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  • Rudd finally gets renewables

    Government Press Release

    The Rudd Government will invest $4.5 billion to support the growth of clean energy generation and new technologies, and to reduce carbon emissions and stimulate economic activity in a sector that will support thousands of new green-collar jobs.

    The Clean Energy Initiative will support clean technologies and industries and assist Australia’s transition to a lower emissions path.
    The Australian Government is committed to ensuring 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020. This objective is supported by the Renewable Energy Fund and the Energy Innovation Fund, and by efforts to encourage deployment including through the Solar Homes and Communities Plan.
    The 2009-10 Budget further strengthens Australia’s domestic and international climate change response, with substantial new measures to encourage innovation in clean energy generation and low-emissions technologies.
    The Rudd Government will invest:

    • $2.4 billion in low emissions coal technologies, including new funding of $2 billion in industrial-scale CCS projects under the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships program;
    • $1.6 billion in solar technologies, including new funding of $1.365 billion in a Solar Flagships program – helping position Australia as a world leader in this vital energy technology for the future; and
    • $465 million to establish Renewables Australia to support leading-edge technology research and bring it to market, including new funding of $100 million. The new body will advise governments and the community on the implementation of renewable energy technologies, and support growth in skills and capacity for domestic and international markets.

    This represents an unprecedented investment of $3.5 billion in new money by the Rudd Government in clean energy in this Budget.
    The Government’s commitment to establish the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute and the Flagships program will ensure that Australia continues to be a world leader in the development of low-emissions coal technology.
    The Institute supports the G8 target for 20 industrial-scale CCS projects to be operating around the world by 2020.
    In addition, the Flagships program supports the demonstration of large industrial scale projects in Australia, and may include a carbon dioxide storage hub.
    The Government will establish Renewables Australia to promote the development, commercialisation and deployment of renewable technologies. It will operate at arm’s length from government, using a strategic investment approach under an expert board.
    The Solar Flagships program will aim to create an additional 1,000 MW of solar generation capacity. This ambitious target is three times the size of the largest solar energy project currently operating anywhere in the world.
    Solar Flagships will seek to develop up to four individual generation plants on the national grid. These may demonstrate both solar thermal and solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies, and have electricity generation capacity equal to or greater than a current coal-fired power station.
    The specific technologies will be based on a competitive assessment, with an explicit criterion of industry development, including capacity to boost domestic manufacturing and future export potential.
    Solar Flagships projects will complement CCS Flagships projects, and demonstrate the Government’s commitment to helping to maintain the value of our coal exports and utilising our renewable potential. The two strategic technology priorities of CCS and solar will be underpinned by supporting specialised research, development and demonstration programs.
    These important clean energy initiatives will kickstart a range of critical low-emissions technologies in the marketplace.
    The Government will work with the private sector to position the Australian economy for a low-carbon, high-skilled future.

  • Rudd touts $4.5b solar project

     

    The project will include up to four individual solar plants generating on average the same amount of energy as a coal-fired power station.

    Currently the largest operating plant is in California in the United States.

    The Government’s Solar Flagships program hopes to create three times as much energy as that project.

    Tenders for the project will be called later this year.

  • The NHS must wake up to climate change

     

     

    We know that as temperatures rise, extreme climatic events will cause heatwaves, floods, and unusually strong storms. People in Britain will die. The incidence of infections, cataracts, and skin cancers will rise. More people will be admitted to hospital.

     

    But the greatest impacts will be on the poorest peoples in the world today. Africa will endure yet another crisis to add to its existing predicaments of poverty, disease, and economic collapse. The warming of the planet will trigger new epidemics of infectious diseases. Food yields will fall and millions of people will suffer starvation. 250 million more people in Africa will face water poverty by 2020. Poor housing and slums will be especially vulnerable to extreme climatic events. The millions of people who migrate away from places of climatic stress will create new tensions, precipitating violence and war.

     

    Climate change seems too big, too complex, too unpredictable, too global, and too distant. It’s tempting to give up when confronted by this prospect of human catastrophe. There is much that we don’t know about what climate change might do. We are frightened by this terrifying uncertainty. We need new technologies to pull us back from the edge of disaster. We need new ways to solve the stubborn problem of global poverty. We need ways to get the public and politicians to take climate change more seriously. Climate change should be a major priority for our political parties in the 2010 general election.

     

    Despite reasons for despair, our commission remains optimistic. We can do something, and the health community, in particular, can do a great deal to lead a movement to protect billions of people from the health effects of climate change. We did it once before. It took 20 years – from the 1940s to the 1960s – to assemble the science to prove that smoking damaged human health. It took another 40 years to translate that science into a ban on smoking in public places. We have reached the point where we can be confident of the cataclysmic effects of climate change on health. But we don’t have the luxury of 40 years to change public policy. Every decade of delay will push up the peak temperature of the earth to increasingly unsustainable levels.

     

    The NHS is Britain’s largest employer. If those who work in it now back a radical agenda to change our lifestyle to low-carbon living we will make a big and valuable contribution to saving our fragile human species. Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. But health is possibly the best means to mobilise political action to face down that threat. Because without health there is no life for us or our children.

  • Why solar power can help us cycle round the world

     

    I had been a keen environmentalist for some time, starting up a sustainable-living blog in 2004. Now though, I turned my attention to solar energy.

    Investigations led me to the first solar-powered rickshaws operating in India. Always keen to seek out original challenges, I meandered onto the idea of taking one on a long distance journey. To my dismay, the rickshaw was not suitable for covering such distance.

    But the idea of undertaking an adventure to demonstrate solar around the world had taken root. If I couldn’t do it on a rickshaw I would do it in another environmentally-friendly way: by bicycle.

    I began to read about new flexible nanosolar panels, which would be ideal to power my technology in places far from a plug. In my research, I eventually found G24 Innovations, a Cardiff-based company specialising in dye-sensitised flexible thin-film solar technology. I gave them a call. “Of course we can make solar panniers. We can attach the panels to almost any fabric.” Really? Could I have a solar dress too?

    Sadly, the dress was deemed impractical but I convinced my friends Iain and Jamie to accompany me on this solar-powered journey. Today, starting in London on EU Solar Day, we set off for a 12,000-mile tour of solar power around the world.

    We are taking a satellite tracking device which, along with other communications equipment, will be powered using solar panels on our bike panniers. The independence of the solar kit will help us document the entire route – from Libyan sandstorms to ancient Iranian cities, 4000-metre passes in Kyrgyzstan to the lowest point of Death Valley – precisely and second by second.

    Our route has been chosen to take us through North Africa and the Middle East in order to visit a concentrated solar plant and profile the work of the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), a project to supply huge amounts of green energy from the Sahara. We’ll go past the Quidam basin, where the world’s biggest PV solar power station is being built, across the pacific by cargo ship (we are hoping to be carried by Nippon who have just launched the first solar-assisted freighter) and on to America’s solar heartland, the Nevada desert.

    I hope the trip will demonstrate the potential of solar power in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit this December. Follow us in real-time on The Solar Cycle Diaries, and wish us good luck with the weather.

  • Furore over northern food bowl plan

    Related story from The Land

    FRESH divisions have emerged between Aboriginal leaders on Cape York over Queensland’s wild rivers legislation as the row widened into a debate over the merits of agricultural development in tropical Australia.

    The chairman of the Mapoon Council, Peter Guavarra, said his community was divided over the legislation, which seeks to provide permanent protection to pristine tropical rivers and their catchments.

    “Some people are worried they might not be able to fish and hunt if the rivers are damaged by development,” Mr Guavarra said.

    “Other people say we need the economic development and the river shouldn’t be locked up.”

    Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has claimed the near-unanimous support of Cape York communities for his stand against wild rivers legislation.

    Mr Pearson has quit the Cape York Institute, a vehicle for the economic advancement of impoverished communities, in protest at the law because he says it undermines their prospects for development.

    The Wenlock, the main watercourse at Mapoon on the west coast of Cape York, is expected to be the next river gazetted under the legislation.

    Six rivers have been protected in what critics claim is a step towards the World Heritage listing of Cape York.

    Opponents say it stops development of large-scale irrigated agriculture on Cape York, which had most potential for indigenous advancement. Cairns economic consultant Bill Cummings said there was a great deal of potential for agricultural development in Cape York and other parts of the vast “savannah belt” of tropical Australia.

    “Locking the doors on this with the wild rivers legislation is ill-considered and inappropriate,” he said.

    “What many people do not realise is the size of the area we are talking about, and the comparatively minuscule impacts likely to be involved.”

    An expert on tropical river management, CSIRO scientist Garry Cook, said the prospects for large-scale agriculture in the north were extremely limited for reasons ranging from poor soils and the hot climate to a lack of service infrastructure.

    “There is no potential for the sorts of things we see in the south like the wheat belt,” Dr Cook said.

    He said a big problem facing agriculture on Cape York is the wet season. “You have the potential for massive flooding along those rivers that can cause a lot of damage,” Dr Cook said.

    Australian Rivers Institute director Stuart Bunn said low-key developments such as ecotourism and recreational fishing provided the greatest potential for indigenous advancement. “It is sheer fantasy for people to think we can have another Murray-Darling Basin in northern Australia,” he said.

    Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said the north had the right fundamentals for agricultural development — plenty of water, sunlight and fertile land.

    “When the arse is hanging out of the pants of Aboriginal people in remote areas, you can’t have people in the cities foisting their environmental conscience on them,” he said.

    The indigenous chairman of the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce, Joe Ross, said Queensland was right to protect pristine tropical rivers but should do so in consultation with indigenous leaders.

    “We don’t want to end up with more unhealthy river systems like the Murray-Darling,” Mr Ross said.

  • Rudd in secret Uranium deal with China

    The Australian Greens say Foreign Minister Stephen Smith’s accidental tabling of a document that reveals disturbing negations between Australia and China needs to be scrutinised.

    “The document reveals amendments to Australia’s existing nuclear cooperation with China. These are so significant it’s doubly important that they are carefully scrutinised as part the usual Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) process,” said Greens nuclear spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam.

    “The Committee, of which I am a member, should apply the same conditions to this China Agreement as it did on the Australia-Russia uranium agreement. Australia needs to be absolutely certain that materials sent to nuclear weapons states will not be used in nuclear weapons,” he said.

    Australia’s nuclear safeguards agreement with China is focused primarily on supply of uranium in uranium ore concentrates. The new negotiations, which began in January, are intended to provide a mechanism to account in China for an enormous amount of Australian uranium planned to be extracted from copper and other concentrates arising from the Olympic Dam expansion.

    The document exposes the fact that what BHP plans to do at Roxby – under the EIS publicly released on 1 May – will not be legal unless the treaty is amended because safeguards regimes would not exist over Australian Obligated Nuclear Materials (AONM).  BHP’s expansion is entirely dependent upon being able to export 2/3rds concentrated copper to China.

    “The accidental tabling of this material begs the question as to why these negotiations are conducted in secrecy.  If there was more transparency and accountability in bilateral treaty negotiations, maybe they would save the Minister from further embarrassment,” said Senator Ludlam.