Category: Archive

Canberrans seek debt relief for utility bills

admin /10 October, 2006

An unusually cold autumn and high rental prices have caused a surge in the number of Canberrans seeking debt relief for gas, electricity and water bills, reported The Canberra Times (9 October 2006, p.5).

100-plus applications a month: ACT residents made a record number of requests to the Essential Services Consumer Council in 2005-06 to discharge their utilities debts. The council received 101 applications a month last year; more than double the number it received in 2001-02. It approved about 36 per cent of the cases it heard.

How the system works: The council can instruct utilities, such as ActewAGL, to eliminate the debts of people in financial difficulty, if the customers can show they are acting to remedy their situation. The ACT Government then reimburses the companies.

Numbers still rising: Council chair Peter Sutherland warned that Canberrans had already lodged 25 per cent more applications between July and September than previously, on top of the record 1211 lodged last year.

Urban poor out in the cold: He said the increased number of claims were caused largely by frosty weather in April – the coldest in seven years – and the lack of affordable private rental accommodation. "It’s got to the point where it’s virtually impossible to live in Canberra if you don’t have a [stable] income," he said.

The Canberra Times, 9/10/2006, p. 5

Source: Erisk Net 

Engineering students shop around for scholarships

admin /10 October, 2006

Engineering students are hot property in a time of skills shortages and can shop around for scholarships from state governments and employers, allowing them to get their degree for free before starting a high-paid job, reported The Australian Financial Review (9 October 2006, p.39).

Tax-free: Country Energy in NSW is the latest to attempt to snap up would-be engineers before they even start their study by offering four tax-free scholarships of $40,000 for students starting a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) next year. The successful applicants will also be offered paid work during their holidays but will not be bonded to work at the company after graduating.

Global shortage: The focus is on power engineers, who are in short supply globally. The Country Energy scholarships will be available through the University of Technology Sydney, University of Wollongong, University of Sydney, and the University of Newcastle, which offer specialisations in power engineering.

Qld also dangling fees lure: Engineering is on the second fee band, costing about $7100 a year for a five-year course. The Queensland government has also called for applicants for 12 engineering scholarships.

The Australian Financial Review, 9/10/2006, p. 39

Source: Erisk Net  

Forest burning practices a fallacy

admin /10 October, 2006

Paul Collins – Canberra author, Catholic priest and "fully paid up member of the Greens" – has written a history of bushfires in Australia which puts an alternative view to much of the opinion and rhetoric that has been recorded recently, particularly since the devastating January 2003 bushfires, according to The Canberra Times (9/10/2006, p.B3).

Controversial bushfire views: It’s guaranteed to stir some strong reactions. Collins is very clearly on the side of nature rather than man in the bushfire debate.

"Allow nature to look after itself": For a start, he’s against using large-scale prescribed burns to reduce the amount of fuel in forests and national parks, claiming the weather is the greatest factor in wildfires, not the amount of trees or logs or leaf litter on the ground. He says we need to "allow nature to look after itself".

Slash and burn not the answer: Collins questions even Aboriginal fire regimes and warns against "romanticising such practices as perfect". "What is clear is that the answer to the south-eastern Australian cycle of fire is certainly not to be found in deliberate, broad-scale reduction burning of forests, even if this were possible. Nor it is letting the logging industry or cattle into national parks to ‘thin’ the forests and undergrowth out," he writes.

"Interference" provokes fire vulnerability: "There are strong scientific and historical arguments to show that such interference with the forests and their natural rhythms is precisely what makes them vulnerable to fire."

Fire-prone area residents asking for it: Collins also has firm views about people who choose to live in fire-prone areas, saying "we need to admit that some built assets are far too dangerous to protect, even in moderate or light fires If [people] insist on living on a ridge line with bush coming up on both sides to their houses, or building houses abutting or surrounded by [flammable] forests, then they have no one but themselves and the local council that granted the building entitlement to blame," he writes.

Top Australian fire incidents: The book tracks in detail conflagrations such as the 1939 Black Friday fires, the 1967 Hobart fires, the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and the 2003 fires including Canberra’s January 18 firestorm (unfortunately referred to as the "January 17" firestorm, more than once). It captures the human drama and tragedy as well as the politics.

Burn: The Epic Story of Bushfire in Australia, by Paul Collins, Allen and Unwin, 420pp, $35.

The Canberra Times, 9/10/2006, p. B3

Source: Erisk Net  

Pedestrian power: cut smog levels by tonnes

admin /9 October, 2006

About 2400 tonnes of smog pollutants could be eliminated from the Sydney skyline every year if commuters left the car at home for just one day a week, claimed The Sydney Morning Herald (6 October 2006 p4).

Pedestrian power: The chairman of the Pedestrian Council of Australia, Harold Scruby, said the organisation’s annual walk, now in its ninth year, aimed to raise awareness of the environmental, social and health benefits of walking.

Vehicles biggest smog factor: Motor vehicles contribute 70 per cent of the pollutants that make up the smog, most visible on the Sydney skyline during the summer months.

High summer temps equal high pollution: The director-general of the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, Lisa Corbyn, said predictions of a hot, dry summer would mean more days with high air pollution.

Room for improvement – and fuel economy: Sydney’s air pollution levels were better than many international cities, Ms Corbyn said, but if everyone in Sydney walked, cycled or caught public transport once a week, it would save about 2400 tonnes of smog forming chemicals from entering the atmosphere each year. “It would also save around one million tanks of petrol,” she said.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 6/10/2006, p. 4

Source: Erisk Net  

What price a tree?

admin /9 October, 2006

It could be a question for a quiz night: Where can you find trees worth $27 million standing on 15 hectares within two kilometres of Hobart’s GPO? proposes The Mercury (7 October 2006 p4). As their value suggests, they aren’t just any old trees, destined to be firewood, but the richly diverse collection within the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens on the Domain.

Birthday-less trees possibly "illegitimate"? Some of the trees have no known date of birth and may even date to when the gardens were founded in 1818. Trees with known “birth certificates”, dating to the 1860s, are fairly common. Then there are the many which have been planted in more recent times…and they all have a price-tag.

$107,000 state emblem worthless as lumber: Even the common Tasmanian blue gum which was removed from its dominant position in the gardens last month had a value of $107,000. It was a striking example of the species, which is the state’s floral emblem, yet it was riddled with fungus and to a sawmiller was worthless.

Value is in the eye of the beholder: However, as the garden’s botanical resources officer Alan Macfadyen explains, the trees are not valued on their worth to a sawmill but on a variety of factors designed to value trees on public or community-owned land in town and Suburban locations. “There are about a dozen different ways of valuing trees,” says Macfadyen.

Simple replacement cost … The simple way is to know how much it costs to cut down and how much it costs to plant a new one in its place.

… or complicated formula: "We’ve adopted the Thyer tree valuation method which was developed in Sydney in 1984. This method takes into account the variety, its rarity, height and age, its health, whether someone of significance planted it, its aesthetic value, its social significance and a number of other factors," explained Macfadyen.

Arboreal aristocracy: “We have some 1400 trees in the gardens which are more than five metres tall and about 100 of these are on the Tasmanian Register of Significant Trees. The significant trees are valued at more than $4 million alone. The fact they have been registered as significant adds markedly to their value.

Tall timber territory: “We didn’t value anything under five metres tall in arriving at the total of $27.5 million. The total value can always be disputed as a lot of the valuation process is subjective.”

Foreign dignitaries: The Thyer method places a $100,000-plus valuation on several trees in the gardens, including a Himalayan cypress, a cork oak (believed to be the largest in Australia), a deodar cedar, three long-leaved Indian pines, a Canary Island pine, a Spanish fir and two Wellingtonias growing at the front entrance.

Winnie’s English oak as solid as the Bank of England: About 30 trees in the oak collection, most about 100 years old, have a total value of $890,000. A single oak on the lawn just inside the gates, although not a particularly outstanding specimen, has a value of $32,000 – largely because of its history as it was grown from an acorn taken from Sir Winston Churchill’s garden at Chartwell in Kent.

The Mercury, 7/10/2006, p. 4

Source: Erisk Net  

US EPA stands condemned for toxic air pollutants

admin /9 October, 2006

The US agency charged with cleaning up America’s air, the Envioronmental Protection Agency (EPA), is failing to do so, according to an article in New Scientist (5 August 2006 p9).

Fifteen years of ‘go slow’: Plans made 15 years ago to rid the country’s air of toxic pollutants that cause cancer and a range of other health problems are hopelessly behind schedule, says a damning report released last week by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Dry-cleaners not so clean: Slow progress has also been made on a third task: to regulate toxic emissions from small stationary sources such as dry-cleaners, which emit the carcinogen percholorethylene (PCE).

One-third of airborne toxins: These sources discharged a third of all airborne toxics in 2002, but the EPA had only set 16 of 70 emission standards when the report went to press. Since then, it has finalised its standards for dry-cleaners to phase out PCE in residential areas, according to an EPA official.

‘Biggest-bang-for-your-buck’ approach: As for the final task, setting standards for mobile sources of toxics such as cars, the EPA has only just begun. Any attempt to prioritise the work, however, may be hindered by EPA’s failure at another task: a cost-benefit analysis to determine how the most disease could be prevented for the least cost.

Going around in circles: "This means no one can fully assess the benefits of reductions in concentrations or risks of current exposure," says Amy Kyle, a toxics researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.

New Scientist, 5/8/2006, p.9

Source: Erisk Net