The Victorian Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability has released an annual report which examines the condition of the Victorian environment.
Early media reports note that some sections of Victoria have been “damaged beyond repair”. I am surprised that this is news to anyone, but I suppose it’s worth repeating.
There’s lots to chew through in the report, and I’d imagine that there are various aspects that various LP’ers might want to quibble about (to pick one, I don’t think the use of “ecological footprint” is terribly helpful, as it gives very little indication of what aspects of our lifestyles are unsustainable, and contains a lot of assumptions which have value judgements embedded in them). But there was another interesting little statistic from the section on energy and transport in Chapter 3 that caught my eye: “Based on full fuel cycle greenhouse gas emissions factors and average occupancy rates, passenger cars emit 0.213 kg of CO2-e per person-kilometre travelled, compared with 0.145 kg CO2-e/PKT for trains, 0.158 kg CO2-e/PKT for trams and 0.159 kg CO2-e/PKT for buses”.
I am slightly surprised, but it seems that replacing Commodores with trams is not nearly as big a win for the global environment as might be hoped, at least until Hazelwood and Loy Yang stop belching CO2 into the air.
Robert – I don’t know if its the same problem in Victoria, but here in Canberra the lack of savings in CO2 emissions by public transport is primarily due to the low *average* occupancy rates. The buses here are very full during peak hours, but during off peak there are many of them driving around empty or nearly empty.
We need public transport for social justice reasons, but I did some back of the envelope calculations a couple of years ago based on kms that the buses drove and passenger statistics and just in terms of CO2 emissions people here might as well be driving cars as taking the bus. This is where our low density living really hurts us.
Whilst surprised by the narrow margins between the figures a different impression might be apparent if we multiply those rates by the actual number of persons/km..
I’m assuming the small margins would be multiplied by very large numbers and thus the absolute differences would be relevant.
Meanwhile, the Victorian government continues to log our tiny remaining old-growth ash forest ecosystems.
…err, for “log”, read “harvest”, the weasel word du jour.
I would think if we used the most efficient hybrid-diesel buses that were available, and doubled the occupancy rate (i.e. moved that many people out of cars and into buses), buses would compare quite favourably to cars – but of course there’s also huge potential for cars to become vastly more efficient: if everyone owned the most efficient vehicle available on the market now that was necessary for their typical needs then CO2 emissions from traffic would probably be half what they are now.
I dispute that PT primarily is there to serve a social justice purpose: you only need to look at cities around the world where P.T. is the primary mode of travel for commuters to see that.
Obviously, CO2 is not the only reason why public transport is good. It reduces the amount of space required for roads and parking, local air pollution, and so on.
As for social justice, you do have to wonder whether it’d be cheaper to use taxis to provide some of those outer-suburban bus rides to nowhere on an on-demand basis.
wizofaus – I don’t think PT is there primarily for social justice reasons, but its a reason we can’t just throw it away even if it would be more efficient.
Robert @ 6 – it might be cheaper to use taxis but I think it would be pretty difficult to administrate. Smaller vehicles (cars/mini-buses) driving bus routes during off peak hours could be an alternative but means quite a bit of capital investment and I’d imagine you’d see resistance from the unions.
“some sections of Victoria have been “damaged beyond repair”.”
Are they referring to Burke Street, Victoria Park, the Lexus Centre or Parliament house?
Of course the amount of greenhouse gas emitted from passenger cars could be greatly reduced if more motorway type roads were built in our congested cities. These motorways would greatly reduce the amount of fuel hungry stop-start driving that occurs on our surface roads. But have you ever heard an environmentalist lobby for a motorway to be built? Unfortunately public transport, particularly rail, is a sacred cow of many an environmentalist.
It is impossible to imagine our Melbourne trams and trains running on electricity wholly generated by wind or solar – or any other form of renewable energy. Nuclear, on the other hand…
#9 – That’s a joke right?
The solution to our environmental problems is to build more motorways, thus encouraging more cars on the roads? Even accepting your flimsy premise re stop/start driving, where do you suppose all these cars will go when the get off the motorway?
There’s a reason you’ve never heard an environmentalist lobby for more mororways. It’s because it’s a crap idea.
Colin: you are making the false assumption that the distances people drive are not change by the existence of motorways allowing longer distances to be travelled in a comparable time period.
In any case, the fuel-hungriness of stop-start driving could be avoided if hybrid or electric vehicles are more widely adopted over time.
Indeed I’d almost be prepared to bet the only way a motorway could get funding these days is if it could be shown to increase the amount that people drive, thus generating extra fuel excise revenue and toll fees.
I doubt anyone can point to a single example of where building a motorway reduced CO2 emissions or pollution of any form.
http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/pollution.shtml
That said, the PTUA are incorrect when they state:
Aside from CO2, cleaner engines have outpaced more traffic. The air in California is much cleaner than it was a few decades ago.
Well that’s a pretty big “aside”!
And if you want proof that destroying roads can produce less traffic…
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/01/local/me-freeway1
…though of course it’s not really a very meaningful experiment. But you have to ask why it is such an event is needed to encourage drivers to explorer alternative means/times of travel?
Meanwhile, the Victorian government continues to log our tiny remaining old-growth ash forest ecosystems.
I’m sorry helen, do you have any actual facts to back up that absurd assertion? Of the remaining old-growth forests in victoria, they are overwhelmingly permanently protected in formal and informal reserves. The Area of old-growth in Victoria is INCREASING from year to year, with the only threat being bushfire.
The only poeple who consistently turn up to put out bushfires are otherwise employed in the timber industry!
Re freeways reducing emissions, I don’t buy it personally but it is a common theme.
From the Frankston bypass environmental effects statement:
Wilful – have a look at brown mountain:
If you don’t want to watch the youtube clip, just google logging in brown mountain.
It’s in east gippsland. Old growth. In Victoria. Being logged.
Absurd, isn’t it?
The comparison between CO2 emissions of cars and buses seems to me to be an invalid method for deciding how to make a journey. If i make a journey by bus instead of by car the CO2 reduction is the amount not produced by the car less the incremental extra amount used by the bus in carrying an extra passenger. The bus will run whether or not I am on it; it will produce most of the CO2 even if empty and very little more for each extra passenger.
yeah duke, what about it, looks like usual harvesting (sorry, logging, or rather, whatever) to me.
Of course, you could tell me what old-growth is, and how much of it still available for harvesting compared to how much is reserved?
When the government starts making money from the “carbon pollution reduction scheme” – that is, if they aren’t just handing all the money right back to those poor, disadvantaged hard-done-by coal-fired generators – one of the first things I would like to see the money spent on is a massive shake up of public transport.
A significant increase in the number and frequency of services, including trains, trams and buses, better quality of services, better reliability of services, less crowded and more secure services, and serious penalties for the private operators if they don’t deliver quality service.
Of course, you’re quite right in that the carbon dioxide emissions mitigation potential of trams, just like electric cars, is intrinsically limited until we close down the likes of Loy Yang and Hazelwood.
Brad Templeton has discussed the US equivalent to this problem at some length:
http://ideas.4brad.com/green-u-s-transit-whopping-myth
AFAIK in Christchurch (NZ) they have switched to minibuses and taxis during off-peak times for some of the bus network, with good results. It means that they can run buses nigh on 24/7 even in a small city because if the minibus fills up the driver just radios in for another one. Big buses most of the time, obviously. They also have electronic indicator boards at some stops telling you when the next bus is coming.
You need to read the assumptions in the studies *very* carefully. The Frankston one was written on the assumption that traffic volume and journey distance did not change, AFAIK. This is common and at best misleading – look back at the study for any completed motorway and there are two likely outcomes – tolled PPP roads have lower patronage than expected, everything else has significantly more. To many supporters the whole point of the new motorway is so they can drive more, more often. Otherwise why build it?
ChrisV: fine. But it does call into question the benefits of – say – running buses through outer suburban residential streets that nobody rides.
Human population growth: still an underlying and fundamental factor in environmental damage.
I’ve managed to skim read a fair chunk of the SoE report now, and it’s depressing, but entirely unsurprising.
I like that McPhail has protected his independence. Not sure how effective he is, but at least he says what he thinks (or so it seems).
Got reasonable coverage today. Check out this for depressing: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/big-house-on-the-hill-is-a-dream-come-true-20081204-6rpi.html
wilful @ 21
Just pointing out that old growth logging (or harvesting if you will – why play that boring semantic game?) continues in Victoria. The question is, why?
As for defining old growth – you obviously have some definition in mind for you to make the statement that the area of old growth in Victoria is increasing from year to year.
By the way, what do you mean by an ‘informal reserve’?
or harvesting if you will – why play that boring semantic game? I’m not interested in the tedious semantics, this is something Helen was commenting on. Informal reserves are commonly understood as Special Protection Zones and Code of Practice exclusion buffers, not legislated but where harvesting cannot take place. The question of why old-growth harvesting? How about why not? Old-growth is not the ne plus ultra of forests, it’s just old forest. It has important values, but if we only had old-growth forest, that would be a poor outcome for biodiversity as well, you know.
Re the definition: ’Old-growth forest is forest which contains significant amounts of its oldest growth stage in the upper stratum — usually senescing trees — and has been subjected to any disturbance, the effect of which is now negligible’
Re that Age article – do they ever publish similar implication-filled accounts of the way people live in the inner suburbs? Until I read some such articles I have to continue to think the environmental angle (however valid on its own merits) is largely a pretext for the paper to express its class-based contempt for People Not Like Us.
Wilful, laura: there’s a point there.
What was that land before houses were built on it? Low-grade cattle grazing land, or horse agistment, most likely. It’s not like it was pristine wilderness in a major water catchment.
If that couple drove an electric car and got their electricity from low-carbon sources, most of the environmental concerns about their lifestyles go away.
Wilful “but if we only had old-growth forest, that would be a poor outcome for biodiversity as well” – the planet had no biodiversity issues before humans came along. Nature is perfectly capable of balancing out the need for various stages of forest without our help.
I think there’s a pretty strong argument that the long term costs of old-growth forest logging are significantly higher than those of plantation logging. If those costs were properly factored in, old-growth forest logging would almost certainly be largely uneconomical in Australia.
laura – fair point, and indeed some studies have shown that the resource-usage/carbon footprint of inner-city dwellers is often higher than those in outer suburbs. It’s also not completely clear that higher-denser living is likely to be better for the planet or human beings as a whole.
I suppose the issue I have with small families choosing to build oversized houses on huge blocks of land is that they’re often not having to pay for the full long-term costs of such a decision. Especially true when people take out 30-year mortgages to pay for such extravagances, when there’s every chance that in 30 years time the damage caused by our unsustainable lifestyles will reach a point that fairly draconian measures to contain it will be required – such as bulldozing such inefficient housing and replacing it something capable of improving the health of the environment.
Robert, that kinda assumes that carbon pollution is the only way in which our lifestyles are unsustainable. Almost everything we buy these days is causing some measureable amount of damage to the environment – especially China’s. And all things being equal, someone living in a 10 room house is going to be buying more consumerables than someone living in a 4 room house.
Robert, some of the land on the outskirts of Melbourne is native grassland, and covering it in housing is every bit as problematic as cutting down trees in other areas. Even if there are horses grazing currently, it can still to some extent function as habitat for native insects, birds and frogs and so on. Backyards that have been landscaped with lawn (or fake lawn) aren’t equivalent.
A few years ago a friend of mine was researching grasslands to Melbourne’s north. She’d go to her sites periodically and find they’d been levelled by a bull-dozer in preparation for housing. It’s about time we got past the idea that “the environment” means “trees”, and that “no trees to cut down” means “no environmental damage”.
The other problem with allowing the city to get bigger and bigger is that it further entrenches really long commuting times, because most people in very outer suburbs don’t (can’t) work near home. So wealthier inner suburban people get to be home in time to cook a decent meal and see their kids and be Good Parents who read a story before bed, and poorer people spend three hours or more a day in the car, come home exhausted and open a packet of something. Then they get to be the Bad Parents who are too tired to read a story or get the kids in bed at a respectable hour.
Actually that’s something in the land and biodiversity section of the SoE report that is dwelled on – loss of native grasslands. The trouble is is that native grasslands are aesthetically deeply unappealing, which is why you get dills out protesting in the deep forest because it doesn’t look very good, yet the real crisis is much closer to home.
wizofaus, feel free to start creating a full LCA of old-growth harvesting. Don’t forget to add a few things – availability of suitable plantation land, time taken to grow a sawlog, Australia’s $2bn annual trade deficit in timber, cost of alternatives (steel, aluminium, concrete), other opportunities in remote communities…
And why do you think that putting forest in parks is equivalent to solving all our problems? It’s still ecosystem manipulation, and what happened pre-white fella is a) impossible to truly know, and b) probably no longer all that relevant.
wilful, why is it relevant whether Australia is self-sufficient in timber? It really makes no more sense to expect us to be than to expect, for instance, Sweden to be self-sufficient in iron ore.
Three reasons.
1) kinda puts the lie to the suggestion that we could all swap to plantations straight away.
2) most of our well regulated imports are fairly fully utilised. Any reductions in Australian industry would, without changed consumer behaviour, result in more imports, and these would most likely come from poorly regulated sources. Risk of quoll extinction in eastern Victoria is both far less likely and to my mind less important than the uncalculated losses (but including Sumatran tigers and orangutans) of tropical logging.
3) balance of trade is still important, we’re still sending money overseas that we could enrich ourselves with (no this isn’t a protectionist argument, it’s just uncontroversially stating that we should have some competitive strength in this area, and import replacement is a good thing for the wealth of Australians).
PS I believe Sweden is quite iron rich.
Wizofaus, we are self-sufficient in timber. 80-90% of timber clearfelled in SE Australia goes to woodchipping.
Wilful, as usual you are coming out with what are clearly timber industry talking points. A couple of things:
I’m not interested in the tedious semantics [of calling clearfelling "harvesting"], this is something Helen was commenting on.
Wow, you’re good, aren’t you? Let me explain this to other readers,
(1) a short while back the proponents of logging old growth forest began referring to old growth logging as “harvesting” in their press releases, thus attempting to give this violent and destructive process a spurious glow of bucolic peacefulness,
(2) I called them on it, in my own blog, in letters to the relevant MPs, and on here,
(3) Wilful now says I’m the one engaging in tedious semantics.
Wow. Just wow.
“Old-growth”, as most people in SE Australia know, is forest with mature and secescent tree growth plus a mature understorey of trees such as myrtle etc, plus other native understorey plants, particularly tree ferns. The senescent trees are not, as the timber boosters claim, merely worn-out, but are an integral part of the ecosystem, containing knotholes and other crannies which native wildlife use to live in.
“Harvesting”, for Brown Mountain, will mean clearfelling, bulldozing, and burning. For the benefit of non-Australian readers, the soil is actually very thin on our continent and once this vandalism is completed the work of erosion and degradation begins. Trees may be grown in their place (as a monocultural environment) but the understorey, tree ferns and critters have gone. The new regrowth is, of course, much more vulnerable to bushfire.
The Australian obsession with suburbia gets a hiding in the report. My thoughts at Suburbamania: Choking Australia. CO2 is a bi-product of our sprawl, which is a nationwide disease.
Wilful, this harping on wooden furniture is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that around 85% of the cut goes to woodchips. After wastage, only a percentage of a percentage of the rest is used in any way for high-value use.
We already have plantation hardwood to use to build timber furniture and floors. So someone wants to import mahogany? I don’t see that banning that is going to cause anyone to die in the near future. Look in the constitution for the right to own a tropical hardwood setting. See? Not there. Imagine if hardwood became so scarce we had to have pine furniture? Boo-hoo. If that’s the worst that happens in the next few decades of climate change we should consider ourselves extraordinarily lucky.
This is the thing, old-growth will be eventually gone if your employers, whoever they are, continue
harvestingclearfelling it at the rate they are doing. What is their game plan for when it is all gone? Implement that game plan now. They don’t have one? Bad business.Thanks for pointing out the stuff on grasslands; where I grew up all the farmland has been sown down with non-native grass anyway so replacing farmland with houses doesn’t affect native grasslands much.
wiz: there are indeed a number of other ways in which our lifestyles are unsustainable. But I simply don’t buy the argument that is often made that everything about modern lifestyles is unsustainable. There are lots of issues that need addressing, sure. But we should (in my view) be concentrating on fixing the specific issues. For instance, many China’s environmental issues are because their factories just dump crap straight into their rivers and air. We mostly don’t do that any more in the western world, and we still manufacture a hell of a lot of stuff.
That’s assuming that most outer suburbanites commute to the city to work. It’s not the case. Most work near where they live. I wish I had a better example more readily to hand, but this is instructive.
“Imports…would most likely come from poorly regulated sources”
And I agree that’s a problem, but it’s not an insoluable one. There’s no reason we couldn’t impose a significant tax on wood imports from countries with environmentally damaging logging practices, as a form of incentive for them to clean up their act.
I don’t see why we should assume that Australia is naturally competitive in terms of timber logging. If we were to move resources away from logging timber, there’s no reason they couldn’t be moved towards producing exportable goods that would be more profitable than timber, thus improving our balance of trade.
One other point – the “attractiveness” of forests vs grasslands can’t be dismissed out of hand. It’s one thing to protect the environment because it’s necessary for its long term health (and hence its ability to sustain human life), but it’s equally important to protect it because having a beautiful environment is part of what makes life worth living (even aside from the tourism industry implications).
If humans generaly don’t find grasslands particularly attractive, then unless their destruction has significantly greater ecological implications that the destruction of alternative (and more visually attractive) ecosystems, then why should we not generally prefer bulldozing grasslands?
As it is, I would think there’s actually still significant amounts of land with minimal ecological or aethestic value that haven’t been developed to full potential – so until that land is used up, there shouldn’t need to be significant pressure on grasslands.
Helen: eliminating those forests entirely is going to be rather difficult, seeing large fractions of them are in national parks.
Oh, “timber industry talking points”. yeah whatever. You’re coming out with “deep greenie talking points”. Now that we feel superior to each other, can we move on?
From this point on in this thread, I’m happy to call timber harvesting whatever you would like. It is totally trivial. Logging. Sure. Good. Done. Irrelevant. Though it’s been called harvesting since day dot.
Old-growth. A technical term. Got qualifications? The definition I provided has been agreed by governments since at least 1992. By the way, myrtle (Nothofagus cunninghami) is an overstorey tree found in rainforest. Which by law cannot be logged/butchered/raped/pillaged (beent hat way since the 80s). Old-growth can occur in mallee, in box, in inronbark, all forest types.
Senescent means old, end of life, will fall over in due course. Likely to be hollow bearing which is important for a variety of fauna, but not the be all and end all of forest ecology.
Harvesting/raping/pillaging doesn’t mean bulldozing, actually, except in small areas, because that disturbs the soil excessively, which is a poor outcome that is closely managed. Clearfelling, yes, allows a successful regeneration burn with an ash bed, so the trees removed can be regenerated with the original species mix (by law). To make that clear, NOT a monoculture, that’s illegal, and doesn’t happen, at least according to the independent EPA audits.
Erosion is certainly an issue to be managed, but generally speaking is well managed. Forestry roads are a much more significant issue than the harvesting (raping, etc) area itself. Of course, if you refer to the SoE report, you’ll see where the streams in good condition are, in the forestry area
Adrian comment 11 says:
“There’s a reason you’ve never heard an environmentalist lobby for more motorways. It’s because it’s a crap idea.”
No. It’s because environmentalists wrongly believe their sacred cow (public transport, especially rail) can somehow provide the urban mobility that most Australians demand. It is clear to everybody bar those with their head stuck up a dark place that public transport has serious limitations. Certainly public transport can be an easy and quick alternative if your destination is a central location like the CBD. But it is hardly a viable alternative to the motorcar for time hungry citizens travelling between suburbs which is what most urban travel is, suburb to suburb. And Adrian you say motorways encourage more cars on the road. Really? Where do these extra cars come from? Errr maybe from other roads that than have a decrease in traffic and/or population growth.
I can’t speak much about Melbourne, but I know from my own experience in Brisbane, motorways generally reduce traffic and congestion on surface streets thus reducing fuel consumption and therefore CO2 emissions. By way of example a trip from Brisbane’s inner city to Upper Mount Gravatt via the Pacific Motorway uses half the amount of fuel needed to travel from the same inner city location to Aspley via the northern surface roads even though both trips are of equal distance.
And Robert Merkel, I was making no false assumptions. The motorways I was suggesting needed building was in already built up areas suffering traffic congestion. Tell me again how traffic congestion reduces air pollution?
And wizofaus, do you think if we closed down all our motorways we’d end up with less pollution? Do you think all those people currently using such motorways would vanish into thin air along with their cars? Or do you think they might force themselves onto the surface roads causing massive congestion and increased fuel consumption?
Those sacred cows are always the hardest to kill!
And yes, Sweden/Iron was a bad example. Pretend I said, say, copper ore (of which Australia is a net-exporter).
Oh one more small point before I stop talking about forestry, since I know you’ll never believe me. A bit of context. Brown Mountain is 18 hectares. The state government is introducing an additional 41 000 hectares of new old-growth national parks, to add to the current 423 000 hectares of parks in East Gippsland. 44 percent of all public land will be formally ‘locked up’, while vast other areas that can never be logged (under the RFA) mean that far less than half of the forests in east Gippsland can ever be harvested. Over 95 percent of old-growth in east Gippsland will be protected, together with 100 percent of rainforest communities.
All forests are fully renegerated, and regulated forestry has occurred in Victoria since white settlement. Yet we’re still not running out of forests, since sustainable yield calculations are done over the full rotation (80 to 120 years).
Colin: it’s very simple. If you make it more convenient to go from Point A to Point B to another by building a motorway, over time, more people will choose to travel from A to B than do presently. Go have a look at the Wikipedia article on induced demand.
“Go have a look at the Wikipedia article on induced demand.”
Alternatively, have a little bit of a think.
Ahem
And I agree that’s a problem, but it’s not an insoluable one. There’s no reason we couldn’t impose a significant tax on wood imports from countries with environmentally damaging logging practices, as a form of incentive for them to clean up their act.
That would be the Australian government’s issue to work out, it would be fraught with difficulty. Though I encourage everyone to buy timber that’s certified to either PEFC or FSC. As a matter of fact, the UK government will only use certified wood.
I don’t see why we should assume that Australia is naturally competitive in terms of timber logging.
It’s a reasonable assumption though. Australian hardwoods are brilliant, and growing them where they’ve evolved to grow makes sense. Forestry is highly mechanised and capital intensive, it’s cost competitive with the world. As a bulky product, you would think local timber would have local advantages, rather than shipping it around the world.
I understand and in principle agree with the classical economic argument, however you must remember that these are people and communities that exist now, and do what they do cost effectively and efficiently. Heavy machinery operators are in demand in the mining sector, but Mt Tom Price is a long way from Bendoc, and I go back to my primary point, which is that we do appear to have competitive strength in this area.
… the “attractiveness” of forests vs grasslands can’t be dismissed out of hand
This is an important philosophical point. Given that we have less than 1 percent of our native grasslands left, and 98 percent of our mountain ash forests left, I think we could probably focus a bit more effort on the grasslands, which do have a lot of threatened endemic species. We’re not running out of beauty due to forestry. The stunning bit of the Black Spur past Healesville is all regrowth, planted by foresters. It’s now in National Park, however it shows how we can appreciate an area that has been harvested in the past.
The trouble with our grasslands is that they’re nice and flat and lie in the path of Melbourne’s expansion. And if you just build around them they’re stuffed anyway.
Colin – “do you think if we closed down all our motorways we’d end up with less pollution” – absolutely, we would.
Car travel would become significant less attractive and people would seek alternatives.
But I wouldn’t seriously propose that at this point, for any number of reasons.
And your Brisbane examples ignore the fact that before the freeways were built people simply drove less. Show me the slightest evidence that any of the freeways built in Brisbane have causes a net reduction CO2 emissions.
Helen: eliminating those forests entirely is going to be rather difficult, seeing large fractions of them are in national parks.
I don’t see how this invalidates my point, that the woodchippers are eventually going to run out of the oldgrowth that they have available to them, Robert.
I didn’t mean to imply Robert that all outer suburbanites commute to the city, but commuting from suburb to suburb is also time consuming. Some of the people in any given area work within a short drive (or a walk or bus or whatever) but plenty work a few suburbs from work, and if they’re not going into the city the commute is long because freeways and train lines (in Melbourne at least) lead to the CBD, only the ring road works radially, and none of the train lines do anymore. The distance isn’t necessarily large, but the commute time can be when everyone is trying to commute at the same time. I wouldn’t, for example, want to be living in Caroline Springs and working at Highpoint.
wilful – pedantic point but your definition of old growth is from Woodgate et al 1994. You might be thinking of the NFPS 1992 version which is slightly different:
“Forest that is ecologically mature and has been subjected to negligible unnatural disturbance such as logging, roading and clearing. The definition focuses on forest in which the upper stratum or overstorey is in the late mature to over mature growth phases.”
I’m still not sure that the area of old growth is increasing every year, regardless of the definition you use. Anyway, neither here nor there.
But I do take issue with “all forests are fully regenerated”. I don’t have time to check at the moment but I recall that the VicForests annual report suggests otherwise. In any event, anyone with any experience in regeneration surveys would not make that claim.
Of course they’re not fully regenerated. They never have the diversity of species – botanical, animal, fungal, bird, insect, bacterial – that they had before. And while they’re young, of course, they burn better.
I didn’t read the part in the report that said (per Kevin Rennie at #38) that the Australian ‘obsession’ with suburbia is responsible for our environmental problems.
The bits I read (extensive, tied to something I’m writing) indicated that overconsumption is actually the key problem. I think there are recommendations in there to the effect that Govt should investigate awareness campaigns about reducing consumption along the lines of the water saving campaigns we’ve had.
As far as I understand it, people in the inner suburbs are just as good at shopping as those of us in the outer ones.
RE: moz (23) and Christchurch entry for best practice: They have a
Zero-fare shuttle service in the inner city…hybrid buses battery powered, with small natural gas fuelled turbine engine to keep the battery charged .. service is funded by Christchurch City Council.
The buses are the ones wizaus pointed out in post 42 of an earlier thread .
His Malcolmness has one
http://www.designlineinternational.com/photos/52746/electric1.jpg
to take him and his fans to the beach every morning.
Designline (Ashburton, NZ) designed them as a response to the international tender for ecological buses to be used in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the design was rated as technically best, but did not win the tender. That’d be right.
Some Seppoes, on the other hand, were a bit cluier, and bought the company, tho the chassis’ are still manufactured in NZ . Someone please tell Kim Carr … (ooh I’ve just got it, why he’s so far up the car industry,… if his name was Kim Hybrid-Buss we’d be well on the way)
Puddingwise, the proof is pretty darned significant
Robert Merkel comment 47 says:
“If you make it more convenient to go from Point A to Point B by building a motorway, overtime, more people will choose to travel from A to B than do presently.”
I see, so you don’t want to make it convenient to travel. Maybe you could work that into an election slogan.
But the point is even if you don’t make it more convenient to travel from Point A to Point B by refusing to build a motorway, overtime more people will still choose to travel from A to B than presently do and create even more emissions than they would it a motorway was built.
Yes wizofaus before freeways people drove less. May have had something to do with less affluence 50 years ago. Also more women work today than 50 years ago. They have to get to work somehow. Also people marry later now compared to 50 years ago. Look at all those in their 20s and 30s constantly busy travelling from A to B. You reckon they’re going to do that on a bus do you? Time to give up on all that 1970s basket weaving stuff and take a walk in the real world.
You want to know of a freeway that has reduced CO2. Take your pick. They all reduce CO2. But for a recent example try the inner city bypass from Kelvin Grove Road to Kingsford Smith Drive. In peak hour the 4km trip takes about 3 minutes and has no stops. Prior to the bypass being built a trip between Kelvin Grove Road and Kingsford Smith Drive in peak hour took about 15 minutes and involved a constant stop/start and zig zagging along eight different named streets. Since the opening of the inner city bypass not only are their significant savings in time, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions when travelling between the above mentioned roads, the amount of congestion on Bowen Bridge Road around the Royal Brisbane Hospital has been so greatly reduced that it has been possible to temporarily close one lane on Bowen Bridge Road so as to enable the construction of the Northern Busway. But hey I don’t expect I’ve changed your mind. As I said sacred cows are hard to kill.
Speaking of Vistoria’s environment, could someone please explain the steps of how it came to pass that the Sugarloaf pipeline got through with the Water Amendment Bill… The Senate last week apparently passed an amendment to bill that would prevent any new water being taken away from the Murray-Darling Basin… yet the Victorian Water Minister Tim Holding was able to say the amendment faces certain defeat in the Lower House, They have no chance of being incorporated into this bill,…??
How come the senate ( libs, + greens, + indies) was able to impose it’s will on Roxon’s legislation which wished to get rid of the enhanced care dental plan brought in by howard in the last month of his government, such that the howard arrangments still hold today, yet the Senate (L+G+I) has no such ability to impose it’s will here?
You want to know of a freeway that has reduced CO2. Take your pick.
South East Freeway. That’s reduced a lot of the carbon dioxide from trudging along Logan Road, hasn’t it? Expect that the South East Busway is build next to it, with an even lower environmental footprint. What’s produces more CO2 per person – a single occupancy car, or a multiple occupancy bus? Especially one that’s traveling relatively unimpeded from Mt Gravatt to the city alongside a peak hour crawl on the M3?
That’s what Robert is getting here – a freeway may use less energy than a series of intersections, but buses or trains use a lot less than either of the first two. And both buses and trains appear to be popular when I’m visiting the CBD. People will use public transport if it is convenient for them – and there are a lot of them I’ve observed – office men and women (and students of course).
Colin – do you work in the traffic industry? I’m thinking you don’t. You seem to think freeways are the magic bullet for traffic woes. They’re not (and that’s after some time of working alongside traffic engineers). Flow breakdown is one of the phenomena that they have to put up with… the occupancy is close to capacity, everyone is zooming along, someone slows for some reason (and it’s not even an accident) and everyone just breaks. It will take maybe a couple of minutes for everyone to get going again… and they’re still using the same amount of carbon dioxide, if maybe not more.
Danny: my guess is that the Liberals weren’t prepared to wear the opprobrium of Melbourne voters if the pipeline sat idle with Melbourne on Stage 4 water restrictions in 2010.
As I’ve said before on the merits, urban water is a red herring in the sustainability of the Murray-Darling. When you look at the quantities of water going to Melbourne (and Adelaide) compared to the water going on irrigation, the urban water supply is a relative piddle.
Just to reinforce Robert’s point, cos its my hobby horse.
Just for SA, dunno about Victoria.
In the drought years a couple of years ago Adelaide and a large part of the rest of SA increased [because of the drought] its water take from the Murray from its ‘normal’ average of about 100-150 GL per year to a bit less than 250 GL.
In the same years the irrigators along the Murray in SA decreased their take from the Murray [because of quotas cos of the drought] down to about 450 GL each year.
In ‘normal’ years they take about 640-660 GL from the river.
So:
-in drought years a handful of irrigators use nearly double the quantity of river water that over a million urban people use for all purposes including industrial, domestic, commercial and recreational.
-in ‘normal’ years the same handful of irrigators use about 4 times the amount of river water that over a million people use.
Irrigation is the problem.
Not urban use.
Not even the drought.
When you say a “handful” of irrigators using 600GL, that would largely be cashed up Managed Investment Scheme operators, on the part of their beaumont and toorak and wentworth and ascot
tax deduction harvestorsinvestors, who can afford to buy-out real farms for their water entitlements, nyet? Too bad about the price-dropping gluts they cause when they get into grapes, oranges, whatever.I’ve seen a calculation showing that these MIS forest plantations “took 1.5 Tl out of MDB states (while the ) total water flowing into Murray Darling Basin in 2006 was reported at 1,317 Gl or 1.3 Tl.” A helluva lot of water, and the opportunity cost, is part of the price of fixing carbon in plantation trees, 1.5 Ml of water per hectare per year.
Cattle can be leased under MIS schemes too, (investment unit is a drove = 4 head), pastoral bores are draining 495GL/yr out of the artesian basin. Roxby Downs/OLympic Dam in case you’re wondering takes 50 gl a year from the artesian basin.
I’m thinking we bite the bullet, deport the melbournites and adelaidians to tasmania where there’s water, and room for lots of grand-view high rises. Without them there to complain about the smell, we could then set up port phillip bay and gulf of st vincent as giant carbon fixing algae farms. Algae’s looking good for bio-diesel feedstock. The only thing standing in the way is the people in adelaide and melbourne, so we treat their immanent dessication as a feature, not a bug. We could have a national whiparound to raise funds for a couple of million one way tickets to tasmania, problems solved.
Colin, how long has that bypass been open? New motorways affect commuter behavior over decades.
I’m not anti-freeway – I live very close to one, and there’s no question it makes a huge difference to travel times and efficiency, outside of peak hours (which is mostly when I travel). But the fact is if the freeway was never built, then residential development would inevitably have been more compact, with far less need for driving long distances.
But the fact is that the building of new freeway has never caused a city’s fuel consumption to decrease.
Reply to Down and Out of Sai Gon,
Sure flow breakdown can be a problem when a motorway is at capacity. But so what, all transport systems have capacities that when reached cause flows to breakdown. The South East Busway between Mater Hill and The Cultural Centre exceeds capacity every peak hour, causing that part of the Busway to slow down. But it would be utterly idiotic to suggest the Busway is a failure because it gets congested during peak times. Ditto for the South East Freeway.
And I think you’ll find Robert’s initial point was that he was surprised the energy used to transport people by public transport was not much less than transporting those people by car. I don’t have a problem with public transport. In fact as I don’t own a car all private trips I make are by public transport. Maybe it’s because I depend so much on public transport I realise better than most its limitations. You say trains and buses seem popular when you visit the CBD. Yes they are. But why do so many other people still use the South East Freeway when they could pick up a bus every 5-10 minutes on the South East Busway? Has it occurred to you that most people on the South East Freeway do not have the CBD as their destination, but one of a couple hundred possible suburban destinations. That being the case it’s unlikely you’ll ever get such people out of their cars onto public transport. Generally public transport is not a serious option for those wanting to travel suburb to suburb unless they’re prepared to invest much time to do so. Although many people will say they are concerned about the environment not many wish to make any real sacrifice to protect it. I recently heard somebody use the term non practicing environmentalist (NPE). In the area of transport I think most environmentists could be called NPEs.
Down and Out, I don’t think motorways are the magic bullet to all traffic woes but they are a far more important part of the solution than that sacred cow of “Progressives”, public transport, especially rail.
“Generally public transport is not a serious option for those wanting to travel suburb to suburb unless they’re prepared to invest much time to do so”
But that’s not an inherent limitation of public transportation – in many cities in the world, travelling suburb-to-suburb via PT is perfectly feasible.
As for why so many people still prefer private cars, even if it means sitting in congested traffic and paying more in parking fess/fines than they otherwise would on PT fares, there’s a whole bunch of reasons many of which aren’t necessarily particularly rational. For instance, my wife and I drove into Melbourne CBD last night, which, in retrospect, was a stupid decision – the traffic was truly awful. If I’d known ahead of time it would have taken as long as it did, I’m fairly certain I would have been able to talk my wife out of it (she’s not a fan of PT in general, having grown up in LA, where PT is just not even thought about as a serious mode of travel).
But…there were some definitive advantages…it meant, for instance, that we could go home at any hour we wished, without worrying about when the last train was (indeed, we didn’t get come until 2am). And a taxi would have been hugely more expensive.
COMMUTERS will be asked to leave their cars at home, share the drive to work, get on motorcycles and scooters or take to their bikes in a sweeping package of reforms to be unveiled as part of the State Government’s transport blueprint this week.
But the Brumby Government’s plan to upgrade bike paths — believed to amount to $100 million over 12 years — is likely to disappoint cyclists, adding only $800,000 to existing annual funding statewide.
“They have made the time scale very long,” Bicycle Victoria chief executive Harry Barber said. “With this commitment, they are clearly not moving quickly enough to turn car trips into bike trips to relieve congestion.”
Aaaaaaaaaaergh! MORONS!! YOu have been systematically favouring roads over every other mode of transport for decades, you have systematically refused to listen to bike lobbies begging for paths and other safety measures, your own minister Tim Pallas ruled out bike paths on St Kilda Road. And now you suddenly discover that perhaps so much car use might not be the best thing in the long run and you piously tell us to GET ON OUR BIKES whereas people like me have wanted to do so for years and WE ARE AFRAID TO RIDE ON THE ROADS.* Because you have made the car king.
[Stamps off, cussing]
*Young, fit or just relatively fit blokes coming in to tell me I should just get over it and be more like them can drink a steaming hot of STFU, too. I rode like them when I was twenty but people, not everyone is a bloody hero.
Nope. Gary Liddle, manager of the Eastern Freeway extension project (from Bulleen Road to Springvale Rd) way back in the 80′s made that claim in writing to me way back then. He said pollution would drop in the Koonung Ck valley because all the cars on Doncaster Rd would transfer to the freeway and run at an optimum non-stop 80km to the city. He also said there wouldn’t be any more traffic. I suggested they measure air pollution prior the extension opening and each decade thereafter.
If they did, I am sure we would see lots more pollution from car exhaust due to many more cars, stop start traffic all the way in due to congestion. So let’s duplicate the Eastern to provide more capacity and “free up the cars” again (joke).
Fast forward to 2008 – Liddle is now Managing Director at VicRoads, clearly unaccountable (in fact rewarded for) the mis truths he peddled way back when. Can’t remember who the dopey Roads Minister was back then; but he surely won’t be accountable either. Today’s transport announcement is basically more of the same, with some token funding for a very expensive rail tunnel of questionable value, minimal suburban rail, and truckloads of more freeways.
Wilful, your claim (again) that “old growth is being created” is palpable nonsense, as I have pointed out before, and other too. Keeping on saying it doesn’t make it true. All old growth forest logged and destroyed , such as Brown Mountain [link]
, is then subject to crop style “rotations” of 30 to 80 years – as you well know.
Not one hectare of old growth forest has ever been “replaced”, nor has any 200, 300 or 400 year old tree – of the kind that are falling RIGHT NOW in Brown Mountain.
Definition of old growth? DSE’s will do – they have designated the area being logged as such.
Brumby, Jennings and Lenders should all be jailed for crimes against the planet, and for breaking a clear 2006 election promise.
Yes, whatever Wilful’s opinion of the sustainability of oldgrowth logging might be, the fact remains that they made an election promise to preserve it, and they’re breaking it.
is “Grammar fairy” directed at Mr Brumby, at Mr Baillieu, or both?
You can’t fit a cigarette paper between Baillieu and Brumby on logging old growth forest.
Both keep saying its about protecting jobs – even though local jobs are steadily declining despite ongoing logging of old growth – and as Helen points out – will go when they chop down what is left.
Politics is failing us: John Brumby = Jeff Kennett = Ted Baillieu
Logging of Brown Mountain nineteen hectares will provide 4 local jobs for about 6 weeks. Thats it.
It would be very good if the Federal government, instead of providing one-off stimuli for people to consume, created some real, permanent ongoing jobs looking after the oldgrowth forests; Trail maintenance, weed control, feral pest control, fire fighting/reduction. Those jobs would be for ever and they would benefit everyone, not just a tiny minority of workers and some rich shareholders.
Oops, that was me, forgetting to change my handle.
Yes, the old growth walks at Walpole (WA) and Otways (Vic) bring in $millions every year. Both are also remote, just like Brown Mountain. Local and international visitors will travel in a bus all day to get there.
Just imagine 5 or 10 coaches per day stopping off in Orbost for lunch, and a few stopping at the Bendoc pub. Fantastic opportunity for local jobs in services and hospitality.
But it is going down in the roar of chainsaws, bulldozers and trucks. Then what is left will all go up in smoke.
This is economic vandalism too.
Write a letter to John Lenders (Treasurer) john.lenders@parliament.vic.gov.au to tell him this too.
yeah whatevs. Obviously I can put mapreading and tourism industry analysis next to your list of impressive skills.