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  • India bans planting of first GM crop food

    i

     

    ‘…till such time as independent scientific studies establish to the satisfaction of both the public and professionals the safety of the product from the point of view of its long term impact on human health and environment, including the rich genetic wealth existing in brinjal in our country.’

    Biodiversity threat

    Bt Brinjal would have been the first GM food crop approved for release in India, which has allowed the use of GM seeds for cotton production since 2002.

    But campaigners said the possibility of cross-contamination would have threatened the 2,000 or more traditional varieties of aubergine currently grown in India.

    ‘India is the origin of the brinjal family of plants, so containing the GM trait once the GM brinjal is released could prove impossible,’ said GM Freeze campaigner Peter Riley.

    ‘There are also doubts about how effective the insect resistance would be in the long term,’ he added.

    Friends of the Earth’s food campaigner Kirtana Chandrasekaran said the GM crop would benefit ‘big business and not local farmers or hungry people’.

    Useful links
    Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company

    9th February, 2010

    Ecologist

  • Society ignores the oil crunch at it’s peril;

     

     

    With modern economies geared to their rivets on just-in-time supply of copious amounts of affordable oil, society surely ignores this risk issue at its massive peril.

     

    But that is what BP, Exxon, Saudi Aramco and many other institutions of the hydrocarbon era would have us do. And theirs is the perceived wisdom. I do not know of a single company, outside the taskforce group, where peak oil is on the agenda as a serious risk issue. As for government, Whitehall’s official line is typical, as things stand: there is 40 years of oil supply, no need to worry, and certainly no crisis. To be fair, that view may be in the process of changing, in the light of recent events in the energy markets.

     

    The taskforce report is the second such. The first, published during the financial crisis in October 2008, charted global production capacity coming onstream, factored in depletion, and found that overall global production would peak in 2013, and then fall rapidly while demand continued to rise. The taskforce worried that things could be worse even than this early peak in oil production, if other risks we are concerned about kick in: more giant-oilfield production collapsing in the manner of Mexico, flaws emerging in reserves estimates in Opec countries, and so on.

     

    In 2009 came the recession, and a steep fall in global demand for oil. This has helped, in the narrow sense of that word. It may have bought us two more years. The new report projects production dropping in 2015, though the risks that it could be earlier remain.

     

    The CEOs and chairmen of the taskforce companies have a simple message for government. This monster threat is very likely to descend on the next government in office, in their first term, and the nation needs to act now.

     

    The stakes are arguably higher than with the financial crisis. The taskforce’s worst-case fear is that premature peak oil will involve not just global energy crisis, but potentially energy famine for some oil importing nations – including the UK.

     

    During the financial crash the world went within weeks from a received wisdom that investment banks had squeezed risk out of complex derivatives, to a spiralling doubt, to a tipping point of disbelief and panic. With peak oil, officials around the world, corporate and governmental, would experience exactly the same collapse of confidence in their cosy cultural assumptions. A second giant industry would have been found to have its asset assessment systemically and ruinously wrong. The net impact would be that oil-producing nations would begin to husband their own resources: keeping exports back for use in their own oil-hungry multi-hundred-billion dollar-and-rouble infrastructure programmes.

     

    This is a scenario that could lead to food delivery lorries failing to reach Tesco in time for Friday-night shopping.

     

    The lessons from the financial crash ought to be stark. The prevailing culture mocked the disbelievers, ahead of the crash. Gillian Tett, capital markets editor at the FT, saw the crisis coming because she was a trained anthropologist and knew how to recognise a cult when she saw one. She was accused of scaremongering from the stage of the World Economic Forum. The pattern is the same this time. BP, in particular, has a tendency to mock the concept of peak oil and its advocates.

     

    Meanwhile, as with the climate crisis, there is a general desperation to believe the comforting narrative ahead of the uncomfortable one. This is why it is so important that companies who understand risk speak out, as the taskforce companies have. It is why governments – who must lead in matters of national security – should listen to the uncomfortable arguments and, given the stakes, buy insurance against them.

     

    History is going to judge us all on how we manage the risk of premature peak oil. And soon.

     

    • Jeremy Leggettis the chairman of Solarcentury and SolarAid, and the convenor of the UK industry taskforce on peak oil and energy

  • Ice age coral could point to future sea levels

    Ice age coral could point to future sea levels

    ABC February 11, 2010, 9:35 am

     

     

    Every day thousands of tourists flock to north Queensland to witness the Great Barrier Reef in all its glory.

    But soon a different group of travellers will visit the reef in order to dig up samples of ancient coral buried deep in the ocean floor.

    A group of international scientists say this sediment holds clues to how the Earth adapted since the last ice age.

    Buried deep under layers of coral reef lies a time-capsule of chemicals and sediment and scientists say that contains the clues to how the Pacific Ocean looked several thousand years ago.

    Professor Neville Exon from the Australian National University is one of the masterminds behind the project.

    He says the coral samples will tell researchers how the sea levels and water temperatures have changed in the past.

    “The real proof of a lot of scientific theories developed in other ways is to drill a hole and actually see what’s there,” he said.

    “You often have a pretty good idea of what you’ll get but you don’t have any detail, and this gives you the detail.

    “To build up a good idea of the future you have to understand the past, you have to understand what’s happened in recorded history and you’ve got to have good modellers who understand how all these things interplay.”

    Climate change evidence

    Dr Jody Webster, one of the scientists in charge of the drilling expedition, says the coral samples will provide concrete evidence of climate change since the last ice-age.

    “From other work that we’ve done in different parts of the world, there’s evidence, still quite controversial evidence, that a sea level rise following the end of the last ice-age was not smooth and continuous; there’s these periods of accelerated sea-level rise,” he said.

    “It hopefully will provide better constraints on past sea level rise and a better understanding of past dynamic ice-sheet behaviour, so the way in which some of these perhaps catastrophic ice-sheet collapses occurred.”

    He says this year’s dig is one of just many since the project began seven years ago.

    “It is very expensive 0 I don’t know the exact dollar value but in the order of $5 million to $10 million is being spent,” he said.

    Professor Exon says the scientists are hoping to release the findings to the public after documenting their deep sea treasure.

    “It will be public domain information, and what that means is all the geo-physical information, all the well logging information and all the samples are available one year after the expedition, they are available to all comers,” he said.

    “This is what makes science great, is when it’s in the public domain as this one is.”

  • People who don’t want to live in glass houses should throw stones

     

    It’s not only Sydney. Just as a tree’s age and context are legible in its annular rings, so a city’s age and determinants are legible in the density of its core and its subsequent growth-rings. Sydney was luckier than Auckland, say, or Houston, in having crystallised, as it were, that much earlier, before the car blew it all apart. But as Haskell notes, cities everywhere – including the Parises and Florences – are now ringed by medium and low-density sprawl every bit as relentless and hideous as ours.

    This, though – and the fact that when Sydneysiders hear the word ”density” those beige boxes and redbrick walk-ups are what they see – tells us more about 20th century arrogance than about density per se.

    That’s scandalous enough, but the real jaw-dropper is that architecture wants to go again, and is reviving modernism holus bolus. Pick up any mag and you’ll be hit by some odd-angled, flat-topped, board-form concrete house; eaveless, shadeless, shadowless, sill-less. As though water no longer ran downhill, glass no longer trapped heat, people no longer delighted in grace, breeze or transition.

    The particular house I’m slagging is the Fosc House in Chile, but it could be any one of hundreds that have been darlinged by the design mags over recent months, including several in this country. Modernism is not only back, it’s back unrethought, unreconstituted, unrepentant. How can sentient professionals be so dumb?

    It’s sometimes tempting to think this stuff trivial, and in a way it is. But the density issue illustrates just how pivotal architecture will be in determining the future of the species.

    In November 2008, while the world’s eyes were crossed on Obama and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, humanity passed an important milestone. Thenceforth, more than half of us live in cities. How those cities are shaped – and how lovely they are – will largely determine our wellbeing and even our survival.

    Again as Haskell notes, the European city-cores we admire are distinguished by “the type of architecture that ensures inner-city living can be a pleasure”. Can this be so hard to do? Well no. It’s not hard. It’s just that pleasure – other than the architect’s pleasure at making the glossy front covers – hasn’t been on architecture’s critical path for some time. And now, making matters worse, we’ve allowed a system to take root that means it can never be reinstated.

    There are several factors here: the way modernism played – nay, danced – into the hands of the profiteers, the way successive governments sold out to these same profiteers in the fiasco we call ”planning”, and the way virtually all city-building is now done by publicly-listed developers whose shareholders actively eschew superfluities like delight (ours).

    So just when it matters most, environmentally, that we get our cities right; just when city living has become a majority interest and just when democracy ensures that our cities cannot be shaped by fiat but only by desire; at this precise moment we find ourselves saddled with a building procurement system that all but prohibits the building of pleasurable cities.

    Cities are greener than suburbs. No question, and in countless ways. Edward Glaeser’s Harvard study compared city and suburban emissions from driving, public transport, heating, electricity across 46 US cities. His report is on the net. Check it out. There are also savings in construction, infrastructure, farmland, forest and food transport. But to save us, cities have to be more than green. They have to make us want them.

    So it’s heartening that Glaeser makes San Francisco America’s greenest, since it is also lovely; light, tight timber terraces and apartments, medium and high density, rent-controlled and in general, height-controlled. But its big achievement – and this is hard – is accommodating the car without losing its picturesqueness.

    The only Sydney example that comes close is Surry Hills’s Moore Park Gardens. Designed by Alan Jack + Cottier back in the ’90s, MPG provides 560 apartments in three to 20 storeys on 2.6 hectares. By our standards that’s pretty dense.

    But it doesn’t feel it. With its sophisticated and varied composition, myriad walkways, luscious planting, parks, pools and established delis, it creates not just a community, but a genuine middle-class chic. This is seriously rare. The disgrace is that in the last decade’s huge medium-density boom, nothing has come even close.

    For me the acid test is this. Can I imagine someone reading Kant in there, hammering out the next Dada, writing the next Houellebecq, making the next Star Wars? Answer, yes, actually. No trouble.

  • Let The Joyce Era Begin

     

    But the Finance Minister? What does he do, exactly? Does he play the stockmarket? Is he in charge of providing car loans? Does he just sit around all day calculating the interest on things?

    Nobody knows, least of all the current minister, Lindsay Tanner, who has decided that the role is what you make of it, which is why the Finance Minister’s role under this government is mainly to abuse the Opposition and make overt threats to public servants.

    But if the Finance Minister’s job is a hard one, the shadow finance minister has it even tougher. This is pretty much the case in all shadow portfolios. The role of a shadow minister is to create a kind of parallel universe, where things are mostly the same except for minor cosmetic changes to the Budget. Even worse, you then have to get people to pay attention to the parallel universe, which is hard, because it’s boring. And then after you win the election, you’ll probably get pushed out of the portfolio anyway so Julia Gillard can have it.

    So essentially, shadow ministries are well suited to people who enjoy thankless, dull tasks with no promise of future benefit. The one exception may be Health, where the shadow minister’s job is to laugh mockingly at the actual minister, who is crying quietly into a shot glass.

    With all this in mind, can we cut Barnaby Joyce some slack? He has it tough. There he is in the most difficult portfolio of all, trying to “cut through” on the issues, fighting an enemy of pure fiscal malevolence. Is it any wonder he stumbles occasionally? How many of us can honestly say that, when faced with difficult tasks and awkward situations, we have not said something hilariously stupid to the entire country? I know I have. To tell the truth, I do it almost every week.

    The fact is, Joyce performs a very important role in the Opposition. He is, as Tony Abbott has noted, a gifted “retail politician”. This is a crucial thing to have in any opposition. If you don’t have a retail politician, why, you’re simply going to get crucified! Going into an election without a retail politician is like going into battle without some guns: madness!

    What is a retail politician? Well, it’s difficult to explain to the layman, but essentially it is a politician who is on sale in individual units, at a price marked up from the wholesale cost. And that’s Barnaby Joyce all over — if there ever was a politician who you would not be surprised to see sitting on a shelf in K-Mart, it’s Barnaby. You can see why Abbott promoted him.

    What’s more, Joyce is an accountant. Think on that for a moment. What is the greatest problem with the Westminster system of government? It is that ministers do not bring appropriate expertise to their roles. For example, Health Minister Nicola Roxon is not a doctor. So how can she credibly tackle health issues? Defence Minister John Faulkner is neither a soldier nor a sailor nor a fighter pilot. So what does he know? And so it continues along the frontbench: the Foreign Minister is not a foreigner, the Sport Minister is rubbish at sport, and the Arts Minister is Peter Garrett. It’s a great big Incompetence Orgy in there.

    But imagine if the Finance Minister were an accountant? Who would be better? When you ask yourself, “who should I engage to handle my finances?”, what’s the invariable answer? That’s right, “a crazed country bumpkin”! No, sorry, lost focus for a second there. What I meant was, “an accountant”! Finance is what accountants do. I undertook a personal survey of over 800 accountants and when asked what their deal was, over 65 per cent of respondents mentioned the word “finance” in the first ten minutes of their answer. Accountants know finance, there’s no question about it.

    And so, when an accountant tells you that Australia may be unable to repay its debt, you damn well better listen. I mean, you could take the word of Joe Hockey, a lawyer, or Kevin Rudd, a diplomat/Chinese spy, about debt. Hey, why not go out on the street and ask a drunken hobo, if you just want to ignore qualifications like that?

    And as for Tanner, the actual finance minister? What credentials does he bring? Apparently he used to be an “articled clerk” and a “solicitor”. Now, try this. Next time your accountant says you have too much debt, feel free to reply, “Thanks for the advice, but I’m going to find out my solicitor’s opinion.” You will be bankrupt within hours. And an “articled clerk”? That’s not even a thing!

    No, there is nobody in Australia politics as uniquely qualified to do financey things as Barnaby Joyce. And that’s not even the only thing he brings to the table. He also has vast experience of life in rural Queensland, so he can speak to country folk on their own level, not like your average Canberra plutocrat who can’t help talking down to them, their voices dripping with arrogance, pretension, and basic literacy.

    What’s more, Joyce was in the Army Reserve, so he knows what it’s like to do a reasonable impression of someone serving his country; and he once worked as a bouncer, so he knows what it’s like to use unreasonable force on innocent people — all vital components of a cabinet minister’s toolkit.

    That’s why Tony Abbott is standing by his man — that and the Catholic thing — because he knows that without Barnaby Joyce, the Coalition would lose a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain indefinable something that some call insanity, some call incompetence — and some call brilliance. Admittedly those who call it brilliance are mostly the kind of people who spend most of their time telling other people fluoride is going to kill them, or sitting on top of poles screaming about how they’re not allowed to cut trees down. Nevertheless, there’s a constituency there. And Abbott has cannily recognised this, and plans to exploit it to the full. As he says, Barnaby has street cred. And that’s worth a thousand years of book-learnin’.

    Oh sure, he doesn’t always get the facts and figures 100 per cent correct, but he gets the feel of it. He understands that economics is all about making connections with people, about getting the lie of the land, about putting your ear to the ground. It’s about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty and letting the Budget know who’s boss. It’s about saying, “Hey, I’m in charge of finance, finance is not in charge of me”. And only a street-creddy, accountancy-savvy, farm-oriented bronzed Aussie like Joyce can bring that sort of down-to-earth, up-to-speed, off-with-the-pixies approach to the solvency of the nation.

    And I think Australia will be all the better for it. If nothing else, politics is never dull when Barnaby is around. Politics is never dull when snipers are around either, of course, but we can’t have everything. And Barnaby is in a way the sniper of Parliament — he lurks in the bushes and the treetops, taking aim at governmental hypocrisy and fiscal recklessness, taking his targets down one by one with his searing rhetoric, homespun country wisdom, and a knowledge of economics bordering on the mammalian.

    And when the Liberals are elected, as seems inevitable now that climate change has been disproven and interest rates continue rising to stratospheric levels of 4 per cent-plus, we will be all the better for having a cabinet full of ministers appointed for their appropriate skillsets. An accountant for Finance, an immigrant for Immigration, a bitter old man for Superannuation, and a desperate search for something to occupy Julie Bishop — it’s the new way forward for the Liberals.

    Let Australia be ruled, finally, by men and women with impeccable qualifications. If they have a certain sense of what their job entails, so much the better!

    Let the Joyce era begin!

  • World’s first personal carbon credit earns $17 cashback for one tonne of carbon dioxide

     

     

    Randy and Tami Wilson, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, earned the single credit through a transaction brokered by the My Emissions Exchange website. It aims to certify emissions reductions by home owners or tenants and then sell those credits to companies looking to up their green quotient.

     

    The website’s existence suggests that while Congress may have given up on creating a national scheme for trading carbon emissions, there are ordinary Americans willing to play the voluntary market. The company says it has signed up 1,800 households since going into business last autumn.

     

    A company in Middlefield, Ohio, Molten Metal Equipment, bought the Wilsons’ carbon credit, representing a tonne of carbon dioxide, for $21.50. The website earned $4.30 in commission, and the Wilsons took home $17.20.

     

    But this modest cash reward was not the only reason for the Wilsons’s solar conversion. Outraged by a threatened 30% price hike by their local electricity provider, they hired a contractor to install 36 solar panels on their roof.

    “When my husband and I heard six or eight months ago from PPL Electric Utilities that our energy costs were going up 30 to 40%, we said to ourselves, what can we do?” said Tami Wilson.

     

    In addition to the solar panels, the Wilsons also switched to energy-savings light bulbs, replaced their windows, and made a habit of turning off computers, DVDs and other appliances not in use. They adopted a “hybrid” system for doing laundry, putting wet clothes in a dryer for 10 minutes before hanging them on a line. They got rid of their son’s heated waterbed.

     

     

    The couple told reporters they were counting on federal and state tax credits to recoup $36,000 of their investment, but it will still take six years to get back the rest of their investment through energy savings and the sale of carbon credits. At that point, though, the solar panels will be turning a profit. “Then we basically have no electric [bill] for life,” Tami said.

     

     

    Prospective domestic carbon traders begin by handing over a year’s worth of electricity and heating bills. American households – with the stereotypical television in every teenagers’ bedroom – are notorious energy hogs. The average family produces about 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

     

    If the family then goes on to reduce emissions, the website will calculate how much carbon they have saved. The savings then translate into credits for every tonne of carbon avoided. The company certifies the credits, and then arranges the sale.

     

    The company says customers gain twice, in carbon credits and in lower electricity bills – although it will obviously take time before major investments, like the Wilsons’ solar panels, pay for themselves.

     

    But it says even replacing a few old lightbulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs or putting in a programmable thermostat would be enough for most homes to offset about a tonne of carbon a year – or about $17.20 after commission.