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  • No peace in sight for Labor caucus

    No peace in sight for Labor caucus

    Date February 21, 2013 60 reading now

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    Mark Kenny

    Senior political correspondent

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    Greens grandstanding?

    Greens call time on their agreement with the Labor party, but what does it mean? Joel Fitzgibbon and Josh Frydenberg discuss. Also: joint strike fighter and leadership challenge.
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    Divisions within Julia Gillard’s Labor caucus are showing no signs of healing with her critics slamming suggestions their preference for Kevin Rudd was driven by resentment at being overlooked for promotion.

    Backers of a leadership change said a series of bad polls for Labor were the inevitable result of ”a catalogue of mistakes” under Ms Gillard’s leadership, singling out the abandoned surplus pledge and the underperforming mining tax.

    ”We have somehow arranged this so that our toughest budget yet is the one just before the election,” said one exasperated MP.

    Julia Gillard. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

    He said several MPs were moving across as the reality of the September election dawned.

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    However, no numbers were being counted and no names have been provided.

    But one of the government’s most senior ministers said claims of a groundswell in caucus were nothing more than an attempt to manufacture momentum.

    ”We’ve been down this road before,” said the minister, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    ”We’ve been in a similar space before and that’s where we were at the beginning of last year and, of course, after all the sound and fury, we saw a resounding vote.

    ”I don’t think anything substantial has changed since then.”

    A ballot for the leadership in February 2012 resulted in Ms Gillard securing 71 votes to Mr Rudd’s 31, despite claims by his supporters of significantly higher support.

    The minister’s frustrations were aired as attention swung to Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten, whose support for Ms Gillard is seen as crucial to her survival.

    Touted as a future Labor leader, Mr Shorten was travelling on Wednesday and unavailable for comment. But sources close to him said he remained solidly behind Ms Gillard.

    With the ALP rocked by this week’s Age/Nielsen poll showing its primary vote slumping to 30 per cent, MPs critical of Ms Gillard repeated claims that something must be done.

    They said dissatisfaction was both ”real and widespread”.

    ”If they think it’s just a dozen or so people, well, these are the same people who did the numbers on the mining tax,” the MP said.

    The jibe was directed squarely at Ms Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan, the architects of the minerals resource rent tax that raised just a fraction of its expected revenue over its first six months of operation.

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    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/no-peace-in-sight-for-labor-caucus-20130220-2erqn.html#ixzz2LTxiSKRm

  • Water wise, dollar dumb

    Water wise, dollar dumb

    Date February 21, 2013 201 reading now

    Comments 14
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    Nicole Hasham

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    SYDNEY WATER has abandoned a decade-long push for Sydneysiders to cut their usage because pursuing more efficiencies would drive up bills.

    Critics say the move is short-sighted and is designed to preserve corporate profits, maximise state government dividends and make the Kurnell desalination plant appear viable.

    Water saving programs were cut as a ‘backdoor way to drive up water usage and increase dividends to Treasury’.

    After years of successfully promoting a culture of water efficiency – the former premier Morris Iemma described water as “liquid gold” in 2007 – the utility has now dumped programs for schools, businesses and households and has abandoned large-scale recycling schemes.

    Illustration: Cathy Wilcox

    The utility’s latest water efficiency report says consumption in Sydney is at historic lows, and “after more than a decade of sustained effort, the biggest gains in water savings are already made”.

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    Sydney Water says that continuing to drive down water consumption would cost it more than the value of the water saved, which would lead to an increase in bills.

    “There is now little scope for the broad-scale water efficiency programs … to continue to produce additional water savings cost-effectively,” the report said.

    The backflip comes despite dire warnings in 2003, when the then premier Bob Carr said water restrictions could become a permanent way of life. He called on Sydneysiders to reconsider their love of thirsty European-style gardens.

    Latest figures show per capita use in the Sydney Water catchment, which includes the Illawarra and Blue Mountains, was 297 litres of water a day – more than meeting Sydney Water’s target.

    Sydney Water is now forecasting in its corporate planning documents that overall consumption for the Sydney catchment will increase from 487 to 491 gigalitres over the next three years. Warragamba Dam is this month at 95 per cent capacity.

    Sydney Water spending on water efficiency programs fell from $30.5 million five years ago to $1.5 million last financial year.

    Programs scrapped over the past two years include the Every Drop Counts program in schools, the rainwater tank rebate and water-saving kits. Large water-recycling schemes will be replaced by smaller, local projects.

    Programs still in place include subsidised WaterFix and toilet replacement services for customers experiencing financial hardship.

    VIDEO: Saving water in the city

    Critics have long claimed that the corporatised Sydney Water makes money from selling water, which conflicts with environmental considerations and the need to manage water use.

    The utility expects a $496 million pre-tax profit this financial year. About $232 million will be paid to the government as a dividend.

    A City of Sydney council draft report said Sydney Water believed declining water use would drive up bills “to compensate for the loss of revenue”. It described the position as “regulatory failure”. Sydney Water denied the claim.

    Labor’s water spokesman, Walt Secord, said water saving programs were cut as a “backdoor way to drive up water usage and increase dividends to Treasury”.

    The Greens MP John Kaye said scrapping water efficiency programs would increase demand and “help disguise the folly of Sydney’s $2 billion desalination plant”, which only operates when dam levels fall below 70 per cent.

    Water-saving programs were sacrificed “to ensure that the desalination plant is turned back on as soon as possible”, Mr Kaye said.

    Households will pay $193 million this financial year to keep the plant in shutdown mode. That cost would rise to about $250 million if it was operating.

    A spokeswoman for the Minister for Finance and Services, Greg Pearce, denied the claim and said running programs that were not cost-effective “would be an irresponsible investment by Sydney Water”.

    The NSW manager of the Save Water Alliance, Robert Bell, said the water conservation message should be kept alive, “independent of the economic argument”.

    “[It] has taken a lot of resources to convince the community that there is high value in conserving the resource,” he said. ”People quickly forget.”

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/water-wise-dollar-dumb-20130220-2erql.html#ixzz2LTvNmtVm

  • New study reveals Labor will hand $2.3–5.4 billion profit bonanza to Australia’s dirtiest power stations from carbon price compensation

    New study reveals Labor will hand $2.3–5.4 billion profit bonanza to Australia’s dirtiest power stations from carbon price compensation

    Posted: 19 Feb 2013 01:38 PM PST
    by David Spratt

    The warnings were clear and now its happened: bending over backwards with carbon tax compensation to appease Australia’s dirtiest electricity generators, the Gillard government has handed big coal billions in windfall profits, whilst consumers are effectively paying twice for the carbon price.

    Anybody with any sense — from Professor Ross Garnaut to The Greens — warned two years ago that Labor’s carbon tax package was far too generous in compensating Australia’s dirtiest, brown-coal-fired power stations in Victoria and that, rather than providing reasons for them to be phased out, the package would perversely provides financial incentives to keep generating dirty power even longer.

    And now the damning evidence is in.

    As reported by The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times, the Financial Review and ABC AM this morning, a new study released today — ‘Transitional assistance or windfall profits?’ — by consultants Carbon and Energy Markets (CME) shows how far overboard the Gillard government has gone in appeasing Australia’s dirtiest coal power station owners. The report is the first analysis based on market outcomes, as opposed to predictions and models.

    In an eerie parallel to the mining tax disaster — which has produced revenue of just $126 million in six months as against a giveaway of $1.7 billion in tax credits to the big miners — Transitional assistance or windfall profits? finds that:

    In the first six months of the operation of the carbon price, generators have passed on more than 100% of the carbon price to electricity retailers. That is, despite the carbon tax, their profits from the sale of Australia’s dirtiest electricity have increased.
    Victorian brown coal generators have already received $1 billion in cash compensation payments from the Energy Security Fund.
    They are due to receive billions more in compensation from that Fund, with the next payment due on 1 September this year.
    The combination of full carbon price pass-through and compensation will deliver windfall profits for generators estimated at between $2.3 billion to $5.4 billion, depending on the future carbon price.

    Report author Bruce Mountain of CME says that in the first six months since the introduction of the emission price, generators in Victoria “seem to have been able to pass on all of the cost of the emission permits, through higher electricity prices in the spot market”.

    Assuming the generators are able to pass on a similar proportion of the carbon price in future, he estimates:

    the Victorian brown coal generators, which receive over 90% of Energy Security Fund payments, can expect to accrue additional operating profits somewhere in the range of $2.3bn to $5.4bn (Present Value) depending on emission prices in future… Professor Ross Garnaut and others warned against compensation payments for generators stating they were unnecessary. The level of pass-through that has been observed so far has been unexpectedly high, and seems to vindicate their concerns

    The report, commissioned by Environment Victoria, leaves the Labor Gillard government little choice but to urgently review and reduce or abandon these compensation payments. The report’s findings are embarrassing and damaging to a government already suffering public odium for its cave-in over the mining tax.

    Together, these events paint Labor as a party which has capitulated to the miners and brown coal generators at a cost of many billions of dollars a year in tax revenue. The practical consequence is that Julia Gillard’s newly-described “modern families” will pay the price through a combination of more taxes and lower government services.

    It adds to the picture — contrary to rosy claims about “clean energy futures” — of a government beholden to the fossil fuel industry. At the launch of Environment Victoria’s “Paid to pollute” campaign last Sunday, the results of detailed analysis by The Australia Institute of fossil fuel industry subsidies in Australia painted a startling picture. The research found total government subsidies to the fossil fuel industry of around $13.3 billion a year, compared to revenue from the carbon tax of just $7.7 billion a year (on fossil fuel industry pollution).

    For all the pain associated with its struggle withe the mining and carbon taxes, Labor has little to show if this compensation bonanza to Australia’s dirtiest generators isn’t quickly remedied. It’s hardly surprising that these generators refused to negotiate seriously (and there is evidence that Martin Ferguson didn’t try) under the proposed “Contracts for Closure” arrangements. If this compensation had been taken off the table as The Greens, Garnaut and many others advised, then we would now likely be watching Australia’s dirtiest generators receiving some compensation to close down, rather than reaping windfall profits of $2.3–5.4 billion to keep pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

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  • Antarctic Biodiversity Data Gathered by 90 Expeditions Since 1956 Summarized

    Antarctic Biodiversity Data Gathered by 90 Expeditions Since 1956 Summarized

    Feb. 19, 2013 — A new peer-reviewed data paper offers a comprehensive, open-access collection of georeferenced biological information about the Antarctic macrobenthic communities. The term macrobenthic refers to the visible-for-the-eye organisms that live near or on the sea bottom such as echinoderms, sponges, ascidians, crustaceans. The paper will help in coordinating biodiversity research and conservation activities on species living near the ocean bottom of the Antarctic.

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    The data paper “Antarctic macrobenthic communities: A compilation of circumpolar information,” published in the open access journal Nature Conservation, describes data from approximately 90 different expeditions in the region since 1956 that have now been made openly available under a CC-By license. The paper provides unique georeferenced biological basic information for the planning of future coordinated research activities, for example those under the umbrella of the biology program Antarctic Thresholds — Ecosystem Resilience and Adaptation (AnT-ERA) of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The information collected could be also beneficial for current conservation priorities such as the planning of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

    The expeditions were organised by several famous explorers of the Antarctic. The area covered by the paper consists of almost the entire Southern Ocean, including sites covered by a single ice-shelf. The vast majority of information is from shelf areas around the continent at water depth shallower than 800m. The information from the different sources is then attributed to the classified macrobenthic assemblages. The results are made publicly available via the “Antarctic Biodiversity Facility” (data.biodiversity.aq).

    A specific feature of this paper is that the manuscript was automatically generated from the Integrated Publishing Toolkit of the Antarctic Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (AntaBIF IPT) and then submitted to the journal Nature Conservation through a novel workflow developed by GBIF and Pensoft Publishers. Data are made freely available through the AntaBIF IPT, and sea-bed images of 214 localities through the data repository for geoscience and environmental data, PANGAEA- Data Publisher for Earth and Environmental Science.

    Speaking from on board the research vessel ‘Polarstern’, the paper’s lead author Prof. Julian Gutt of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany commented: “The most important achievement of this paper is that data collected over many years and by various institutions are now not only freely available for anyone to download and use, but also properly described to facilitate future work in re-using the data. The Data Paper concept is certainly a great approach that multiplies the effect of funds and efforts spent by generations of scientists.”

    The data will also be used for a comprehensive Biogeography Atlas of the Southern Ocean project to be released during the XI SCAR Biology Symposium in Barcelona July 2013.

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  • State’s north on flood watch as heavy rain returns

    State’s north on flood watch as heavy rain returns

    Date February 20, 2013 – 5:59PM 166 reading now

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    Saffron Howden

    Rural and Indigenous Affairs Reporter

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    Weatherzone: Sydney radar

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    A flood watch is in place from the Queensland border to the Hunter Valley, amid forecasts of heavy rain along the sodden New South Wales north coast in coming days.

    More than 300mm of rain is expected to fall in some areas over the next two days, the Bureau of Meteorology warned this afternoon.

    The far north coast, already saturated from ex-tropical cyclone Oswald just weeks ago, is expected to be hit first, followed by the mid-north coast, before the rain continues south to the Hunter Valley.

    The Sydney forecast is for showers on Thursday, increasing to rain by Friday afternoon, which should last until Saturday evening.

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    “The heaviest rain is expected in the mid-north coast,” NSW Flood Warning Centre manager Gordon Mackay said.

    “Further north, we might have a bit less rain, but the catchment’s sodden.”

    Caused by a tropical low, the heavy rain is expected to generate moderate to major river flooding as well as localised flash flooding.

    The State Emergency Service (SES) has already been called out to help two people stranded on the banks of a creek in the Nightcap National Park near Nimbin, a spokeswoman said.

    Heavy rain had already started to fall in the state’s north, she said.

    “What we’re preparing for is some very heavy rain to hit northern NSW tomorrow night,” she said.

    “We’re looking at flash flooding, localised flooding.

    “The catchments [are] already really saturated.”

    The spokeswoman warned people to stay out of floodwater.

    Late last month, ex-tropical cyclone Oswald dumped heavy rains from far north Queensland to the Hunter Valley in NSW, causing severe flooding in many areas within 200 kilometres of the coast.

    Experts warned the flooding could have been worse if conditions had not been so dry beforehand.

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    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/states-north-on-flood-watch-as-heavy-rain-returns-20130220-2erhg.html#ixzz2LQnnFYuf

  • Updates on atmospheric methane and volume measurements of Arctic sea ice

    Updates on atmospheric methane and volume measurements of Arctic sea ice

    Posted by Dan Crawford (Rdan) | 2/18/2013 10:05:00 PM

    climate change, rjs (links)
    4 comments

    Here is a link filled update on the rise of atmospheric methane and a decrease in volume of Arctic sea ice from reader rjs.

    Today we’d like to make note of an interesting development in the arctic during January. Below we have 3 images of methane concentrations above the Arctic Ocean from 3 ten day periods in january (January 1-10, January 11-20, and January 21-31) from Russian physicist Dr. Leonid Yurganov.. The methane concentration scale, with darker reds being the highest, can be viewed by clicking on the image to enlarge it.

    Quite obviously, there’s been a sudden increase in atmospheric methane in an area of the arctic ocean north of eastern Europe and western Asia. As shown in the post about this at Arctic News, that area where the methane concentrations are highest coincides with the area of the arctic ocean that is still relatively ice-free.
    This dramatic increase in atmospheric methane seems to be similar to an arctic event that we covered a little over a year ago that occurred in November 2011. At that time Russian scientists had observed vast plumes of methane bubbling to the surface of the arctic ocean off the coast of eastern Siberia, which they described as “powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter”.

    Back then we figured that since that eastern Siberian area was one of the shallowest areas of the arctic, it had warmed enough during a period of unusual atmospheric circulation that fall to thaw the extensive amounts of frozen methane hydrates known to be locked up by high pressure and cold temperatures on the ocean floor, and they were melting and rising to the surface. In this case it appears that a branch of the warm gulf stream current is causing enough warming to destabilize the frozen methane on the ocean floor in the areas between Norway and Svalbard and points east. This is similar to a scenario that was warned about in a study in the journal Nature in October.

    What happens next is anyone’s guess, but Dr Yurganov’s records indicate that higher levels of arctic methane emissions have been increasing over time. (US scientists must now rely on Canadian & European monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions because NOAA’s monitoring of Arctic methane and CO2 was halted last week by budget cuts). We’ve pointed out before that atmospheric methane hit a new high of about 1813 parts per billion (ppb) in 2011, which was at 259% of the pre-industrial level, and that 40% of the increase was coming from natural sources such as this. Methane is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years, and methane’s global heat trapping effect is now roughly one-third that of CO2. Further thoughts on the potential impact of large abrupt release of methane in the Arctic are here. Suffice it to say that if all the ancient carbon were to be released from the arctic it would be enough to raise global temperatures 3C on top of the 4C temperature rise from human activities predicted by the recent World Bank study…

    Our awareness of this comes the same week that the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe has confirmed the conclusion of the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center that not only is the extent of the arctic ice receding, but it’s thickness has diminished considerably as well. The combined result has been a collapse in total arctic ice volume to one fifth of what was the minimum ice volume as recently as 1980. With the associated warming in the arctic, we can only expect the frequency and range of such arctic methane releases to increase, from both the seabed and the permafrost.