Ed Ballard
speaker
163 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 30 Aug
Ed Ballard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And that's just the private sector.
But when we look at the public sector, which is inevitably where a lot of this money is going to come from, all of these sort of essential sounding projects are going to have to compete for money with other essential sounding projects.
So, you know, maybe you have to decide whether to spend money on a new desalination plant or a new battleship.
And these are not going to be easy to do.
easy decisions and we're gonna have to face up to a lot of them.
The problem is the scale, the number of fires, the intensity of fires.
All of that has just exceeded the capacity of firefighting infrastructure.
Western Europe's in a drought, and as the world gets hotter, Europe is increasingly enduring these long, hot droughts that dry out the landscape.
And the current one came after a very wet winter.
Over the longer term, much of Europe is more wooded than it was a few decades ago, thanks in part to the depopulation of agricultural land, especially in Spain.
So you've had temperatures rising, droughts have been getting worse.
And at the same time, there's been this steady accumulation of flammable material that's waiting for a spark.
And we've seen something called pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which is essentially when a fire creates its own thunderstorm.
And that is not a normal weather phenomenon in this part of the world.
The problem is the scale, the number of fires, the intensity of fires.
All of that has just exceeded the capacity of firefighting infrastructure, both in terms of the number of people to do the work, professionals and volunteers, and the equipment they can use.
My colleagues wrote a story yesterday on a political argument that's developing in France over the country's limited number of water bombing planes, which are old and have frequently been grounded for maintenance.
And Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has been criticized by his opponents for failing to replace them.
What we're really talking about is really long lines of trucks barreling across the desert.
Before the war, there were about 100 trucks a day.
Showing 81–100 of 163 · page 5 of 9
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