(We) can do better

MEDIA RELEASE

Thursday, 14 June 2007

Environment groups meeting at Coolum Beach on the Sunshine Coast last Sunday, 10th June, called for a moratorium on Local Growth Management Strategies (LGMS’s) under the South East Queensland Regional Plan until after the local government elections in 2008, when local residents would have the chance to vote for candidates based on their views regarding growth.

One of Australia’s leading scientists and finalist for Queenslander of the Year, Professor Ian Lowe, speaker at the weekend conference, said that the existing SEQ Regional Plan accepts the irreversible destruction of SEQ’s lifestyle and biodiversity. “Our unique local natural assets are being destroyed by over-development,” said Professor Lowe.

The State Government’s SEQ Regional Plan is requiring 60,000 hectares of farmland, open space and bushland to be bulldozed and concreted to accommodate over 550,000 new homes.

According to Sunshine Coast Environment Council spokesperson Keryn Jones, environment groups reject the irresponsible population growth targets set for the region through the SEQ Regional Plan and call upon the State and local governments to immediately halt further progress on their respective Local Growth Management Strategies until communities are better informed.

“The LGMS’s are the most important planning documents we will see in our lifetime as they will open up new suburban developments in areas previously inaccessible to developers, lead to high rise in suburban areas, and tie the region into irreversible growth,” said Ms Jones. “Injurious affection laws, unique to Queensland, mean that once land uses have been given the green light it can never turn to orange or red without attracting compensation payouts of many millions of dollars.”

Simon Baltais, President of Sustainable Population Australia SEQ Branch said that the fundamental weakness of the SEQ Plan is that it doesn’t recognise SEQ’s limits to growth. “SEQ will become very ugly and crowded,” he said. “Naturally, many are opposed to these strategies going ahead until the numbers are reconsidered in light of recent carrying capacity studies.”

Simon Baltais: mob: 0412-075-445
Keryn Jones: mob: 0418-982-158

Background paper attached: appeal for moratorium on LGMS

<strong>Media Release</strong>

Wednesday, 13 December 2006

All Australians should be alarmed at the accelerating rate of global warming highlighted by melting polar ice and extreme fires, the Australian Greens said today.

"Climate change is exacerbating bushfires in Australia because of higher temperatures, higher evaporation rates and changed rainfall patterns, as confirmed today by the chief of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, Kevin O'Loughlin," Greens climate change spokesperson Senator Christine Milne said in Hobart.

The following is from a larger article, "Peak Oil and the Preservation of Knowledge" by Alice Friedemann (Link to http://www.energybulletin.net/18978.html was broken. Now changed to http://www.energybulletin.net/node/18978 -  Ed, 14 Jun 11) from www.energybulletin.net. An abridged version "The fragility of microprocessors" (Link similarly fixed) can be found on the same site. This article refutes the kind of argument frequently put by people who argue against the urgency of taking action to preserve our world's stock of fossil fuels. A typical #comment-38071">example can found in a discussion on Peak Oil on John Quiggin's blog site of November 2005:

Plenty of options exist. Solar and its derivatives (wind, wave, tidal etc) all have good chances and, with some serious work, could answer the problem. If a more immediate need is there, nuclear is already there. For cars, hydrogen is a suitable energy storage mechanism in the medium term and batteries or hybrids will work now. There is no major crisis, nor will there be.
The important thing now is not to panic and start forcing solutions - let the market signals work their way through and sort it out. It has worked in the past and will in the future.

It is often difficult, without the hard facts and sound, such as are to be found in the article below, to refute these kinds of cock-sure assertions that technology, particlarly technology operating in a world in which market forces are unfettered, will solve all of our looming problems of overpopulation and resource scarcity.

Please refer to original document for footnotes.

Replacing fossil fuels with some other energy source

by Alice Friedemann

At one time, the Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) for oil was at least 100 to 1.₁ We are reaching the point where the EROI of oil will be 1 and no more drilling will take place.₁₇ It was while the EROI of oil was high that most of our current infrastructure was built.

Evidence suggests that the EROI of corn ethanol is less than one, which means it takes more energy to make than you get out of it – an energy sink.

Pimentel and Patzek have shown that it takes twenty seven to fifty seven percent more fossil fuel energy to create ethanol or biodiesel than you get in the energy returned. Worse yet, this is done at a tremendous environmental cost, since biofuel crops harm soil structure and remove the nutrients, deplete groundwater, pollute water with pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides, cause eutrophication of water via nitrogen runoff, increase soil erosion, and contribute to air pollution and global warming at the ethanol plant and when burned in cars.18

Even if the highest claim of a net energy for ethanol of 1.67 were true, a much greater EROI than .67 is needed to run civilization. The 1 in the 1.67 is needed just to make the ethanol. An EROI of .67 has 150 times less energy than oil when we started building American infrastructure.

Charles A. S. Hall, who has been studying net energy for decades, believes that you’d need an EROI of at least 5 to run civilization, because you need to include the energy to make the machines, mitigate environmental damage, feed and house the workers, etc.₁₉

For example, consider a windmill composed of steel and concrete. A windmill farm in the Escalante desert, built to produce 5.55 TWh of power, would require 13.8 million pounds of aluminum, 2.8 trillion pounds of concrete, 639 billion pounds of steel, etc. The wind farm would occupy over 189 square miles.₂₀ Pacca & Horvath don’t give the capacity factor for these windmills, but an often used number is 30% (i.e. wind blows hard enough 30% of the time), so a 5.55 TWh wind farm might serve around 175,000 to 350,000 people, depending on the wind speed and how close people were to the windmills, since power is lost via transmission over long distances.

In 1992 such a wind farm would cost 200 million dollars, which doesn’t include labor and maintenance costs, and would serve less than one percent of the United States population. It would cost over $200,000,000,000 to build enough windmills to generate electrical power for everyone (though of course, you couldn’t, since not all areas have enough wind). With energy prices many times higher now than in 1992, the cost would be far more expensive.

After fossil fuels are gone, the windmills must be able to generate enough energy to maintain themselves and build new windmills, including all of the equipment used to mine the metal and concrete components, forge metal into blades and towers, and build the trucks and roads that enable windmills to be delivered to their sites. Windmill energy must also provide the energy to build and maintain the electric grid and storage battery infrastructure, and all of the people involved in the process. Any extra energy could now be used to run civilization.

It’s often said that once oil goes to “x” dollars a barrel, alternative energy will become economically viable. But this will never happen, because the alternative energy infrastructure is built with fossil-fuel inputs, so alternative energy sources will always cost more than oil. To even talk about energy using dollar figures makes no sense -- you can’t stuff dollar bills down your gas tank.

Energy can be reduced to physics, to the laws of thermodynamics and other rules that the Big Bang bequeathed our universe. Oil has been a free lunch, one that nature spent hundreds of millions of years making, reducing 196,000 pounds of plant matter into one gallon of gasoline – pure, unadulterated solar power that no alternative energy source but fusion could possibly hope to replace.₂₁ Oil is also incredibly easy to use, ship, and store.

The number of scientists who insist that alternative energies can substitute for fossil fuels, and ignore or deny the basic laws of physics and thermodynamics is frightening. It’s reminiscent of Lysenkoism.

By Paul Sheehan
The Sydney Morning Herald

Go to original, also posted in www.truthout.org

Monday 23 October 2006

All attempts to turn Australia into a new Europe have failed miserably, writes Paul Sheehan.

The Roman emperor Nero is best remembered for having his mother and wife assassinated, murdering his second wife, indulging in orgies, concerts and sporting spectacles while persecuting Christians, and blaming them for the great fire of Rome during which, most infamously, he supposedly played the lyre from the balcony of his palace. Nero playing while Rome burned is myth. The rest is not.

I wonder what history will say about us when we are gone, off to that great absolute water frontage in the sky?

That we fiddled while Rome burned? That we were the wealthiest society in our history, worth more than $350,000 for every man, woman and child, with the biggest homes, the most cars, the highest debt, the lowest savings, the highest rates of obesity and excess weight, and the greatest amount of consumerism, gambling and drug consumption, while the landscape, the lifeblood of the nation, died around us, a disaster drowned out by the clamour of consumerism.

Harsh? We have elected a prime minister, four times, who has led Australia through an era of unbroken and unprecedented prosperity, yet appeared obdurately impervious to the greatest issue of our times. He promised to reduce the size and intrusiveness of government but instead increased federal taxes, including the GST, to a peacetime record of 25.7 per cent of gross domestic product, but did not use this unprecedented flow of funds to mobilise the nation against the greatest threat to its survival. Two great strokes of fortune marked his longevity as leader - the economic revolution in China, and an opposition dominated by the factional Frankensteins of the Labor Party and the post-Trotskyite ratbags of the Greens_#fn1">1.

All the while, month after month, year after year, the implacable advance of Australia's collective environmental stupidity crept closer until it is now within striking distance of the coastal capitals. After 200 years of trying to turn this continent into another Europe, we are now in retreat, as the arid zones advance.

In this column in August last year, I wrote about a highly innovative grazing enterprise, Coombing Park, not far from Orange, run by George King, who inherited a badly eroded property and turned it into a showpiece, using holistic landcare techniques that are absent from most rural businesses. He had been forced to drop the stock level on Coombing Park to 40 per cent of peak capacity and was deeply worried for the future. As we flew over the western plains in his Cessna 182, he said: "Our politicians and bureaucrats are still illiterate about this environment. We're still treating the symptoms, not the underlying cause. Droughts and water shortages are just symptoms."

Fifteen months later, what is happening on Coombing Park?

"We are going down to 20 per cent stocking rate, which is below our cost of production," King told me on Friday. "Our business cannot trade for many more years if we erode our equity each year. Even the best farmers are suffering now. The bush is dying. The towns, the landscape, the rivers are being killed by this climate change."

Note the term "climate change." Not "drought."

"What I am seeing is a compounding effect," he said. "As more country is stripped bare and dried out we expose more soil. This is releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Organic carbon levels are falling, and the soil is losing its colour. There are more fires than ever because the dry summers are adding enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and creating more bare ground. So when we do get rain it will be much less effective...."

"I have no doubts this will all accelerate as time passes. Pretty soon we will be able to see the great deserts from the Great Dividing Range."

We are creating deserts out of farmland. And when the rains do come, heavy rain will bring problems, not just relief. An enormous amount of topsoil is sitting dry and exposed, vulnerable to run-off.

Does anyone in the Federal Government accept the scale of this disaster, or are we going to keep handing out multimillion-dollar Band-Aids to lost causes? For the past four years, this column has asked, in every possible way, when our popular culture is going to admit that the 200-year national project to turn Australia into another Europe has been a collective national delusion:

"Face the facts" (Sep 18, 2006), "A horror world of our making" (Oct 24, 2005), "The disgrace of Cubbie Station" (Aug 29, 2005), "A new way of seeing green" (Aug , 2005), "The collapse of the wide, brown land" (Feb 21, 2005), "Riding for a fall" (Jan 15, 2005), "Continent at risk" (Jan 10, 2005), "The natural disaster in our midst", (Jan 3, 2005), "The issue that reigns over them all" (Jul 4, 2004), "Nothing but a wasteland", (Jun 28, 2004), "Dwarfing every other issue" (May 17, 2004), "Two degrees between life and death" (Apr 26, 2004), "A nation hostage to the gum" (Jan 30, 2003), "A ravaged country on the way out" (Jan 23, 2003), "Fire and water will define us" (Dec 9, 2003), "The great water crisis", (Dec 7, 2002).

The "great water crisis" was four years - and 17 columns on the subject - ago. Tim Flannery's seminal warning "The Future Eaters" was published 12 years ago. The crisis has since quickened and broadened. It is affecting food prices. It should soon bite as deeply on the psyche as oil prices. And it is being compounded by global warming.

Yet most people still talk about the "drought." It is not a drought. It is climate change. We changed the landscape. We cut, stripped, gouged, channelled and laid it bare. And thus changed the climate. How can we solve a problem when we can't even name it, and thus still can't even face it?

---

Footnotes

1. Whist the site editors are critical of the Greens in many ways, particularly their failure to adopt policies in favour of population control, they don't endorse Paul Sheehan's view of the Greens as 'post-Trotskyite ratbags'. A media release from Greens Senator Christine Milne, entitled "Extreme fires, melting polar ice put world on notice - time is running out" dated 13 Dec 06 here.