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  • Recent rains lead to bigger wheat crop

    From The Land

    The area sown to wheat is set to fall, according to ABARE, down to 13.5 million hectares, but yields are set to rise 3pc to 22 million tonnes.

    It is a figure borne out by other estimates.

    Despite some areas missing out on the April and June rains, NAB Agribusiness has increased its production estimates for the 2009-10 winter crop in the June Commodities Wrap, with wheat now expected to reach 22.6 million tonnes, slightly higher than the ABARE figures.

    The positive numbers are in spite of recent discouraging long term forecasts.

    The Bureau of Meteorology has reported a rapidly falling Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) linked to the return of a traditionally dry El Nino event across eastern Australia, while the Indian Ocean Dipole is in positive territory, which is also a negative driver for rainfall in Australian cropping belts.

    ABARE predicts the acreage of the other major cereal, barley, will also decrease, although production is expected to be up a healthy 13pc to 7.7 million tonnes on the back of better yields.

    The major change in plantings is expected to be a significant rise in canola plantings, perhaps as a rotational requirement after years of safety first cereal rotations.

    The ABARE predictions are for a 9pc drop in canola yields, however, due to a forecast for a decline in WA production this year.

    The forecaster is flagging a 1.7 million tonne canola crop this year, which is right in line with Australian Oilseeds Federation (AOF) numbers.

    In terms of likelihood of exceeding average yields, the torrent of rain that has fallen through north-west NSW means there is a close to 100pc chance of farmers there getting a better than average harvest, a figure that declines to 10-20pc in the parched Riverina in the south of the state.

    In Victoria and South Australia the odds are leaning towards a below average season, although there are parts of SA with good potential, while WA is wildly varied, ranging from a 10pc to 100pc chance of getting above long-term median yields.

  • US starts bulldozing suburbs

    From the UK Telegraph

    Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

    The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

    Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

    Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

    Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

    In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

    “The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”

    Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America.

    “Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.

    Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

    Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

    The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

    In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.

    Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

    But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

    He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

    But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

    If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

    Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

    They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

    The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

    Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

    Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

    Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

    The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

    “Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said.

    Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution “defeatist” but he insisted it was “no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again”.

  • Snowy River revival ‘ a complete failure ”

    Alliance vice-chairwoman Louise Crisp says parts of the river are running out of time.

    “Basically the river has possibly only 18 months before some of the upper section will die,” she said.

    “It’s been a complete failure as far as what the community expected.

    “None of the legislated target flows are binding and neither are the environmental objectives.”

    Ms Crisp says the Snowy’s annual natural flow sits at 4 per cent below the Jindabyne Dam, but the agreed target for June 2009 was 15 per cent.

    The Alliance has been advised it has little chance of suing the three governments for failing to live up to their promises.

    ‘NSW responsible’

     

    Craig Ingram is the independent member for the Victorian seat of Gippsland East and a former member of the Snowy River Alliance.

    On his election to parliament in 1999, the Victorian Labor Party gave him an undertaking that it would work to have an environmental flow of 28 per cent returned to the Snowy, and Mr Ingram’s resulting support helped them take office.

    He blames the New South Wales Government for the Snowy River stalemate.

    “New South Wales under the agreements and under the legislation is the responsible government, if I can use that term very loosely,” he said.

    “They have systematically failed to deliver on the intent, the spirit and what the community thought they were getting when they signed up to the agreement.

    “One of the disappointing things is that we really haven’t had the level of support from the New South Wales Opposition that we should have had to hold the New South Wales Government to account.

    “And basically they’ve been missing in action on this.”

    He said the other governments should probably have taken action against New South Wales.

    “I think it’s probably time they actually investigate their legal avenues to ensure that the money that’s been contributed by the other stake-holding governments delivers the environmental outcomes that the community expects,” he said.

    “If New South Wales isn’t prepared to do it, then the other governments should force them to do it.”

  • Science Museum has a vital role in the climate change debate

     

    No wonder then that decarbonising the world’s energy system to avoid dangerous climate change is proving to be intractable, for it embodies all these features. Despite the rhetoric and a host of initiatives by individuals, corporations and governments, human carbon emissions continue to increase, with no sign of the essential peak and decline. The latest research indicates that if the maximum does not occur by 2015, we will almost certainly have committed ourselves to changes in weather patterns that will adversely affect our food and water supplies, as well as triggering an ineluctable, long-term rise in world sea level.

    Link to this audio

    One hundred years ago the future looked brighter. Our forebears saw science and engineering as the means to improve the human condition. They celebrated the fruits of industrialisation in cathedrals of innovation, such as the Science Museum. The practitioners were the celebrities of the day, and people flocked to see the wonders that were shaping the future. Many were inspired to become the scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who designed and built the modern world.

    So as the Science Museum enters its second century today, what is its role? I believe little has changed from a century ago, except for the degree of urgency. Our unique collection provides us with a powerful means to make sense of the science that shapes our lives. We seek to raise curiosity and release creativity, and to do so in a way that engages and inspires our visitors to participate in shaping the future.

    In particular, our climate change gallery, currently being designed, aims to change the way people think, talk and act about climate change. A glimpse into the museum’s enormous reserve collection of objects (only 6% of the collection is on public display), or along the 20km of historical books and technical documentation in our library, can quickly convince of the ability of the scientists and engineers of the world to develop the array of technical solutions that can make a sustainable future possible.

    What is not clear, is whether humanity has the capacity to marshal this technical capability and to exploit it in time. This is where the role of the museum as a trustworthy source of information, and its track record of presenting a balanced view of the evidence will be especially valuable in stimulating public debate. With many experts viewing the upcoming UN’s Copenhagen Conference in December this year as “the last chance saloon” to put in place the international negotiating mechanism without which a globally coordinated effort cannot take place, the importance of such debate is paramount.

    The Science Museum may be 100 years old, but it has never been more relevant.

    • Professor Chris Rapley CBE is director of the Science Museum

  • Reality hits PM as millions wasted.

     

    Of course, government ministers will bleat there was no explicit promise apart from setting up a website, but the expectation was created, no more nor less than John Howard created during the 2004 campaign the expectation of continued low interest rates.

    The folly of FuelWatch to keep petrol prices down was headed off by the Coalition, but the calamity of Grocery Choice was left to prosper.

    A website that didn’t provide real-time grocery price comparisons was useless from day one. Furthermore, Grocery Choice provided only averages for some supermarkets in a region, which were meaningless to shoppers such as me and hundreds of thousands of others who set out on a Saturday morning to hunt and gather the best food prices for their family.

    It was an empty joke from the beginning that had to be sustained to save Labor’s face.

    Initial curiosity over the website, which sustained relatively high hits, quickly faded as shoppers realised they couldn’t work out where to get the cheapest grocery items in their area.

    Shoppers simply continued to shop using their own initiative and left Grocery Choice to die.

    When consumer affairs minister Chris Bowen announced the scheme last year, he said: “Finally, the government is also fulfilling its election commitment made by the then leader of the opposition on (July 11, 2007) to set up a dedicated website that gives consumers a snapshot of local grocery prices.”

    It was a promise that, before the focus shifted to the global financial crisis, was an integral part of Labor’s commitment to fight rising prices.

    It was then, and remains, an empty and costly gimmick – $13million in taxpayer funds during a global recession – that was implemented only to provide a tick in the promises kept box.

    The only saving grace for the government now is that it has decided not to throw more good money down the drain.

    The government had to be seen to be doing something, and Grocery Choice was part of that.

  • House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change

    “This legislation will break our dependence on foreign oil, make our nation a leader in clean energy jobs and cut global warming pollution,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, a co-sponsor of the bill, adding that Friday’s vote was a “decisive and historic action” that would position the United States as a leader in energy efficiency and technology.

    The bill’s provisions forcing reductions in the use of fossil fuel while increasing production of alternative energy sources would produce millions of new jobs, Mr. Waxman said.

    But the legislation, a patchwork of compromises, falls far short of what many European governments and environmentalists have said is needed to avert the worst impacts of global warming. And it has pitted liberal Democrats from both coasts against more conservative Democrats from areas dependent on coal for electricity and heavy manufacturing for jobs.

    Friday’s vote illustrated that rift: The bill passed by a seven-vote margin, with 44 Democrats voting against it.

    As difficult as passage in the House proved, it is just the beginning of the energy and climate debate in Congress, since the issue now moves to the Senate, where political divisions and regional differences are even starker.

    At the heart of the legislation is a cap-and-trade system that sets an overall limit on emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide while allowing utilities, manufacturers and other emitters to trade pollution permits, or allowances, among themselves. The cap grows increasingly tighter over the years, pushing up the price of emissions and presumably driving industry to find cleaner ways of producing energy.

    While some environmental groups supported the legislation, others — Greenpeace, for example — vigorously opposed it. Business groups were also split. Republican leaders called the bill a national energy tax and predicted that those who voted for the measure would pay a heavy price at the polls next year.

    “No matter how you doctor it or tailor it,” said Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, “it is a tax.”

    Only eight Republicans voted for the bill, which runs to more than 1,300 pages.

    Apart from its domestic implications, the bill is a show of resolve that American officials can point to when negotiating the new global climate change treaty, after years of American objections to binding limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

    The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was in Washington Friday to meet President Obama, strongly endorsed the bill even though it fell short of European goals for reducing the emissions of heat-trapping gases.

    Ms. Merkel, a longtime advocate of strong action to cut carbon dioxide emissions, has been pushing the United States to take a leading role in advance of the global climate negotiations set for December in Copenhagen.

    After meeting with Mr. Obama, she said she had seen a “sea change” in the United States on climate policy that she could not have imagined a year ago when President George W. Bush was in office.

    “This really points to the fact that the United States is very serious on climate,” Ms. Merkel said.

    The compromises in the bill were necessary to attract the support of Democrats from different regions and ideologies. In the months of horse-trading leading to Friday’s vote, the bill’s targets for emissions were weakened, its mandate for renewable electricity was scaled back, and incentives for various industries from automobiles to natural gas were sweetened.

    The final bill intends to reduce overall heat-trapping gases in the United States by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by midcentury.

    When the program is scheduled to begin in 2012, the estimated price of a permit to emit a ton of carbon dioxide will be about $13. That is projected to rise steadily as emission limits come down, but the bill contains a measure to prevent costs from rising too quickly in any one year.

    The bill grants a majority of the permits free in the early years of the program, to keep costs low. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the average American household would pay an additional $175 a year in energy costs by 2020 as a result of the provision, while the poorest households would end up with $40 in rebates.

    Several House members expressed concern about the new market to be created in carbon allowances, saying it posed the same risks as markets in other kinds of derivatives. Regulation of such markets would be divided among the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Treasury Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The bill also sets a national standard of 20 percent for the production of renewable electricity by 2020, although a third of that could be met with efficiency measures rather than renewable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal.

    It also devotes billions of dollars to new energy projects and subsidies for low-carbon agricultural practices, clean-coal research and electric vehicle development.