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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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  • Skilled migration program tightened

     

    Mr Metcalfe said Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has shifted away from her predecessor’s embrace of a ‘big Australia’ toward ‘balanced’ sustainable population growth, had underlined the importance of skilled migration.

    Ms Gillard said on the weekend she does not want to see businesses held back because they can’t access the skilled workers they need.

    But she also doesn’t want to see areas of Australia suffering high youth unemployment because there are no jobs for local workers.

    Treasury earlier this year forecast Australia’s population to reach 35.9 million by 2050, from a current 22 million, saying immigration would be a big contributor.

    Meanwhile, opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison told the summit population growth was ‘getting out of hand’.

    ‘Population growth cannot be a lazy substitute for participation and productivity in our economy,’ he said.

    ‘It needs to be brought under control and there needs to be policies to keep the population under control.

    ‘The prime minister must now answer her own question.

    ‘How many Australians will there be under Labor’s policies, what will be the immigration intake under her policies and where will she make the cuts?’

    However, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally said there was room for growth in the nation’s most populous state, particularly in regional centres.

    But Sydney’s population was set to continue to grow no matter what.

    ‘Even if we stopped all movement into Sydney, there will still be population increases of some 70 per cent,’ Ms Keneally told reporters in Sydney.

    ‘For Sydney, we do join with the prime minister with that desire to have sustainable cities.’

    In its 2010/11 budget, the government said the size of the migration program would be maintained in the new financial year at 168,700 places.

    But the mix would change with increases to skilled migration and reductions to family migration.

    Earlier on Monday, sociologist Katharine Betts told the population summit the level of migration had little impact on the average age of the population.

    ‘Even large migrant intakes don’t make much of a difference to the average age of the population at all,’ said Dr Betts, who is associate professor of sociology at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology.

    However, she also noted a recent Australian survey of social attitudes had found 72 per cent of Australians thought the country did not need more migrants.

  • Eiris review names Britain as ‘dirty man of Europe’

     

    Of those companies in the top 300 dedicated to solving or mitigating the problems of climate change, only 3% were located in Britain. Eiris’s findings come at a time when BP, one of the UK’s best-known companies, has attracted bad publicity worldwide over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

    A spokesman for Eiris said that its review was “worrying from a consumer point of view but also from an investment perspective”. He added: “It is particularly alarming for pension funds and other long-term investors as climate change rises up the political agenda.”

    The greater exposure of UK plc to risk from climate change largely stems from the number of big oil and mining companies that dominate the FTSE 100 index in London.

    Greenpeace said that the Eiris research was a “shameful” indictment of the UK, which had failed to build up a low-carbon business sector despite much political rhetoric.

    Ben Stewart, a spokesman for the environmental campaign group, said: “It seems Britain is still the dirty man of Europe. These figures will shame the succession of ministers who promised Britain would be at the forefront of developing clean tech.

    “As things stand, our economy is poorly placed to benefit from this century’s inevitable shift to low-carbon industry, while Germany looks well-positioned to gain from first-mover advantage.”

    Eiris estimates that 41% of the top 300 companies in Britain and Europe have a significant impact on global warming, either directly from their operations or through the products they manufacture.

    However, there was some good news to come out of the survey. More than 60% of companies with a high or very high impact on the environment have put in place measures under which executive remuneration is in some way linked to the company’s carbon emission reductions.

    More than half of all companies in the most polluting brackets have some kind of long-term carbon reduction targets in place, although Eiris notes that concrete action is harder to find.

    French and German companies in the top 300 are at the forefront among those providing solutions to climate change. The consultancy does, however, point out that many British businesses may be excluded from the ranking because they are smaller.

    In fact, the UK government has led initiatives to limit climate change, publishing the low carbon transition plan and introducing a carbon reduction commitment energy efficiency scheme, as well as a feed-in tariff scheme, promoting clean energy production in the home.

    In the 1980s, the UK was described by Scandinavian countries as “the dirty man of Europe” because of high emissions of sulphur dioxide from industrial power plants, which exported acid rain across the Baltic

  • BP oil spill reaches another US state

     

    Local residents are outraged authorities have not been able to stem the flow of the disaster, sparked almost 10 weeks ago when an explosion ripped through the Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 workers.

    “This might be the last time we are able to come to the beach,” Ocean Springs residents James Vogeney said.

    “What makes us so mad about all of this is that it could have been avoided. All of it.”

    Another resident, Mike Hollings, says he cried when he saw the oil start to wash ashore at the beach.

    “Life as I know it is over. What are we going to do if nobody cares to act fast enough,” he said.

    Wildlife officials have picked up one pelican covered in oil and one dead turtle.

    However, local residents have expressed their anger that the authorities have not yet begun an extensive clean-up of the oil.

    Mississippi state officials says they are waiting for BP contractors to start cleaning up before beginning coordinated work.

    Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Earl Etheridge says they expect more oil to arrive before clean-up crews start their work.

    “We cannot clean up or catch the oil until BP gets here. They have all of our people,” he said.

    “We want to clean this up now. Maybe this will amp up BP’s effort, but we can’t do anything because they have all the money.”

    Later, a reporter visited seven oil-affected beaches and saw only one clean-up crew at work.

    Efforts to contain and clean up oil from the massive spill that began on April 20 are being handled jointly by federal, state and local officials and funded by BP, leading to frustration among people whose coastlines are most at risk.

    The costs for BP are rising sharply on a daily basis. On Friday local time the bill stood at $US2.35 billion.

    That works out at about $US4 million an hour on the basis that the figures were given three days apart.

    But these figures are a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of dollars wiped off its market value.

    Despite desperate efforts, BP is still not capping all of the 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil estimated to be spilling into the sea every day, saying it is managing to contain about 25,000 barrels daily.

    – Reuters

    Tags: disasters-and-accidents, accidents, maritime-accidents, environment, environmental-management, oceans-and-reefs, environmental-impact, water-management, united-states

    First posted 7 hours 40 minutes ago

  • Keneally stands by accused MP

     

    At the time Ms Hay, one of NSW Labor’s biggest fund-raisers, blamed the mistake on an official from head office.

    Yesterday she maintained she had done nothing wrong, saying the matter had been dealt with in 2008 and that any anomalies in returns were nothing more than a ”clerical error”.

    The ALP said it was stunned that the matter had resurfaced and believed there would be no formal investigation.

    ”The election funding authority received and accepted an amended return in 2008. There has been no correspondence between the Australian Labor Party and ICAC over this matter,” an ALP spokesman said.

    An ICAC spokeswoman would not confirm yesterday whether it was investigating allegations against Ms Hay. Less than 5 per cent of all matters referred to the ICAC are brought to the stage of public investigation.

    Having received the backing of Ms Keneally, Ms Paluzzano was exposed by the ICAC last month for having allegedly rorted parliamentary expenses to assist her re-election campaign.

    Her resignation led to the recent Penrith byelection hammering for Labor, which not only exposed the extent of voter antipathy towards the state government but is also believed to have been one of the triggers for the ousting of former prime minister Kevin Rudd in favour of Julia Gillard.

    Before the 2007 election Ms Hay raised $230,000 for the ALP from 170 donors.

    Unfortunately for a string of premiers, she has also never been far from scandal.

    Ms Hay has consistently denied she took part in the infamous sex dance with parliamentary colleague Matt Brown on his desk during an office party. Despite denials from Mr Brown and Ms Hay that the incident ever took place, former premier Nathan Rees dumped her as parliamentary secretary for health last year.

  • What’s the carbon footprint of …a bushfire?

    If you were looking for the single most carbon-intensive thing you could do in your live, starting a bushfire would be a fairly good candidate. That one strike of a match could make your footprint many thousands of times greater than most people achieve over their lifetimes.

    The estimate given above is for the catastrophic “Black Saturday” bushfires in Australia last year. It assumes that 450,000 hectares (1750 square miles) of forest containing 100 tonnes of carbon per hectare was burned, and that all of that carbon becomes CO2. It’s an extremely approximate figure, for sure (some of the carbon would doubtless remain in place) but it does give a sense of the scale. To put 165 million tonnes of CO2e into perspective, the most recent estimate of Australia’s entire annual footprint was 529 million tonnes CO2e, so the fires may have added nearly one-third.

    Emissions from bushfires vary from year to year. In 1997–98 they are thought to have been around 2.1 billion tonnes. In theory, regrowth will absorb the CO2 from the air in time, thus making the fire carbon neutral in the long term. However, it is looking increasingly likely that permanent changes in terrain are taking place, almost certainly helped along by a nasty feedback loop that sees climate change cause drier forests, which in turn lead to more fires, more emissions and more climate change. And so on.

    Furthermore, even if the fires were neutral overall in terms of CO2, they are also a major source of black carbon – also known as soot – which acts as a powerful but short-lived greenhouse gas and one of the key drivers of man-made climate change.

    See more carbon footprints.

    • This article draws from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee.

  • Bob Carr backs Julia Gillard on population

     

    “This is the right direction for Australia and the new prime minister should be congratulated for abandoning talk of a population of 40 or 50 million.”

    Earlier this month, Mr Carr was appointed to head one of three panels on population growth month to develop an issues paper on future population.

    He was charged with chairing the panel, which believes the population is already heading towards dangerously unsustainable levels.

    Two other panels will comprise one with a bent on business interests that view high growth favourably, and one with no strong opinion on numbers but demanding better planning.