David Spratt, author of Climate Code Red, has written a series of blogs on the Climate Spectator website exploring why the "climate message" - the need for strong action to stop global warming - is not cutting through. Public support for action, and indeed public acceptance that global warming is actually happening, has fallen since 2007-8, despite the science becoming more convincing and more alarming.
Spratt identifies two key problems.
First is the idea that you should avoid bad news and focus on positive messages and good news stories - a strategy known as "brightsiding". Key advocates of climate change action such as President Obama, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and big environmental NGOs have adopted this strategy. They focus on the potential of clean, renewable energy rather than the dangers of global warming. Mustn't sound "alarmist", after all.
There's a saying in journalism: everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.
If you can't distinguish fact from opinion, debate is reduced to a shouting match.
That was the problem with last night's ABC climate special, in which climate activist Anna Rose tried to convince former Liberal senator and climate sceptic Nick Minchin about climate change.
As one of the people interviewed, English science writer Ben Goldacre, said, it just lent the appearance of credibility to Minchin's "own facts" on climate, which simply are not true. Of course, there was climate activist Anna there to counterbalance his view. But the format of the program gives the impression both views are equally valid. That's wrong.
The key fact is this: more than 97 per cent of climate scientists agree humans aredangerously warming the planet through greenhouse gas emissions. That counts as a scientific consensus. The views of people like Minchin - and mining fat cat Clive Palmer, who appeared on the following Q&A panel discussion - are as flaky as those who believe vaccinations do more harm than good, or smoking doesn't cause cancer.
Unless people like Minchin and Palmer accept basic facts such as the existence of a scientific consensus on the subject then their opinions are not fact-based and should not be presented in a context that suggests they are credible. It's nothing to do with free speech. Rather, the media has a responsibility to separate fact from opinion. Programs such as this confuses the two. That's simply bad journalism.
To put this media failure into perspective, one of the Q&A panellists, pollster Rebecca Huntley, noted her research showed less than 15 per cent of Australians understand the basis science of global warming. That represents a huge failure by our media to communicate the fundamentals of the most significant issue of our (and probably any other) generation.
It's not just a failure of the media, but of politicians. A recent US study concluded that (given most people can't understand the science) the main drivers of public opinion about climate change are the media and the attitudes of politicians.
A short documentary by Brent Melton about the fight to save the Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania. The Tarkine, one of Australia's great wild places, is threatened not just by logging, but by proposals for up to nine new mines in the area.
Will the Greens fade away with the departure of Bob Brown as leader?
No, for one simple reason: because they have what every succesful political party needs: a "big idea".
In other words, they actually stand for something. Unlike the Democrats.
And, it's tempting to say, unlike Labor. Labor used to be the workers' party; one that stood for trade unionism, public ownership and public services funded by progessive taxation. These days, it doesn't seem to really believe in any of these things. That's why it's support is waning.
The problem for Labor is the world has changed.
The key progessive "big idea" in politics today is not class war, liberty or equality. It's the environment. It's increasingly obvious that if we don't stop damaging the environment, nothing else will matter.
Hence the rise of the Greens. Let's not forget Australia's Greens are part of awell-established global movement, now two decades old. There are green parties throughout the world, all growing steadily. Greens have a committed support base and elected representatives everywhere from Tasmania to Scotland
This year's Climate Action Summit is being held on 27-29 April at the University of Western Sydney's Parramatta Campus. Speakers include Mark Diesendorf, Christine Milne, founder of Beyond Zero Emissions Matthew Wright, Ted Trainer, Costa Georgiadis and Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and founder of 350.org. For more information see the Climate Summit website.
Amid all the shake-ups (mainly cancellations) of various solar energy schemes, Australia's original renewable energy scheme - GreenPower - seems to have dropped off the radar. Does it even still exist?
Well, yes. And a large number of Australian residents and businesses still subscribe to the scheme, which involves paying a premium on your electricity bill, used by your energy supplier to purchase renewable energy - mainly wind, hydro or biofuel from burning landfill.
That renewable energy must be in addition to the energy supplier's mandatory Renewable Energy Target, thus increasing the total amount of renewable energy generated in Australia.
But GreenPower has fallen from a 2009 peak when 904,716 customers, purchasing more than two million MWh. By June 30, 2011, that had dropped to 739,854 customers.
There are three probably reasons to customers feeling the squeeze of higher electricity prices, the media focus in recent years on solar rebates and feed-in tariffs, and a decline in media/public concern about climate change since Copenhagen in 2009.
Yet three quarters of a million consumers and businesses are still willing to pay extra to support clean energy. GreenPower is still the simplest way for Australians to "go green" and reduce their carbon footprint. But it is in dire need of some love and (media) attention.
I recommend this post on the Climate Progress blog for some useful statistics about renewable energy (albeit with a US focus) that shatter the idea that it is expensive, uncompetitive or impractical.
A US study has concluded young people today are less concerned about the environment than previous generations. The longitudinal study of college students found only 5 per cent of young US students considered themselves "committed environmentalists" with 90 per cent saying they wouldn't be seriously inconvenienced or pay a cost to protect the environment.
Commentators in this New York Times article blame the decline in environmental concern on the fact that fewer young people today have much physical contact with the "unpaved world", and on fatigue and confusion over climate change created by vocal climate sceptics.
The Daily Telegraph has been campaigning recently about Sydney's gridlock. But is the solution to urban gridlock really to build more roads? Or even railway lines?
The North West Rail Link? OK, that's a must. You can't have a huge chunk of a modern city without any public transport.
A fast rail from Sydney to Canberra and Melbourne? Maybe. It would link the national capital to the country's two largest cities and allow Canberra to be developed as Sydney's second airport (while reducing demand for air travel: Sydney-Melbourne is one of the world's busiest air routes).
Light rail in the CBD? Definitely. Private cars just aren't a viable way to move huge numbers of people small distances in city centres. Light rail is relatively cheap and easy to "retrofit", as it uses existing roads.
But as for the rest - new freeways, fast rail to Newcastle and so on - forget it. They're all hugely expensive and involve bulldozing people's homes or tunnelling through Sydney's crumbly sandstone.
That's not to say you shouldn't upgrade existing roads and rail. Some of Sydney's trains run slower than fifty years ago.
But solving traffic problems by building roads, in particular, is doomed to fail. Ask any urban planner. Better roads only move bottlenecks to wherever the road ends, and by encouraging people to drive, it ultimately makes congestion worse.
The way to reduce traffic is to remove the need for people to travel in the first place.
Fakegate: a loss is as good as a win for climate sceptics
In an obvious echo of the Climategate affair, leaked documents from the US Heartland Institute, a leading propagator of climate sceptism, show the organisation funded prominent climate sceptics such as Australian Bob Carter. The sums are not huge: climate sceptics will point to larger sums spent by governments and other organisations putting the climate change message across.
But to compare dollar for dollar spending is too simplistic because climate sceptics have some big advantages in this debate.
1) Climate sceptics get disproportionate media coverage. Less than 3 per cent of climate scientists dispute man-made climate change, yet sceptics often get as much press coverage as the mainstream science, for two reasons. Firstly, because white conservative men - the demographic most likely to be climate sceptics - are overrepresented in the media. And secondly, it's because journalists think - and report - in adversorial terms. If someone says yah, they'll find someone who'll say nay. It looks like balanced, impartial reporting even if one of the viewpoints has no credibility. And conflict makes sexier copy.
2) Dealing with climate change requires huge change. To go down that path, politicians need a huge groundswell of public support. Sceptics only need to create a little doubt to scare politicians off such a big challenge. Sceptics don't need to win - or even draw - the argument. They simply need to make people think there IS an argument.
Even if you're worried about fracking and water pollution, the gas lobby tells us, gas is the cheapest low-carbon energy source and therefore essential to stop global warming. But a new study presents the strongest case yet of what looks like an inconvenient truth about natural gas: when it comes to emissions, it may be little or no better than other fossil fuels.
That's double the industry's estimate of 2 per cent but in line with another independent study published last year. (And note the study excludes leakage in transmission pipes and by the end-user - both almost impossible to measure but potentially also significant.)
These figures are critical because natural gas - methane - has roughly 25 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. By some calculations, anything above 2 per cent leakage of methane makes natural gas worse than coal in terms of global warming.
When I reported on this in a previous post I said natural gas could be humanity's suicide note. Read why here.
A new book by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers called What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, which Time magazine recently called one of 10 ideas that will change the world.
So what is it? Essentially, a trendy word for sharing stuff, updated for the internet age.
Sharing is green because it means we don't need to buy so much new stuff which means less resources and energy used to make things. And it seems we are sharing everything from land to cars and bikes to our homes and gardens.
For instance, car share schemes are springing up around the world and many cities, including London and Paris, run bike sharing schemes, where you can hire bikes from numerous stations throughout the city.
Then there are community gardens, and seed saving networks.
Some collaborative consumption websites are listed below.
The trend away from ownership is reflected, too, in the internet "cloud". This is the term for websites that allow you to access media - music, books, movies, games, computer software and so on - when you want, without actually needing to physically own the CDs or DVDs, or even own the downloads or software.
Then there's Freecycle where you can find, or hand on, unwanted goods.
But the grandaddy of the new sharing networks is LETS. Through my local LETS group I've lent or borrowed kayaks, food dryers, tents, trailers, lawnmowers and a host of other expensive things that would otherwise spend most of their lives sitting in someone's shed. (Most Australian LETS groups now operate on the Community Exchange website.)
With expectations low for the forthcoming Durban climate conference, it looks increasingly like our best hope is falling renewable energy prices. Here are a couple of interesting stories on that subject from Climate Progress and Yale360.
If that equation is projected into the future, the cost of wind will fall another 12% by 2016. The Bloomberg report states: "in the best locations [wind] generation is already cost-competitive with fossil fuel electricity, and that will be the case for the majority of new onshore turbines installed worldwide by 2016.
Fatih Birol, chief economist at the OECD's International Energy Agency (IEA) - hardly an alarmist greenie organisation - has issued a dire warning the world is heading for irreversible climate change within the next five years.
"I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever," says Birol.
The warning comes as US Department of Energy figures show 2010 saw the biggest-ever annual rise in greenhouse gas emissions - an increase of 6 per cent, or 564 million tonnes. Emissions from burning coal, the biggest single source of carbon dioxide emissions, rose 8 per cent.
Greenhouse gas levels are now higher than the supposedly "alarmist" worst-case predictions of the 2007 International Panel on Climate Change report.
On October 31st, a newborn baby will take the world's population to seven billion.
Population is the elephant in the room in any discussion of the environment. One reason is that most population growth is in Asia, Africa and South America, and left-leaning greenies don't want to be seen to blame the poor nations of the "global South" for the planet's woes.
You see, the global North - the rich nations of Europe, north America, Japan, Australia - created most of our environmental problems. Capitalism, a European/American invention, drives our endless and rapacious consumption of the natural world. Colonialism turned much of the global South into a giant logging and mining operation. Most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were put there either by rich nations, or by developing nations such as China producing goods for consumption in those rich nations.
But we can't ignore population. It's obvious that seven billion people will use more natural resources than the billion who lived in 1800, or the two billion in 1920.
Our current rate of population growth + consumption, as a species, is unsustainable. We are using natural resources, such as forests or fish, faster than they can regenerate. The Global Footprint Network calculates September 27 was "Overshoot Day" - the day we used up our sustainable supply of nature for the year.
Some, such as James Lovelock (who formulated the Gaia Hypothesis), predict human population will crash to about a million by the end of the century. Disease will thrive in the hotter temperatures of a globally warmed world. Human food supply will collapse as farmland is exhausted through drought and over-farming, and fish stocks will collapse through overfishing and ocean warming and acidification. These things are already happening. Fish stocks are hugely depleted. Arable land around the world is turning to desert.
Organic wine is reasonably common these days, but you don't see many organic beers. But it seems that's changing, with a number of microbreweries now producing organic beers.
Recently I came across Koala Beer's (I've only just noticed the pun) Burragumbilli Organic Lager. Boutique Sydney brewery and beer cafe Redoak makes the tasty Redoak Organic Pale Ale and long-established NSW winemakers the De Bortoli family have gone into the beer business with their Williams Pale Ale.
Here's the deal. Ecuador is a poor country and needs money for development. A rich supply of oil under its eastern lowlands is an obvious source of that money, and in recent years, Ecuador has derived 40 per cent of its national income from oil revenues.
Now oil companies have identified a vast supply of oil beneath the Yasuni National Park. Jackpot! Well, yes and no. The problem is Yasuni is one of the most biodiverse spots on earth. Maybe THE most biodiverse. This is the upper Amazon, a place where cool moist cloudforest tumbles down the eastern slopes of the Andes into steaming rainforest.
A survey of 91 solar operators in NSW by the Australian Solar Energy Society (AuSES) and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) last week found 416 jobs have been lost and 25 per cent of solar businesses have closed or are planning closure in the next month.
Australia's only manufacturer of solar panels, Silex Solar, has also announced the loss of 30 jobs.
The solar industry, which employs about 15,000 people nationwide, has been hit by the recent axing of solar feed-in tariffs in NSW and Western Australia - a key incentive for consumers to buy solar panels.
Ironically, China has just gone in the opposite direction, announcing the introduction of a national feed in tariff for solar panels. Admittedly the tariff is small (16cents per kW/h) but as Giles Parkinson writes in Climate Spectator, China's solar industry is growing so rapidly anyway that prices are tumbling. In recent years, module prices have been falling by 20 per cent for each doubling in demand to a point where, in some situations solar power is close to competing on price with coal-fired power.
As most solar panels sold in Australia are made in China, the growth of solar in China should also see the cost of solar power fall sharply for Australian in the next few years.
It seems the Greens were right to reject Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme and CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) and hold out for a better deal. According to an assessment by climate-change think tank Climate Works, based at Melbourne's Monash University, the Gillard government's current carbon tax and Clean Energy Future Plan will generate double the emissions reductions of Rudd's package.
A recent article in The Guardian looks at how climate - in the form of drought and food shortages - has been a critical factor driving the Arab Spring.
An interesting article in the Australian this week looks at how mudbrick homes are failing the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency's new mandatory six-star energy ratings.
If you want to know what a government really thinks, look at Treasury forecasts. These show that the Gillard government expects - as a result of its carbon tax package - that Australia's emissons will increase by 50 million tonnes by 2020, and will be 545 million tonnes a year by 2050. That's only 30 million tonnes less than we produce now.
As anticipated, the targets and price are too modest and compensation overgenerous. There isn't nearly enough to promote energy efficient. But there are some good things in the Gillard Government's carbon tax package.
Weird weather seemed to be the norm in 2010, and persisted into the first half of 2011.
These two articles from The Guardian's environment editor John Vidal explore whether it's just a bunch of freak coincidences, or global warming to blame - or this year's climate buzzword, "global weirding".
The Tasmanian forestry industry stands on the verge of a historic deal. The question is, can it, and its estwhile green adverseries, get the thing over the line?
If it flows, dam it. I've blogged previously about huge dam projects in the Amazon and Tibet, and Chile's plans for a dam in pristine Patagonia is also attracting fierce criticism from environmentalists. But Turkey's plans to harness "100 per cent" of its hydro-electricity potential by building 4000 dams in the next 12 years are breathtaking even by those standards.
Turkey has one of the world's fastest growing economies. Largely as a result, the country is hungry for energy. Currently it depends heavily on Iranian and Russian natural gas and the re-elected liberal-leaning government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is keen to develop a degree of energy independence.
Laws are being drafted allowing hydroelectricity schemes to proceed even in nature reserves. And each hydro scheme will be allowed to take 90 per cent of the water out of a section of river, leaving the remaining 10 per cent as "lifeline support".
They should come to Australia and study the Murray-Darling first to see what happens when you do that to a river.
Read more in this report.
Getting electric batteries to delivery long-distance driving range at a realistic size and an affordable prices is proving elusive. And while the 100-150km range of an electric battery is fine for everyday city driving 50 weeks of the year, consumers want a car they can also take on holiday a couple of times a year.
One solution to this problem could be the rollout of a battery-switching network, such as that planned by Better Place. Drivers will simply drive into a Better Place station and switch their battery for a fully charged one in a couple of minutes.
If that works, electric cars may overcome the distance problem.
Hold the front page. The conservative British government has just announced a "carbon budget" that will legally bind the UK to cut its greenhouse emissions to half of their 1990 level by 2027.
The US climate change organisation 350.org is coordinating another worldwide day of protest and events to call for greater action on climate change. Called Moving Planet, it takes place on 24 September.
With the nuclear industry on the back foot after the Fukushima reactor crisis in Japan, natural gas is now being positioned as the "only realistic" clean energy option. In the last few years, billions have been poured into gas exploration and development - far more than has gone into developing renewables such as solar or wind. Natural gas is is claimed, generates half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal, making it a valuable transition fuel in any strategy to reduce emissions. But is this true? It's a key question, because if the world invests for gas it will inevitably delay the development of low or zero-carbon renewables such as solar and wind. So if gas doesn't lead to a lower-emissions future, we're in big trouble.
As I've blogged before, it's been suggested that if as little as 2 per cent of gas escapes into the atmosphere - called "fugitive emissions" - the global warming impact of gas could be just as bad than coal. That includes leaks during extraction, flaring to burn off excess gas, leaks while the gas is piped to the user, and even in your home - if, say, you turn your stove on then fumble for a match. Maybe it's no accident that figures for gas leakage are almost impossible to find, but some studies suggest it is not far off the 2 per cent mark. One US Enivonmental Protection Agency study put leakage at 3.3 per cent.
The hot new frontier in the fossil fuel world is shale gas, or coal seam gas - gas trapped in layers or earth and rock, including coal seams, and extracted by a process called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", which involves cracking open underground rocks to release the trapped gas. China is about to get into shale gas in a big way.
Last week, SBS screened a documentary about fracking called Gasland, which has also just been released on DVD in Australia. Coal seam gas featured in a recent Four Corners report.
Critics of fracking say it can release methane locally (as well as carcinogenic chemicals used in the extraction process) including into underground aquifers. Gasland shows methane coming out of the kitchen taps of local residents. Maybe that would be a necessary evil if it reduced emissions. But now a new study claims the fugitive emissions from shale gas might make it worse than coal in terms of emissions.
Ironically, within a decade or two solar power is likely to be competitive with coal and gas. But by then gas extraction, along with coal, may have pumped enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to set off disastrous feedback mechanisms, such as the release of methane currenly locked into the frozen tundra in northern Siberia and Canada, that would make global warming unstoppable. Far from saving us, going for gas could turn out to be the greatest mistake in history. With stakes this high, we mustn't just take the word of the gas lobby. Greenhouse emissions from gas must be given the closest scrutiny possible.
Last week union boss Paul Howes threatened to oppose the carbon tax if it led to the loss of one job in the steel industry. Australian industry, sensing a weakened Government, is queuing up to demand special treatment.
NSW consumers are facing power bill increases of around $300. Of that, something like $100 will be the result of subsidies for solar panels and other green schemes, through mechanisms such as the solar feed in tariff. Most of the rest is due to increased infrastructure costs - building new power lines and so on.
The Greens won their first ever lower-house seat, Jamie Parker in Balmain, in the recent NSW state election. They won 10.3 per cent in the lower house, up 1.3 per cent. With 90 per cent of counting complete for the upper chamber, they have 11.16 per cent, up 2 per cent on 2007. They have two more senators, to give them a total of four. A third senate candidate, Jeremy Buckingham, is narrowly leading Pauline Hanson for the final seat.
But... is that good?
On the face of it, yes. It's the Greens' highest ever vote and first lower house seat. They are clearly the third party in Australian politics. The gap between them and the Labor Party is closing.
But with so many voters deserting Labor, the fact the Greens didn't pick up another 2 or 3 per cent must be a worry.
One issue that may have hurt the Greens was the call to boycott Israel by Marrikville candidate Fiona Byrne (in her capacity as Marrickville mayor), supported by prominent NSW Green Lee Rhiannon. This foray into left-ist fringe politics was a godsend to conservative media commentators keen to portray the Greens as extremist lunatics.
Greens leader Bob Brown thought so. "NSW voters wanted to hear about issues that were effecting them day to day ... I think it was damaging to the campaign," Senator Brown said.
The Greens are at a tricky point in their evolution. As the only party that takes climate change seriously, they will continue to grow, because climate change is the key issue of our time.
But growth brings challenges. Being a junior partner in government risks means you are tarred with the same brush when the government is on the nose. It also means compromising, as with the carbon tax, and thus risking alienating your own core support.
The Greens must do two things. Firstly, they must find candidates who come across as intelligent, respectable, reasonable people who do not alienate "middle Australia". Bob Browns, not Lee Rhiannons.
Secondly, they must keep focused on their core issue, which is the environmental.
Political parties need a core narrative, a guiding principle at their heart. Liberals stand for the free market. Labor stands for worker rights and universal access to public services such as education and health. (Labor's problem is they no longer believe unequivocally in either of these.)
Noted UK environmentalist George Monbiot says in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima that the Fukushima nuclear incident has persuaded him nuclear power is safe. If a 40-year-old nuclear plant with shoddy maintenance can survice a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami without a major release of radioactivity, we should worry less about nuclear power.
Climate change legislation is dead in the United States. So dead that President Obama didn't even mention global warming in this year's State of the Union address.
So who will save the planet?
You’d think a cotton shirt – a natural fibre – would be better for the environment than a polyester one. After all, polyester is derived from oil, isn’t it.
Instead, according to a new report in the journal Science, it was the Amazon rainforest, courtesy of a devastating drought that resulted in billions of trees dying. As they rot, the trees release vast quantities of carbon dioxide. The 2010 drought follows a similar "once-in-a-century" drought in 2005.
It looks like the Federal Government will use the Queensland flood levy to kill off a few ill-conceived funding programs, including a raft of green schemes.
Tipped for the chop are the cash-for-clunkers and green car innovation schemes, and funding for carbon storage.
The White House oil commission has concluded that cost-cutting by BP was at least partly to blame for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It identified nine decisions that increased risk; BP was involved in all nine decisions. Seven of those decisions saved time and (hence) money.
The conclusion could expose BP to billions more in compensation claims.
As we enter the era of peak oil, with extraction moving to ever-more-inaccessible places, the fear is that we'll see more of these sort of disasters in the coming years.
But the commission refused to back calls for a halt to all offshore drilling - and, as a telling detail is towards the bottom of this follow-up article in The Guardian, notes that BP shares rose 2.8 per cent on the news.
The more money we spend, the less happy we get.
Or at least, according to a new study, beyond a certain point increased wealth does not make us any happier.
I notice some in the Australian Labor Party are trying to stir up debate on nuclear power. The main argument of those spruiking nuclear is that the clean energy alternative - renewables - simply can't meet our energy needs.
You may have read about Sydney City Council's plan to build "trigeneration" plants that will use natural gas - and, ultimately, biogas generated from the city's composting waste and sewerage - to produce electricity, heating and airconditioning for buildings in the city.
I've always thought, if you had a spare few million dollars and a team of computer geeks, that creating a computer game would be a great way to get (mainly young) people to engage with the complexities of environmental issues.
And now someone has done just that.
A new British strategy computer game called Fate of the World puts you in the position of an eco-minded World Bank type organisation trying to prevent runaway climate change. Your options apparently range from the usual building wind farms and public transport to killing everyone over 30 to reduce human population.
Another game, EnerCities allows you to build your own sustainable city on Facebook.
The big question is, of course, are they any good?
With all the focus on solar panels, what's happened to GreenPower, that other scheme to encourage households to promote renewable energy?
In case you've forgotten, GreenPower lets you pay a premium to "buy" renewable electricity. (More precisely, your electricity supplier agrees to buy an equivalent amount of electricity from renewable resources.)
The good news is that more than 800,000 households were signed up for the scheme in June 2010. Those people are chosing to support a clean-energy future out of their own pockets.
My guess is green consumers are choosing to spend their money on solar panels instead, given the generous financial incentives. Why pay more to have renewable energy when governments are offering to pay you instead?
What is clear, however, is the huge public demand for more renewable energy.
The fury aroused by proposed cuts to water allocations in the Murray Darling is understandable - and illustrates why the river is in a mess in the first place.
Opponents of water cuts argue for a "balance" between the needs of the environment, business and community. But this represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between economics and the environment.
A sustainable economy depends on a healthy environment - you can't trade one for the other. We can get away with environmental damage only by passing the cost onto future generations - a debilitating "ecological debt" for our grandchildren.
Put simply: we have to fix the river then built industries around sustainable water extraction.
The same applies to the planet.
The United Nations Environment Program' (UNEP) recently published The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report. Described as the "Stern Report of Biodiversity" it tries to put a price on the massive loss of biodiversity Earth is now experiencing.
(This article on the BBC website summaries the report.)
The key concept here is "natural services" - a term for how nature delivers resources and services we need, such as clean water or protection from the elements. For instance, coral reefs, mangrove swamps and coastal dunes reduce damage to coastal communities from storms, cyclones and hurricanes. Without them we'd have to spend billions on massive artificial sea defences.
For the record, the TEEB calculates that price as between $2tn and $4.5tn a year.
In reality the price is infinite, because the loss of these natural services is felt forever (as in: $4.5tn x infinity) or at least for however long humans are likely to be around.
But the TEEB report at least draws attention to the damage we are doing to the planet's ecosystems - and underlines how our economic wellbeing depends on a healthy environment.
Unlikely as it seems, the Tasmanian forestry industry could be a beacon of hope in all this darkness. After decades of forestry wars, a historic truce is in the offing to end logging in native forest. Up to 60 per cent of forestry contractors could leave the industry, with funding for reskilling, relocation and alternative job creation.
The same sort of thinking could save the Murray Darling. And, just possibly, the planet.
Julia Gillard went to the election vowing never to introduce a carbon tax. Now she's set up a committee to look into it, although we've been here before with Labor and climate change committees. Remember Ross Garnaut? He's on the new committee too.
The Australian Conservation Foundation and ACTU have released a report called Creating Jobs - Cutting Pollution that concludes that Australia can create 3.7million jobs across Australia by taking strong action now to reduce carbon emissions.
A study published in Nature magazine reports a 40 per cent fall in the amount of plankton in the oceans. This may or may not sound very dramatic, but it's potentially far, far more significant than, say, the global financial crisis. Yet it barely rated a mention in the media.
Responsible investment fund manager Australian Ethical is pioneering an interesting new approach to ethical investment.
Responsible investment usually avoids the big bad guys, such as fossil fuel companies and the like. But Australian Ethical's aim with its new Climate Advocacy Fund is exactly the opposite - to become a shareholder in big polluters.
Why? Because that gives the fund the right to attend shareholder meetings and raise questions about the companies' greenhouse emissions and responses to climate change.
The Gillard Government certainly isn't inspiring confidence on climate change so far. The Citizens' Assembly on climate change and the Cash for Clunkers scheme are so laughably bad you almost wish Kevin Rudd was still PM.
In my previous blog, I wondered if the Deepwater Horizon oil spill might create a mood among politicians and the public in the US to support a genuine drive for clean energy. Keep an eye on public opinion in the US in the coming months.
I'm increasingly convinced climate change is a psychological problem. We know what the problem is, we know it's urgent and we know how to solve it (principally, by using less stuff). So what's stopping us? And why do most people carry on as if there's nothing to worry about?
Secondly, Futerra Communications, a UK green communications consultancy, has published an online guide on how to get the climate change message across.
Futerra's key point is this: people are motivated to action by positive messages, not negative ones. Bad news turns people off, and they stop listening.
Australia, we're told, needs immigrants and babies to support our ageing population. I've nothing against immigrants (I'm one myself, after all) but it shows our disconnect from environmental reality if solving a tax problem takes priority over the environmental implications of almost doubling our population.
Disasters such as the huge Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are likely to become more common as we approach peak oil.
Peak oil refers to the moment when we've used up half of all the known oil, leaving a declining quantity of oil that is increasingly hard - and therefore expensive - to extract from increasingly difficult locations, such as in deep oceans or tar sands (one of the world's dirtiest fuel sources yet).
The implications of peak oil are significant for other reasons. Rising extraction costs and declining supply will force the price of oil to rocket, causing economic meltdown. And economic meltdown will lead, inevitably, to social meltdown and global conflict.
In fact Lardelli suggests the inability to increase oil supply and the subsequent spike in oil prices were the real cause of the recent global financial crisis.
But we can't wait until we run out of oil to switch to other energy sources such as renewables, because it will take a lot of energy to build the solar power stations and wind farms and so on that we'll need to get the clean energy revolution started. If we wait until the oil runs out, it will be too late.
That's why Bill Gates, no less, has recently helped set up the American Energy Innovation Council.
As Gates points out, "although the information technology and pharmaceutical industries spend 5 to 15 per cent of their revenue on research and development each year, US companies’ spending on energy R&D has averaged only about one-quarter of 1 per cent of revenue over the past 15 years." (That's energy R&D overall, so the proportion spent on clean energy research would be even lower.)
But why stop there. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently pointed out, the US Federal government spends less than $3 billion a year on clean energy research, compared with $80 billion on defence research and development.
Spain and Germany between them make up three-quarters of the global solar panel market. The reason they have so many more solar panels than anywhere else? Feed-in tariffs, which pay solar panel owners a premium to feed their electricity into the grid.
With the disappointment of Copenhagen still fresh as a raw wound, maybe it's time to conclude that the world's politicians are simply incapable of agreeing a worthwhile global deal to combat climate change, and that only technology can save us.
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.
If you've ever been surfing, you'll know there's tremendous power in the oceans. And harnessing it is, theoretically, rather simple.