NSW Premier Kristina Keneally made a revealing comment this week, ahead of a decision by State Planning Minister Tony Kelly on whether to approve coal-fired power stations at Bayswater in the upper Hunter and Mt Piper at Lithgow, west of Sydney.
"What we're doing with our future (power) generation at those sites is providing opportunities for the market to determine and we will be progressing those in a fuel neutral development process," she told reporters on Friday.
"We do have to add to our base load, we know that, and that's why we've taken a position of fuel neutrality," she said.
Fuel neutrality? Translation: we'll be going for the cheapest option, ie coal.
And the respected Scientific American magazine ran a cover story on a Stanford University study that concludes the world can source ALL its energy from renewables.
The most cost-effective time to switch to new technology is when commissioning new power stations. Opting for new coal-fired power stations would be climate madness, locking us into decades of greenhouse gas emissions. It would also risk leaving NSW with useless infrastructure if an ETS or price on carbon does ultimately price coal out of the market.
But, as the authors of the Stanford University study note, "perhaps the most significant barrier to the implementation of their plan is the competing energy industries that currently dominate political lobbying for available financial resources".
Wind energy is currently the second biggest source of renewable energy (after hydro). But if you've experienced a cyclone or just a fierce storm, you'll know there's an awful lot of energy in wind, and there's a feeling we are still a long way from realising the full potential of wind.
A survey by British polling company Ipsos Mori has found a fall in public belief in man-made climate change. Only 31 per cent believe it is "definitely" a reality, down from 44 per cent a year ago.
The arrival of the Toyota Camry (assuming the brakes work) makes 2010 year zero of the future of Australian motoring. True, there's nothing actually new about the Camry.
It's simply a Prius with a bigger body and engine. True, it's been on sale in the US for two years. True, Toyota will only be selling 10,000 a year to begin with. But it's the first electric or hybrid to be assembled in Australia and sets a new fuel consumption standard that will reshape the Australian market.
This list includes current federal and state rebates and grants. There may also be rebates and grants available from local councils. Retailers of solar panels/hot water and rainwater tanks should also know about rebates. We haven't listed remote region rebates - see the state sites below to check if any are available.
The surprise introduction of a gross Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) by the NSW government should boost the solar panel installation industry. For the next seven years, if you own solar panels, the FiT will pay you 60 cents per kW for the electricity they generate. You then buy back electricity for your home at normal rates (ranging from 28 cents peak to 9 cents off-peak).
Climate deniers such as Lord Monckton peddle tired old furphies that have been dismissed time and again by credible scientists. Yet they enjoy vastly inflated media coverage, thanks mainly to green-hating conservative media pundits.
Transition Culture, the home of the Transition Towns movement, has just released an hour long documentary explaining the Transition Towns concept and issues. You can buy it - download it - from the Transition Culture website.
Ecosia say 80 per cent of their advertising revenue goes to a WWF project to buy up Brazilian rainforest. They claim that every search you do on Ecosia generates enough revenue to buy two square metres of rainforest.
Everyone seems to agree Copenhagen was a flop. It didn’t produce any advance on what governments had already offered, which the science says is not enough to prevent runaway global warming.
Hot on the heels of the failure of world leaders to reach a legally binding deal to limit greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen comes news that the worlds biggest coal port - in Newcastle, NSW - has been shut down for 7.5 hours by activists including a local councillor and Buddhist monk. About a dozen protesters, including an 86-year-old man, were arrested.
As Copenhagen summit lurches towards predictable disaster, George Monbiot in The Guardian identifies the crucial division in politics now as no longer left versus right but between those who realise we live in a world of environmental constraints and those who refuse to accept this.
A new study from some of the world's leading climate scientists, The Copenhagen Diagnosis suggests global warming is happening much faster than the last IPCC report predicted. Emissions are rising faster than ever; temperature and sea level rises are ahead of predictions; and glaciers, Arctic sea ice and Antarctic and Greenland icesheet are all melting much faster than expected.
It's a conundrum. The climate science has becomes firmer and more urgent, but studies show less people believe it.
Scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals that dispute the idea of man-made global warming are rarer than hen's teeth.
Yet recent polls by the Pew Research Centre and Rasmussen Reports suggest the public is less convinced or concerned about global warming then they were two years ago.
Researchers have dubbed this the "licencing effect". Because you've done something "ethical" you feel you've raked up some moral brownie points, so you feel more entitled to act selfishly afterwards.
The UK has announced an energy policy featuring 10 new sites for nuclear power stations, investment in clean coal (with a promise of no new coal-fired power stations without clean coal) and 30 per cent renewables (mainly wind) by 2020. The UK plans to generate 40 per cent of its energy from nuclear power by 2025.
When is ranking 39th out of 40 nations considered to be "leading the world"? Answer: when it's an Australian environment minister talking about Australia's climate change policies.
If you're interested in the ethics and sustainability of food production in Sydney, the Sydney Food Fairness Summit taking place today and tomorrow (Thursday 22 and Friday 23 October) aims to draw up proposals for a NSW state food policy " that will address affordable access to healthy food, sustainable food systems and farming, food safety and health".
Continuing the theme, on Saturday there's the Chippendale Food for the Future Fair. The fair marks the opening of the Chippendale Food Co-operative, set up to buy organic, sustainably-produced food from the Sydney Basin.
The recent dust storm that hit Sydney and the east coast could be a sign of things to come, but it's soot, not dust, that could be the real worry. Read more on my Ecoisms blog.
The financial crisis shows we aren't taking climate change seriously
According to the always-excellent Paddy Manning in the Sydney Morning Herald, governments around the world have spent some $US5000 billion ($A5800 billion) fighting the global financial crisis.
We can deduce two things from this.
Firstly deduction: when governments think something is really, really important, this is the sort of money they spend.
And they aren't spending it on climate change.
It's proof, if proof was needed, that few (if any) governments are seriously trying to reduce emissions and prevent climate change. Let's be honest - a couple of billion here and there is just PR spending.
Sadly, the brief flicker of hope governments would see the financial crisis as an opportunity to launch a "Green New Deal" proved to be wishful thinking.
Pumping bucketloads of money into essentially trivial programs such as building school halls instead, as the Australian government is doing, only adds insult to injury. The message seems to be: "we'll spend the money on anything EXCEPT tackling climate change". Or perhaps it's just another indication of how far most world "leaders" and politicians still are from grasping the full implications and urgency of climate change. And of how peripheral "the environment" remains in mainstream politics and economics.
Second deduction: when governments think something is really, really important, they don't leave it to the "free market".
If the market will sort everything out, then why all the financial stimulus spending? Why bail out GM? Why prop up failing banks?
Because, of course, governments don't believe in letting the market solve crises.
For that matter, if the free market is so effective, why do states have armies? Why not allow the market to find the most cost-effective way to fight terrorism and global jihad?
Bees are disappearing /dying in record numbers. This is serious business and very personal. Guys, no bees = NO COFFEE. Ladies, no bees = NO CHOCOLATE. These are just 2 of the many many fruits, nuts and veggies we will no longer see on our tables if bees continue to decline.
Expect to see lots of "action" - or maybe just lots of hot air - on climate change in the next couple of months as we approach Copenhagen.
Kevin Rudd was dampening down expectations of a deal, and there are fears the US may undermine any worthwhile agreement because of domestic opposition.
Bees are disappearing. Maybe it's due to toxins in chemical pesticides. Maybe it's stress caused by commercial bee-keeping techniques, maybe it's disease.
`Sentence first, verdict afterwards,' said the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, and I suspect Kevin Rudd might have said something not entirely contrary-wise to Environment Minister Peter Garrett about the massive Gorgon natural gas project off the coast of northwest Australia.
Last month the NSW Government announced details of its Solar Bonus Scheme, better known as a feed in tariff.
The Government will pay owners of solar panels a premium rate of 60cents per kW for any electricity they feed into the grid.
The Government describes this as "the most generous of any of the State schemes currently on offer".
Like all the other states, however, NSW has opted for a net scheme. This means you only get credits for surplus electricity you feed into the grid - for instance when no-one is home. But a typical home with a typical 1kW system won't produce much surplus electricity.
Gross tariffs, on the other hand, pay you a premium rate for all the electricity your panels generate, even if you use this electricity yourself in your own home.
So gross tariffs, even with a lower cents/kW figure, are more generous than net tariffs. They provide more incentive to install solar panels and therefore more of a boost to the solar industry.
In Australia, only the ACT has a gross tariff. But then, the ACT isn't a state.
The NSW scheme will start January 1 2010 and run for 20 years.
The scheme applies to systems of up to 10kW and will "potentially expand" to include micro wind generation.
Two environmentalists from Nepal - climber Pemba Dorje Sherpa and environmental lawyer Prakash Sharma, are in Australia talking about the impact of global warming on the Himalaya.
As the associated Big Melt website explains:
"Glaciers are melting creating floods and danger for the local people. But the big melt also means a big dry as these 'water towers' of Asia lose their capacity to provide water to the giant rivers in the summer months. Eventually rivers like the Ganges in India and the Yellow River in China will lose their dry season flow and the billion people in these river basins will lose their water security."
Glaciers and snow melt from the Himalaya and Tibetian plateau are in retreat. A UN report says they could be gone by 2035. These glaciers feed the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yellow, Yangtse, Mekong, Ayeyarwady and Salween rivers. Rivers that provide the irrigation water upon which more than a third of humanity depends.
I recently read a book called Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer.
The book plays out imaginary - but potentially real - future scenarios. ne of these is about the Indus. The Indus is the lifeblood of Pakistan, and the main source of irrigation for the nation's agriculture. It rises in the Indian Himalaya.
The British government has announced funding for up to four "smart grid" cities. It is the first step to rewiring the UK's energy grid to make it more flexible and able to integrate small, localised renewable power sources such as rooftop solar panels.
Many experts say smart grids will be essential for future electricity systems based on lots of small, variable power sources - such as solar and wind turbines.
This fascinating article in Scientific American looks at geo-engineering, a term for proposals to reduce heat reaching the earth, or to absorb and store carbon dioxide, to prevent climate change. These proposals are contentious: no-one knows if they will work, what side-effect there might be. On the other hand, they may end up as our last chance to save ourselves.
Most of the Australian media missed it, but a survey out last week reported the world is in the midst of its “sixth great extinction event”, with Australia one of the planet’s worst extinction hotspots.
Last week was the 40th anniversary of the Neil Armstrong's first small step on to the Moon. Since then the space program no doubt taught us many valuable things about what lies beyond our world. But the most important discovery has been about our own planet.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures just out show food prices have doubled since 1980. But in real terms food has never been cheaper. However, cheap food comes at a cost, and that cost is the destruction of the soil - and with it, the future.
Information overload alert: a flood of recent reports and studies say global warming will be worse than we feared, predicting a much more dramatic temperature rise by 2100.
Global warming could just be the break our farmers need. If we start paying our farmers to save us from climate change, then climate change may just save our farmers.
Former management consultant Tim Kruger wants to dump massive amounts of lime in the oceans. Why? Because oceans absorb about a third of all carbon dioxide released by human activity, sucking it out of the atmosphere. So wouldn't it be great if oceans could absorb more CO2.
A new report, the Happy Planet Index, ranks nations according to the quality of life they deliver for the least environmental harm. Costa Rica was first. Australia comes in a magnificent 102nd.
From July 1st, under a new Federal Government scheme, you can apply to have a free 90-minute sustainability audit of your home by a trained sustainability assessor. He or she will give you a detailed report of the ways you can save energy and water and reduce your bills.
Here's something I didn't appreciate. Forty per cent of fish caught in the world's oceans are used to make fish feed to feed farmed fish. In fact, more fish by weight is caught in the oceans than is produced by the fish farms they feed. The process is one of feeding low-grade fish to grow more prized species such as salmon. It turns out farming seafood, certainly as it is practised now, is not the solution to the overfishing of the planet's oceans that I'd hoped.
I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing, but Woolworths has been given the green light to buy the eight Macro Wholefoods stores in Sydney and Melbourne. The Macro stores - the "superstores" of the Australian organics industry - will be rebranded as Thomas Dux, to go with the two existing Thomas Dux gourmet food stores that Woolies already owns.
I'd call myself anti-nuclear. I worry about accidents such as Chernobyl, about terrorists getting hold of enriched uranium, about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years, about governments that can't be trusted not to build bombs.
But I see Adelaide University climate professor Barry Brook wrote in The Australian last week and on his blog yesterday while about a new type of "fourth generation nuclear reactor" called Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) that advocates claim overcome these problems. In fact they actually use existing nuclear waste, neatly solving the waste problem. See also this article by Geoffrey Russell on ABC Unleashed (and note the interesting line about why IFRs were not mentioned in the Switkowski Report). There's lots more on the IFR here.
The catch? Like "clean coal", IFRs don't actually exist yet.
Unlike clean coal, however, some big climate change names are saying it should be taken serious. They include NASA's climate guru James Hansen, Earth Institute's Jeffrey Sachs and UK author Mark Lynas.
Most of these men previously opposed nuclear power.
Another new development being touted is mini-reactors. Toshiba says it is building one and a US startup company called Hyperion claims to have more than 100 firm orders for a mini-nuclear power station smaller than a garden shed - and apparently so safe that even students can use it.
Not everyone agrees. Read Amory Lovins here or Mark Brown here.
The Federal Government has ended its $8000 solar panel grant scheme three weeks ahead of the original June 30 deadline. The scheme will be replaced by a new Solar Credits scheme.
There are rallies to call for stronger action on climate change taking place in all of the Australian state capital cities this Saturday, 13 June (as well as Wollongong).
Updating my recent post about the strains on Aboriginal-green relations in the Kimberley and Cape York, Noel Pearson's brother Gerhardt has signed a letter supporting the Queensland Government's proposal to put Cape York up for World Heritage Listing.
This should scare you. With thousands of kilograms of weapons-grade nuclear material from the cold war still in power stations and universities around the world, and groups such as al-Qaida keen to get hold of it, the agency charged with preventing that happening has an annual US budget of $150m, roughly what the US military spends in eight hours in Iraq.
The Kimberley Land Council's recent decision to accept a $1.5 billion deal with Woodside to allow development of a natural gas hub at James Price Point on the Kimberley coast north of Broome is a worrying development for the Australian conservation movement.
Its simple. Recycle your old phone at your local mobile store or Council and help thousands of koalas affected by the bush fires.
Its the Old Phones More Trees campaign by the Koaladoors Project and its helping not just koalas but all native animals. Full details are in this article at AustConserv. Well worth checking out and getting involved in.
Forget the $2 billion for clean coal in yesterday's Budget. Yes, it's a waste of money. A lot of money. But, given the power the coal industry seems to have over Australian governments, it's the price we probably have to pay for the $1.5 billion allocated over the next six years to build four giant solar power stations.
The Government says these will be three times the size of any other solar power station in the world - up to 1000 megawatts, as large as a coal-fired power station. The power stations could be solar panels or solar thermal.
The Government has announced details of its Green Loans scheme. From July 1st, homeowners will be able to apply for a loan of up to $10,000 to make their homes more energy and water efficient.
I've mentioned before how the ETS will prevent ordinary people from helping reduce Australia's emissions. The problem is, if you or I save energy, it simply means your energy supplier has more unused carbon permits so someone else doesn't have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.
Are leading climate scientists giving up hope of preventing runaway global warming. In this article from The Guardian, an expert from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK considers it "improbable" CO2 levels can be restricted to even 650 parts per million (ppm) - a level that could lead to a catastrophic 4C warming.
The internet's energy footprint is soaring by more than 10 per cent a year and now produces more greenhouse emissions than flying, according to a report in The Guardian.
It's worth reading this interview with James Lovelock from a couple of months back in The New Scientist. The author of the Gaia Hypothesis - known for his bleak pronouncements on climate change - predicts 90 per cent of mankind will die in the next century from even two degrees of warming.
Well, don't forget peak oil entirely, but as this New Internationalist article explains, a shortage of fertile topsoil could be more alarming. Agricultural soil loss is outpacing soil formation tenfold. With world population rising fast will we run out of land to feed ourselves?
There's an excellent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by Paddy Manning about Graham Brown, a miner who retired recently after more than two decades working in the Hunter Valley coalmines.
Adelaide is facing the prospect of having no water supply within two years, following six years of drought, the worse dry spell ever and forecasts of more of the same. The Murray-Darling river system, which supplies all Adelaide's water as well as irrigating Australia's agricultural breadbasket, is down to 18 per cent of capacity.
As the article says, the Murray currently holds 940 gigalitres of water. Although only 350 gigalitres are required to meet current water demand, evaporation means 1000 gigalitres is required to transport that 350 gigalitres along the river.
If you want major coverage in our media's opinion pages, write a book denying climate change is happening. That's what Professor Ian Plimer's has done, and his book Heaven and Earth, a supposed debunking of climate change theory, has been receiving the usual uncritical praise from familiar climate denial commentators such as Andrew Bolt. There's a more critical assessment on Tim Lambert's Deltoid blog.
Badmouthing the sausage sanga may be positively un-Australian, but the humble, belchin' and fartin' five-stomached cow emits more than her fair share of the greenhouse gas methane (scientists are looking at ways to bottle it). Cattle also require huge tracts of rainforest in the Amazon, Queensland and elsewhere to be cleared for their grazing pleasure. A cow consumes about a hundred times more food than it yields as meat, which means meat-eating means humanity needs more land to feed itself. Pork is not quite as bad, but you still have to put a lot more food into a pig than you get out. Meat consumption is soaring among the new Asian middle class in places like China, the world's population is soaring, the amount of cultivatable land is finite... you do the maths. At least we've still got hot chips.
With winter approaching I've been investigating energy-efficient heating options for our home. Close examination of past electricity bills showed our electricity use trebled in winter, suggesting our existing portable oil heaters chew through energy.
Spain's renewable energy sector was rocked last week by a corruption scandal. Officials in several small towns allegedly took kickbacks for approving wind farm applications and similar things.
If you live in Melbourne, make a note in your diary to head to St Kilda beach on 17 May to form part of the Climate Change Human Sign. Help put climate change on the news!
Hundreds of people blocked the coal port in Newcastle on Saturday March 21 in the fourth annual blockade of the world's biggest coal port. Protestors say that Newcastle Port Corporation cancelled all ships coming into the harbour for the day although Port Waratah Coal Services says the operations were barely affected and it was business as usual.
Melbourne-based renewable Energy company Energy Matters has an online petition calling for a nationwide gross feed-in tariff scheme for people feeding solar and other renewable energy into the grid.
Under the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme people who install solar hot water and/or solar power will not be reducing Australia's emissions but merely allowing polluters more room to pollute. GetUp! have started a campaign to get the government to close this perverse loophole.
Our favourite film brothers direct an advert on the merits of clean coal. Note that this video requires flash - if you can't see it here, watch it at ThisIsReality.org.
A French and British nuclear submarines collided recently, prompting this excellent piece by Gwynne Dyer, author of the excellent Climate Wars) on the mindless stupidity of maintaining these totally pointless nuclear arsenals.
