Category: Columns

The good news for everyone involved in this project is that both sides have limited the battleground, thus far, to community consultation. The residents are complaining about a lack of it and the soup kitchen is happy to engage in it. That augers well for a sensible outcome.

The challenge for any project that people that supports the less desirable members of our community is that none of us really want it to be in our back yard. “I’m in favour of music festivals but they should be in Tenterfield … The Rally is okay but it belongs in outback Australia … yadah yadah.”

The real crux of the problem is that we are all too busy taking care of ourselves to step up to the line and take care of others. This was driven home to me after spending a New Years Eve hanging around with a few hundred teenagers waiting for the year to change with a small bunch of parents anxious to avoid a repeat of the troubles of previous years. Yes maam, it can be really boring sharing the evening with a different generation that is just as bored with you. Regardless, the facts of the matter are that unless we mix it up and deal honestly with each other, we will never solve our mutual problems.

The best way for the people of North Lismore to come to terms with having a soup kitchen in their back yard is to get along and volunteer. Hopefully after the community consultation that is coming up, they will come to the same conclusion themselves.

 

 

Here, last month, I used the mathematical tool of first principles to clarify the issues around coastal retreat. It seems I threw fuel on the fire.

Byron United’s James Lancaster on Radio National last Friday night tied himself in knots trying to explain why he is against man-made structures such as the rock wall at Main Beach but in favour of structures that mitigate damage to individual property. He told The National Interest’s Peter Mares, “Of course, we could all move five metres up the escarpment … but at some point, you have to draw the line.”

This pretty much defines the problem in a nutshell. Whether it overallocated water, bushfire endangered housing or coastal erosion, no individual human wants to be the one on the wrong side of the line. We want to remain just where we are.

The NSW town of Nyngan was evacuated in 1990 after major floods. The government offered to relocate the town but the people refused and demanded an extra metre on the levee. A long-term resident justified her instrangience thus: “We refused to move thirty years ago. Why should we give in now?”

If an engineering report had suggested moving Lismore up the hill to Goonelabah rather than building the levee that saved the town last year and in 2005, how would you have responded?

Where indeed, do you draw the line?

I put the dilemma to Mayor Jan Barham on The Generator this Monday. How does a government manage the issue of guiding development away from certain disaster when commerce, tradition and emotion all encourage us to stay put.

“You take a long term view and develop policies that give people time to adapt,” she said, gently reminding the property owners of Belongil that most of their properties have been renovated, bought or sold in the twenty years that the coastal retreat policy has been in place.

Part of the challenge for local governments in low lying coastal areas in NSW is that the state government has removed their power to develop local criteria for planning laws.

That makes it very hard for local councils to move their communities up the hill to safety. Those determined to maintain the status quo, however dangerous, can shelter in the labyrinth of detail until a real disaster hits. Then, as humans always do, they’ll complain that no-one warned them.

 

First, let us take climate change out
of the debate. The rising sea levels and increase in extreme weather
caused by greenhouse gas generated global warming make it more urgent
to sort out these issues, but they are not the force that drives these issues. The
sea has always eaten the coastline at one place and built it at
another. History is freckled with tales of man’s futile attempt to
stay the ravages of nature and hang onto a particular speck where he
has put his mark. (Do not be offended, ladies, by the masculine
pronoun. Our ancestral mothers were smart enough to pull up stumps
whenever Gaia raised her finger to scold.)

Secondly, all attempts by Man to arrest
natural progression lead to greater disasters than they avoid.

Walling New Orleans simply created a
fragile bowl that continues to sink into the Mississippi finger
delta. The irrigation channels constructed across the Middle East
have disappeared beneath the sands of the desert they created. The
shrimp farms of the increasingly salty delta of Bangladesh accelerate
the that nation’s slide into the Bay of Bengal. The rock walls we
built to keep open our river mouths have simply altered the patterns
of the shifting sands, scouring out one side and building up the
other.

Thirdly, members of a community stick
up for each other against external oppression. Yet, when we see one of our
own fumbling drunkenly with his car keys, we embrace
paternalism for long enought to apply the necessary force to get those car keys back.

And so, we must stop these modern deniers of Canute
from squandering our resources on attempting to defy the waves. They
not only harm themselves but they damage the environment and further
enrage Gaia. That’s why, fifteen years ago, the Belongil spit was
declared unsuitable for permanent dwellings. That’s why, all over the
globe, regulatory authorities refuse to allow development on low
lying coastal land. That’s why insurance companies are advising their
policy holders of radical changes in their policies regarding acts of god.

The waves have spoken. Retreat.

This article was first publishing in the Northern Star, an APN newspaper. Reprinted with permission.

The difference is the closed cycle of the human-chook food chain, compared to the linear process of “extract, consume and dispose” that characterises salmon farming.

Given that distinction, recycling sounds lovely. Instead of digging up new resources every time we want something, we simply extract it from our old rubbish. For example, it takes twenty times as much energy to manufacture a kilogram of aluminium from raw bauxite, as it does to convert used aluminium cans into shiny new ingots. Recycling an aluminium can, then, saves about 880kilojoules of energy compared to making a new one. Surely a resounding blow for sustainability?

But wait. There’s more.

Re-use is many times more efficient than recycling. Glass containers were traditionally used fifty times before being recycled. The 120 kilojoules required to recycle each aluminium can transport and wash a glass bottle many times over.

The real challenge is to use energy and resources only when they add real value. On average, every Australian disposes of more than 150 aluminium cans a year, consuming between 18 and 150Megajoules of energy in the process. 60Megajoules of energy feeds, clothes, houses and transports the average Indian for a day. Globally, your recycling is very expensive.

Waste is big business. Australians spend over $2billion each year on disposing of around 30 million tonnes of waste. Over 1700 companies operate in the waste disposal sector employing about 10,000 people. The waste management industry is bigger than sugar or cotton and only marginally smaller than Australia’s annual export of grapes.

Big business it may be, but that two billion dollars produces nothing and, while it adds to the published GDP, adds no value to the economy. The cost of processing each tonne of waste is rising at the same time as the amount of waste is increasing. In an attempt to reduce the rising costs of landfill governments actively promote recycling.

Despite widespread cynicism about whether waste companies actually do recycle the goods they pick up, the amont of recycled material is growing steadily. Most construction steel and concrete is already recycled and about 27 per cent of all glass is recycled, despite the fact that it is made from a readily available raw material, sand.

The problem is that all of this recycling barely impacts on our overall consumption of raw materials or the energy used to convert them into goods. Recycling is the answer to the wrong question. The question is not, ‘How can we better manage our waste?’, but ‘How can we waste less?’

Fundamentally, the recycling bin is still a rubbish bin. It requires transportation and handling, the stuff in there has to be scrubbed and rendered back to its basic materials then reformed into a useful object. You should not be comparing recycling to extraction, you should be comparing it to re-use.

If you cannot re-use a container or packaging at least once, you should not purchase it.

Ideally, you should be able to re-use it many times before it requires replacing. Certainly bottles, baskets and sturdy bags fit this criteria and you will see many people in this shire out shopping with such containers at hand. They are not quaint, retro-shopping hippies, they are the vanguard of your sustainable future. Ask them where they got their gear and shop a while in their shoes. Future generations will thank you.

In January 2006 this newspaper ran a double page spread on a proposal by visiting architect, George Stone about his solution to the affordable housing crisis, which he called agricultural based communities. George had risen to local prominence by publicly suggesting to Bob Brown the previous October that private investors might be a source of finance to save Tasmania’s Recherche Bay. A fortnight later, Dick Smith put more than $100,000 on the table and started the process that saved the international icon.

For personal reasons George was specifically focused on creating an environment that supported artists, single mothers and other displaced citizens, but the proposal was fundamentally a communal ownership of expensive assets, such as swimming pools, laundries and workshops combined with the private ownership of a minimalist house. In an interview with The Generator, available online, he said, “No single mother can afford a $400,000 mortgage but we can house ten single mothers on one acre of land, with the right design.”

Over the last two years, Britain has developed an approach to affordable housing that reduces the size of new homes built by the government to reduce both their environmental footprint and their price. The idea grew up under Gordon Brown’s eco-village announcement of 2007 and has been taken up by a number of regional housing associations. A key component of the approach is that “some resources, which citizens have become used to owning individually, may once more need to be viewed as common property.”

These type of approaches to reducing our impact on the planet through living more frugally are an important part of building a society that is capable of sustaining itself in the long term. The current obsession by governments to re-establish economic growth needs to be replaced with sensible approaches to building a society that we can currently afford and that does not steal the resources needed by future generations.

MLC Dr John Kaye will be talking about the transition to a green economy at the Mullumbimby Civic Hall on Saturday June 13. I’ll see you there.

Giovanni Ebono is publisher and presenter of The Generator www.thegenerator.com.au

>Algae-based technologies could provide a key tool for reducing
>greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants and other
>carbon intensive industrial processes.

Algae has a lot of potentially good applications. “Cleaning”  carbon from coal-fired stations isn’t one of them. Shawn and I went over this about 4+ years ago and our basic conclusion is that while the CO2 is “double used” by using it to promote the algae grown, it still end up in the atmosphere. In short, assertions
that this approach can reduce greenhouse gas emissions are dis-ingeneous in the extreme.

 

>Using an intricate photosynthetic process, trendsetters have
>developed biodiesel and ethanol from an unlikely source –
>algae – that, given optimal conditions, can double its
>volume overnight. Up to 50 percent of an alga’s body weight
>is comprised of oil, whereas oil-palm trees–currently the
>largest producer of oil to make biofuels–yield just about 20
>percent of their weight in oil.

This is starting to become clear : these guys are hyping the subject for investment purposes.

Firstly : there is nothing complex about getting bio-diesel from algae. The oil is pretty much the same as most other forms of vegetable oil. You then either have to heat treat it or esterify it with an alchohol such as methanol or ethanol to get a liquid with the right kind of physical properties. The processes for doing so are quite old and well established, yet these guys are trying to slant this like it’s something new.

Secondly : you can’t get optimal growth conditions without very expensive support facilities. I’ll come back to this a little bit later. My point here is that they are, quite literally, trying too hard to “sell” the idea. As a
bio-algae advocate, I’m very suspicious of heir motivations simply because they are trying to instill an un-realistic expectation of what this can actually do.

An oil content of 25% – 35% by mass is more realistic and while this might seem like “splitting hairs” to some people, the reality of the situation is that a large scale _commercial_ process can be very sensitive in terms of it’s profitability to relatively minor shifts in the composition of it’s feed stock. Any Chemical Engineer will tell you that, and their insistence on only quoting the most optimistic values possible is fishy.

>Soy produces some 50 gallons of oil per acre per year;
>canola, 150 gallons; and palm, 650 gallons. But algae are
>expected to produce 10,000 gallons per acre per year, and
>eventually even more.

The relative numbers for algae bio-diesel production are well known. A realistic rate of about 30 times the oil
production per meter per day is accepted as a realistic value. On that basis alone I would question the values in the above paragraph and regard 3,000 gallons per acre per year as the upper limit for commercial production without enclosures ( see below for more on enclosures ).

>Algae are the fastest-growing plants in the world. But if
>it were easy to extract the fuel, most of the world’s
>biodiesel would already be made from microalgae grown on
>nonagricultural land, close to coal-fired power plants.

No : the majority of the worlds transportation vehicles use petrol, not diesel and until recently the cost of
producing bio-diesal from algae was expected to be muchhigher than production from crude oil.

>It’s critical to understand how to select the right algae
>species, create an optimal photobiological formula for
>each species, and build a cost-effective photobioreactor
>that can precisely deliver the formula to each individual
>algae cell, no matter the size of the facility, or its
>geographical location.

Finally, we get to the point.

You can’t “select the right algae” species unless you are growing them in environmentally controlled enclosures ie, special tanks. Otherwise, local algae species will contaiminate the tank and substantially reduce the yield. Special enclosures reduce but do _not_ eliminate this problem and periodically the enclosures must be emptied and sterilised.

The problem with building such specialised enclosures is that they add considerably to the capital fabrication
cost of the facility ( and thus, to the dollar cost of the product ).