Climate Tasmania

While our political leaders continue to act as if our climate challenge is going to sort itself out, others are taking it more seriously.

[Peter Boyer: posted 31 August 2010]

Our headline-hogging, energy-sapping political extravaganza shows no sign of going away. Meanwhile in the real world — including within Australian communities — many people are getting on with building their own sustainable future.

Leonards Hill, south of Daylesford, showing the wind turbines in place. IMAGE BY HEPBURN WIND

It’s not hard to see why. While some in our parliaments continue to question scientists’ warnings about climate, many constituents see what the evidence is saying and accept the reality of global warming.

People note that while in 2007 Australia was hailed as a budding global climate champion, now our climate and energy policies don’t cut it on a world stage. We’re falling away.

They see that China, that great ogre of John Howard’s carbon world view, has just ordered over 2000 of its most carbon-intensive factories to close by the end of September, stopped electricity discounting to big industrial consumers, and announced that it will have its own carbon trading scheme within five years. So much for Australia getting too far ahead of the rest.

They note that while in Australia renewable energy’s share of the electricity market sits at 6.8 per cent and falling, and while we continue to talk about energy efficiency, countries like Sweden and Portugal enforce universal energy efficiency standards and already have renewable energy schemes supplying over 40 per cent of total energy needs.

They see a big Victorian winemaker, Brown Brothers, looking south to Tasmania and spending over $32 million on Tamar Valley vineyards “to position ourselves to combat global warming.”

Tasmanians who have seen the longer-term benefit of building business resilience in the face of future energy constraints include Dr Bob Walker of Lindisfarne’s Lincoln Street Clinic, poultry producer Rob Nichols, of Sassafras, Richmond vegetable growers Colin and Anthony Houston, and Kettering tourism operator Gerry White.

We can add to that ever-growing list Robert Rockefeller, owner of Hobart’s Marine Board building. He got some bad press a few weeks ago when his rooftop wind turbines stopped turning, but it hasn’t stopped him from seeking to install more turbines atop another of his city buildings.

Whatever’s been said about the appearance, safety or energy efficiency of Rockefeller’s turbines, or about any of the other “climate-friendly” ventures around Tasmania, the effort and money they’ve spent is testament to their willingness to set the kind of example that is so lacking among our political leaders.

These pioneers are far from alone. Around Tasmania households and groups are building neighbourhood sustainability by exercising their own muscle, literally and otherwise. Walk-to-school regimes, community gardens, growers’ markets, rooftop solar power and hot water, home insulation and energy-efficiency schemes are among their growing list of achievements.

The world-wide Transition Towns movement, based on the experience of the UK town of Totnes, offers a process which many of these community groups have adopted. But the scale of their accomplishment is small compared with what’s been achieved in some European centres, such as production of surplus energy that can be fed into national grids.

But at least one Australian community can claim to be rapidly approaching that macro level of sustainability. Daylesford, northwest of Melbourne, is in a region that many years ago embraced the need for people and communities to become more sustainable and self-sufficient.

Here, within the next 12 months Australia’s first community-owned wind farm will begin operating on a hill 10 km south of the town, courtesy of a brand new phenomenon known as the community social enterprise investor. It’s small — only two two-megawatt turbines — but it provides enough power for nearly all the community’s 3000-odd residents.

In 2005, concerned about the threats posed by climate change and peak oil, people in Daylesford and its outlying “suburb”, Hepburn Springs, formed the Hepburn Renewable Energy Association, which in turn established a cooperative wind-farming venture now called Hepburn Wind.

Each person who is a member of this community cooperative gets a single vote regardless of the number of shares held, distinguishing Hepburn Wind from commercial ventures. Failing to attract much interest from institutional investors, the cooperative managed to raise $8 million among 1200 mostly-local members — nearly two-thirds of the capital needed for the $12.9 million project.

There have been hurdles to overcome, not least last summer’s sudden drop in the value of renewable energy certificates, but recent adjustments to the REC scheme and steadily rising electricity prices are putting the venture in a more favourable investment light.

Around Tasmania communities and local governments, including all Greater Hobart administrations, are keeping a close eye on what’s happening with Hepburn Wind, which is setting up a non-profit organisation to give practical advice to other groups. That’s the good thing about such cooperatives — they’re in it for the common good, not the money.

The success of the Hepburn Wind project is proof that communities don’t have to wait for government to act — they can do it themselves. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

• People from southern Tasmanian communities are invited to a Saturday workshop on 18 September about building community and personal resilience and work out how we can deal with severe energy constraints caused by peak oil. For more information call Sustainable Living Tasmania on 62345566.

Of all the questions thrown up by Election 2010, there’s none bigger than where Australia is heading on climate change and our growing carbon emissions — and the threat posed by peak oil.

[Peter Boyer: posted 24 August 2010]

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see us as we really are. People like visiting American media specialist Jay Rosen.

Reaction of politicians to key questions from the University of Queensland survey, “Political Leaders and Climate Change”

In the depths of a shambolic Australian election campaign, Rosen characterised Australian media coverage of the election as “horse-race journalism”, in which stories focus on who’s going to win rather than what the country needs to settle in the election.

This is a cop-out, said Rosen on ABC TV’s Lateline — a sort of journalistic ritual requiring little or no background knowledge and treating the campaign as a sporting event in which trivial aspects take centre stage and things that really matter, such as policy, are cast aside.

Considering Election 2010’s implications for climate and energy policy, Rosen’s analysis strikes a chord, revealing leaders and parties as part of an election machine, also taking in on-line, broadcast and print media, that seems hell-bent on turning this very serious event into a mere entertainment.

So any election analysis needs to take in not just Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Bob Brown and all those other aspirants for political office, but also the media that convey their doings and sayings. Ultimately, we also must take a good hard look at everyone else, the consumers of media offerings.

Taking Rosen’s observation about triviality trumping substance and applying it to the way politicians have dealt with (or not dealt with) climate, peak oil and other sustainability matters, we can begin to see why these big issues are making no headway in the public debate.

Take climate knowledge. Over the past few months researchers at the University of Queensland surveyed 310 politicians in federal, state and local jurisdictions around Australia. The result was a minor news story on a single day of the campaign. It should have been a major election issue.

For years now, science has told us that if we don’t manage to contain global warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels, we’re in serious trouble, and that going even just one degree above this limit would have catastrophic consequences. It’s also found that absorbed carbon dioxide is threatening ecosystems in our oceans, making it harder for many species to survive.

Despite this, more than two in every five politicians questioned said they thought four degrees of warming would be safe, and 7 per cent of them even believed the same of a six-degree rise. Nearly half didn’t believe scientific evidence that an increasing level of carbon emissions threatens ocean ecosystems.

The party breakdown on the cause of warming turned up a stark divergence. A big majority of Green and Labor politicians (98 and 89 per cent respectively) agreed with the contention from science that human activity is causing warming, but nearly half the independent members and over 60 per cent of Liberal and National politicians thought the warming was natural.

This all helps to explain why climate action, a major issue in the lead-up to the election, got so little airplay during and after the campaign. It would have distracted politicians and their media groupies from attending to what they see as their real business: political tactics, manoeuvrings and gossip.

Gillard and her team have much to answer for in this, as does Kevin Rudd before her. Gillard endorsed Rudd’s capitulation on an emissions trading scheme, refusing to reconsider Rudd’s two-year postponement or to countenance the alternative of an interim carbon tax. In delaying a price on carbon, Labor effectively relegated climate action to a second-tier issue.

But the prize for sheer effrontery must go to Abbott, who in light of Saturday’s vote now presents himself as the rightful prime minister.

Last December Abbott branded emissions trading “a great big new tax”, a meaningless cheap shot that promptly became a mantra among his front-bench colleagues. Then when Rudd and Gillard tacitly acknowledged the impact of this attack by postponing the scheme, he accused them of lacking the courage of their convictions. He’s right, but he’s also breathtakingly hypocritical.

On the ABC’s Four Corners six days out from the election, Marian Wilkinson put to Abbott that he disputed that humans have a role in current global warming. “Sure,” he agreed, adding “but that’s not really relevant at the moment”. He went on to say that “the only major political party with a credible policy in this area is the Coalition”.

So the claimant to the prime ministership says that when we consider what he’s going to do about our carbon emissions, it doesn’t matter that he thinks our emissions aren’t the cause of climate change. Why should we believe that “action man” will act on something he thinks is untrue?

Then there’s peak oil, after which the rate of oil extraction goes into a terminal decline. The US and UK governments both acknowledge that global peak oil has either happened or is soon to happen and that it will bring severe supply constraints and rising costs.

The Rudd-Gillard government all but ignored peak oil and its colossal implications, but it wasn’t so foolish as to deny its existence. Abbott feels no such constraint. A week ago he told a public forum: “The interesting thing about oil reserves is that they’re always being expanded,” adding that technology and price changes make reserves accessible that were once out of reach.

The major parties’ failure on climate action didn’t emerge into the surface fizz of this superficial campaign, but it remains as an underlying factor. The most obvious pointer is the strong outcome in both Houses for the Greens — the only party coming out of the election as a clear winner.

Then there’s the growing non-aligned vote, not least the astonishing Denison performance of Andrew Wilkie, whose policies acknowledge humanity’s role in climate change. The robust vote for independents, whatever their policies, is a clear sign of discontent with major parties.

The uncertainty over this election doesn’t end with the settlement of the numbers. Beyond that is a whole universe of doubt, about where the winners are going to take us over the next three years and beyond. And of all the big question-marks, climate and energy action is the daddy of them all.

Australia’s recent population surge has attracted attention from some influential quarters.

[Peter Boyer: posted 17 August 2010]

Eons before Jesus and Solomon walked the earth, humans called Australia home. They were here tens of thousands of years before the last ice age held the world in its grip.

Australia’s population is now rising faster than ever before. DATA AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF STATISTICS

Apart from vegetation changes caused by repeated firing of bushland, the original Australians trod lightly upon the land. Early Europeans remarked how well they blended with the landscape.

Contrast that with modern Australians. Our big environmental footprint is seen as an outcome of technologies and economies that draw heavily on natural resources, but one other factor often gets overlooked: sheer weight of numbers.

The number of indigenous Australians when the First Fleet arrived at Port Jackson in 1788 has been estimated to be no more than 750,000, based on a calculation of the maximum sustainable population given the natural resources available to these non-agricultural nomadic people.

As Aboriginal numbers dropped, European immigrants arrived at an increasing rate. It took 170 years for the population to reach eight million, but only 40 years for that number to double. Today, Australia is home to around 30 times the number of people it held in 1788 — the figure calculated to be the “unimproved” continent’s carrying capacity.

It’s a success story, of sorts. We managed to “tame” our land with irrigation schemes watering vast food-producing acreages, and to find minerals underground, including the important ingredients of today’s wealth, coal and oil. We used the wealth to grow, and grow more.

The idea of growth has become a part of the fabric of our society. In the decades of plenty that followed World War II our lives have been dominated by the endless loop of more people feeding more consumption feeding a growing economy feeding more people… and so it goes on.

But our attitudes to resource extraction are changing. The mining boom is making some people lots of money, but “Quarry Australia”  has tended to suck investment dollars out of genuine innovation. Meanwhile that other resource vision, “Foodbowl Australia”, is troubled by a shortage of water in the Murray-Darling basin, yet another reminder of the perils of pushing nature’s limits.

Politicians are shifting ground. In her first days as Prime Minister, Julia Gillard distanced herself from Kevin Rudd’s “big Australia” mindset by adding “sustainable” to the title of Tony Bourke’s population portfolio. In the present election campaign both sides of the main party divide are at last talking about our land’s capacity to feed us, and to question our rate of population growth.

The Liberal Party has routinely taken the position that a high population growth is good for business, but in one of those sudden turns that have become his trademark as Liberal leader, Tony Abbott announced a fortnight ago that he would restrict annual immigration to the average of the past 40 years — 1.4 per cent of the Australian population.

Enter the ubiquitous Dick Smith, aviator and former electronics retailer, who has started a campaign to limit the country’s population in a documentary screened last week on ABC TV.

In Dick Smith’s Population Puzzle, Smith said that he’d never thought much about the issue of population, both for Australia and the world, until his daughter Jenny put it to him that in all the talk about sustainability and climate action, this was the elephant in the room.

The hour-long show was a statistician’s delight. Australia’s population growth leads the world (last year 2.8 per cent or 480,000 — close to Tasmania’s total population). Two-thirds of the increase comes from immigrants; the rest are natural increase fuelled by the baby bonus. To accommodate the extra people, each year we need to build 300 new schools and recruit 1200 extra police.

The resultant housing shortage raises property prices, while also causing enormous pressure on food-producing lands around cities. To feed today’s population we need to produce two tonnes of food per hectare from available suitable land (6 per cent of Australia’s total land area). At current growth rates, by 2050 the demand will rise to around five tonnes per hectare.

Then there are our obligations to other countries. Australia takes people who’ve been trained cheaply in undeveloped countries, where they’re most needed, while neglecting training at home. Australia, says Smith, should look to its own training programs to meet our needs, cutting intake of skilled migrants while increasing humanitarian immigration.

Smith concluded that when all the factors are brought together — climate change, food, mouths to feed, housing and the rest — Australia is headed for a crash. “No-one is joining up the dots.”

Tony Jones’s Q&A show, screened after the documentary, revealed why we don’t talk much about population. This was as heated and personal a debate as you’ll ever see on public television.

Immigrants came out strongly against the Smith view, arguing that the world, including countries from which migrants come, benefits from a high immigration rate. Equally vocal in their opposition were business people, notably panellist John Elliott and Anthony Shepherd of Transfield Services.

Deep into an election campaign it was good to see politicians speaking in support of sustainable population policy. The Greens’ Bob Brown was more forthright than I’d heard him, but the real surprise was the thoughtful, bipartisan position of the two major party panellists — current minister Tony Bourke and the Liberals’ Scott Morrison.

It’s too early yet to claim any breakthrough on population policy, but maybe, just maybe, this might be the start of something big.