hundred and thirty-seven people, and injured hundreds more.
2008
The US experienced widespread drought through the entire year. Wildfires, as well as Hurricanes Dolly, Iki and Gustav, caused damage estimated at thirty-three billion dollars. Loss of life totalled a hundred and twenty-eight.
Tornadoes ripped through the US Midwest, killing eighty-eight people, and causing property, crop and livestock losses amounting to four and a half billion dollars.
Severe snow storms in southern China left thirty-one provinces without power, and stranded six hundred thousand train passengers. The economic cost of the storm was over three point two billion dollars.
A Dengue Fever outbreak in Rio de Janeiro infected seventy five thousand three hundred and ninety-nine people, and killed eighty-seven. Army field hospitals helped to control the epidemic.
Sixty-seven thousand people died, and hundred of thousands were injured when a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit Sichaun, Gansu, in the Yunnan province of Western China.
A state of emergency was declared in New England, US, after electricity was cut to eight hundred thousand homes for several days after a storm. National guard troops helped to restore power lines.
Share market prices fell dramatically, and comparisons were made to the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Share markets around the world followed the Wall Street lead, and went into free fall.
Banks and financial institutions in the US and Europe that were deemed too big to fail, collapsed. Some survived with government intervention.
In Australia, the Queensland government response was to sell all remaining state businesses to private enterprise, but the public outcry caused second thoughts. The people of Queensland were starting to get to know what privatisation meant.
In the couple of years since electricity supply had been handed over to private enterprise, electricity prices rose by fifty percent, with suppliers making further submissions for increases. The reason given for selling the electricity asset was that there would be fewer increases in power bills and a more efficient supply system delivered by private enterprise. This has proven to be incorrect.
Our old mate, Kato, again became the environmental warrior, not by taking out a mining generator this time, but by building a power-saving device called Pool Whisperer. This device reduced power consumption and noise pollution by eighty percent, and would be the start of the future wave of energy conservation.
Kato thought that any government would support such a huge saving, and that the electricity suppliers would promote it. However, even with the help of an ex-public servant and now-lobbyist who knew how to approach government departments, he still would not succeed. The conclusion was that governments and electricity suppliers would not support something that would reduce revenue and profits. However, that was not all. Kato warned a senior government official that, if maintenance continued to be reduced, and the latest technology was not implemented in transformers throughout the country, the whole power supply system would fail when a perfect solar storm reaches Earth like the one of 1859. His warning was clear and precise: it could not be disputed.