Climate Tasmania

Solid, practical action by government on climate is looking increasingly like a vain hope. Short-term gain, vested interests and opportunistic politics are making it tougher than ever for governments to persevere.

[Peter Boyer: posted 9 March 2010]

Amid all the talk of a changing world, human nature remains as it always was. Among the many things about us that will never change is our tendency to look after immediate needs first, even when it’s obvious there will be a long-term cost. This has big implications for the future of government.

The Tasmanian election campaign is a case in point, with barely a peep from any candidate about carbon mitigation or preparing for climate change. It’s clear that there’s a high level of discomfort among candidates and parties about climate change, and the notion prevails that any attempt to communicate such a concern to voters will only turn them off. More about that, and the widely diverging climate policies on offer, next week.

Climate action has slipped down the priority list on a federal level too — except for the great batt debacle.

Perhaps we should be grateful that the important matter of home insulation has attracted so much political energy. But to me the hubbub over the government’s admittedly clumsy handling of this $2.45 billion program is profoundly depressing. There’s been a lot of noise, but over what?

Kevin Rudd deserves some censure — more than Peter Garrett, whom he demoted — for failing to see the problems inherent in the short time-frame allowed for a program as big and complex as this. But his critics should pause and consider the context in which these problems arose, and what the affair says about the future of government.

The Rudd government is right to feel a sense of urgency about carbon emissions: there’s only a narrow window of opportunity to get that upward path curving downwards. It’s right to feel that such measures as home insulation need to be rolled out quickly.

That’s easy to say, but not so easy to do. Any nationwide project needs a lot of planning and careful management. Doing things in haste can cause problems, as Rudd and Garrett found.

It’s in our genes to seek personal advantage for ourselves and our immediate circles, even at the expense of the wider community. When a government is doling out large sums of money to get something done quickly, it stands to reason there will be corruption, inefficiency and mistakes.

This is familiar ground. In World War II, much of the government’s vast budget allocation to build and maintain Australia’s biggest-ever military force went on projects that got nowhere and goods and services bought at inflated prices. The community accepted that, along with a lot of accidental death and injury, because it knew it faced a big, urgent challenge.

But today there’s no consensus about the challenge. Few people would see a link between the home insulation program and an advancing enemy, and without the sense of urgency, opponents have exploited the deaths of workers to force the postponement of a scheme that had much merit.

The batt program failed because the government buckled under a mostly unreasonable attack. Yet the need to pursue large-scale, transformative schemes will not go away as we get deeper into the climate crisis. Both the government’s emissions trading scheme and Tony Abbott’s $3.2 billion “emissions reduction fund” promise to push our governmental systems to their limits.

Advocates of emissions trading argue that the market is the simplest, cheapest and most efficient way to maintain a carbon price. They might be right in principle, but the Rudd government’s array of free permits, foreign offsets and special assistance adds many layers of complexity, making it a big administrative challenge.

For his part, Tony Abbott might reflect on what the batt fiasco might mean for his own policies. He says that providing incentives for businesses to cut emissions would be simple to administer. He should think again. The scale of his plan will mean a massive call on public service resources, and as Peter Garrett’s scheme showed, this carries a significant risk of failure.

Implementing climate policy is as tough as it gets in government. Because climate is an indeterminate threat stretching into the distant future, it will always be hard to keep people behind the big changes called for. Even with public support, the administrative burden will be colossal.

In the long term the whole future of government may be at stake. No politician will express such a notion, but I can see the batt fiasco repeated on a much larger scale, with embattled bureaucrats and ministers, against a background of deafening political and public noise and under increasing budgetary and personal stress, struggling in vain to implement policies.

Making climate policy work will require the goodwill of a substantial majority of people. I thought we had it a year or two ago, but now I’m not so sure. Over the past four months the scene has changed, with public doubt and confusion the order of the day. The setbacks haven’t just been in Australia, but everywhere else too.

The scientific evidence which persuaded governments all over the world to develop climate policies is now clearer than ever, but facts are only a small part of this political debate. Looming much larger, fuelled by moneyed interests and spurred on by political spin, is the fear of change.

The battle to win hearts and minds in support of climate action is turning out to be harder than we ever thought.

• “Vote for the Climate” is a public forum in Hobart on Thursday evening that puts climate policy under the spotlight. Starting at 6.30 pm at the University Centre (Churchill Avenue, Sandy Bay), party representatives will pit their climate credentials against a questioning audience. Organised by Climate Action Hobart: click here for more information.

One way of cutting down on motor vehicle emissions is to make it more pleasant to visit the city without your car close at hand. Enter Jan Gehl, whose mission is liveable cities.

[Peter Boyer: posted 2 March 2010]

When Jan Gehl was a green young architect finding his feet in Copenhagen in the early 1960s, his home town had a few things in common with our own Hobart. They both sat on a harbour, with fresh salty breezes, low-profile buildings — and lots of cars.

With the cars came a certain mindset, shared by traffic engineers and motorists alike, which said that streets belonged to them. As Prof Gehl puts it, if you were a pedestrian you had to apply for permission to set your foot on the sacred tarmac. If you were a cyclist you just took your chances.

Jan Gehl decided he didn’t much care for the kind of city Copenhagen was turning into. Far from a pleasant, friendly place, its streets were full of metal (cars, trucks, buses) that forced people indoors as quickly as possible. People accepted that the car, virtually an extension of the human body, wasn’t going away any time soon.

With advice from his wife, a psychologist, he thought hard about how people might get more pleasure from being in their city centre. He liked the idea of outdoor dining, but Copenhagen folk had always thought it was too cold a place for that, so they kept their social life indoors, leaving the outdoors to the all-conquering car.

Prof Gehl got to know the city’s traffic engineer, a thoroughly eccentric cello-playing individual who, astonishingly, saw his job as keeping cars out of the city. With encouragement from Gehl, he embarked on a multi-year campaign of attrition against the motor car.

“Our traffic engineer said that if you can’t park you can’t drive,” Prof Gehl told an audience of 500 in the inaugural “Hobart Talks” lecture at the University of Tasmania last week. So the engineer’s answer to traffic congestion was to reduce both parking spaces and the number of available lanes.

“The engineer said that if you do it slowly, no-one will notice, so each year he removed a few parking spaces here and there, and every now and then closed off a lane of traffic.”

Over time, Copenhagen administrators came to appreciate how the space that had been taken from the cars quickly filled with people, walking or on bicycles. With growing enthusiasm, they approved the closing of more and more spaces to motor traffic, employing Gehl to monitor car, bicycle and foot traffic and transform the new spaces into venues for dining and socialising.

Copenhagen’s main street, Strøget, became a car-free zone — Europe’s longest pedestrian mall — as the city adjusted to a regime in which people ruled. Pedestrians were given maximum time to cross car lanes while cars had to wait longer behind red lights. Bicycles also took priority over cars. With bike lanes on the kerb side of parked cars, and connected to each other, cyclists could transit the city while having only minimal contact with motor traffic.

It wasn’t without critics. Prof Gehl recalled one business owner complaining that business had dropped because of lost parking spaces near his shop. But armed with the Gehl team’s traffic statistics, the mayor was able to tell the complainant that foot traffic had doubled in the vicinity of his shop over the period, which left the business itself as the likely culprit.

So what was happening in Hobart while all this was going on? Well, our city fathers stopped the hydro-powered tram and trolley buses in the 1960s because they got in the way of cars. Cyclists, who’d been plentiful earlier in the century, were squeezed out as motor traffic took over.

Which is where we are today, except for sporadic development of facilities for cyclists and pedestrians in the form of some valuable but unconnected bike tracks and lanes, a well-used mall, more pedestrian space near shops, and some new walking tracks out of town.

That suggests we do understand the need to cut our urban traffic monster down to size, yet we continue to serve it by putting resources into more city parking spaces and maintaining arterial roads through the city centre. Something’s not right.

Such imponderables led Hobart City Council and the University of Tasmania to take on Prof Gehl. With a CV that includes major makeovers to Melbourne, London and New York, he’s now started a year-long central Hobart project to help the council achieve its 2025 goal to develop the best possible city for residents and visitors.

Now comes the hard part. The Gehl study will focus on the CBD, addressing other traffic issues only as they relate directly to the city centre. But Hobart’s traffic problems are much wider than this. Keeping cars out of the CBD will need issues elsewhere to be addressed which will need support from a higher level of government.

The biggest problem is that the stream of traffic along the two major streets that separate the city from its waterfront — Macquarie and Davey — can’t be avoided because these are the only connections between southern suburbs and the northern and eastern parts of greater Hobart.

It will take expensive infrastructure to change this, such as a costly new route through the city’s west and north, or a significant cut in car usage, perhaps resulting from carbon mitigation measures, or peak oil. While the cars remain in such numbers, these streets can never realise their great potential as public open space.

Other significant traffic issues are Hobart’s cycle-unfriendly topography (which suggests we need to consider powered pedal cycles as a legitimate transport option), traffic congestion on the Tasman Bridge, and the question of what might be done to increase water transport options. While none of these may be directly relevant to Prof Gehl’s CBD study, ignoring them will pose the risk of his whole vision being rejected as impracticable.

That would be a pity. I confess to being won over by this 73-year-old Nordic warrior of engaging charm and gentle humour. May his insight and wisdom help us over the hump.

• On 11 March, Gehl Architects partner Lars Gemzøe will open a discussion on Launceston’s inner city, at 6.00 pm at The Tramshed, Inveresk. He will be introduced by the Mayor of Launceston, Albert Van Zetten.

The smart money says that a mineral oil price surge will happen sooner than most people think. We need to get ready for a very different world.

[Peter Boyer: posted 23 February 2010]

If you think I might be a teeny bit alarmist in discussing the impact on Tasmania of coming changes in the supply of mineral oil, be assured that today’s post is at the conservative end of the global oil supply debate.

I could cite without question the widely-quoted Canadian economist Jeff Rubin, who says a serious crunch is imminent. The era of cheap oil is past, he says, and within a few short years the only way we will meet expected demand will be to spend a lot more money to extract oil from the ground.

Rubin is not alone among economists in believing that the real reason for the 2008 credit crisis was not a housing bubble in the United States, but a doubling of the price of oil: a global energy crunch. That, he says, is just a foretaste of things to come.

By the end of 2012, Rubin expects US motorists to be forking out US$7 a gallon to fuel their cars. Our globalised oil economy suggests if this happens in the US it will also happen here, which would see Tasmanians paying about $4 a litre, or $280 to fill a standard 70-litre fuel tank.

Rubin may be too pessimistic. He’s not a petroleum specialist with detailed knowledge of oil geology, or the practicalities of how gas (natural, coal, shale), or methane or other fossil sources might fill the void left by depleted liquid oil. But as an economist, he understands the massive investment required by alternative processes, and the high prices we can expect when they’re on the market.

Like everyone who studies the world petroleum scene, Rubin is also hampered by the notorious secrecy of oil companies and exporting countries. We can use estimates of capacity and past performance to make educated guesses about when the world’s oil reservoirs will pass their collective peak (or whether they’ve already passed it), but it’s impossible to know for certain.

Two major studies out of the United Kingdom over the past six months give a more measured assessment, while also indicating a rising concern in that country about the future of oil. Reports by the UK Energy Research Centre and the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security each examined widely-divergent scenarios, and separately concluded that we have a big problem.

The Energy Research Centre report examined in detail the labyrinth that is the science, business and politics of world oil. Noting strong scepticism about “peak oil” among governments, oil companies and energy analysts, the report was careful to avoid any suggestion of alarmist thinking, supporting its cautious views with a mountain of evidence.

The ERC report found that world oil production would almost certainly peak well before 2040, and that a pre-2020 peak was a “significant” risk. “Given the potentially serious consequences of supply constraints and the lead times to develop alternatives,” it said, a pre-2020 peak “should be given urgent consideration”.

The Industry Taskforce report released two weeks ago was more forthright. With the era of cheap oil behind us, it said, we must plan for higher, more volatile oil prices “where oil price shocks have the potential to destabilise economic, political and social activity.”

The report sees the “oil crunch” coming within five years: “We do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well.” Five years — if we have that long — is very little time to get ready for a whole new world.

Think of it: all our travel from daily commuting to overseas holidays depends on cheap oil, as does all our freight transport supplying virtually all the food we eat and pretty well everything else we buy. Without fuel and lubricating oil, building our roads, digging for minerals and harvesting our fields and forests will be impossible, at least in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed.

We should not allow ourselves to be placated by promises that alternative strategies are in place. Consider this:

• Electric-powered vehicles (which we will need money to buy) will become a massive drain on the power grid, at a scale that hydro and wind resources could never meet. For Tasmania, that currently leaves only Victorian coal-fired power.

• It will be many years before power is available from any other sources (large-scale solar, wave, tidal, geothermal, nuclear, biomass). Nuclear and biomass power rely on transport to carry fuel, which in the case of biomass means a yearly supply of between 9,000 and 16,000 tonnes of forest waste (depending on whether it’s dry or green) for each megawatt of electricity generated.

• Biofuel made from plant or animal material is touted in many countries as a replacement for petrol. But such material and the land for growing it will be in increasing demand to produce food, which will always come before fuel. Biofuel is an unlikely source of primary transport energy.

• Public transport could be a more efficient use of fuel for carrying people, but our sprawling population centres and entrenched car-use patterns lessen its effectiveness.

• Tasmania’s rail system remains in a state of suspended animation, barely able to cope with today’s reduced freight demand let alone a future inter-city or suburban passenger service. Light rail using existing streets may serve part of this need but not in the near-term, and not without a lot of money.

If all this is alarmist, so be it. We need a loud clamour for transport and fuel strategies. If political and business leaders can’t lift their gaze to see this, the government and corporate infrastructures that support them will be at risk of joining our transport system in one great big train wreck.

“Government must act”

Key recommendations of the 2010 UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security:

• Contingency planning by government and business to deal with a significant increase in oil price spikes, supply problems and electricity consumption.

• Reduce oil dependence of vehicles, promoting lighter hybrid and electric vehicles.

• Support public transport and promote an electrified railway system.

• Measures to change behaviour and secure shift from cars to public transport.

• Mitigate impact of higher fuel prices on cost of food and other essentials.

• Support company investment in necessary new technologies.

• Continue to support renewable energy to abate risks from peak oil and climate change.

• Support energy-efficient buildings and heat pumps to cut dependence on fossil fuel for heating.