Author: admin

Australia’s methane gas could power the world: expert

“These are large world scale projects, expect to see some consolidation,” he said.

“But at the moment, we have got five projects, potentially 28 million tonnes within five years. That’s more than existing Australian northern production.”

Mr Regan says that globally there are more reserves of coal methane than conventional natural gas reserves, and Australian reserves represent about 40 per cent of the world’s proposed new projects.

“CBM [coal-bed methane] in Australia is very, very significant,” he said.

“Australian energy development is hugely significant. Those projects there represent about 50 per cent of the total global proposed new capacity.”

11 September, 2009
Revelation that Australia is the worst polluter in the world

Australia worse than the worst
* Revelation that Australia is the worst polluter in the world

Risk assessment company Maplecroft’s CO2 Energy Emissions Index has
revealed that Australia has overtaken the United States as the worst per
capita emitter of carbon pollution in the world.

Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown said: “Australia has overtaken the US
on Kevin Rudd’s watch.”

“David Spratt has warned that just two infrastructure projects announced
in 2008 will alone result in destination emissions equal to 117 percent
of our domestic emissions.”

“With our coal export facilities expanding, things are getting worse.
The government’s emissions trading scheme will not reverse this,”
Senator Brown said.

As reported in The Age newspaper today, Australia is responsible for
19.78 tonnes of carbon per head every year.

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11 September, 2009
Decision opens door for legal action on Lithgow river

Heavy metals and contaminants such as arsenic, copper, boron and very high levels of salt are thought to have been leaching out into a section of the Coxs River and killing aquatic life, based on a series of independent tests and regular monitoring by the company.

Delta Electricity and the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change have known about the discharges for at least two years. But the company has been operating within the boundaries of its environmental protection licence, which requires that Delta monitors its discharges but does not require that some of the pollution levels be reduced.

The NSW Land and Environment Court decision, delivered by Justice Nicola Pain, marks the first time an environment group in NSW has been able to guard itself against escalating costs. Justice Pain ordered that any costs incurred at the end of the case be limited to $20,000, the maximum the conservation society says it can pay in the event that it loses the case.

“This is a precedent which hopefully will be very encouraging for other environment groups,” said a society spokeswoman, Tara Cameron. “Now we are looking forward to pursuing the case and our main concern is back on stopping the pollution in the Coxs River. There are salts and heavy metals that we know don’t belong there and the Coxs River is dying.”

Delta Electricity has maintained it operates within its license conditions and has provided the government monitoring authority with regular updates on discharges from its power station.

The Department of Environment and Climate Change has recently reviewed Delta’s environmental protection license and believes it is appropriate. It says its licensing system is stringent and many prosec-utions have been carried out against companies that have breached licenses in the past two years.

A report compiled by a University of Western Sydney researcher, Dr Ian Wright, found that arsenic levels downstream from the plant were “large and unnatural”, but were unlikely to pose a risk to human health. High levels of copper, boron, fluoride and salt “were likely to be toxic to aquatic ecosystems”.

The Opposition spokesman on the Blue Mountains, Michael Richardson, said the case exposed flaws in the state’s system of controlling toxic discharges.

“This case is not solely about the safety of Sydney’s water,” Mr Richardson said. “It’s about the Government’s environmental protection licenses not protecting the environment.”

The Environmental Defenders of NSW, which is undertaking the case on behalf the society, said the decision was in the public interest.

11 September, 2009

Schellnhuber: developed countries are ‘carbon insolvent’

It sounds a lot. But European countries today emit about 11 tonnes annually for each inhabitant. It would be more if we counted the embedded emissions in goods we buy from China and elsewhere. Using Schellnhuber’s rough numbers, Europeans will exhaust their allowance within ten years if emissions do not fall.

Put another way, to meet the target Europe’s countries need to reduce per person emissions by about half a tonne a year every year for the next twenty years. Achieving this would require a near 5% cut next year, rising to 10% a year by 2020 and 20% annual reduction by 2025. As Stern has pointed out (Stern Review, p. 231) the only time even a 5% emissions reduction has ever been achieved over a large country for several years was the 1989 to 1998 period in the former Soviet Union, when emissions fell 5.2% per year.

The 110 tonnes figure for the maximum permitted emissions per person omits consideration of the probable 40% increase in world population by 2050. This would cut the figure to 85 tonnes or so – less than eight years of current European per capita emissions. It also assumes that all world citizens have an equal right to a certain volume of emissions even though the developed world has been responsible for more than 80% of the increase in CO2 in the last century. Schellnhuber points out that if we allocated emissions rights in inverse proportion to historical CO2 output the developed countries would already be ‘carbon insolvent’.

He concludes by saying that the richest one sixth of the world should pay $100 a year per person to help reduce the future emissions of low income countries. In effect, we would be paying poor states to hold their cumulative emissions per head below 110 tonnes so that we can overshoot our allowance. Compensating the least polluting countries for the almost certain failure of the developed world to keep within our quota must surely be the broad outline of any Copenhagen scheme that will be acceptable to the global south?

• From Carbon Commentary, part of the Guardian Environment Network

But somewhere along the way politicians realise that they want to get re-elected. Instead of making cheap flights so expensive that we stop taking them, the pragmatists in power have decided to raise taxes slightly, hoping that we don’t really notice the difference. But someone always notices (the press release tends to give it away) and the Daily Mail’s message boards collapse under the weight of the home counties finding new and inventive spellings of “stealth tax”.

If you want people to accept something then the last thing you do is associate it with taxation. However, fear of becoming unpopular has led to politicians doing just that. Instead of telling people what they don’t want to hear – that their lifestyle is built on unsustainable foundations and that big changes will have to be made – ministers would rather pretend that the only difference between stopping climate change and business as usual is turning our televisions off standby and paying a few extra pounds for a flight to Rome.

But the public is not as stupid as the politicians think. They’ve noticed the disconnect between talk of global ecological disaster and a slight increase in taxes. It’s worrying that the How to Solve Climate Change handbook seems to be empty, except for the phrase “increase taxes” scrawled on every page in the chancellor’s handwriting. Meanwhile the government is doing everything it can to keep us polluting, encouraging airports all over the UK to grow as fast as they can pour the concrete and allowing adverts pushing unnecessary flights to grow alongside every high street.

You can’t discourage flying with one hand and promote it with the other without being rightly labelled a hypocrite. How is the public, up to their eyeballs in loft insulation and recycling boxes, to react to reductions from every other sector because the aviation industry wants extra runways at Heathrow and Stansted? How can you take this government’s claims to be serious about tackling climate change when you can’t leave your house without a billboard inducing you to splash out on a plane ticket? Even Ed Miliband – the person who is supposed to be sorting this mess out – doesn’t see anything wrong with supporting taxes on air travel while declaring that a bigger airport in his constituency would be great for the economy.

If something is wrong, then we should do everything we can to stop it. If ministers believe in climate change, they need to stop relying on taxes and start taking action. If flying is bad for the environment (and at 13% of our climate impact, I think it’s safe to say that it is) then we need to be flying less and closing down some of our runways, not being charged a little bit more to make up for all the flying we’re doing.

When every square foot of public space is plastered with adverts for cheap flights and communities are being bulldozed to make way for new runways, whacking a tenner on a return trip to Europe isn’t strong leadership. Is that really how Labour wants its climate change strategy to be remembered: not for a bang, but a whimper?

Regions	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004
Total bottled water consumption by region (1997 to 2004) Measurement: Thousand cubic metres
Europe	34,328	36,074	39,965	42,276	44,520	47,037	51,768	53,661
North America	25,398	25,822	29,695	31,850	34,734	38,349	41,778	44,715
Asia	12,472	14,820	17,647	21,170	24,824	29,783	32,795	35,977
South America	5,484	6,362	7,323	8,528	9,915	11,437	12,677	13,607
Africa/Middle East/Oceania	2,459	2,808	3,092	3,456	3,837	4,302	4,499	4,823
All Others	508	1,953	737	891	1,033	1,592	1,407	1,597
TOTAL	80,649	87,838	98,459	108,171	118,864	132,499	144,925	154,381

Author: admin

Australia’s methane gas could power the world: expert

Revelation that Australia is the worst polluter in the world

Decision opens door for legal action on Lithgow river

Schellnhuber: developed countries are ‘carbon insolvent’

Labour’s great green whimper

Total bottled water consumption by region