Tuesday, November 14, 2006
The bottom line is... Why Howard wants sequestration to work
November 2006 may go down in history as the month when the last tattered renegade band of global warming sceptics retreated to the hills in strategic defeat. One hundred and ten years after it was first mooted by Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenious, and nineteen years after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the US House of Representatives that there was a strong "cause and effect relationship" between global temperatures and anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Al Gore has managed to convince audiences yet exposed to the unfolding crisis. Worrying evidence continues to be collated from the Artic to the Australia. And it appears Stern gave such a – well – stern economic review to the UK administration that people are demanding that business and their government proxies deliver more than rhetoric.

Even our own Prime Minister, John Howard appears belatedly convinced that anthropogenic global warming is a serious issue; though he remains sceptical that the ‘ordinary Australian’ would be willing to forfeit even a single dollar of GDP growth to do anything about it.

As a result, domestically, Howard continues to be politically timid on the issue. Worse, on the internationally stage he remains belligerently non-committal; unwilling to break ranks with the other Kyoto refusenik, George W. Bush on any policy of significance, from Israel to the so-called "War on Terror”.

Instead, Howard demands a techno-fix and is banking on carbon sequestration to deliver emissions reductions. His government is lavishing subsidies on the coal industry to help them find a fix. $500m of federal government cash (and half as much again from State Labor governments) will be pumped into developing cleaner energy, most going to help the coal industry.

Howard has also come down firmly in support of developing nuclear energy, despite Australia’s reluctance to see other nations – Iran in particular – develop nuclear projects.

In short, Howard’s model Australian economy is one that will only function with a continuously growing input of energy. He is not about to start challenging this paradigm.

So why isn’t solar, geothermal, tidal or wind power attracting such vast sums of government pork? The bottom line is: you can’t export them.

Australia is desperate to develop ‘clean’ coal technology simply to keep export dollars rolling in. If the engineers can pull this sequestration rabbit out the hat, not only can Australia sell the technology to Chinese, more lucratively, we can keep flogging our coal too.

And with the Chinese building one new coal fired power station every five days, it doesn’t appear that they are in much of a hurry to invest in renewable energy sources.

With Kyoto in its twilight years, and a new emissions regime beckoning, the Chinese will be keen to increase their energy consumption and per capita emissions to near developed world levels, before negotiations begin and we all forced to make cuts.

Australia’s export bonanza should be further boosted by John Howard’s revitalised support for nuclear energy. When Australia starts producing nuclear energy, it will seem all the more acceptable to sell it to the Chinese and Indians, to fuel their production of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

At face value, this export driven strategy seems like a good one for Australian consumers, at least in the short term. The resources sector (especially exports) currently drives around 80% of Australia’s GDP expansion each year. This international demand for dollars works to reduce the massive trade imbalance resulting from our insatiable demand for imported plasma screen TVs.

Conversely, if Australia invested in developing cutting edge wind or solar power, the export dollars would quickly blow away. China does not need to import wind and sunshine. And they could definitely manufacture carbon-fibre wind turbines cheaper than Australia.

But this strategy is built on short-term political expediency. There is no grand vision to ween the human race off burning the planet’s natural capital. It’s simply another fix to see us through the next few years, to keep the plasma TVs rolling out the retailers’ doors and the votes coming in for political incumbents.

Meanwhile, the Navarra regional government in Spain has commitment itself to generating 100% of its stationary energy from renewable sources by 2010.

Australia – as result of its addiction to coal export revenue – is going to be left behind, burdened with outdated modes of generating and consuming energy. And with a mucked-up climate to boot.

So when Spaniards are paying virtually nothing for their domestic energy needs, - and producing zero emissions – Australians will still be using energy to dig up energy and then using even more energy to pump and retain the energy emissions.

---

Friday, November 03, 2006
No worries, we'll pray for rain
Premier Beattie’s latest strategy for beating the drought is [Christian] prayer.

That ought to do it.

Beattie wants to “galvanise the powers of prayer at this critical time”. Church leaders have responded enthusiastically to his call and will run a series of church services focusing on imploring the gods for some of the wet stuff.

Other religious communities have all been invited to join in too, just in case the Christian god is not responsible for orchestrating meteorological patterns.

I am getting slightly worried. Not so much by the lack of rain, but by the fact a modern, supposedly secular, government has to resort to prayer, rather than policy, to deliver water.

Of course, Beattie’s appeal to the Christian faith to solve the water crisis has nothing whatsoever to do with the criticism he recently copped for spending public funds on supporting the Muslim Ede Festival this weekend week, much to the chagrin of voters not far removed from One Nation Party.

But frankly, if I had even the vaguest flicker of Christian faith in me, I would be offended at such squalid political manipulation of my religion. Even with my limited understanding of Christian theology, I have learned that you don’t just “ask and [H]e shall give.” Otherwise half of all Christians would be lottery winners with big boobs.

But maybe I am behind the times and god has implemented a more customer-centric corporate philosophy, where the delivery of customer needs and the exceeding of their expectations is the paramount goal.

If that’s the case, it looks like my weekend is ruined.

Ironically, scientific weather forecasting, based on observation, modelling and statistics predicts rain this weekend. Now if it transpires, will this be the result of hundreds of years of acquired scientific knowledge, or some devoted, but misguided, churchgoer having a good pray?

And if it’s the latter why did they wait until now? Are they some kind of psycho?

---

Thursday, November 02, 2006
What happens when a city runs out of water?
What happens when a city of 1.5 million people runs out of water?

We may soon find out.

Many Australian cities are facing water shortages; all capital cities (but Darwin) have some level of restriction in place. In Brisbane, Level 4 are now in place, as regional dam levels hit 25%.
Level 4 means its buckets only on alternate days, when it comes to watering the garden and washing cars, houses and windows.

(However, if you are planning a new swimming pool, that’s fine. You can fill it up solely on the proviso you have a water efficient shower and washing machine and dual flush toilets. Brisbane maybe running out of drinking water, but we are not going to spoil any middle class fun.)

Two related factors have got us here. It hasn’t rained (the climate appears to be drying) and the population continues to boom (it's good for the economy). The water storage capacity that was supposed to last for 20 year’s growth, now appears hopelessly inadequate. What policy makers assumed was a short dry spell, has gone on and on.

But the Australian water ‘crisis’ is full of conundrums. It is the ‘driest’ continent on Earth, yet receives more rainfall per capita that most of Europe. Brisbane is desperately short of drinking water, yet we consume far more water per head than Europe, and pay virtually nothing for it. We then throw it on our European-inspired green gardens. The nation’s farmers have adopted some of the world’s most water-efficient technologies, yet we grow rice and cotton in the desert, relying on 100% irrigated water, thus use more water for agriculture than most places on the planet.

In the good times, Australian water policy was premised on two simple strategies. One, dam enough water in the short (3 month) wet to see you through the long dry each year and two, mine it from the Great Artesean Basin - taking more each year than is replenished.

The prolonged drought and concerns over the sustainability of simply allowing aquifers gush-forth unregulated are now finally impressing on policy makers we need a more sophisticated approach to how, where and what sort of water we use.

True, some of the responses, such as desalination powered by fossil fuels, continue to force us down an unsustainability path (and ironically contribute to the global warming that is probably inducing the current drought), but there are plenty of other projects being pursued, which contribute to achieving a more robust supply.

The keystone is diversity: the trending away from the simple ‘tree’ pattern of centralised provision of water resources for consumption, whereby we rely on a few, large sources to meet the demands of millions of consumers in thousands of different categories.

Using recycled water for industry, large scale stormwater harvesting and bore water are all now being carried out in various parts of Australia. Nested, smaller scale schemes, such as domestic rainwater tanks and community level stormwater capture, along with demand management incentives for efficient appliances and water sensitive gardens, all contribute to suppressing demand on inefficient, ineffective and unresponsive, centralised dam-to-consumer reticulated systems.

But it is also now time to get innovative. Consider this: Unmeasurable amounts of environmental damage has been caused and billions of dollars has been spent in delivering drinking quality water to every urban household in Brisbane. 50% of this is thrown on the garden and another 40% is used in washing clothes and houses and flushing toilets. Around 1% is directly consumed by humans.

Yet we spend millions of additional dollars on extracting, ‘purifying’, bottling, distributing and displaying mineral water - then treating the packaging - because so many people do not trust the system that delivers water to their home.

This grossly inefficient phenomena is glibly dismissed as ‘consumer choice’; but really, it’s pretty stupid. Our Indigenous cousins must despair when see us flush our toilets with water good enough to drink.

Furthermore, through the study of ‘path dependencies’, it is demonstrated that inefficient consumption of one good – say reticulated water – leads communities down the an increasingly inefficient pathway, where good money gets thrown after bad. For example, when previously water self-sufficient communities are connected to the town water system, the increase in water consumption inevitably means that the community then requires connection to the town’s waste water treatment, thus creating a dependency – and ever more investment in large infrastructure - that wasn’t there to begin with.

Small and nested is nearly always more efficient, effective and responsive than large and centralised.

But naturally, the progressive diverse schemes being encouraged by current governments will always be tempered by their old-fashioned desires for grandiose schemes. As a colleague in our marketing department said to me the other day: the Lord Mayor wants lots of ribbon cutting ceremonies.

The State government continues to moot outlandishly massive schemes, such as pumping and piping water from as far afield as Townsville and Papua New Guinea. With a constantly changing [meteorological] climate – notwithstanding the impacts of global warming – you must question the sanity of sinking further billions into all-or-nothing schemes.

But the end game is economic growth. As long as GDP remains the only politically acceptable measure of well-being, then more infrastructure, more consumption and more

---