The water tank wars are going another round, this time in the Victorian state cabinet, according to yesterday’s Age:
The behind-the-scenes Government debate centres on the role of tanks in light of last year’s contentious decision to spend almost $5 billion on big water projects such as desalination.
It has intensified as the Government finalises its new-look green building code. Existing five-star rules require that all new homes must have a tank or solar hot water system.
Senior bureaucrats with the ear of Water Minister Tim Holding are arguing that, with the desalination plant set to come on line in 2011, tanks should be left to personal choice.
Continue reading ‘Water tanks, round 247′
Not since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon has there been an urban innovation…oh, hang on…
Not since the gardens of Versailles have we seen…oh, wait…
Not since ivy…
Ok, so it’s not really a new concept - but there is something enormously appealing and compelling about the vertical gardens designed by Patrick Blanc, which have transformed more than a few nondescript buildings and shopping malls across Europe.
Using a kind-of trellis system and felt impregnated with seeds, Blanc can design growing walls which live off grey water and nutrients drip-fed from the top of the structure. The system is lightweight and doesn’t damage the building, as it’s suspended a few inches out from the surface.
Continue reading ‘Could this turn cities into carbon sinks?’
There hasn’t been much commentary about the government’s announcements on the Murray-Darling plan - notably, the beginnings of large-scale buybacks of water rights - in the blogosphere so far; Quiggin thinks it’s good because they’ve announced they’re going to start buying back water; the only problem is that they’re not buying back enough. However, the ABC comes to the rescue with a a lengthy report from the Landline program.
There’s lots to chew on in this report - for one thing, it makes the excellent point that while rice may be a water hog, it’s one of the only things grown in the basin that can be planted after it’s clear how much water is available. And the stupidity of holding water in Queensland and northern NSW, much of it to just evaporate, while the Coorong dies is fairly dramatically illustrated.
Continue reading ‘Landline on the Murray-Darling plan’
It’s unrealistic to expect detailed policy prescriptions to come out of two days of discussion - though the choice of two days of discussion with SFA preparation was entirely the government’s. And a variety of sources are saying that the interim reports really struggled to capture the tenor of the actual discussions. But the interim report of the “population, sustainability, climate change, water and the future of our cities” subgroup at the 2020 Summit fits right into Jeremy Sear’s typically snarky critique. While there is some substantive and good ideas, it’s mixed in with a collection of meaningless motherhood statements, populist pandering, prediliction for bureaucracy, and an overly narrow focus.
Below the fold, I’ve outlined the “top ideas” proposed by this stream, with some brief comments, and some reflections on the stuff that didn’t make the cut.
Continue reading ‘Timid, dull, and vague’
Tim Norton is a communications and campaigns advisor for Senator Rachel Siewert, Australian Greens spokesperson on Water issues.
The announcement of the Council of Australian Governments that an ‘historic’ Murray Darling Basin agreement has been reached seemed to tickle the fancy of most people involved. Now that the fanfare has died down, it’s time to look past the rhetoric and back-patting to ask what is in fact being delivered, how does this differ from Howard’s previous water plan, and when will we see some change for the better in the Basin?
One glaringly obvious difference is that all the States are now on board … which is a good thing. However, the dynamics of Federal-State collaboration may be brought into question by the methods employed to reach this agreement. We wouldn’t dare call the extra $1 Billion for Victoria a bribe – it’s much nicer to think about the huge strides in cooperation and consultation, with the inclusion of a few nice sounding phrases in the Memorandum of Understanding along those lines.
Just what it is that has been signed up to may well be a concern – but the far bigger worry is not so much ‘what’ as – when?
Continue reading ‘Guest post by Tim Norton: COAGulating the Murray Darling Basin’
Well, Mark might not be picking apart the 2020 list, as it’s too obvious, I’m an obvious kind of person…A few hours Googling later, and we have a horribly superficial, uninformed commentary on the 100 (well, 86 actually) listed delegates to the sustainability sub-summit.
Discussion and the annotated, commentated list over the fold.
Continue reading ‘A linked list - the 2020 participants Googled!’
That’s actually kinda how you could read the day’s news in politics - Victorian Premier John Brumby has agreed to sign up to the Commonwealth’s Murray-Darling plan (just over a year after it was pulled out of John Howard’s hat), Kevin Rudd thinks he might be able to end Japanese whaling through diplomacy, while he’s off re-engaging our fair nation with the world, and meanwhile the blame game just got ended, and health got a big injection of funds.
Meanwhile, Joe Hockey is whining:
Making fun of the Liberal party seems to be the new national sport, Joe Hockey has complained.
The shadow health minister and former workplace relations minister told Fairfax Radio everyone was picking on the party following revelations a serving federal MP - Scott Morrison - was denied membership of his local branch because of a factional dispute.
“Will everyone please stop bashing up the Liberal Party at the moment,” he said.
“It’s like a national sport for people, particularly journalists, at the moment to belt up the Liberal Party.”
“I think it’s in the national interest that the Liberal Party be a viable, feasible alternative government at state and federal level.”
Two points.
Continue reading ‘Rudd saves country and world, opposition talks about itself’
Before getting too up in arms about former National Party leader Mark Vaile moonlighting as a lobbyist - while staying on the public payroll as an MP - let’s look on the bright side and note that he can’t continue to pervert good environmental policy. While in government, the National Party remained the biggest single barrier to fixing the Murray-Darling river system, with their absolute refusal to countenance the idea that governments would have to buy back water allocations.
And now, quietly, without fuss, it’s beginning to happen, as Professor Quiggin discusses approvingly at length:
Three months after the change of government, the seemingly immovable barriers to action have disappeared. The Minister for Water, Penny Wong, has announced a tender to buy water rights back from irrigators willing to sell, allocating $50 million for the current financial year.
Continue reading ‘Waterworld’
The aphorism “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” may have (apparently) been the coinage of one Bernard Baruch, a stock trader and later adviser to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. It’s such a favourite amongst computer geeks I’d assumed that it was coined by one, as it neatly pigeonholes the tendency of people to assume that the tools and skills which they themselves possess are the best ways to tackle the problem at hand.
Given that, it’s surprising to see the US’s National Academy of Engineering has identified as its 14 Grand Challenges For Engineering for the (still-new, I suppose) century. While there’s certainly some worthy challenges amongst them, whether many of them are primarily, or even in large part, the domain of engineers seems kind of doubtful.
Continue reading ‘Grand engineering challenges’
It’s all doom and gloom throughout Australia’s farms, isn’t it?
Nope. Now that the drought has started to break in parts of eastern Australia, farmers can take advantage of record prices for “soft commodities”, such as grains. Meanwhile, dairy farming’s not doing so bad either - over in New Zealand, dairy farmers can’t get enough people to work on their properties as the industry’s growing too fast to keep up. While the irrigated dairies of the Murray-Darling basin can’t get enough water to produce much, over the other side of the Divide Gippsland dairy farmers are doing quite nicely.
What’s going on? Well, a lot of it’s the same story as mined commodities - increased demand from China and India. As people get themselves out of poverty, one of the first things they tend to buy more of is meat. And the vegetarians are right - it requires a heck of a lot more than one kilogram of grain (that could otherwise be eaten) to produce a kilogram of pork, chicken, or fish. Throw in the United States’ (and to a lesser extent, the EU’s) quixotic attempt to grow its way to “energy independence” through turning its corn crop into alcohol, and you’ve got a big jump in demand for all things agricultural.
Continue reading ‘Next, the farm boom’
Victorian Premier John Brumby must have been tempted to invite the motley bunch of protesters who greeted the first state Parliamentary sitting of the year with a simple offer - come to a united position on every issue you’re protesting about, and I’ll adopt it.
The chances of that are minimal. The protesters included farmers complaining about a pipeline to take water from the Goulburn River to supply Melbourne (with water obtained by efficiency improvements through the Goulburn-Murray system; the water is to be evenly split between the pipeline, farmers, and environmental flows), farmers and residents near Benalla, in north-east Victoria, complaining about returning the Lake Mokoan reservoir to a natural wetland, saving 44 gigalitres a year in evaporation losses, people protesting about the desalination plant to supply Melbourne’s water to be put near Wonthaggi in Gippsland, and, of course, the Blue Wedges Coalition of urban environmentalists opposing the plan to dredge the shipping channel through Port Phillip Bay and the lower Yarra River to let bigger ships into the existing port.
Farming groups have been vocal in their support for channel deepening, and probably think the desalination plant is just fine and dandy because them city folk aren’t stealing our water. And I’d bet money that the people in the Blue Wedges coalition generally think that removing dams from the Murray-Darling system is an excellent idea.
Continue reading ‘The disparate bunch of discontents’
Yesterday morning on Insiders, Bob Brown pointed out that neither Howard or Rudd mentioned the drought in the debate last Sunday. That may be so, but Labor has put it back on the agenda with the promise of a $1 Billion National Urban Water and Desalination Plan”. The plan, in a nutshell, is a 10% tax credit on private sector capital investment in approved new water projects - for every dollar of capital invested in the project, whomever is responsible gets 10 cents knocked off their corporate tax bill. State government-owned water corporations - who don’t pay tax - would receive a cash grant of 10% of the capital cost.
Meanwhile, on the global warming front, Labor has announced some new plans to combat climate change, of which the headline was solar panels in every school, while the Liberals have interrupted their confusion over Kyoto to announce some extra grant money for renewables research.
Particularly with Labor’s plans, it seems that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of the policy and the amount of media attention it gets, if you look into the policy detail. Continue reading ‘Power and water’
A little rain falls and this happens.
The Hon. Duncan Gay: There was snow at Crookwell yesterday. It will all be flowing into the catchment.
The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: That is what I love about these people. When the drought was at its worst, I kept saying, “It will rain”. But the Greens and idiots like Tim Flannery said, “It will never rain.”
The Hon. Melinda Pavey: He is the Australian of the Year.
The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: You made him Australian of the Year, not me! Well it has started to rain and it seems as though it is going to rain forever. These people do not understand climate cycles. When it comes to the climate they are alarmists and cannot see beyond the end of their noses. They create division, panic and fear so that they can rustle up a few naïve people to vote for them at election time. Climates change. If there is one constant about climates, it is that they change. I do not mean that they are changing now; but they have changed over history. We will continue to see climates change, and rain cycles will vary from drought, to normality, to heavy rainfall incidents. That is the reality of the world and that is what we have to plan for. We do not plan on a day-to-day basis, as the Greens do. It is easy for them to make unaffordable promises and to come up with an economic model that could apply only in cloud-cuckoo-land. It is easy for the Greens to make policies that no-one need fear will be implemented. But that does not stop them putting up ridiculous propositions every question time. The Government’s policy is clear. We have a range of alternatives to secure our water supply, including capturing water for our dam system, recycling and, now, desalination.
I like an open mind. I’m happy to know the minister accepts that climate changes and continues to plan for a water poor future.
There are several bullets that can potentially be bitten in the process of making sure that the supply and demand for urban water meet, and none of them are particularly pleasant for state governments. But the particular bullets that have been bitten have varied somewhat from state to state. In a nutshell, the bullets are:
- the perceived ickiness of drinking water that’s been through other people’s digestive systems - in a nutshell, the pooh factor.
- the energy usage, and potential brine disposal problems of desalination
- the screams from the farming sector if water is taken from river systems currently exploited for irrigation, particularly the Murray-Darling
- whatever technological fix is adopted, the cost of water will go up, and the best way to recover that cost is user-pays (with possible compensation for low-income earners)
Continue reading ‘Victorian water plan - why go with two projects?’
With climate such an intensely discussed topic today, a fascinating Hindsight audio documentary about Goyder’s line.
George Goyder was the Surveyor-General of South Australia from 1861 until 1893. While he was involved in many things, Goyder is most famous for his analysis of the patterns of the South Australian climate, deriving a boundary within which the rains were reliable enough for wheat growing, while beyond they were too low and, equally importantly, not predictable enough.
Despite this, a sequence of good seasons in the 1870s saw his work ignored and wheat growers head out into the farthest northern regions of South Australia. Needless to say, the good seasons came to an end and whole communities were abandoned, leaving the desert regions of South Australia to the graziers and miners. The documentary discusses the religious aspects to the farmers’ optimism - the idea that “rain follows the plough” as a reward for effort seems to have been a popular one.
Foolhardy optimism about the Australian climate, in the face of the best scientific advice of the time, doesn’t exactly seem to be a new phenomenon.
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