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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.
As well as Giovanni’s articles it picks up the most pertinent articles from a range of other news services. You can publish the news feed on your website using RSS, free of charge.
 

  • Ethanol plants lag the law

    Read it in The Land

    THE NSW Government this month re-affirmed its decision to mandate 10 per cent ethanol in all regular unleaded petrol sold in the State by 2011, but finding enough ethanol could be a stretch.

    Proposals to build ethanol plants in NSW are at worst floundering or at best grinding their way slowly through the approval processes.

    The exception is the Manildra Group which is in the process of ramping up ethanol production at its starch plant at Nowra.

    According to Manildra chairman, Dick Honan, the expansion will lift annual production to 240 million litres a year, equivalent to about four per cent of the State’s petrol consumption.

    “For 10 per cent ethanol there will have to be another player to do it,” he said.

    But where the remaining six per cent for the target will come from is in the lap of the gods, and the crash in the world oil price in recent months is unlikely to spark latent ethanol projects into life.

  • Foodbowl project saves redgum forests

    Australia’s most cleared state will create four new national parks in 2009 after the Victorian Government promised significant extra protection for the prized river red gum forests in the state’s north.

    In Victoria, another 80,000ha of national parks will be created which will have grazing and logging bans.

    The move to reduce the scale of commercial logging and cattle grazing in Victoria’s red gum forests has been applauded by environmental groups.

    And Wilderness Society spokesman Gavin McFadzean challenged NSW, which also boasts significant strands of red gum forest, to match Victoria’s action.

    But it’s sparked anger among farming and timber groups.

    Supporter of cattle grazing in the red gum country, Max Rheese, said the bans would increase fire risk along the river.

    “Cattle grazing is a fuel-mitigation measure,” he said.

    “By shutting the graziers out, you increase the fuel load … the grasses in the Barmah are already chest high.”

    The comments were echoed by Victorian Farmers Federation spokesman Simon Ramsay.

    National Party leader Peter Ryan said the burden of creating the new parks would be carried by towns along the Murray in the form of job losses.

    “This will do nothing to preserve the river red gums – what they need is rain,” he said.

    The conservation expansion is the result of a 2006 election promise and to reports suggesting the majority of red gums are either dead or dying.

    In a long-awaited response to the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council’s investigation, the Brumby Government has proposed new national parks for the Barmah Forest near Echuca, parts of the Gunbower Forest near Cohuna and sites on the Lower Goulburn River near Shepparton and the Warby-Ovens region near Wangaratta.

    The move means up to 160,000 hectares of red gum forest are now protected in reserves, prompting the Wilderness Society to label it the most significant environmental gesture of Mr Brumby’s 17-month premiership.

    Victorian Association of Forest Industries chief executive Philip Dalidakis estimated that up to 75pc of red gum areas currently available to commercial logging would become off-limits, meaning many jobs would be lost.

    He disagreed with Mr Brumby’s claim that logging in the red gum areas was “just not sustainable”.

    Most of the logging licences will expire next year, however, logging will still be permitted indefinitely in parts of the Gunbower, Benwell and Guttram forests.

    Environment Minister Gavin Jennings said the Government would also sanction forest “thinning” in some regions — a process where some red gums will be removed to help maintain the health of superior specimens nearby and reduce fire risk. Environmentalists said they would have preferred a ban on all logging, but were still happy with the result.

    Yesterday’s announcement did not guarantee any environmental flows for the red gums.

    But the Brumby Government said its Foodbowl Modernisation Project — which is planned to save water by minimising irrigation losses — would play a major role in watering the ancient forests

  • Packer sells up Top End

    Read it in The Land

    James Packer is set to sell off his family’s huge rural holdings built up over a quarter of a century, as the credit crunch severely dampens investors’ ability to borrow.

    Reports indicate that British private equity firm Terra Firma is interested in buying the Packer family’s 16 properties, for about $425 million.

    Although Packer was considering selling a stake of his Consolidated Pastoral Company to private equity early last year, he had intended to retain his family’s links to an iconic Australian business that his father, the late Kerry Packer, began 25 years ago.

    But the credit crunch seems to have put paid to those hopes.

    Packer will sell 90pc of Consolidated Pastoral, Australia’s second-largest cattle owner, to Terra Firma and allow Ken Warriner, a long-time family friend and boss of the cattle empire, to keep his 10pc holding.

    The sale will force the billionaire, who worked as a jackeroo on one of the family stations in the Northern Territory as a teenager, to relinquish his title as one of Australia’s largest landholders.

    Terra Firma is not the first overseas investor to buy great swathes of Australia’s outback cattle stations in recent years.

    In 2005, the Sultan of Brunei bought five cattle stations, joining other investors from Malaysia, Indonesia, Argentina and the US.

    The pending sale, expected to be finalised early in the new year, comes at a high point for the price of remote cattle properties in northern Australia, because of the expected growing demand for beef exports in China and India and weakness in the Australian dollar.

    Packer is also rumoured to have quietly put the last of his media interests — a 38pc stake in Consolidated Media Holdings — on the auction block.

    His gambling investments have been under pressure.

    Crown has been forced to put in an extra $C20 million ($A24.8 million) to fund nine casinos in Canada through a joint venture with Macquarie Bank.

    Earlier this month, Crown launched a $300 million equity placement to strengthen its balance sheet to help weather the gambling downturn in the US, Macau and Australia.

    Packer’s pastoral interests are little known to those outside the pastoral industry, as part of his extensive financial empire.

    Consolidated Pastoral is a part of the family’s private company, Consolidated Press Holdings, and owns 17 beef-producing properties — mostly in the Northern Territory and Queensland — covering more than 5 million hectares, or almost the size of Tasmania. It employs 139 people, nearly half of whom are station hands or jackeroos.

    The properties include the 1 million-hectare Newcastle Waters station in the Northern Territory, bought in 1983 (pictured) and also home bases for Ken Warriner when he in the cattle country.

    Like his love for television, James’ father showed a close interest in the family properties. “It is one thing that Kerry really liked about it, compared to television,” Warriner once said.

    “He said, ‘You guys tell each other everything. You’ve got nothing to hide; it’s all open.’ He had a lot of time for the people in the north because they copped it pretty tough.”

    The cattle are either exported to South-East Asia via Darwin, or to Japan, or sent to the Australian market.

    They are bred on the vast outlying properties, then trucked south where they are fattened on properties in southern Queensland.

    It is unclear whether the latest sale will involve just the stations or whether it will include Packer’s interests in the live-cattle export business and processing.

    Packer plans to sell only 16 stations because he would be loath to even consider parting with the flagship family property, Ellerston, in the Hunter Valley, NSW.

    Parts of Ellerston have been in the family since 1956 and James’ father is buried there.

    Consolidated Pastoral racked up a loss of $20 million in 2007-08, according to the latest financial statement filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in November. But this was an improvement on a loss of about $24 million the previous year and $36 million in 2005-06.

    The latest accounts show the company’s revenue of $36 million a year.

    Consolidated Pastoral has total debts of $684 million, including $459 million owing to its controlled entities and $225 million in non-current bank debt.

    Its 300,000 head of cattle are valued at $145 million.

     

  • Barrier Reef already in decline

    See the Guardian Article

    Coral growth across the Great Barrier Reef has suffered a “severe and sudden” slowdown since 1990 that is unprecedented in the last four centuries, according to scientists.

    The researchers analysed the growth rates of 328 coral colonies on 69 individual reefs that make up the 1,250 mile-long Great Barrier Reef, off north-east Australia. They found that the rate at which the corals were laying down calcium in their skeletons dropped by 14.2% between 1990 and 2005.

    Corals around the world are severely threatened by coastal pollution, warming seas and over-exploitation, but the most probable explanation for the drop in the growth rate of the corals’ calcium carbonate skeletons is acidification of the water due to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. More acid water makes it more difficult for the coral polyps to grab the minerals they need to build their skeletons from the sea water.

    “Our data shows that growth and calcification of massive Porites in the GBR [Great Barrier Reef] are already declining and are doing so at a rate unprecedented in coral records reaching back 400 years,” wrote Dr Glenn De’ath from the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, Queensland, and his colleagues in the journal Science. “Verification of the causes of this decline should be made a high priority.”

    Porites corals can be centuries old and grow into 6m tall mounds. Rather like a tree ring, each year’s growth is visible as a band, so by drilling into the corals the scientists could examine the extent of growth in specific years. The team used x-rays and a technique called gamma densitometry to measure annual growth and skeletal density, which then allowed them to calculate the amount of calcification annually. They found that the calcification rate rose 5.4% between 1900 and 1970, but this dropped by 14.2% between 1990 and 2005. The drop was mainly due to a growth slowdown from 1.43cm a year to 1.24cm. The researchers measured the same effect in both nearshore and offshore reefs, suggesting it is not due to pollution from the land.

    “This study has provided the first really rigorous snapshot of how calcification might be changing,” marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland in Australia told Science. “The results are extremely worrying.”

  • Hansen begs Obama to follow through

    Check out the Guardian article

    Current approaches to deal with climate change are ineffectual, one of the world’s top climate scientists said today in a personal new year appeal to Barack Obama and his wife Michelle on the urgent need to tackle global warming.

    With less than three weeks to go until Obama’s inauguration, Prof James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, asked the recently appointed White House science adviser Prof John Holdren to pass the missive directly to the president-elect.

    Obama spoke repeatedly during his campaign about the need to tackle climate change, and environmentalists fervently hope he will live up to his promises to pursue green policies.

    The letter, from Hansen and his wife Anniek, is a personal plea to the first couple. It begins: “We write to you as fellow parents concerned about the Earth that will be inherited by our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born … Jim has advised governments previously through regular channels. But urgency now dictates a personal appeal.”

    In a covering letter to Holdren, Hansen explains that he wrote the letter a few weeks ago while in London. His wife had suffered a heart attack (“fortunately we were near a very good hospital”) and while they waited for doctors to give the go-ahead to fly back to the US he decided to compose his petition to the new first family.

    Hansen has been one of the most prominent advocates of action to tackle climate change since he first spoke on the issue at congressional hearings in the 1980s. His testimony to the senate featured in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and he has received numerous honours for his work on the issue, including the WWF’s top conservation award.

    Hansen wrote that there is a “profound disconnect” between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem as described by the science. He praised Obama’s campaign rhetoric about “a planet in peril”, but said that how the new president responds in office will be crucial. The letter contains a wish list of three policy measures to tackle global warming.

    Hansen lambasts the current international approach of setting targets to be met through “cap and trade” schemes as not up to the task. “This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat. It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity,” the Hansens wrote.

    The letter will make uncomfortable reading for officials in 10 north-eastern and middle–Atlantic states whose carbon cap and trade mechanism – the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative – got under way today. The scheme is the first mandatory, market-based greenhouse gas reduction programme in the US and it aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 10% by 2018.

    Hansen advocates a three-pronged attack on the climate problem – all measures he has promoted before. First, he wants a moratorium and phase-out of coal-fired power stations – which he calls “factories of death” – that do not incorporate carbon capture and storage.

    “Coal is responsible for as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as the other fossil fuels combined, and its reserves make coal even more important for the long run,” the Hansens wrote.

    Second, he proposes a “carbon tax and 100% dividend”: a mechanism for putting a price on carbon without raising money for government coffers. The idea is to tax carbon at source, then redistribute the revenue equally among taxpayers, so high carbon users are penalised while low carbon users are rewarded.

    Finally, Hansen wants a renewed research effort into so-called fourth generation nuclear plants, which can use nuclear waste as fuel. “In our opinion [fourth generation nuclear power] deserves your strong support, because it has the potential to help solve past problems with nuclear power: nuclear waste, the need to mine for nuclear fuel, and release of radioactive material.”

    Hansen argues that the current emphasis on reduction targets combined with carbon trading schemes make it too easy for countries to wriggle out of their commitments. He cites the example of Japan’s increasing coal use – the dirtiest fuel in terms of carbon emissions. To offset these increases in emissions Japan has bought credits from China through the clean development mechanism – an instrument set up by the Kyoto protocol – yet China’s emissions have continued to increase rapidly. China has now overtaken the US as the biggest polluter in the world.

    “Nobody realistically expects that the large readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the ground. Caps will not cause that to happen – caps only slow the rate at which the oil and gas are used. The only solution is to cut off the coal source,” the Hansens wrote.

  • Developed countries lead on carbon negotiations

    With the target date for the Kyoto Protocol’s successor agreement still a year away, and a lame duck U.S. delegation in attendance, nobody expected a watershed moment at the recently concluded climate change conference (COP-14) in Poznan, Poland. While delegates made modest progress on some key issues, the real stuff happened outside the negotiations, as the leaders of some of the highest-emitting and fastest-growing economies pledged to reduce their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.

    Brazil announced it would reduce its deforestation rate over 50 percent from recent levels by 2017, avoiding an estimated 4.8 billion tons of CO2 emissions. Mexico pledged to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, employing a “cap-and-trade” policy like the one recently considered by the U.S. Congress. South Africa presented a detailed plan to peak their country’s emissions by 2020. And while China—now the world’s largest source of annual greenhouse gas emissions—made no new announcements in Poznan, it is on track to reduce its energy intensity 20 percent by 2010. In 2007 alone, China closed over 1,000 inefficient factories.

    These developments are significant for two reasons. First, these four countries collectively account for nearly a quarter of global emissions. More importantly, China, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico are all developing countries—”non-Annex I countries” in the parlance of the Kyoto Protocol. Critics perennially complain that international efforts to address global warming won’t work unless developing countries—which account for just over half of all global greenhouse gases—take action to reduce their emissions. For their part, developing countries have resisted emissions targets, arguing, legitimately I think, that developed countries have contributed the lion’s share of emissions so far, and should lead in making reductions. In any case, the argument that developing countries are taking no action is wrong. This month’s pronouncements signal a growing urgency on the part of emerging economies to shift their own development to a more sustainable path.

    While the new targets are politically significant, their impact on emissions and domestic policy remains to be seen. Brazil’s plan, for example, has come under fire by local environmental groups, who charge that it lacks ambition (the first phase of its target was largely achieved before the plan was even announced) and means little without an implementation plan. There is no doubt that China’s plans are being implemented, but as long as China’s economic growth outpaces its intensity targets, they will not result in absolute emissions reductions. Per-capita Chinese energy consumption is still well below that in the United States, so reducing emissions intensity is a reasonable near-term goal. Ultimately though, we will need absolute reductions in China as basic energy demand is satisfied and new technology options materialize.

    Developing countries have come a long way since the US Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because it did not require them to act. President-elect Obama has stated that his administration will seek deep emissions cuts in the U.S., but Congress will no doubt have an eye on China as it considers what policies to enact. A clear understanding of developing country climate and energy policies will be key to fostering confidence that emissions reductions at home will not be negated by unconstrained growth abroad.

    For their part, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa have made at least some of their efforts contingent on outside support, and the Chinese used their program to call on developed countries for greater action. Mexican environment minister Juan Rafael Elvira said that his country’s target was meant to spur other countries to reduce their own emissions—and to help Mexico attract investment to make its reductions. South Africa has divided its plan into low- and no-cost efforts it can tackle alone and additional efforts it could undertake with international assistance.

    As the Obama administration takes up the negotiating reins, it will be navigating a very different terrain than the one in which the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997. Developing countries have presented a range of initiatives that they are prepared to take forward either unilaterally or with international support. The U.S. must now act quickly to pass strong legislation to spur an economic recovery while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Internationally, the U.S. must seek a fair and effective agreement that supports the initiatives already underway in developing countries. A significant part of the global community is ready to do its part. So must the United States.