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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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  • Macquarie follows smart money into food

    From The Land

    Shares in Macquarie Group – the corporate flagship of Macquarie Bank and its raft of subsidiaries – are no longer a market favourite, but that doesn’t seem to faze investors in Macquarie Pastoral Fund.

    From a 2008 high of $66 in May, Macquarie Group shares have plunged to below $20 as the global financial crisis raises questions about the investment bank’s debt – and fee-driven business model.

    But that model, honed to a high pitch with Macquarie’s highly-geared infrastructure funds, is seemingly on a different planet to Macquarie Pastoral Fund and its operating arm, Paraway Pastoral Company.

    Paraway is evolving more along the lines of some of the old-time conservative land companies that dominated the eastern Australian pastoral scene for much of last century.

    Like Scottish Australian Company, Australian Estates, Dalgety, and others of that era, it is building a strategic chain of pastoral properties to give investors low-risk access to Australia’s livestock sector.

    Full story in The Land, March 5.

  • Dock delays threaten wheat exports

    “It would be bad enough if it were just the Koreans threatening to pull out of the Australian market.

    “However, Dow Jones Newswire is reporting that ‘shipment delays have left most, if not all, Indonesian wheat importers scrambling to source the grain from other suppliers such as the US, Canada and Russia’.”

    The Dow Jones Newswire is also reporting: “In previous years, when AWB was the major or sole exporter, shipments were more evenly spread out, limiting the stress on the system at any one point.

    “But with 22 different players jostling for space for the first time this year, the existing system has simply not been able to cope with demand amid the rush by everyone to get their cargo out at the same time.”

    Mr Cobb said the Rudd Government was repeatedly warned that by handing CBH Ltd an effective ‘single desk’ monopoly on transport and ports, that bottlenecks would occur which could lead to the loss of markets.

    “Minister Burke continually ignored this advice and now every Australian will be paying for his negligence,” Mr Cobb said.

    “Agriculture is the one area of the Australian economy which did not contract last quarter.

    “The loss of these major export markets could be an absolute economic disaster, not just for farmers, but for the whole nation.”

  • Obama paves the way for Copenhagen agreement

    Visiting Washington last week, UK Climate Secretary, Ed Milibrand said that the changes wrought in US global warming policy had dramatically increased the likelihood of reaching agreement on a new international treaty at Copenhagen this year.

    “No-one wants to be the nation that wrecks a global deal [on climate change],” he told reporters in Washington. The United States held out until the last minute at the Bali conference in December 2007, making its agreement conditional on hard targets for developing nations India, China and Brazil.

    Since then, the situation has radically worsened, with scientists predicting up to a four degree temperature rise by mid-century and global disasters that could cost the lives of billions of people. United States investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency under President Obama’s financial rescue package will leapfrog the leadership shown by European nations such as Germany.

  • Rebuilding New Orleans to be energy efficient

    Related article from Renewable Energy News

    New Orleans is going green as it continues rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina — with a big assist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

    Sprouting in once-flooded neighborhoods are some new energy-efficient homes featuring rooftop solar panels, extensive insulation and more efficient climate systems. These standards will be applied citywide in schools and hospitals, too.

    Many of the improvements are based on renewable energy programs and strategies provided by DOE and the laboratory.

    Nor are the energy-saving improvements limited to hurricane reconstruction. Even before Katrina, many of the city’s commercial buildings and dwellings were blighted. Entire neighborhoods were built decades ago without insulation and are subject to termite infestations.

    The lab’s commitment to demonstration projects and community partnerships has encouraged city officials to embrace renewable energy.

    Now the motto “Cleaner … Smarter” is stenciled on the city’s new buses that run on a 5 percent biodiesel blend, and New Orleans has been selected as one of DOE’s Solar America Cities.

    “New Orleans has an amazingly vibrant local culture,” says senior project leader Phil Voss, who returned to Golden in January after 18 months in New Orleans. He is the lab’s first energy expert to be embedded in a field project.

    “And until now, that same culture has not been open to many outside ideas – like energy efficiency.”

  • British industrialists in denial about climate change

    Related article from UK Guardian

    Senior figures in the manufacturing industry do not accept that human activities are driving global warming or that action needs to be taken to prepare for its effects, the UK government’s science minister said today.

    Lord Drayson said recent discussions with leaders in the car industry and other businesses had left him “shocked” at the number of climate change deniers among senior industrialists. Of those who acknowledged that global temperatures were rising, many blamed it on variations in the sun’s activity.

    Speaking in London to mark the launch of a new centre that will gather information from satellites to improve understanding of how the Earth’s environment is changing, Lord Drayson said there was an urgent need to restate the scientific evidence for global warming and called for companies to focus on their environmental obligations despite the pressures of the economic downturn.

    “There is a significant minority of senior managers who do not accept the evidence for climate change and don’t see the need to take action,” Drayson said. “It really shocked me that those views are held, and it’s not limited to the car industry.”

    “The industrialists are faced with a very difficult challenge, which is huge infrastructure investment in existing ways of doing business and very difficult global economic circumstances.

    “The temptation is to say we’ll get round to dealing with climate change once we’ve fixed all this other stuff. We need to present them with the evidence to say this can’t wait, we need to fix both,” he added.

    The new centre will receive 33m pound over the next five years and will coordinate research using Earth-observing satellite data at 26 British universities and institutions. Known as the National Centre for Earth Observation, it will focus on ways to improve climate change models, sea level rise estimates, flooding forecasts and ways to predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It also hopes to develop improved weather forecasting software ahead of the London Olympics in 2012.

    A major task for the centre will be to use real-time measurements of sea ice melting, droughts and atmospheric conditions to hone computer models that climate scientists use to predict future warming and its effects.

    “Earth-orbiting satellites are revolutionising our understanding of planet Earth, in terms of how it works and what forces work against it, not least from climate change. But in order to get more from that data, to get climate information on 10 year scales, and on regional scales, we’ve got to iron out some significant issues we have with the computer models,” said Alan O’Neill, director of the centre.

    Some environmental processes are so poorly understood that they hinder the ability of climate models to make accurate predictions. The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from deforestation in the tropics is so uncertain that estimates range from 0.7 to 2.6bn tonnes a year. Other scientists say that some feedback processes in the atmosphere are so unclear they do not even know if they will speed up global warming or slow it down.

    The centre was due to take data from Nasa’s ill-fated Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite, which crashed into the ocean near Antarctica shortly after take-off last month. The satellite was designed to bolster understanding of climate change by mapping levels of CO² in the atmosphere.

    Three new Earth observing satellites are scheduled to launch this year, including the European Space Agency’s Goce probe, which by mapping the Earth’s gravity field will reveal details of changes in ocean currents. Another satellite, Smos, will measure soil moisture and ocean salinity, with the third, cryosat-2, monitoring the thickness of continental ice sheets and sea ice cover.

  • Rainforest drought speeds up global warming

    Related article from Science Daily

    The Amazon is surprisingly sensitive to drought, according to new research conducted throughout the world’s largest tropical forest. The 30-year study, published in Science, provides the first solid evidence that drought causes massive carbon loss in tropical forests, mainly through killing trees.

    “For years the Amazon forest has been helping to slow down climate change. But relying on this subsidy from nature is extremely dangerous”, said Professor Oliver Phillips, from the University of Leeds and the lead author of the research.

    “If the earth’s carbon sinks slow or go into reverse, as our results show is possible, carbon dioxide levels will rise even faster. Deeper cuts in emissions will be required to stabilise our climate.”

    The study, a global collaboration between more than 40 institutions, was based on the unusual 2005 drought in the Amazon. This gave scientists a glimpse into the region’s future climate, in which a warming tropical North Atlantic may cause hotter and more intense dry seasons.

    The 2005 drought sharply reversed decades of carbon absorption, in which Amazonia helped slow climate change.

    In normal years the forest absorbs nearly 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The drought caused a loss of more than 3 billion tonnes. The total impact of the drought – 5 billion extra tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – exceeds the annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined.

    “Visually, most of the forest appeared little affected, but our records prove tree death rates accelerated. Because the region is so vast, even small ecological effects can scale-up to a large impact on the planet’s carbon cycle,” explained Professor Phillips.

    Some species, including some important palm trees, were especially vulnerable”, said Peruvian botanist and co-author Abel Monteagudo, “showing that drought threatens biodiversity too.”

    The Amazon accounts for more than half of the world’s rainforest, covering an area 25 times as great as the United Kingdom. No other ecosystem on Earth is home to so many species nor exerts such control on the carbon cycle.

    The study involved 68 scientists from 13 countries working in RAINFOR, a unique research network dedicated to monitoring the Amazonian forests.

    To calculate changes in carbon storage they examined more than 100 forest plots across the Amazon’s 600 million hectares, identified and measured over 100,000 trees, and recorded tree deaths as well as new trees. Weather patterns were also carefully measured and mapped.

    In the wake of the 2005 drought the RAINFOR team took advantage of this huge natural experiment, and focused their measurements to assess how the drought had affected the forest.

    The study found that for at least 25 years the Amazon forest acted as a vast carbon sink. A similar process has also been occurring in Africa.

    In fact, over recent decades the tropical forests have absorbed one fifth of global fossil fuel emissions.

    But in 2005 this process was reversed. Tree death accelerated most where drought was strongest, and locations subject even to mild drying were affected. Because of the study, we now know the precise sensitivity of the Amazon to warming and drought.

    If repeated, Amazon droughts will accelerate climate warming and make future droughts even more damaging.

    The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.