“The Oil Price”: It might be fiction, but it’s deadly serious

Among the 100 Global Sustain
Ability Leaders are many authors, of mostly non-fiction and mostly serious
tomes. One of them is new author, Guy Lane, a Sustainability Consultant
from Townsville, Queensland, Australia. His first published book is a novel
just out “The Oil Price” with a strong environmental theme, but it also a
thriller in the James Bond. And it’s deadly serious.  Read More

Ken Hickson has read ‘The Oil
Price” and highly recommends it as a great read. It is racy, action packed and
shows that the author not only understands the subject well – the oil industry and
the environmental impact of unsustainable development – but also creates some very
believable characters and locations. It is deadly and it is serious. And shows
you take your sustainable consultants seriously too!

All about “The Oil Price”

Lala is a Fiji island that is
home to endangered sea birds, marine turtles and coconut crabs.

Pity poor Lala Island, it is
located over an unexploited oil field. And where there’s oil there’s blood, the
real oil price.

Brad Moore, Dubai-based Chief
Executive of Peking Petroleum, wants to turn Lala into an oil production
facility and bury the turtle nests under concrete.

But there is another plan for
Lala – a bright green plan.

Brad Moore knows that to make a
brain omlette you have to crack a few skulls, so he brings to Dubai two
hard-hitters from Storm Front, an Iraq Security Contracting firm.

He brings Teck, the emotionally
challenged body-guard, to kill the man who is competing for Lala.

And he hires Madeline Obst,
corporate spin-doctor, the Liar for Hire, to make sure the truth is completely
misrepresented.

But Brad Moore doesn’t know that
in between the car bombs and death squads of Iraq, Teck and Madeline have
developed some history together.

Neither does he know that Bren
Hannan is heir-apparent to the sustainable Lala project and has just met Danny
Lexion, a man who cares about  nothing
more than doing okay and looking good.

- Is Danny Lexion more than just
a dabbler in environmental affairs?

- Will Brad Moore turn the turtle
nests of Lala into a concrete parking lot for oil trucks?

- Or will Bren Hannan, the
Climate Cop, find a way to stop him?

- And why did Bren chew off a
man’s ear for leaving on a bathroom light?

Find out the answers to these
questions by reading The Oil Price

For more information and how to
get the book, go to:

www.guylane.com
or www.seao2.com

Just to show that Guy Lane is not
just all about fiction, here’s a story about just one of his projects:

Save the Maldives

By Hayley Simpson

JCNN is produced by students of the Bachelor of Multimedia Journalism at
James Cook University

Planning an escape to the
Maldives? Better pack your swimmers – and not for the reason you think. The
Maldives are sinking courtesy of global warming, according to environmental
activist Guy Lane. But he is hot on the case to save them…

The Maldives will be the first
country to disappear underwater due to the rising sea levels caused by global
warming, warns environmental activist Guy Lane, who heads up sustainability
consulting firm SEA 02. To put it in perspective, the highest point on the
Maldives is 2.4 metres above sea level, while Townsville is 16.3 metres above.

So what’s being done about it?
Well, Guy got involved with the dilemma a few years ago. He’d been busy
coordinating a Townsville workshop on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC)
technology and put information from the event on his website. He never could
have imagined how far-reaching it would be – all the way to Southern Utilities
in the Maldives, as fate would have it. Southern Utilities operates the power
generation facilities for the southern province of the Maldives and they wanted
to know whether OTEC technology could help them provide 20 megawatts of
renewable energy to their island group.

“The Maldives want to be carbon
neutral by 2020, so I spoke with them at great length about the various ways it
could power the islands with renewable energy to achieve this,” Mr Lane said.
“These include solar energy, OTEC technology, wind turbines, wave energy and
tidal energy.”

Mr Lane then posted his research
into renewable energy opportunities for the Maldives on his website to make it
available to the public. Another motivation for doing this was to help raise
funds. Although technological solutions are available to the Maldives, they’re
costly. Mr Lane thought his My Clean Sky initiative, which he established in
2006, could be the answer.

“I hoped that my carbon offset brand might be
able to help, so I made a plan for island nations that have tourism industries
to raise capital for renewable energy projects by charging a carbon offset fee
for air travel to the island,” Mr Lane said. “You could think of the fee as
similar to an environmental tax, but one that’s based on the carbon footprint
of tourists’ trips to the Maldives.”

Mr Lane has calculated that the
600,000 people who visit the Maldives every year produce about one million
tonnes of carbon dioxide. “If we took about $20 per tonne for carbon tax, that
would provide $20 million per annum to fund the transition to sustainable
energy on the islands,” he said. “The money could go towards studies, the
implementation of energy efficient improvements and the appropriate renewable
energy technologies.”

Mr Lane is still in preliminary
discussions with Southern Utilities about adopting this strategy, but said any
island with a tourism industry could employ the same system.

In his spare time, Guy is working
on scripts for a movie and television series. He is writing a trilogy of movie
scripts – the first called The Oil Price – which he categorises as a thriller.
“It’s about a local hero, Danny Lexion, who is fighting an evil oil man, Brad
Moore, in Dubai and then Townsville,” Mr Lane said.

“And my TV series, Hommus:
Smartest Apes in the Galaxy, is a drama about aliens who crash land on The
Strand, bringing an important message to save humanity from itself.”

Watch this space for developments
on these projects. In the meantime, you can help save the Maldives by finding
out more about Mr Lane’s initiative at www.mycleansky.com.au.

“Climate change is with us for
good,” Mr Lane said. “The sooner we swap oil and coal for sustainable energy,
the better the future for the human race.”

On our digital media platform, JCNN, you will read stories that no-one
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Source: www.public.jcu.edu.au