Letters: Blind workers in too hard basket Saturday, August 24, 2013 60% of legally blind people were unemployed and looking for work. I disagree with a few points in the article “Blind workers fight for jobs at Vision Australia”. There are lots of parts of welfare to work which are not great but there is a particular part which helps people with disabilities be able to compete on the labour market or become self employed more easily. This is the Job Access Fund [JAF], which is a grant system that gives funding to people with disability to buy infrastructure they need, i.e assistive technology such as talking technology on computers, magnification for the vision impaired or altered desks for a person in a wheelchair. Stating welfare to work should be scrapped is simplistic since the JAF is part of this. In regards to unemployment, there was a Vision Australia survey that found 60% of legally blind people were unemployed and looking for work. But when it comes to disability, merely ordering that a company or government department has to employ someone with a disability is not enough, there needs to be a degree of a mindshift. There is legislation in India, for example, which makes it compulsory for the government to employ a certain percentage of people with disabilities (PWD) in the government workforce. A number of PWD do not feel empowered or engaged as a result of this legislation because they are sometimes told to stay at home yet still get paid. Having legislation making it compulsory to employ a percentage of PWD’s is not enough. A mind shift needs to take place as well. This needs to start with the government taking the lead. Why are the workers who have been sacked by Vision Australia unlikely to find more employment? It’s because they are in the too hard basket like many of the blind. Duncan Meerding Hobart, Tas SUSTAINABLE AUSTRALIA RESPONDS In the article “Rise of the populationists greenwashes racism”, Malcolm King claims that: “Talking about population control serves to shift blame from the rich in the West onto those who are least to blame”. First, Sustainable Population Australia does not advocate “control” as it implies coercion. Voluntary measures should be sufficient to stabilise and then reduce population numbers and thereby help bring the world back within its biological carrying capacity. Of course the West and highly polluting life-styles are to blame for much of the world’s environmental woes, especially in terms of greenhouse gases. Yet people need to be fed and it is agriculture that not only destroys other species’ habitats through land-clearing, but is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. SPA does not advocate contraception as the only means of reducing fertility. You can’t “blame” women who have too many children if they do not have the means to control their fertility or the education to pursue a different life-style than merely raising children. Women need empowerment, education and access to a full range of reproductive services. Those who deny women these things and condone the status quo are the ones practising coercion. For King to go on at length about forced sterilisations in the 1970s that no-one supported, certainly not us, is anachronistic at best. Post-1994 and the International Conference on Population and Development, the focus has rightly been on women’s reproductive rights and health. SPA does, in fact, have environmental credentials. We are recognised as an environmental organisation by the Department of Environment and by the Tax Office. We were set up 25 years ago by people concerned about overpopulation’s effect on the environment. Social and economic factors were secondary. Many of us have a background in science so any claims we make are based on science and not ideology. SPA does not blame immigrants for our environmental problems. If blame is to be sheeted anywhere, it is successive federal governments who have encouraged population growth through incentives for bigger families such as the baby bonus and exceptionally high immigration levels. The latest State of the Environment: Australia report recognises population growth as one of the major drivers of environmental change. One would hope that a publication that has “Green” in its title would accept this. Jenny Goldie President Sustainable Population Australia Michelago, NSW – See more at: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54832#sthash.d6YmkGyb.dpuf

What’s the difference between natural gas, liquid natural gas, shale gas, shale oil and methane? An oil and gas glossary

• 23 Aug 2013, 00:00
• Robin Webster

Over the last few weeks, shale gas has shot into the national consciousness – resulting in more discussion on the airwaves about what, exactly, the UK’s energy future is going to look like. But it’s easy to get lost in all the technical terms. Here’s our quick oil and gas glossary to help you sort your coal bed methane from your LNG.

Natural gas:  Natural gas is a major energy source around the world, accounting for  21 per cent  of the world’s energy supply in 2010. Natural gas is an odourless, colourless gas, largely formed over millions of years underground. It’s made of a variety of compounds (see below), but methane is by far the most significant.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel, releasing greenhouse gases when burnt – but is less climate-polluting than coal, releasing about half of its carbon emissions.

 Typical makeup of natural gas. Source: Naturalgas.org 

Unconventional gas: Unconventional natural gas is trapped in deep underground rocks that are hard to reach, such as shale rock or coal beds. Recent technological advances have made it possible to get these new sources of energy out of the ground.

Shale gas: Shale gas is extracted from shale rock using fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, of the rock. Shale rock is very common; the BGS estimates it makes up 35 per cent of the world’s surface rocks. It also suggests there are 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in the north of England.

The application of the fracking process – which has been used in the oil industry since the mid nineteenth century – to shale gas extraction has the potential to bring about a “a sweeping transformation” of the energy system around the world, according to the International Energy Agency, as different countries develop the resource.

Methane: In the shale gas debate, commentators sometimes make a distinction between natural gas and methane. In fact, as the chart above demonstrates, natural gas mostly is methane.

When it’s released directly in the atmosphere – rather than being burnt – methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. It is approximately 25 times more climate-polluting than carbon dioxide over a 100-year timescale. Some academics are worried that methane leaks during the fracking process – so called fugitive emissions – will significantly increase the impact of fracking on the climate.

Liquified Natural gas (LNG): In order to feed the world’s demand for natural gas, the gas needs to be transported from where it’s produced to where it’s going to be consumed. But transporting gas is not that easy. LNG is created by cooling natural gas to -160ºC, creating a clear, colourless and non-toxic liquid, 600 times smaller than natural gas. The biggest exporter of LNG around the world is Qatar, which sends it around the world in enormous tankers.

Shale oil: Fracking can be used to get not just gas out of the rock, but oil. The US-based Energy Information Administration estimates that shale oil represents 10 per cent of the world’s crude oil resources. It’s not clear how much the UK has got. The British Geological Survey is working on a survey of the shale oil resource in the south of the country. But a spokesperson tells Carbon Brief it will be “several if not many months” before the report is produced.

Coal bed methane (CBM): Methane occurs naturally underground within coal reserves. It can be extracted using a variety of techniques. In comparison to shale gas, the amount of gas we might get from CBM seems to be fairly small – maybe around three years of UK natural gas supply, according to the British Geological Survey.

Underground coal gasification (UCG): UCG is an industrial process where coal is converted into gas while it’s still underground. It involves drilling boreholes into the coal seam, injecting water and oxygen, and partially burning the coal underground. UCG has not been carried out in the UK since trials in Derbyshire in the 1950s, but recently there’s been an increased interest in the technology. UCG has the potential to open up large new areas of coal to exploitation – a prospect that has alarmed environmental campaigners.

David Roberts

Energy, politics, and more

Climate change is an awkward fit for the conventions and institutions that make up today’s media.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the main one is that not much happens. Ecosystems change slowly and incrementally, on time scales much longer than those we’re biologically designed to heed. Climate processes unfold over centuries, millennia, whereas we’re primed to pay attention to what’s happening in front of our noses, or at best within our lifetimes. “The seas rose another .001 feet today” is not a story any editor wants to publish or anyone wants to read.

Climate politics is its own story, of course, and offers some day-to-day developments … but not many. U.S. politics addresses climate rarely, if at all, and when it does the results are, ahem, unenlightening.

All this means that it’s difficult to report on climate change. News editors want to know what’s new, what’s changed, and on climate, not much has. There are no crime scenes, no explosive revelations, no sudden shifts, just … PDFs. Lots and lots of PDFs. Climate change is just puttering along, moving at a pace that won’t mean much over an editor’s career but will profoundly reshape human habitats over centuries.

So it’s not much fun being a climate change reporter. Yet the public badly needs to hear about, and understand, climate change. So if not reporting, then what?

It seems to me what’s needed is more discussion of the meaning of what’s happening, the context, the forces at play, the narratives unfolding. The public — or more importantly, the subset of the public that is engaged, or potentially engaged, with these subjects — needs to learn about concepts, technologies, ways of doing things, ways of thinking about things, that are not familiar.

“Not familiar” is key here. The mainstream media, for all its talk of “objectivity,” is in fact incredibly biased in favor of the status quo, not just status quo powers but status quo narratives and frames. So anyone who’s going to try to help the public understand climate change is inevitably going to be in the position of an outsider. That adds a whole other layer of complications and tactical considerations.

What’s the best way to go about this? What’s the best way to write about climate and related issues?

From the time I first entered this field, I noticed a huge gap between wonks/academics, who release jargon- and chart-filled PDFs, and advocates/polemicists, who release propaganda. (I don’t mean that pejoratively; I just mean it’s explicitly designed to produce political outcomes.) Between those poles there is a large space for analysis, explanation, and argument, delivered by voices who (like wonks) are not forced by institutional commitments to “stay on message,” but who (like advocates) want to reach ordinary people. Independent thinkers and communicators — or, as they were once called, public intellectuals.

That space is well-occupied when it comes to, say, healthcare. Think of Ezra Klein. He’s not a reporter; he’s not writing in the voice from nowhere. He doesn’t pretend not to have values, preferences, and opinions. But his main focus is explanation. He elucidates complicated matters of healthcare policy and politics in ways that average, non-wonk readers can understand. He writes clearly, and fairly. His goal is to grow the pool of healthcare-literate citizens.

That space is much less occupied when it comes to climate. There are lots of wonks and academics, lots of advocates, but very few people who are (successfully) translating the issues so they are digestible by ordinary folk.

Why is that? My lay diagnosis is that most climate communicators originally approached the subject through science, or have scientific or academic backgrounds, or an interest in science writing. Much writing about climate is thus technical and dry; relatedly, most writers and advocates have been (and are) disproportionately obsessed with the “scientific consensus” and arguing with climate deniers. All of this is boring and off-putting to people who don’t approach it with similar scientific training or strong prior opinions about climate (which is most people).

I have tried, with varying success, to occupy that space. I have generally stayed away from science and instead focused on the social, political, and economic aspects of the problem. So, e.g., I try to explain discount rates, CBO scoring, the filibuster, risk-based decisionmaking, baseload power plants, and electric utilities. The stuff engaged citizens need to know.

Insofar as I’ve been successful at this — and jebus, you all have said so many nice things in the last few days! — it’s because of my secret formula. Since I’m leaving for a year, I’m going to share it with you. That way you can replicate me while I’m gone.

As I mentioned the other day, my entry into this field was rather idiosyncratic. I wasn’t trained in journalism or science or advocacy. Obviously that left me without the skills imparted by those disciplines (as many people have reminded me over the years), but it also left me without their preconceptions and dysfunctions. Instead, I was trained in academic philosophy, which is all about achieving conceptual clarity and constructing arguments. So when I approached these issues, it was all about breaking them down into their conceptual components, clarifying what the real disputes are, and making the case for my perspective. (Because I have argued in favor of some policies and positions, I often get accused of being an “advocate” or being part of a “team,” but unless you want to spend your life writing dreary, braindead “both sides are wrong, the truth is in the middle” pieces, you just have to live with that.)

Which brings me to my secret formula, which I call the Friend In a Bar principle.

When I write, I imagine that I am with a good friend in a bar. This is an intelligent friend, a generally knowledgeable and well-read friend, but a friend who doesn’t know much about the thing I’m talking about. I am trying to explain to my friend why she should care about this thing (say, discount rates). We’ve had a few drinks, so I’m feeling chatty.

If I were talking to a friend, would I adopt an “objective” tone, listing facts and citing sources in an inverted pyramid? No, that would be boring as hell. My friend doesn’t have to listen to me; it’s up to me to keep her from tuning out. Then again, would I just rant and rave about how long-term discount rates ought to be lower? No, that would be tiresome. There’s nothing worse than listening to someone get all red in the face about something you don’t particularly understand or care about. Would I speak as though I were some kind of Official Expert, standing at a podium and dispensing wisdom? No. My friend wouldn’t put up with that. She knows me too well.

So yeah, instead, I’d just talk to her. Not at her. To her. What I want, really, is to make discount rates interesting to my friend, to explain the context and considerations involved, so that she understands why the argument exists at all, the animating principles behind each side. I want her to see that it matters, that it’s lurking behind a lot of other stuff she already cares about.

I wouldn’t pretend I don’t have an opinion on discount rates, but I’m not looking for disciples, for soldiers in some discount rate army. Mainly what I want is to create someone else who cares about discount rates, so I have someone to talk to!

That’s the secret formula. I recommend it. And I mean really: When you write something, read it aloud and literally imagine yourself saying it to a good friend in a bar. When you speak to someone you know, someone you respect and who knows you, your voice has a kind of natural rhythm and variety. You instinctively know when you’re getting boring, or when you’ve droned on too much about technical stuff, or when you’re getting too pedantic or strident. You will know because, when you read it aloud, you will imagine your friend rolling her eyes.

And yeah, when you’re talking to a friend, you drop the occasional joke or curseword. Because that’s how people talk in real life. Not all Official. Just real.

Is this “journalism”? Hell, I don’t know. It’s not reporting. It’s not quite op-ed writing. It’s more … conversing. That’s what I’ve tried to do: draw people into conversations, enlarge the group of people aware of and engaged in this stuff.

I’m not arrogant enough to think my being gone will have any big impact on the world, but I do know that we need more people in that middle space, not wonking, not polemicizing, just musing and explaining and arguing and conversing. It’s what a healthy democracy looks like. I hope more people come in and occupy that space, and even more, I hope media editors and publishers see the worth in it.