Day 6 (con't)

You (we) really need to listen to this guy Swan a bit I think.  He is clearly crazy; but talk about walking the walk.  This is one of the toughest bastards on the face of the Earth.  Who the Hell voluntarily hauls a 300 pound sled over nine hundred miles in subzero temperatures 9 hours a day seven days a week for nearly three months?  And he is going to do it again – though this time he is going to make it a little bit more challenging by not bringing fuel for a camp stove, for example.  When somebody cares enough about something to do things like that, the least we can do is take a minute to think about it I suppose

We just watched a film Sir Robert made three years ago.  Tomorrow we are going to Bellinghausen Island, where Robert and a crew spent a month at an “e-base” they built powered only by renewable energy.  With no sun to speak of and winds that destroyed their wind turbine, it was not an easy gig.  Rob said it was about as miserable as he had been.  It must have been hard to struggle to boil water for one cup of tea when just down the way the Russians and Chileans were enjoying hot showers and full meals.  But they survived. And on his last day, the President of Chile flew over their base on his way to a nearby Chilean installation.  As Robert said – “He flew over with three helicopters and we understood that he just consumed far more energy than we busted our asses to save in the last month.  But that’s not really the point.  The point is that we did it and the point is that we sent a message that it could be done.”  Robert left from there and sailed to the five largest polluting nations on earth to meet with school children to talk about clean energy.