EcoRadio

Author: admin

  • Aphid plague hits southern NSW

    NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) district agronomist at Cowra, Jan Edwards, said for some reason the aphids were particularly attracted to drought-stressed crops.

    She said typically the aphids could strike crops at any time during the growing season but this year they had made their presence when canola was at the grain-fill stage.

    “There seems to be more aphids about this year; and we don’t see them every year,” she said.

    “We have definitely got some aphid numbers in this district and right across the region.”

    Ms Edwards said the aphids could wreak havoc on moisture-stressed crops by sucking the sap from the stems.

    “It results in a fair bit of damage,” she said.

    Landmark Temora, agronomist Craig Warren said it was the worst outbreak of aphids he had witnessed in his 13-year career.

  • Kangaroos affected by climate change

    The kangaroo population could be devastated by climate change, putting a cloud over suggestions roo should replace beef and lamb as the nation’s favourite meat, new research shows.

    A temperature rise of 2 degrees, which is likely by the second half of this century, would reduce the range of most kangaroo and wallaby species by half, the James Cook University study found.

    A 6-degree increase, which is at the extreme end of possible temperature rises predicted for 2070, would lead to the territory where kangaroos can survive reducing by 96pc – a level that would cause large-scale marsupial extinctions.

    “The area where kangaroos and wallabies are able to survive is probably going to get smaller, so you would have to expect the populations to drop quite significantly,” said Dr Euan Ritchie, who drove 150,000 kilometres around northern Australia compiling data for an epic, three-year study.

    “Although rainfall in northern Australia may increase as the climate changes, the temperature will also be going up, so you might see a net loss of water through evaporation.”

    Dr Ritchie said the study findings did not rule out the expansion of kangaroo farming

  • Labor refuses water reform

    It would have committed the Government to holding an independent inquiry into the affects of long-wall mining on groundwater on the Liverpool Plains and other areas that form part of the Murray-Darling Basin catchment.

    “The Federal Government has a mandate and responsibility to override the interests of State Governments to ensure the security of the nation’s water supply,” Mr Windsor said.

    “The issue goes beyond the Liverpool Plains and the Murray-Darling Basin catchment.

    “It extends to all rivers and catchment systems as part of a national water management strategy.”

    Mr Windsor moved that: “Prior to exploration licences being granted for subsidence mining operations on alluvial floodplains that have underlying groundwater systems forming part of the Murray-Darling system inflows, an independent study must be undertaken into the impacts of such mining on those systems.”

    The Government opposed Mr Windsor’s amendment saying that the Bill already allowed for the Minister or the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to cause such a study to happen.

    Mr Windsor argued that whilst this may be the case, it does not compel the Minister or Authority to order such a study to be done.

    “The people of the Liverpool Plains farming community continue to seek an independent study into the impact of long wall mining under the Liverpool Plains before it commences,” he said.

  • Arctic 5degrees hotter than usual

    That warming of the air and ocean impacts land and marine life and cuts the amount of winter sea ice that lasts into the following summer, according to the report.

    In addition, wild reindeer and caribou herds appear to be declining in numbers, according to the report.

    The report also noted melting of surface ice in Greenland.

    “Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect from multiple causes more clearly than in other regions,” said report author James Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

    “It’s a sensitive system and often reflects changes in relatively fast and dramatic ways.”
    Researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, part of the University of Colorado, reported last month that Arctic sea ice melted to its second-lowest level this northern summer.

    The 2008 season, those researchers said, strongly reinforces a 30-year downward trend in Arctic ice extent – 34 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000, but 9 per cent above the record low set in 2007.

    Last year was the warmest on record in the Arctic, continuing a regionwide warming trend dating to the mid-1960s. Most experts blame climate change on human activities spewing so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

  • Local power generation saves regions and economy

    For many years, rural economies have depended upon the land: agriculture and forestry, minerals and fossil fuel resources, beautiful landscapes. But not everyone can farm. Minerals and fossil fuels vary widely in price and are finite. Beautiful landscapes may remain pristine, but tourism is a fickle business.

    Renewable energy development may be the catalyst for changing the rural economy. The boom in corn ethanol and soy biodiesel has provided many farmers with a market price above the cost of production for the first time in a generation. Large wind projects are providing steady lease payments to farmers who surrender a small portion of their land to the turbines.

    These benefits are sustainable because the resource is limitless. Wind will blow no matter how many turbines harness its energy and the sun will shine on rooftops and fields whether they’re bare or lined with solar panels. Simply put, the rural renewable resource is vast: the wind in just the Dakotas could supply 80 percent of U.S. electricity, the sun in Nevada could power the entire country. We could fuel half the nation’s cars with biofuel made of non-food biomass.

    This renewable resource can be harnessed in a centralized fashion or a decentralized one. But the rewards of harnessing it will mirror the style of development. A massive wind farm in the Dakotas and a big solar plant in Nevada may provide enough electricity to power the nation, but they will do so only with a massive investment in long-distance power transmission and use of eminent domain. The beneficiaries of this development will not be rural residents and farmers, but instead will be the same big investors that dominate existing electricity markets.

    If our vision is grand — to get to 100 percent renewable power — some centralized power production is inevitable. But a decentralized network of modest wind farms and biorefineries can harness the vast renewable resource of rural areas and bring home the economic benefits as well. The success of homegrown renewable energy lies in two key findings. Very large renewable power plants and biorefineries cannot be locally owned past a certain size because the capital costs are beyond the community’s wherewithal. Typically this occurs when the facilities have reached a scale such that the cost savings of “bigness” are minimal. But the rewards of local ownership are significant, delivering anywhere from 25 to 300 percent more economic impact to rural communities from identically sized absentee owned facilities.

    Federal renewable energy policy tends to disregard these facts. Renewable power tax credits limit the opportunities for local ownership by requiring investors to have significant tax liability and hampering the ability of cooperatives, nonprofits, units of government and other aggregators of average people from becoming investors. Some incentives, such as accelerated depreciation, are only provided to commercial projects, with no comparable incentive for residential projects. The result is few locally owned projects, except in states with strong policies favoring such development. It’s as though the federal nutrition programs were designed to fight hunger with McDonald’s coupons – providing plenty of calories – when supporting home cooked meals would do a lot more for nutrition and the overall health of the nation.

    There are policy alternatives that do much more for energy and economic security. Renewable energy payments (also known as feed-in tariffs) provide stable, long-term incentives without bias against local ownership. They also wouldn’t expire regularly, as federal tax credits are threatening to do yet again.

    The coming US $1 trillion investment in rural renewable energy will help secure America’s energy future, but it also requires a choice. Will we build large, centralized power plants and biorefineries that bypass the rural communities whose resources we tap? Or will we change our policies to disperse the development of renewable energy and its financial benefits more broadly, securing our economic future, as well?

    Readers can find more on confluence of rural economic development and renewable energy policy in ILSR’s latest report: Rural Power: Community-Scaled Renewable Energy and Rural Economic Development.

    John Farrell is a research associate at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where he examines the benefits of local ownership in renewable energy. His latest paper, Wind and Ethanol: Economies and Diseconomies of Scale, uncovers why bigger isn’t necessarily better. He’s a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  • New book on Bee Death

      

    Lyons Press, 2008, $24.95.

    Lyons Press, 2008, $24.95.

    Referencing the French experience with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), Schacker implicates IMD, a relatively new pesticide and close cousin to DDT, manufactured in its most widespread form by Bayer. This revelation has a feeling of inevitability to it, like finding out that the murderer who drew the light sentence was the Congressman’s cousin. Though Schacker’s tone can sometimes get a little strident, any initial annoyance on the reader’s part is dissipated by the urgency of his message. By the time we get to the section titled “The Government Responds?” we are very much with him.

    As the front flyleaf of the book points out, it’s been 100 years since the birth of Rachel Carson, and A Spring without Bees makes a fine testament to how right she was—and how little she’s been heeded. Looking beyond IMD and Bayer to uncover the deeper whys, Schacker makes it crystal-clear that deregulation of pesticide manufacturers—and the lobbyists who currently steer the EPA and the FDA—have brought us all to the brink of a new definition of CCD. That would be Civilization Collapse Disorder, and intervening at this point will take a vast and basic paradigm shift. But Schacker doesn’t merely wring his hands and moan. He offers a potpourri of hopeful small suggestions that, if widely adopted, could have big results: nontoxic lawns, starting our own bee gardens, planting our streetscapes with lovely silver linden trees and our agricultural fields with hedgerows. Organic and regenerative agriculture, he points out, are things we know how to do. Natural predators can take care of bee mites without hurting a soul, and the Earth, properly understood, can still rebound enough to help us heal its biosphere. But there is no time to waste.

    Schacker has not only written a book that manages to convince, educate, and somehow amuse at the same time, he’s also the founder of The New Earth Institute, an online transformative learning center. At this writing, he’s recovering from a catastrophic stroke. He should be in all our thoughts. Not only is his heart very clearly in the right place, but his boring-but-erudite statistics are relegated to appendices, a habit more science writers might emulate. A Spring without Bees poses the question: could the humble honeybee be the agent of our planetary awakening? Michael Schacker’s book is a powerful wake-up call.