As we collect firewood for the cold days ahead, we are facing not one but two challenges. While the State government allows us to go into forests and collect dead dry timber, their ritual burning program threatens to beat us to it. The object of this induced bushfire for disappointed arsonists is ‘Fuel reduction’ – that’s to say the burning of all the dead timber accumulated on the forest floor,- as well as the burning of flammable thickets which make for problems controlling a ‘wildfire’.   Considering the minimal gain to public security – ‘health’ – from this burning, as well as its significant contribution to asthma problems in nearby communities, and economic losses to wine growers from ‘smoke taint’, one wonders whether similar results of fuel reduction couldn’t be produced by encouraging people to go and get firewood with incentives.

 But our public health bodies and government departments have other ideas. Far from encouraging us to burn ‘Biofuel’ to heat our homes, and recognising that it is one way to reduce dangerous CO2 emissions, these bodies have concluded that the particulates from wood heaters are an intolerable health hazard, and on that basis would be better banned or regulated out of existence.  The Age reports:

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/wood-fires-focus-of-pollution-cut-20130426-2ik44.html

The recommendation -

“Options being considered by COAG range from doing nothing and letting emissions decline as households moved to gas and electricity heaters, to introducing regulations that would require all new heaters to carry efficiency ratings and release just 1.5 grams of particulates per kilo of wood burnt.”

It is one thing to suggest people burn gas for home heating; gas is relatively clean, and using it this way makes use of most of its energy. But the suggestion that by using electricity to heat our homes ‘emissions would decline’ is dangerous nonsense.  Not only is the main source of electricity in Victoria from Brown Coal, and so inherently more than twice as ‘emissions intensive’ as gas, but the process of transforming it into electricity and bringing it hundreds of Kms to the consumer makes it perhaps FIVE times dirtier than gas. This is because the power station only extracts 35 – 40% of the heat energy from the Coal – the other 60 – 65% goes to heat the air in the Latrobe valley, and then a further proportion is dissipated in the transmission lines.

 These days of course, many people have solar power for electricity, and may use this as an excuse to use more electricity for home heating than they otherwise would. I actually have friends with underfloor heating who have done this – previously it was simply too expensive.  This however is not only a false economy but an extraordinarily decadent  option. If you want to heat your home with solar energy you need roof windows and good insulation, or a solar water heater and hydronic system; neither will be much use when the sun isn’t shining, and this is the time that your home will need heating.

 The problem with using the solar electricity in this way is that it simply means that the other things in your house which would run on it, like TVs and lighting, are powered by that dirty old coal in Gippsland; as we know it isn’t possible to run TVs or lighting on COAL directly. This means that those people who look out on Loy Yang’s smokestacks, between coughing fits and with watery eyes, will get even more of the same while we warm our toes on beautiful clean electric power.

 But back to the WOOD.  Even though the government and bodies who came up with this stupid advice admit that the dangerous particulates from wood burning happen mostly because of using damp wood and badly operated stoves, they still see the change away from them to Fossil Fuel power as ‘progress’, and alarmingly as progress that is already underway. Well it’s not progress! And if they like to give this advice on public health they first need to stop burning the bush except close around settlements, and restrict it to times when a genuine slow burn will not kill everything except old trees, leading to a progressive loss of ecological diversity. They also need to think hard about using ‘dry wood’ in Hazlewood power station, where 30% of the energy from brown coal is wasted in evaporating the water in it.

 So get in those wood stores, and don’t let them tell you there’s anything ‘cleaner’ than this remarkable renewable energy source.

– David Macilwain, Rayburn owner.

 Although results from similar recent research on the West Antarctic Ice sheet give a more ambiguous result, of periods of warmer and cooler conditions over the last 2000 years, it appears beyond doubt that in the peninsula – which is much further north, conditions have become significantly warmer, as well as spending a significant time above the critical temperature – freezing point.

 One of the researchers, Dr Nerilie Abram from ANU, was interviewed by Fran Kelly on Radio National about the research.

[Submitted by Lizette Salmon]

Pigs unable to breed and thousands of local chickens dying; these are just two of the more unusual local consequences of this summer’s extreme heat.  “Bushfires, drought, crop losses and heat-related illnesses were consequences of climate change we anticipated in this region”, said Lizette Salmon, spokesperson for Wodonga Albury Towards Climate Health (WATCH), “but now we’re hearing some unexpected stories too”.

The National Environment Centre’s Rob Fenton has been a teacher of organic farming and permaculture for 26 years, but said the Border’s extreme January temperatures had impacted the farm in ways he’d not previously witnessed.  “Our free range pigs simply stopped feeding. At night they just lay in their wallow and whinged about the heat. Our breeding program has been set back because they dropped a cycle and still aren’t cycling. This will mean a reduction in our ability to supply bacon.” According to Mr Fenton, zucchinis were also affected. “In mid January they dropped their flowers and stopped growing. This was a problem with many of our student’s crops too”.

While the National Environment Centre did not report poultry deaths during the heat wave, other producers were not so fortunate. Nicole Stephens, coordinator of the Hume Region Farmers Market was told of at least three thousand chickens that had died across the region. “Chickens have poor cooling mechanisms and unfortunately the 42 degree day in January was too much for many of them.”

Ms Salmon has heard many locals comment on the number trees that are suffering. “Although this is not an unexpected consequence of climate change it’s getting discussed quite frequently. A friend who’d been out jogging noticed that nearly every garden she passed contained stressed or dead plants. I’m concerned, too, by the number of dead and dying trees along our roadsides; just take a look outside the new Tax Office or on Baranduda Boulevard.”

WATCH is compiling a data-base of extreme-climate consequences around the region and encourages residents to contact their group with descriptions of impacts. They anticipate the list will help identify and publicise climate risks. “It’s not possible for scientists to anticipate every possible consequence for every region, so we’re using real community experiences to help us track climate change impacts at the local level,” said Ms Salmon. “At the same time, of course, we urge everyone to do everything in their power to try to limit extreme climate change, at the personal level through to meaningful actions by governments and businesses, especially the power industry. A record 45 degree day now will become a record 50 degree day in twenty years. It’s imperative we act now before locking in even greater challenges to the survival of our children.”

Residents are encouraged to register their extreme weather experiences by emailing Ms Salmon on lizette@salmonfamily.id.au.

For link to subsequent article in Border Mail see: http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/1332487/video-these-pigs-were-bakin/?cs=53

 One needs to know this most basic science to understand the ‘Carbon Cycle’, where Carbon is used as a means to convert energy from the sun into plant and animal bodies.  Carbon exists in the atmosphere as Carbon Dioxide, which is a stable gas and a useless one; it is the final waste product of all living processes, following its ‘combustion’ in their metabolism, or its combustion by fire. In living plants and animals, compounds containing Carbon and Hydrogen – Carbohydrates and Hydrocarbons – are the energy source necessary for life. To extract their energy they are ‘burnt’ in the body by combining them with Oxygen, so the Carbon becomes Carbon Dioxide, and the Hydrogen becomes water – Hydrogen Dioxide.

 The other side of this cycle is performed only by plants, which use ‘photosynthesis’ – solar energy – to separate the Oxygen from the Carbon Dioxide and synthesise compounds such as fats and starches….

 Why this matters  is that there is currently far too  much oxidised Carbon in the atmosphere from which all the energy has been removed, and not enough energy and space for plants to remove it to restore the balance. We desperately need to restore this balance before the increasing CO2 overheats our home, and so look for ways to ‘sequester Carbon’ in the soil and take it out of circulation. This means it must be in a form that cannot be broken down by microorganisms, or eaten by animals or termites.  While some forms of ‘organic matter’ in the soil are very slow to decompose, ecosystems require that they eventually do; the only consequence otherwise is an accumulation of carbon such as happened in the Carboniferous era, or as happens in Peat bogs, where carbon compounds are prevented from breaking down because of lack of oxygen in waterlogged ground.  There is however one exception to this – Charcoal.

While various bodies, both governments, research stations, and private businesses, all try to promote the idea of ‘Carbon Farming, or sequestration, as an opportunity and a necessity, all such schemes fall down at the first two gates.  The first of these is that all  carbon that goes into the soil through natural processes will finally come out again, with no net gain. ( unless it is charcoal as the result of fire that gets buried)

 The second gate is that Charcoal is chemically much the same as Coal. So we may go to extraordinary lengths to safely  bury Carbon as Charcoal, for instance by growing tree crops, burning them for fuel in limited oxygen, and burying the Charcoal – while in the next paddock some bloke is digging up COAL. And until we stop mining and burning coal, and mining and exporting coal to be burnt ( what else?) we are simply kidding ourselves that our efforts have the slightest effect.

Some recent reports about the subject:

In a collision of parallel universes – that of the ordinary taxpayer and that of the extraordinary non-taxpayer – the revelation of the new Mining Tax’s pitiful returns coincided with the concealment of Rio Tinto’s extraordinary tax-free profit.

 The returns to the people’s fund from rattling the can around the coal-pits and slag heaps for the last six months was a mingy $126 million. a ‘poor result’ put down to falling demand for iron ore and difficult trading conditions – the mining companies simply couldn’t afford to give any more.

 At the same time, Rio Tinto announced that 2012 was the first year it had not been able to record a profit, and had allegedly made a loss of $2.9 Billion. Unlike the paper money that the government collects to spend on US, Rio’s money is only ‘on paper’, and the announcement of its ‘loss’ was soon followed by an admission that thanks to a profit of $9.3 billion it would be able to pay its shareholders a dividend up 15% on last year.  

 A little quick maths reveals that Rio’s profit was 72 times the little bit thrown to the Tax agents by mining companies, though Rio wasn’t one of them – it paid nothing. Simply couldn’t afford it!

( The explanation for the ‘disparity’ is that Rio marked down the value of some of its assets/investments in Mozambique ( a coal mining project) and aluminium refining, to the tune of $13.5 billion, these assets being allowable against Tax on earnings.)

 Never mind that the NT government has just mortgaged its future gas supply in a vain effort to keep open the polluting Aluminium refinery which Rio plans to sell, once the indefinite guaranteed gas supply has been assured. Nowhere else in the world can Aluminium be made with fossil fuel – it’s either too expensive or too polluting, and the plans to replace the dirty heavy oil burning plant at the NT refinery with ‘Clean’ gas rely on it being supplied at a knockdown price, just as the Portland refinery uses dirty brown coal power from Gippsland supplied under a 30 year deal for  minus peanuts – it costs Victorians $120 million a year to subsidise it.

 So why do we do it? It’s not a question I can answer.

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2013/s3690940.htm

We shouldn’t spend more money on renewables etc because Australia has a large deficit

Politicians often refuse to spend more $ on pro-environmental actions, arguing it’s too costly and will increase the public deficit, BUT:

1. We have the third lowest debt in the world.
2. Many Australians go into debt to buy a house, and call it an investment.
3. In 1950 when our GDP was 1/8 its current size, the government spent a massive amount of money building the Snowy Hydroelectricity scheme.

It’s not that we cannot afford it, it’s because the top end of town (in politics and business) doesn’t want it. A sensible country would borrow $s for renewable energy and public transport infrastructure.

We need to understand big numbers:

GDP in Australia is $1,400 billion (i.e. $1.4 trillion), therefore a figure like $10 billion is nothing (‘a rounding off error’). The Australian government is borrowing $100 million a day (i.e. $5 per person per day) – a figure some argue is a high debt but it’s not relative to many other standards. We’re about to spend $50 billion building 12 submarines to replace other submarines that weren’t being used. Opposition hasn’t complained about this because they realise it’s pocket money.

Australians pay high taxes

Joe Hockey and others in Opposition often refer to our high taxes. In reality we are the 6^th lowest taxing country (from the 34 OECD – developed – countries).

Businesses want a free market economy

There’s no such thing as a free market. Free markets imply an Adam and Eve state. You cannot have a market without rules and regulations. While fossil fuel industries decry carbon taxes they love government subsidies. They make a lot of noise about the regulation they hate. The truth is they love some regulation and hate other regulation.

We must not risk job losses

In Australia this month 350,000 people will move from a state of employment to unemployment. In the same month 360,000 people will move from being UE to employed. This will be described as an increase in employment of 10,000. It doesn’t take into account all the upheaval involved. It’s ridiculous to argue against something on the basis of job losses. Privatisation of electricity by Kennett cost 10,000 jobs, yet that wasn’t a big deal.

DEFINITION OF ECONOMICS: “The science of the efficient allocation of scarce resources.”

When you use up a scarce resource (be it time, a commodity, water etc) you lose the opportunity to use it elsewhere. So if the govt spends money on building roads it has less money to spend on building railways. This is referred to as ‘opportunity cost’ or ‘the production possibility frontier’. If we understand that scarce resources once used for one purpose are unavailable for other purposes we can start talking about allocation.

Businesses rarely confess to the fact that making profits is their priority (witness Twiggy and his claims that he’s concerned about jobs for indigenous people and employment in remote communities). Similarly they will never tell Fran Kelly they’re doing well – firms have no incentive to confess their profits.

When you provide a business with free access to a resource (eg free labour through slavery) their supply increases.  Often free access to a resource (eg water, the atmosphere etc) is not valued. (Consider all-you-can eat buffets where people heap their plates with food but a lot of it is left uneaten). So if you want to ‘efficiently allocate scarce resources’ you need to charge for them.

Giving fossil fuel companies free waste disposal (into the atmosphere) is inefficient. We don’t give the construction industry free hard waste disposal. We now realize the atmosphere is a scarce resource but in the 1900s it was thought to be abundant. Where the politics of economics gets hard is when we’ve already set off in a certain direction (i.e. providing free use of atmosphere).

Notes taken by Lizette Salmon, 5.12.12

 At the recent World Economic Forum at Davos, Christine Legarde chief of the IMF drew attention to climate change as the ‘biggest economic problem’ faced by the West, a position eagerly adopted and praised by those wishing to appear to be conscious of and dealing with ‘the problem’, such as our Foreign Minister Bob Carr.  

 Speaking in an interview from Davos with the ABC, Carr picked out this statement on climate change as the most important beside the other various crises being discussed, like how to overthrow uncooperative Middle Eastern governments, and support our proxies with new arms sales…

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/bob-carr-joins-us-from-world-economic-forum-davos/4483640

Carr postulates that we’ve wasted so much time in Australia on Climate Change denial, unlike so many Western nations .. and then describes the disasters from Climate Change as a collosal self inflicted burden resulting from ‘our addiction to fossil fuels’.

So far so good, you might think, till the interviewer points out that our coal exports are the second largest in the world ..  Carr: “well that’s true we’ve got a coal based energy sector, and coal is relatively cheap, and it’s er, the er higher quality of , er, coal (incomprehensible ) …. and the moral response is that we are pricing it, and we are leading the global push for a comprehensive network of agreements..”   etc etc.

Now I know that Carr isn’t the climate change minister or whatever, but this looks like the government’s position in a nutshell:  – we have to keep our coal exports flowing to keep our economy growing, and help other countries to keep producing the products we need to maintain our excessive lifestyles, but we’ve more than done our duty to help cut (the rise in) emissions by introducing the “Carbon Tax”.

 Our planned emissions by 2020 will be at least 15 % higher than now, but will be called a 10% cut because we will buy someone elses supposed emissions cuts, at the knockdown price of $3 a tonne…   this is our “moral response”.

People in the industry know better of course, like Ian Plimer, onetime AGW sceptic and sci-fi author, who now is appointed director of a nice little shale gas earner for mining guru Gina Rhinehardt:

The following submission was submitted on behalf of WATCH, written by myself, David Macilwain:-

Submission to Senate Enquiry on Extreme Weather, trends and preparedness.

I make this submission as a member of WATCH ( Wodonga Albury Towards Climate Health), and will focus on the issues which are most likely to affect the economic and social health of our region. This includes the valleys and mountains of the Upper Murray catchment, as well as the plains and irrigation areas of the associated areas of the Murray basin.

I would first like to make a general comment about the nature and objectives of the inquiry.

  The Climate Commission focusses on ‘The Critical Decade’, with the next ten years as the make-or-break period for effective action. Such bodies must concentrate on programs for mitigation rather than adaptation as their raison d’etre, and so are loath to admit that – in many people’s view – the ‘Critical Decade’ has already passed. While this new inquiry is certainly important to have in view of the deteriorating climatic conditions, I think it should be acknowledged at the outset that it is ‘the enquiry we didn’t have to have’. Consequently also we should acknowledge the regrettable and reprehensible failure of our governments to take any effective action to mitigate climate change, and indeed to also pursue policies which have ensured that the rate and scale of this change continues to increase.

  Neither is this merely an ‘apology’ to be later forgotten; as we plan and take action to try to adapt to extreme weather events and climatic instability, our job is made harder by the continued existence and expansion of emissions producing activities; a simple response to this paradoxical situation would surely be ‘producer pays’, where a major share of the cost of climate change adaptation is borne by those industries profiting at our expense and that of the environment on which we all depend. Today’s news that the main mining companies liable under the new mining tax have failed to pay ANY tax in the first six months of its operation illustrates how far we still have to go.

In view of this ongoing failure to restrain our emissions and the companies who are responsible for them, it now seems almost futile to talk about any local efforts to limit global emissions in a meaningful way. Recent changes in the Arctic suggest that a tipping point may have already been passed, and positive feedbacks may result in accelerating warming even if all global CO2 emissions were to cease today. It is a huge irony that we are now consequently restricted to efforts to adapt to climate change – the very course advocated for years by the people who have fought against any controls on emissions, and have thereby been largely responsible for bringing us to this lamentable situation. Not only have these people – in government, business, and in the media – poured fuel on the fire by promoting and encouraging fossil fuel extraction and combustion; they have also worked against the expansion in use of renewable energy sources. In addition they have funded and promoted the corrupt cause of the so-called ‘sceptics’such that Australia is fast becoming a bastion of climate change deniers even as its climate changes radically and attracts world wide attention.

So it is in this light that I make the following short submission on some of the possible changes and implications of extreme weather events in our region.

The effects of what appear to be climate changes have certainly been felt in our region in the last decade. Most notably, following some years of general drought, the Murray effectively dried up, with both major storages below 10% full. The complete absence of irrigation water had significant consequences for communities further down the Murray, and in some cases water deliveries were necessary for town supplies as well.  Despite this being a long-record breaking drought, it proved not to be a sign of times to come in the short term; two years of well above average rainfall saw long-dry springs flowing again, and a return of some perennial pasture species like white clover which we had seen the last of in the nineties.

 While these changes are dismissed by some farmers who see everything as cyclical, and accept the losses and gains they might incur, for others on the land the extreme variation is hard or impossible to cope with. Although perverse economic conditions have often been equally responsible, the years of drought forced many dairy farmers to sell up in areas without irrigation or where such water was no longer available. The return of a favourable climate for dairying however did not bring them back, even with the encouragement of better prices for their milk – such enterprises require long-term planning, and some predictability.  And where finance is needed there is now an added problem of greater perceived risk.

  Although severe droughts and floods have the most serious effects on agriculture, the less reported effects of ill-timed frosts, and periods of humid weather, can have disastrous effects on some crops, and both of these climatic effects may become more common. The effects are felt for instance by wine-growers, where a late frost kills the flowers; the same is true for wheat growers, who may also suffer huge losses from ‘unseasonal’ rain and humidity at harvest time.

  While it would certainly be true that a continuation and exacerbation of the drought and heat of the mid 2000s would make ‘traditional’ agriculture difficult in our area, it is arguable that stability around any ‘norm’ is preferable to instability and chronic unpredictability.

 We currently seem to be going through just such a period, where the short term predictions for this spring-summer period were of little use to anyone on the land trying to decide which strategy to follow, or what crop to sow. These predictions merely reflected what appears to be the global situation, where ocean currents and patterns of heat transfer are constantly changing. It is hard to see how this new ‘climate’in our region  may stabilise into any particular regime, such as ‘warmer and wetter’ or ‘hotter and drier’, or whether it may become chronically unstable. With accelerating changes in the Arctic currently affecting most of the Northern Hemisphere beyond the tropic, global instability and unpredictability look likely to follow.

  On the basis merely of my own observations of weather over the last thirty years, the most notable pattern is of the huge influence of atmospheric and oceanic currents, and the consequent prevailing wind direction. The simplistic idea that global warming will bring us hotter and drier conditions is shown to be false by the experience of the last two years; even though the average temperature may have followed the continuing upward trend, and the weather pattern itself was a result of high sea surface temperature in the Indian Ocean, the two wet and humid summers with no extreme heat were a remakable change. The fall in electricity demand that accompanied this different weather illustrated another aspect of it, and was highlighted by the huge resurgence in demand with the recent heatwave, as people turned on their rusting air conditioners.

The increasing occurrence of extreme weather events has just been reported on in a survey by the Potsdam Institute, looking at 131 years of records over 12,000 sites across the globe. The fivefold increase in these record breakers cannot be dismissed or ignored any longer, and the predicted continuation of the trend should force us to dramatically expand our planning and research on the consequences.

 This senate enquiry is a good and overdue beginning.

    David Macilwain,

  Sandy Creek,    NE Victoria   3695