Category: Columns

After the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday night, Channel Seven was paid to screen an advertisement featuring a Tibetan woman asking ear-wax Kev to raise human rights when polishing his Mandarin on Chinese officials. The advertisement was paid for by the online activist group, Get Up, in conjunction with the Australia Tibet Council.

Channel Seven refused to run the advertisement despite a protest by thousands of Australians against this insidious self-censorship.

For every thousand protestors there are more enthusiastic viewers who consider international politics, even doping scandals, a dull side-show. For them, the real action is the five ring circus, on the track and in the pool. If you’re that way inclined, you may think that mixing politics with sport spoils the party; like the disgruntled aunt who ruins every wedding by reminding anyone who’ll listen that she should have inherited grandma’s ruby.

I wrote last month that we should cut China and India a little slack on their carbon emissions. Some people think we should cut them a little slack on human rights. If it’s okay to emit tonnes of carbon dioxide in an attempt to feed and clothe hundreds of millions of poor, perhaps it’s okay to lock up a couple of hundred thousand protestors to keep a nation of 1.2 billion on the rails. You don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Right?

I don’t agree.

Chairman Mao told the first deputy premier of the USSR, Anastas Mikoyan, in 1957 that China was invincible because she could sacrifice tens of millions of citizens without blinking an eye. He maintained this stance until his death, telling party officials before meeting Nixon in 1972 that the United States was weak because it would not take strong action against its own people.

Guantanamo Bay and the Homeland Security Act indicate that Mao may have viewed the United States through rose-coloured glasses, but there is no doubt about China’s ruthlessness. Since 1999, 70 million Falun Gong practitioners have been condemned to silence, or arrest and torture. Amnesty International estimates that half a million Chinese are imprisoned without trial and thousands of people are killed in prison each year. It also reports that the Chinese government sells the organs of executed prisoners to Japanese and American customers. Certainly, Westerners in need of a new kidney regularly head to China on “organ holidays” organised by US brokers. The arrangement conveniently gets around international laws on organ trading.

With global malfeasance widespread, it might seem trifling to imprison 0.05% of your population without trial and sell a few thousand organs of those that happen to die while under state care.

The point is, China has begged for international approval, it has signed treaties to win the Olympic games and presents itself to the world as a modern, enlightened state.

This week is the best opportunity to raise these issues.

If your son or daughter had been raped and killed by a prominent citizen widely suspected of serial offenses, would you have any qualms about gate-crashing a high profile party to state your case? All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good people do nothing.

Doing something can be as simple as watching the film Plum Blossom in the Snow, visiting the web-site of the Australia Tibet Council or registering your views with Get Up.

Paying to watch the circus, while ignoring the conditions of the dwarves and bears, only prolongs the agony.

It seems, though, I was not as far off the mark as you thought. One enterprising entrepreneur has built a business replacing internal combustion engines with humans. Known as Pedapods, space-age rickshaws now ply the streets of Sydney competing with yellow cabs and stretch limos.

The highly visual, arguably attractive taxi-alternative is powered by, you guessed it, a human. A small electric motor can be used to help drag larger tourists up hill, which is just as well as the Pedapod seats three and some of Sydney’s streets slope slightly.

I expect that local operators will see the benefits of paying backpackers next to nothing to drag wealthier tourists up Danger Point for a view of the Great Divide,while earning advertising dollars by promoting local businesses on the attention-grabbing cab. I’m surprised that a gymnasium chain has not joined in charging gym membership fees to Pedapod “pilots” who will then pay for the privilege of publicly pulling people in a partly powered pushbike.

It’s true, novelty plays a certain part in this business model, ensuring the advertising revenue contributes to the set up costs. The point though, is exactly the one I made last week: As oil costs continue to soar (temporary corrections do not buck the overall trend) muscle power will once again play an appreciable role in our daily life.

Since we cannot do everything for ourselves, we should start considering the option of paying another to do it for us.

Simple arithmetic dictates that there must be more employees as there are employed, so some of us will have to be paid to do someone else’s chores. I kinda thought that was already the definition of employment, but some of you, I know, will argue that work ennobles and defines us.

The broad consensus is that our suburban life-style is roughly equal to those in classical times who had a household retinue of forty slaves.

In truth, the human is not a terribly efficient machine.

We consume about 2.5 kilowatt hours worth of energy as food every day, even when we are not working. When physically working at full stretch, such as pedalling three large German tourists from Pacific Fair to Jupiters, we burn about 400 watts – using our daily food supply in six hours – to deliver about 30 watts. The other 370 is exhaled as carbon dioxide, heat and flatulence.

By comparison, a litre of unleaded petrol delivers about 10kilowatt hours or four person day’s worth of food. Using these numbers, some people claim that it is more efficient to drive to the shops than it is to walk.

The point is, you burn the fuel you eat anyway, watching the telly or digging a ditch. By doing useful physical work, you contribute twice. Firstly through the work you do, secondly by replacing the machine that burns fossil fuels to do it for you.

Giovanni Ebono is on-air at 99.9 FM this morning from 9:00am

Nelson is right, without a mechanism to limit the emissions of those countries, climate chaos is likely to destroy civilisation as we know it.

The good news is that Australia can provide that mechanism. We account for one third of global coal and iron exports, 43 percent of aluminium ore, and ten percent of the world’s base metals.

A carbon tax on the energy that we export would immediately bring China and Japan into a carbon trading scheme. A carbon tariff on all imported goods would complete the process, enforcing carbon trading at a global level while leaving developing countries free to expand their own economies.

The argument that this will disadvantage Australian energy exporters in the short term is a complete furphy. The world’s nations meet in Copenhagen next year to negotiate an agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol in 2012. The major obstacle to that agreement is the refusal of the world’s developed nations to commit to targets more ambitious than developing nations.

Carbon tariffs remove the unfair competitive advantage that the developing world’s manufacturing industries would have over the developed world, thereby encouraging nations, such as Australia, to rebuild their own manufacturing industries and reducing the carbon produced by transporting cheap goods around the world.

The Labor government has seen fit to avoid such bold action, because the energy sector, notably coal, which produces around ten percent of our export dollars, has such a strong grip on the governments of most mainland states.

In fact, any short-term negative impact on energy exports will be quickly made up as energy prices rise, local manufacturing picks up and the rest of the world joins the scheme.

Australia can break the nexus between the developed and developing world at the Copenhagen conference in 2009. We must insist that our political parties take the long term view, now.

Here’s a relatively simple way to reduce your greenhouse emissions and unemployment at the same time. Hire a human.

We all know that the energy we consume in our daily lives is what causes global warming, the problem is that a low energy lifestyle looks pretty drab and miserable when stacked up beside our push-button, always-on world of convenience.

It is a lot easier to throw a frozen dinner in the microwave than to prepare dinner from freshly grown, organic ingredients, or to grab a packet of biscuits and bucket of dip on the way to a meeting, than to knock off an hour earlier to bake and make your own. We are trapped in a vicious cycle of earning money to pay for the convenience products that allow us to maintain our busy lifestyles.

If the alternative, though, is staying at home to bake our own bread, sprout our own mung beans and kill and prepare our own chickens, many of us are simply not prepared to make the transition.

Food is only the tip of the iceberg. The dish-washer, food processor, washing machine, vacuum cleaner and lawn mower all consume hundreds of kilowatts of energy to manufacture and more energy to run. The thought of chucking in these appliances and applying the elbow grease is not an appealing one.

The solution may be as simple as paying someone else to do it for you.

For the last one hundred and fifty years, machines have replaced humans because labour was expensive. Cheap, plentiful energy has made it more cost-effective to hire (or buy) a machine to do the job. In 1900, 75 per cent of work performed in the United States was done by muscle power. Horses pulled carriages and ploughs, men harvested crops, dug ditches and unloaded ships. Almost all domestic chores and food production was carried out by hand.

During the sixties, the phrase “untouched by human hand” advertised food that was hygenic and scientifically produced. Today less than one percent of work is manual.

Now we move into an era where resources are limited and labour is plentiful.

The new slavery is a term coined to describe the global phenomenon of factories in the world’s megacities that employ millions of people on subsistence wages without any consideration of sick pay, retirement funds or opportunity to educate their children. When the worker collapses, they are simply thrown into the street and a new one is found. Their prospects are considerably worse than those of negroes captured in Africa and transported across the Atlantic two hundred years ago.

Even in the isolated, pampered world of suburban Australia, there are plenty of people under-employed and without sufficient resources to put a decent roof over their heads.

Do the numbers for your own family.

If you were to cut your food bill in half by buying only staple ingredients, stop paying for childcare and babysitters and employ a cook and carer instead, how much worse off would you be?

You could come home to a freshly cooked meal every night, with the washing already folded and put away. You might even have time to sit back and have fun with the family.

Given that the cost of manufactured goods and energy is going to keep rising rapidly for the foreseeable future, the numbers are only going to get better.

If you want to help solve the affordable accommodation crisis at the same time, you might start clearing out that spare room, now.

Grain and animal farmers are clamouring to be recognised for the contribution that new (or renewed) cropping methods can make to burying carbon-dioxide in the soil.

Organic matter is 57 percent carbon and industrial farming practices have halved the amount of organic material in the soil. Perennial grasses and crops planted into existing stubble instead of bare soil can restore this organic matter to near natural levels. Hundreds of tonnes of carbon can be stored in every hectare of soil by simply adopting sustainable farming practices.

Visiting Australia for the Grains Industry Conference in Melbourne next week, David Miller, of the Iowa Farm Bureau said that American farmers are now earning between $US3 and $US7 per tonne for the carbon dioxide stored using such practices. The system pays around 20% of the global prie for carbon dioxide but the low price means that rigorous auditing is not required and the scheme operates on a voluntary basis without much bureaucracy.

Australian farmers are incensed that they have not been acknowledged for their contribution to reversing global warming. It is the changes to land use that has kept Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions below the generous eight percent increase over 1990 levels that was negotiated under the Kyoto protocol. Industry and the energy sector have significantly increased their carbon emissions while farmers have footed the bill.

Last week’s Green Paper released by the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, only rubs salt into the wounds. While it exempts farmers from the carbon trading scheme until 2015 it provides taxpayer subsidies to the coal-fired electricity generators and completely exempts energy exporters.

Even Woodside Petroleum is angry about the scheme. CEO, Don Voelte, said that the industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars cleaning up its act, and is now being hit for it. “We are not dirty enough to get the compensation,” he said.

With farmers, environmentalists and petroleum producers all on the same side, the government is clearly taking a high risk gamble to keep the powerful coal lobby happy.

Because the nation’s food supply is at stake, we can only hope that the government recognises that the farmer’s close relationship with nature puts them in the prime position to steer us toward a carbon neutral future.

Giovanni posts sustainable farming stories to www.thegenerator.com.au

In each case, a small problem in a critical part of the system, caused system overload elsewhere and exposed other minor problems that lead to massive failure. The loss of power interrupted water supplies and switched off fridges and petrol pumps as well.

These complex, integrated systems respond unpredictably to minor problems.

A 1.4 megaton nuclear device exploded 250 miles above the North Pacific in 1962, blew out streetlights and telephones in Hawaii, 800 miles away. Mobile phones and personal computers were still fictional in 1962.

Twenty years later, interest rates were rising along with fears of neutron bomb attack.

Johnny Carson observed that scientists have invented a weapon that destroys human life, but leaves buildings standing. “It is the 17% interest rate,” he quipped.

In this context, it is interesting to note that the Internet was invented precisely to avoid this threat. A network of networks, with no central control and intelligent connections that automatically channel traffic to the fastest link, it was created to survive electro-magnetic pulse weapons.

Ironically, communication companies, media giants and many governments spend vast sums to tame the Internet and to re-establish central control. In some cases, such as the Great Firewall of China or commercial firewalls and routers, this attempt is deliberate. The cost of building an Internet backbone, though, is the major culprit. A small number of fast links still carry the majority of traffic.

The loss of Internet services to India, Pakistan and Iran last year because a submarine cable became snagged by a US naval vessel may have been deliberate or accidental; either way, it proves that the Internet is vulnerable, as the Gold Coast discovered last week.

You and I, dear reader, can leave these high level considerations for the International Institute of Electronic Engineers. There is, however, one significant lesson for all of us.

If your home does not have its own rainwater supply, there is no food in your garden, and you have no way to get to the nearest shop without your car, you may want to consider how you would survive if the power went off for a week.

A report to the British Government last month revealed that there is only enough food stored in UK shops and warehouses to supply nine meals for each Briton. If the power went off or oil imports were interrupted for more than three days, some poms would starve.

I’m not saying that the end of the world is nigh and you should start loading the baked beans into the bunker. I am saying that the future will be less stable than the recent past and we all need to start living so that we can remain comfortable when the power and water supply are interrupted.

The always-on network may not be always there.

Giovanni Ebono is on Bay FM 99.9 from 9am this morning.