Quantock in just released "Planning Backlash" - the movie
Rod Quantock is currently appearing in First Man Standing at Trades Hall in Carlton, 03 9659 5699, but here he is in a stand up role for democracy (which does seem very funny in Victoria) at the Mary Drost-led rally in July.
This film was made on the occasion of the Planning Backlash rally against the horrific, undemocratic changes being forced on Victoria's population, more about which you may read and view by going to the Marvellous Melbourne website at www.marvellousmelbourne.org, where you will find an example worth following of how to organise a rally and motivate people to confront government and undesirable policies.
How could a comedien not get involved in Victorian politics? Or Brisbane ones? Or West Oz ones or ...
Anyway...
You can see Rod live in his new show called, First Man Standing!
'First Man Standing'
Now Playing:
Wed to Sat, 6 Aug to 6 Sept, 8:00pm
Trades Hall, Carlton
Tickets: $20 - $35
Bookings: comedyattrades.com.au or 03 9659 5699 or at the door. (Rod recommends 'at the door')
Ideas for affordable housing
Topic:
As Rudd Government dithers, Greens and Independents act to save Murray lakes
The Australian Greens Senators, with the support of Independent Senators will move to set up a Senate Inquiry to establish exactly what water in the Murray Darling system can be used to save the RAMSAR listed Coorong and lower Murray River lakes from acidification.
See also: Keep fighting for the Murray Darling in spite of our Government, Oz Turtles pay horrible price of mindless market-focus: S.A. Murray-Darling, Coorong tragedy was avoidable: Greens Senator Siewert, Why did Karlene Maywald conceal surrender in fight to save Coorong from Goolwa meeting?, Minister Karlene Maywald 'too busy' for Save the Murray rally of 1 Aug 08, Why Karlene Maywald must lose water portfolio of 10 Aug 08, River inaction something to shout about of 11 Aug 08, River Lakes and Coorong Action Group Inc.
Urgent Senate Action to Save Murray
Greens Media Release of 14 Aug 08
The Australian Greens will move to set up an urgent Senate inquiry when Parliament resumes on August 26th, aimed at securing water for the Coorong and lower lakes of the Murray before Christmas, Greens Senators Bob Brown, Rachel Siewert and Sarah Hanson Young said today.
"The Coorong and lower lakes need a drink before Christmas. The water is there but the political will isn't. When Governments fail to act, the people, through the Senate, must provide action," Greens Leader Bob Brown said in Canberra today.
Senator Brown said the inquiry would report back by the end of September and that the Greens would urge the committee to visit the Coorong. The inquiry will investigate current water stocks and options for amending the Water Act to accelerate the purchase of water allocations and entitlements for the Coorong.
"Governments across four states and the Commonwealth are dithering while Australia loses the great RAMSAR-listed wetlands of the Coorong, and the entire social and economic fabric of the lower lakes and their communities have been thrown into turmoil."
SA Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said, "There is a cry for help coming from the communities of the Lower Murray to save the Coorong. That's a call that is being keenly felt by the river communities along the length and breadth of the Murray-Darling system."
"They do not accept Senator Wong's statements that the Coorong is lost."
Senator Rachel Siewert, Greens water spokesperson said there was enormous goodwill in river communities upstream to contribute to a revival of the Murray River.
"We don't want the federal government to simply hold a vigil for the death of the Murray"
"We need action now, and an emergency Senate inquiry can deliver that," Senator Siewert said.
For more information: Ebony Bennett 0409 164603
See also: Keep fighting for the Murray Darling in spite of our Government, Oz Turtles pay horrible price of mindless market-focus: S.A. Murray-Darling, Coorong tragedy was avoidable: Greens Senator Siewert, Why did Karlene Maywald conceal surrender in fight to save Coorong from Goolwa meeting?, Minister Karlene Maywald 'too busy' for Save the Murray rally of 1 Aug 08, Why Karlene Maywald must lose water portfolio of 10 Aug 08, River inaction something to shout about of 11 Aug 08, River Lakes and Coorong Action Group Inc.
#WhatYouCanDo" id="WhatYouCanDo">What you can do
Public Forum Climate Change and Water Solutions
With Kenneth Davidson of The Age, Dissent
Compere: Nonie Sharp of Arena publications
at Dante's
150 Gertrude Street Fitzroy
(in the back room, downstairs)
On Thursday 4 September 2008
At 7 pm for a 7:30 start
After a decade of drought, Australia faces an unprecedented water crisis. The once mighty Murray-Darling river system stands on the brink. Projected climate change makes the prospect look even drier. The water crisis will have lasting economic, social and political effects on the future of rural Australia, the southern states, and Australia as a whole.
Kenneth Davidson, economist, Age columnist, and co-editor of Dissent magazine, has been a leading commentator on the Australian water crisis. The forum will begin with Kenneth making a presentation on the issue, and the floor will then be opened to general discussion. All are welcome
.
Photo essay of a rural Japanese city
Note from Candobetter Editors:
Since this article is so popular, we feel we should tell readers that there is more, much more by Antony Boys, in Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto, UK, 2008. Antony has two long articles in it: The first is about how North Korea coped without cheap soviet oil. The second evaluates in detail Japan's carrying capacity in the Edo period, then looks at changes to agriculture and population during Japan's industrialisation, then looks at how Japan may fare with oil depletion.
1. Rationale
A short while ago I wrote a "food and energy survey" of the city where I live in Japan to try to get some idea of how the city might do if there was an extended food and energy crisis. A pdf file of the survey is attached to this article. Please feel free to read and comment on it. Until October 2004, what is now Hitachi Omiya City had been Omiya Town, one other town and three other villages, and although I had lived in Omiya Town since 1986, when the town and village amalgamation occurred I had only a vague idea of what the new city consisted of.
Take the word "city" with a degree of skepticism, by the way. This is not London or New York. In Japan, any administrative unit with a population over 30,000 can be a "city". That can mean that you have a small commercial and administrative district with a large rural hinterland, as we have here. Don't go looking around for the "city". There really isn't one.
After writing the survey, I sent it off to several people for comments. One of these was my good friend Martin, who lives near Tokyo. Martin is writing a book about food in Japan, so he has a good feel for the subject, but the problem was that he had very little idea of what the city looked like. Martin came up to visit my family a few days ago, and so we set off on a five-hour drive around the city so that we could both get a much better idea of what is there. You can also see Martin's version of the trip on his blog.
Here's a sketch map of the city. It is very roughly a square, each side being about 12 miles, or 19 km. The brown shaded area near the southeast corner of the city is the main commercial and administrative area. An interesting feature of the city that you can see from the map is that there are two quite substantial rivers that approach each other and come quite close together at the southern end of the city area. The river flowing north to south on the east is the Kuji River and the river flowing roughly southeast in the south of the city is the Naka River.
One further notable geographical fact is that the city is on the northern edge of the Kanto Plain, the large flat area that surrounds Tokyo.
2. What's different about Japanese Agriculture?
Martin and I decided to drive along some of the main roads as far as the border with the next administrative unit, and to stop to take pictures every time we saw something interesting or representative of the city, or of Japanese farming in general. Perhaps three of the most representative features of Japanese farming are:
1) Field areas are small,
2) Farmers are mostly older people,
3) Capital intensity is high.
The first two are fairly clear, but the third feature refers to the fact that the amount and size of machinery is out of proportion to the land it is used to work. This is also one factor in the high energy-intensity of Japanese agriculture, which is expressed either in terms of high levels of chemical (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and so on) inputs to the land, or in terms of very intensive labour inputs. In addition, for some fruit and vegetable crops, large amounts of plastic sheeting for covering the ground or for making hothouses are used, and in the colder seasons kerosene is sometimes used to heat the hothouses from the inside.
I will try to illustrate these three features with photographs taken during our half-day trip.
3. A Local Farmer
Actually, as we came out of the house, I saw that the farmer who is now growing a crop of upland rice (i.e. a rice variety that does not need to be grown in a wet paddy field) right next to my house had turned up on his morning round of his fields. We went over and said hello and I took out my camera and snapped him right there. The evening before, Martin and I had passed by another of his fields which is on my regular dog walk. The field is a bit less than one-tenth of a hectare and is now covered with a dense growth of soybeans. It's very 'clean', but it's interesting how it got that way. Since I walk our dogs along the same route nearly every day between about four and five in the afternoon, I had seen what had happened in the field over the few weeks since the soy had been planted. The farmer had been out there with a tiny hand-pushed machine (like a small manual lawn mower about 20 or 25 centimetres wide) almost every day, slowly and labouriously, and with meticulous care, removing anything green in the rows between the soybean plants. Sometimes he was just walking up and down between the rows, with his eyes on the ground, occasionally bending down to pluck out a weed. Only once in the two weeks or so that I walked by the field every day did we greet each other, because he was concentrating so hard on what he was doing that he probably didn't notice me, and I didn't want to disturb his concentration by calling out to him.
Martin and I agreed as we walked the dogs that this man's work is now being replaced by herbicide-resistant GE soybeans. If you are farming hundreds of hectares of soybeans, perhaps that makes sense to you. But it does not make sense in about 90% of Japanese farming, which is done something like I describe here, on very small plots of land. (There is NO commercial planting of GE soy in Japan.) When I visited Kumamoto Prefecture some years ago, the topography was so hilly/mountainous, that field sizes were even smaller than where I live. The people there told me that in the 1950s and early 60s they had switched to chemical/mechanical farming along with everyone else, but had given up a few years later because it just did not make economic sense on their small fields. That's why now Kumamoto Prefecture has more organic farming than any other area in Japan. I didn't hear anyone complain about it, though.
This farmer, growing his upland rice and soybeans on small fields here and there in the area (and is also well-known for his good vegetable seedlings) is about in his mid-seventies. I don't know anything about his children, but I have never seen any younger people in his fields. The 'funny' thing was that when Martin and I arrived back at my house about two in the afternoon, at the end of our drive around the city, there was a bicycle standing at the edge of the field with the upland rice growing in it; the farmer's wife had turned up to do a little weeding!
4. Small fields, disproportionally large amounts of machinery
First of all, we drove out along the main road that roughly follows the course of Naka River, which cuts across the southern end of the city. We reached the border with the next prefecture (Tochigi Prefecture), took a few pictures and turned back again. Here's a picture of what the river looks like at this point.
As we drove back towards the town again, we saw a brilliant example of feature number three (and one) taking place right up ahead; a farmer preparing a miniscule patch of land with a tractor. You can imagine his concern as, early on what should be an uneventful Monday morning, a car screeches to a halt and two foreigners jump out and start to take pictures! He smiled as we explained who we were and what we are doing (Martin's Japanese is pretty good too) and then went on to his next job for the morning.
This example is clearly extreme. I'm sure small plots of land as small as this are farmed all over the world, but do the farmers come round to prepare the ground with a tractor? These photos will make some of you, used to farming 100s of hectares at a time, laugh your heads off, but it is pretty typical of the way Japanese farming works, as you will see below.
5. Japanese agriculture: Elderly individuals with little family or local solidarity
A little further on, we saw a sign for "ostriches" and decided to take a look, expecting to see some kind of ostrich farm, but there were only the two giggly specimens that you can see in the chain-link pen here.
As we were having a laugh about the size of the 'ostrich farm', Martin caught sight of something interesting in a paddy field close by; a farmer with a basket on his back weeding the field.
We decided to go over and investigate. The farmer noticed us immediately as we stood at the edge of the field taking pictures and decided to come out and talk to us. He turned out to be extremely friendly and open, as most Japanese farmers are. He told us that his main work was growing vegetables for sale and that the rice he would harvest from the paddy field was just for family consumption. Looking around, we could see that there were plastic sheet hothouses nearby for preparing vegetable seedlings, and also vegetable fields.
I asked the man if the vegetables were his main source of income. I half expected him to say that he had other family members who bring in more income, but he did not, simply replying 'yes' to my question. I imagined that he lived nearby with his wife. I asked if he had been farming long and he said he had been farming in the same place for 55 years - he told us he was now 65.
He mentioned that he was doing his vegetable farming business as a group. I was interested in this because working as a group is one way of reducing the capital-intensity of the farming; the group could buy machines and chemicals as a collective, thereby holding down the average cost to each individual farmer. Martin and I had talked about this the previous day, and I was hoping we had perhaps run into a positive example of feature number three. I asked the farmer how many people were in the group. He said that they had started as seven, but were now down to two. That was disappointing, but he agreed with us that there were advantages to working as a group and I encouraged him to see if he could find more local farmers he could work with.
I was interested to know if the administrative areas had changed before and he told us that the area had been a small village before the previous round of town and village amalgamations in the 1950s. Then the area had become Gozenyama Village, which was then amalgamated into Hitachi Omiya City in October 2004.
I told him that I had recently completed a survey of the city to get some idea of how the city would fare if there were a sudden 'food and energy' crisis in Japan, given all the 'news' we were getting from the media about global food and energy problems, as well as the prices of gasoline at the pump and food in the supermarkets.
He seemed to be quite interested in this, but then, quite unprompted, began to talk about his son. I suddenly realized that we had stumbled upon a typical example of feature number two.
The farmer told us that his son, who lived with him in the house close by, was 38, but had only just recently begun to help out with the farmwork by sometimes cutting the grass (at the edges of fields and so on) with a kusaharaiki, the ubiquitous little two-stoke engine grass-cutter that every farming family here seems to have. The son apparently had no idea how to grow rice or vegetables.
This is absolutely typical of the situation here; children of farming families, with farmland that they will eventually have to take over, but with not a clue about how to grow their own food. I told the farmer that he had better hurry up and pass on his skills to his son, because if there is a problem in the future the son will not want to find himself hungry, and yet with fields that he doesn't know how to farm.
Martin told him that he could tell his son that two "European specialists" had just visited him and told him to do just that. I thought that was quite amusing. I don't know if the ostriches found it funny as well. Anyway, we exchanged names and I promised to visit him again sometime. In a month or so I will probably drive out and see how he's doing.
6. Prototypical Japanese agricultural scenery
Martin and I then continued on down the road back towards the city 'centre', but turned left onto a small road heading north towards the areas where the golf courses are. I had never driven up this road before, and it turned out to be a very pleasant typical Japanese country road in a low mountain area. We decided to stop and look when we saw a small area of paddy fields nestling in a tiny valley.
In hilly areas in Japan (all over Asia, actually) you will come across tiny valleys like this where the original stream bed has been built up and leveled so that the farmer can take advantage of the natural water flow of the stream to construct paddy fields. Large areas of paddy fields tend to be areas close to larger rivers and so work on the same basic principle. These small valley paddy fields are generally surrounded by densely wooded hills, as here, and so are fed with the runoff from the woods, usually full of minerals and other nutrients. This is sometimes called the "original Japanese scenery" - a kind of prototypical essence of the Japanese agricultural lifestyle. (You may get some idea of why the Doha Round and so on does not make a lot of sense out here.)
The rice flowers were just 'blooming' in the field so I tried to photograph some of them. If you haven't seen rice flowers before, this is what they look like.
Over the last 30 or 40 years, some of these tiny paddy fields have been abandoned as the owners become older and unable to farm all the land, or as the rice consumption per capita has declined and the government has ordered farmers to take some land out of use - 'set-aside'. Sure enough, the old paddy field at the head of the little valley had been abandoned. The paddy fields are nearly always abandoned from the head of the valley down - pretty obvious really, I suppose - but the main reason is that the top paddy field will always be the least productive because the water temperature is always lowest in that field.
Unfortunately, in this particular case, the little valley backed onto one of the local golf courses, which means that the runoff probably contained high concentrations of chemicals. That would certainly be one good reason for abandoning the top field, though I should think the rice in the other paddies would not be much better. Since there was no one around, we could not ask, but I have a feeling that the farmer is possibly eating the rice he grows in other paddies elsewhere and selling the produce from this little valley into the industrial food chain.
Sometimes one or two of the paddies have been turned into ordinary 'upland' fields, like the one you can see here, so tiny that you can even see the farmer's footprints.
Further up the road, we saw a field with an unusual dark red colour. We stopped to take a few photos. This was a small field of 'akajiso' plants. ("Aka" is red in Japanese. There are red and green varieties of this plant, the green one being called "aojiso". The word "ao" covers a wide range of colours all the way from what we call blue to green.) This is an edible leaf - quite tasty once you get used to it - which is used as a decorative leaf on certain kinds of food, especially sashimi, raw fish slices. If you buy a small plastic tray of sashimi in a supermarket here, the sashimi slices are placed on shredded Japanese radish (daikon) and then decorated with two or three of these leaves. The colour contrasts make the fish look really appetising. This small field of akajiso is maybe one-tenth of a hectare, perhaps a little less. When I got home, I showed the photo to my (Japanese) wife, who immediately exclaimed, "What a big field of akajiso!" (The ostriches probably would have had a good laugh at that.)
7. What Japanese call a "large" area
Martin and I drove up the main road to the border with Tochigi Prefecture close to the northwest corner of the city, enjoying the forests as we went. The trees are mostly Cryptomeria japonica, a kind of conifer in the cypress family. The tree is called "sugi" in Japanese and is sometimes called the 'Japanese cedar' in English, though it is unrelated to the cedars. Being a conifer, it is good for construction wood, but not much good for leaf mold. I am told it is also not a good fuel wood, perhaps because it burns too quickly and fiercely.
We then drove eastwards along a small and very pretty road through the low mountains until we came to the main north-south road, where we turned right to head home again. On the way there is a good lookout spot which overlooks an area of rice paddies close to the Kuji River. In the photo, you can see low wooded hills in the distance, which are on the far side of the river. In the middle distance, if you look carefully, you can see the river embankment. In this area, this is what we would call a 'large' area of rice paddies. Even so, you can see that the individual fields are one-tenth to one-fifth of a hectare each, each one of them owned by different families, with one family having one, two or three fields dotted about here and there. You can also see that some of the fields have been abandoned. It's either 'set-aside' or the owners have become too old to farm the land, or died, and the younger members of the family either cannot be bothered to farm it, or don't know how to, or have moved away to Tokyo (or other conurbation) in search of higher incomes.
8. Final comment
These three features of Japanese agriculture, small fields, age of farmers, and capital intensity, are generally not known to people in the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Argentinia, or Brazil and so on, although Asian agriculture is quite similar and people in India and China would be able to relate fairly easily with this description.
Large-scale 'industrial' farming no doubt 'feeds the world'. Without the green revolution, humanity may well have run up against land-population limits in the 1980s or 90s, and Japan relies on industrial agriculture to feed 60% of its population, since only 40% of the food calories needed to keep the Japanese population alive are actually produced here. So what will happen if imports of cheap food and oil cease? That's why I wrote the survey; to try to see whether this small city can survive without 'imports' of food and energy from outside. If you read the survey you will see that there are many problems to be overcome even for a city like this to reach sustainable self-sufficiency (not the least of which is what to do about the hordes of hungry people from Tokyo who will want to relocate here - but that is another story). At least, after reading this and seeing the photos you have a better idea of what the city looks like, and perhaps what life might be like here after "peak oil" becomes really serious.
Please also feel free to comment below on either this 'photo essay' or the survey. If you care to ask questions, please also feel free do do so as a 'comment' and I will try to get around to answering your question(s) within a reasonably short period of time.
Immigration to U.S. increases global greenhouse gas emissions
Once again Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May was wrong in her contention that immigration was a "trivial aspect of the world's and the country's environmental problems", as only 3% of the global population was on the move. So "stop beating up on immigrants." Well this report by the Centre for Immigration Studies reveals that immigration to the United States is putting the whole world, not just the US, in deep trouble. There is a message for Canada and Australia here too.
Study: Immigration to U.S. Increases Global Greenhouse-Gas Emissions
WASHINGTON (August 13, 2008) ? The findings of a new study indicate that future levels of immigration will have a significant impact on efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions. Immigration to the United States significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher-polluting country.
The report, entitled "Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions," is available at www.cis.org/GreenhouseGasEmissions and a video regarding the report is available at www.cis.org/GreenhouseGasEmissionsVideo.
Among the findings:
- The estimated CO2 emissions of the average immigrant (legal or illegal) in the United States are 18 percent less than those of the average native-born American.
- However, immigrants in the United States produce an estimated four times more CO2 in the United States as they would have in their countries of origin.
- U.S. immigrants produce an estimated 637 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually -- equal to Great Britain and Sweden combined.
- The estimated 637 million tons of CO2 U.S. immigrants produce annually is 482 million tons more than they would have produced had they remained in their home countries.
- If the 482-million-ton increase in global CO2 emissions caused by immigration to the United States were a separate country, it would rank 10th in the world in emissions.
- The impact of immigration to the United States on global emissions is equal to approximately 5 percent of the increase in annual world-wide CO2 emissions since 1980.
- Of the CO2 emissions caused by immigrants, 83 percent are estimated to come from legal immigrants and 17 percent from illegal immigrants.
- Legal immigrants have a much larger impact because they are more numerous than illegal immigrants and because they have higher incomes, and thus higher emissions.
- The above figures do not include the impact of children born to immigrants in the United States. If they were included, the impact would be much higher.
- Assuming no change in U.S. immigration policy, 30 million new legal and illegal immigrants are expected to settle in the United States in the next 20 years.
- In recent years, increases in U.S. CO2 emissions have been driven entirely by population increases, as per capita emissions have stabilized.
Discussion: Some may be tempted to see this analysis as "blaming immigrants" for what are really America's failures. It is certainly reasonable to argue that Americans could do more to reduce per capita emissions. And it is certainly not our intention to imply that immigrants are particularly responsible for global warming. As we report in this study, the average immigrant produces somewhat less CO2 than the average native-born American. But to simply dismiss the large role that continuing high levels of immigration play in increasing U.S. (and thus worldwide) CO2 emissions is not only intellectually dishonest, it is also counterproductive. One must acknowledge a problem before a solution can be found.
One can still argue for high levels of immigration for any number of other reasons. However, one cannot make the argument for high immigration without at least understanding what it means for global efforts to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Some involved in the global-warming issue have recognized immigration's importance. For instance, chief U.S. climate negotiator and special representative for the United States, Harlan Watson, has acknowledged that high immigration to the United States is thwarting efforts to reduce the nation's emissions. "It's simple arithmetic," said Watson. "If you look at mid-century, Europe will be at 1990 levels of population while ours will be nearing 60 percent above 1990 levels. So population does matter." This research confirms Watson's observation.
The Center for Immigration Studies (www.cis.org) is an independent research institute that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.
Queensland Government killing koalas for developer dollars
Queensland Labor Premier Anna Bligh, in a #CourierMailLetter">letter published in the Courier Mail on 8 August, claimed concern at the decline in South East Queensland's koala population. However, it was her Government which only recently legislated, against community and local council objections, to fast-track the destruction of much of the remaining koala habitats in South East Queensland to make way for residential development.
Queensland Government to blame for the koala's demise
Wildlife Preservation Society Queensland, Bayside Branch media release
The Queensland Government's growth strategy and past poor planning are the causes of the demise of the state's wildlife emblem, the koala, in South East Queensland, say conservationists.
"One of the biggest reasons why the SEQ koala is heading towards extinction is because of the State Government's pursuit of growth at any cost," said Simon Baltais, spokesperson for Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland Bayside Branch. "As Deputy Premier and Minister for the Department of Infrastructure and Planning, Paul Lucas should be held responsible for this deplorable situation."
"Hundreds of hectares of koala habitat will be destroyed and hundreds of koalas will be killed because of the Minister's push to open more land for residential development," said Mr Baltais.
In a recent joint statement from the Premier and Deputy Premier Lucas on the issue of providing more land for urban development it was stated, "The development industry has been calling on us to make more land in the Urban Footprint available sooner - here it is." (see attached #QldGovtMediaRelease">media statement at end)
Yet the Government's own research has shown urbanisation is driving the koala to extinction (see attached background paper). The SEQ koala had gone from Common to Vulnerable in 2004 and now the Koala Coast koala population is considered Endangered. Just recently the Environmental Protection Agency and Moreton Bay Regional Council showed the urban koala population in that area had declined 46 per cent over the past six years. The situation is similar on the Gold Coast, where the State Government has condemned hundreds of koalas to death because they have allowed massive development in Coomera koala habitat.
"The loss of koala habitat was recognized as the biggest killer of koalas." said Mr. Baltais. "As a member of the Koala Taskforce recently setup to advise the State Government on the matter of how to save the koala I will state what scientists have been saying since 1995, protect koala habitat in both the rural and urban environment."
"The key reason why the koala is heading towards extinction is because the State Government is ignoring the scientists and because ministers like Mr Lucas have encouraged an unsustainable pattern of development in SEQ."
Simon Baltais
WPSQ - Bayside Branch
Mb: 0447 539 968
#Background" id="Background">Background for Media Release
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The 1995 Planning Guidelines for the Conservation of Koalas in the Koala Coast (SPP 1/95) stated, urban residential, industrial and commercial estates and major Community developments were considered to be generally incompatible with the maintenance of koala habitat values.
However, the State Government allowed urban development to occur in koala habitat.
The 1997 Planning Guidelines for the Conservation of Koalas in the Koala Coast (SPP 1/97) stated that urban residential, industrial and commercial estates and major community developments were considered to be generally incompatible with the maintenance of koala habitat values.
However, the State Government allowed urban development to occur in koala habitat.
In March 2004 the koala was re-listed from a common species to 'vulnerable to extinction' in the South East Queensland Bioregion, under the Nature Conservation Act 1992 (NCA).
However, the State Government allowed urban development to occur in koala habitat.
In 2005 the SEQ Regional Plan stated that koala populations are declining or becoming locally extinct in many areas, primarily due to habitat loss. The SEQ Regional Plan Regulatory provisions stated that subdivision of land in the Regional Landscape Area could not be subdivided below 100 ha.
However, the State Government allowed urban, commercial development, rural industries and quarries to occur in koala habitat and allowed subdivision of koala habitat in the Regional Landscape Area. The lots were smaller than 100ha.
In 2006 the Nature Conservation (Koala) Conservation Plan 2006 and Management Program 2006-2016 stated that koalas are suffering from the impacts of urban development and habitat clearing. The greatest threats to their survival are the destruction and fragmentation of their habitat, car strikes, dog attacks and disease.
However, the State Government allowed urban expansion and development to occur in koala habitat.
In 2006 Nature Conservation (Koala) Conservation Plan 2006 stated:
koala habitat means-
(a) a woodland where koalas currently live; or
(b) a partially or completely cleared area that is used by koalas to cross from (1) one woodland where koalas currently live to another woodland where koalas currently live; or
(c) a woodland where koalas do not currently live, if the
woodland-
(i) primarily consists of koala habitat trees; and
(ii) is reasonably suitable to sustain koalas
However, the State Government allowed urban expansion and development to occur in koala habitat.
In 2007 the Report on Koala Coast Koala Surveys 2005-2006 (EPA) stated,
Studies have suggested that conservation programs for wild populations need to be designed to conserve habitat capable of supporting approximately 5000 - 7000 animals in order to ensure long term persistence (Begon et al. 1996; Smith 1996; Reed 2003). To conserve this number of koalas in the Koala Coast, the area of RL/RP would need to be increased by between 12% (24 550 ha) and 57% (34 440 ha) based on habitat composition in 1997. Improving the landscape composition through bush rehabilitation to fully vegetate the RL/RP would not provide sufficient habitat by itself to maintain a viable koala population of 5000 - 7000 animals. Consequently, functional habitat must also be conserved on the Urban Footprint to secure sufficient resources
However, the State Government allowed urban expansion and development to occur in koala habitat.
In 2008 the survey by consultants GHD for the Environmental Protection Agency and Moreton Bay Regional Council showed the urban koala population in that area had declined 46 per cent over the past six years. The loss of koala habitat was recognized as the biggest killer of koalas.
Perhaps repetition repetition repetition will finally see the State Government take strong positive action and stop the loss of koala habitat?
Unfortunately, the State Government has already suggested major koala habitat south of Boundary Road, Thornlands (Woodlands Drive) be opened to greenfield development and has forced the community to go to court to stop quarries destroying koala habitat in Mt Cotton. The State Government appears to have written off hundreds of hectares of koala habitat and koalas in the Coomera area.
Is the State Government perhaps just a bunch of slow learners? Do they listen too much to developers and not the scientists and community?
Help the State Government understand the need to protect koala habitat, if
they are genuine about saving the koala, by sending them an email and
reminding them. Email:premier[AT]ministerial qld gov au and
deputypremier [AT] ministerial. qld. gov. au
#QldGovtMediaRelease" id="QldGovtMediaRelease">Bligh greenfield study reveals land, lots of land
Joint Statement:
Premier The Honourable Anna Bligh
Deputy Premier and Minister for Infrastructure and Planning The Honourable Paul Lucas
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Premier Anna Bligh today announced the State Government would fast-track planning for development of 17 greenfield sites in South-East Queensland, as part of its plan to tackle housing affordability.
Ms Bligh said while the Government was limited in its ability to influence
housing prices, she was determined to do everything possible to tackle the
issue of affordability.
"I want the Australian dream to be alive and well here in Queensland, particularly for young people wanting to own their first home.
"Yesterday we announced significant changes to stamp duty to make buying a home in Queensland cheaper and today, we are tackling the issue of land supply.
"Last year as Treasurer and Infrastructure Minister I commissioned a review of the Greenfield areas within the Urban Footprint that could be market-ready sooner.
"I want to see land being turned into new homes for Queenslanders as quickly
as humanly possible and this investigation looked at 42 greenfield areas -
containing more than 40,000ha of undeveloped land.
As a result - the Government will remove any regulatory hurdles slowing the development process on 12 sites:
- Maroochydore, Meridian Plains, on the Sunshine Coast;
- Market Drive and North Lakes in Moreton Bay;
- Upper Kedron and Rochedale in Brisbane;
- Coomera and Helensvale on the Gold Coast;
- Springfield and Redbank Plains in Ipswich; and
- Kinross Road and South-East Thornlands in Redlands
"This will make it possible for the industry to begin the development process of these sites by Christmas.
"In addition, there are five sites where we believe integrated communities of 15,000 people or more can be delivered and we will work with councils to prepare land developer-ready within 12 months:
- Palm View and Caloundra South on the Sunshine Coast;
- Flagstone in Logan;
- Oxley Wedge in Brisbane;
- Ripley Valley in Ipswich
"That's a total of 17 new Greenfield sites that will be developer-ready by this time next year.
"This is about cutting red tape and bottlenecks that are delaying the development process.
"These bottlenecks are occurring at all levels of government - including within State Government agencies - and its not good enough.
"An implementation team will be established with the Department of Infrastructure and Planning charged with the task of cutting through and removing these hurdles.
"The development industry has been calling on us to make more land in the Urban Footprint available sooner - here it is," she said.
Deputy Premier and Minister for Infrastructure and Planning Paul Lucas said
the fast tracking of Greenfield sites will be guided by an Action Plan
released today.
"Housing affordability is a challenge that demands action not just at all levels of Government but also from the development industry," said Mr Lucas.
"The industry wants more land released and the Bligh Government has responded with a plan that will provide additional housing choice for the public and contain costs by increasing competition between developers.
"But governments can't do it all alone and we can only bring these sites forward if the necessary infrastructure is in place.
"Yesterday we announced the $107 billion South East Queensland Infrastructure Plan and Program, which demonstrates our commitment to building for Queensland's future.
"Now we need to work with the industry to deliver these sites ahead of time.
"They will also need to demonstrate how they plan to deliver the transport options, road upgrades, water and energy needs for these areas.
"These sites must all be developed as well-planned and integrated communities and the State Government will need to ensure growth is spread across the regions.
"Although the review shows plenty of greenfield land available for housing it must be emphasised the South East Queensland Regional Plan aims to cater for 45 percent of the expected population growth through infill and redevelopment."
"This review is another one of the State Government's strategies to address
housing affordability in addition to setting up the Urban Land Development
Authority and implementing reforms to the state's planning and development
systems."
Visit www.dip.qld.gov.au for more information.
Media: 3224 4500 (Premier's office) or 3227 8425 (Deputy Premier's office)
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
#CourierMailLetter" id="CourierMailLetter">Queensland Premier Anna Bligh's letter published in the Courier Mail of 8 August
I assure readers who share my concern about the continued decline in southeast Queensland's koala population that I appreciate the need for a multi-pronged strategy.
The specific areas I have requested the taskforce to consider are further protection of koala habitat, changes to road speeds, signage and koala crossings, koala-friendly fencing in habitat areas, restricting or controlling dogs and banning clearing of habitat trees.
Pets are an important part of our lives, so proposals for controls or restrictions will arouse the most discussion.
However, this is a discsussion we need to have as part of a total response.
Anna Bligh
Premier of Queensland
What you can do: Email Premier Anna Bligh (premier [AT] ministerial qld gov au) and Deputy Premier Paul Lucas (deputypremier [AT] ministerial. qld. gov. au) to demand that they act now to end Queensland's economic dependency upon population growth. This dependency, if not broken, will make the extinction of the koala and other native species, such as the lungfish, inevitable.
See also: Locals join koala 'crisis' taskforce in the Bayside Bulletin of 7 Aug 08 including readers' comments.
Oz Turtles pay horrible price of mindless market-focus: S.A. Murray-Darling
Mon Jul 14, 2008
Volunteers remove parasites from the shells of tortoises
Hundreds of Australian long-necked turtles are the latest victims of the demise of the lower reaches of the Murray-Darling Basin. [The Murray Darling Basin is Australia's major riverine system and principle foodbowl.]
Volunteers cleaning victims of worm and market-logic
Small turtle, Big message
The message is that, in the Environment Minister, Penny Wong's scheme of priorities, South Australia's southern lakes long-necked turtles, don't rate much against an irrigation incumbent from the big end of town. For Australia's cash-obsessed government, economic growth may seem to out-rate the turtle, but remember Aesop's fable about the slow and steady turtle against the hare. Thermodynamics tell us that the turtle outlives the hare due to superior thermodynamic efficiency over the long haul. Consider in this light, that respect for nature, rather than subservience to the inhuman market, carries the greater chance for the survival of humans and their civilisation in this desert country. (Sheila Newman)
(Film briefly showing worm-affected turtle but also gives good info on frightening impending collapse of riverine system.)
The turtles that live on the Murray mouth in the Coorong Lakes have been infected by a parasitic bristle worm that thrives in hyper saline waters.
A Goolwa resident, David Surmon, has organised an emergency rescue service for the turtles.
He says that he has saved something between 200 and 300 tortoises, but that he finds more dead each day.
He was reported by Bronwyn Herbert, to say that,
"In the last week I've found around about 13 or 14 dead and that's all deadly in the case of the bristle worm - because what happens is the turtles, if they can move, they get up onto the shore and they can't go any further because there's so much weight."
He added that foxes and rats attacked the encumbered turtles and killed them.
Apparently the bristle worm attaches itself to the turtles' shells and then the infestation slowly increases from then, creating a huge encrustation on the turtles upper and lower shells. The turtle can be trapped inside its shell by the growth of the encrustation. Its legs may not reach the ground anymore, or the worm-infestation may become so heavy that the weight prevents the turtle from moving.
Surmon was quoted by interviewer Bronwyn Herbert, saying that the rescue group had "...actually weighed one, one time, and it weighed nearly seven kilos. And that was a very small turtle. On the back of the turtle was around about three or four inches high of bristle worms."
Turtle rescuer, David Surmon, describes how the team he works saves as many turtles as they are able to reach by taking the turtles from the river and putting them in a big bathtub of rain water. They leave them there for about two or three hours, which is enough to kill the worm. Afterwards the volunteers liberate the turtles from their prison by scraping the dead worm and its encrustation off the turtles carapaces.
"Believe it or not pure fresh water, even tap water will actually kill the bristle worm because it is not used to living in fresh water," David Surmon says.
He said that when he had around a dozen of them, he generally took them further up-river, freeing them up above Murray Bridge.
According to Surmon, the Coorong Lakes comprise very important habitat for turtle reproduction and are the location of a significant breeding population.
Many of us would agree with David Surmon that "Without the wildlife in the river and around the river (...) All we've got is just a big, big mud pan that's going nowhere."
He sounds like a kind and thoughtful man, able to take responsibility and initiative, and to communicate something very significant about our society, our government, and our river system, by reading and interpreting important signs from generally overlooked inhabitants of this badly treated country.
Photos of turtles and their human helpers republished with kind permission from Citizens saving turtles from Murray-Darling crisis The film from you-tube was a selection by the writer.
Bloomington USA - An oasis of sanity in a sea of growthist madness?
An oasis of sanity in a sea of growthist madness?
Could this be happening in the Land of MORE, MORE, MORE?
Bloomington, Indiana supports a steady-state economy!
You heard it right….
The City of Bloomington Environmental Commission issued a statement which identifies steady state conditions as being in the best interests of the community..
Apparently the Commission built on the work of:
1] Economist Herman Daly, who describes the economy as a "wholly owned subsidiary of the environment"
2] Eben Fodor, who demonstrated that population growth imposes capital costs far in excess of taxes that can be recouped from a community's new residents; and
3] The American Farmland Trust which showed that residential growth is a net economic drain on community resources.
Press Release, for immediate release, August 8, 2008
Contact: Kelly Boatman, Chair, City of Bloomington Environmental Commission
(812) 287-0031
Environmental Commission addresses growth
"The City of Bloomington Environmental Commission has adopted a position statement and completed a report to increase awareness of growth and sustainable development. The statement, “Position of the City of Bloomington Environmental Commission on Economic Growth in the United States” is modeled on similar statements issued by the United States Society for Ecological Economics and over 40 other groups inspired by the work of the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (CASSE). The statement advocates a steady state economy in which resource consumption and waste production are maintained within the environment’s capacity to regenerate resources and assimilate waste, emphasizing development as a qualitative, rather than quantitative, process.
“This position statement acknowledges that the human economy is contained within, and dependent on, a finite and depletable natural environment.”
“This position statement acknowledges that the human economy is contained within, and dependent on, a finite and depletable natural environment,” said Environmental Commission member Heather Reynolds. “Ever-increasing economic growth ultimately leads to resource consumption and waste production at rates greater than can be sustained by nature.” A steady state economy for the U.S. will depend in no small part on the efforts made by communities across the nation to achieve sustainable local economies. The first step is awareness and acceptance of the concepts, both of which it is hoped that the position statement will foster.
Report examines costs associated with residential growth
The report, “An Examination of the Costs Associated with Residential Growth in Bloomington” is modeled after similar studies in other communities. Such studies have shown that infrastructure costs to support growth often outpace the benefits of that growth to the city. A sustainable approach to development would mean ensuring long-term benefits outweigh costs.
The Commission’s report focuses on the City of Bloomington’s capital expenditures and how these expenditures are impacted by residential growth. The report is not intended to define the full costs of growth in Bloomington, but rather to illustrate that there are substantial costs incurred by the City to provide necessary infrastructure to residences. To fully examine costs, further analysis of not only facilities and infrastructure, but also social and environmental impacts is needed.
“The Commission’s report illustrates that the City incurs real costs that are associated with residential growth,” said Environmental Commission member Mike Litwin. “The Commission would like to see the costs of growth balanced against the benefits and incorporated into the decision-making process in order to promote sustainable development in Bloomington.” The report and position statement are available on the Environmental Commission website at http://bloomington.in.gov/environmental-commission.
Position of the City of Bloomington Environmental Commission on Economic Growth in the United States
(Adapted from the Position of the United States Society for Ecological Economics on Economic Growth in the United States and adopted on May 22, 2008 in a 4-2-0 vote following two years of discussion.)
Whereas:
1) Economic growth, as understood by most professional economists, policy officials and private citizens, is an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services, and;
2) Economic growth occurs when there is an increase in the multiplied product of population and per capita consumption, and;
3) Economic growth has long been a primary policy goal of U.S. society and government because of the belief that it leads to an enhanced quality of life, and;
4) Economic growth is usually measured by increasing gross domestic product (GDP), although this is an incomplete indicator of quality of life that excludes the equity of income distribution, other social factors such as physical health and level of crime, and ecological health, and;
5) The U.S. economy grows as an integrated whole consisting of agricultural, extractive, manufacturing, and services sectors (and the supporting infrastructure) that requires physical inputs of non-renewable resources, land and water, and that produces wastes, and;
6) Economic growth occurs in a finite and depletable biophysical context, and;
7) Continuing non-renewable resource-intensive economic growth is having unintended damaging consequences for ecosystems and human societies…
Therefore, the Bloomington Environmental Commission takes the position that based on the above evidence:
1) There is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and ecosystem health (in such areas as biodiversity conservation, clean air and water, and atmospheric stability) and the ecosystem services deriving from healthy ecosystems that underpin the human economy (for example, regeneration of renewable resources, decomposition and recycling of wastes, pollination of crops and other vegetation, and climate regulation), and;
2) Although technological progress and unregulated markets have had many positive effects they cannot be depended upon to fully reconcile the conflict between economic growth and the long-term ecological and social welfare of the U.S. and the world, and;
3) A sustainable economy (that is, an economy with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating product of population and per capita consumption) is a viable alternative to a growing economy and has become a more appropriate goal for the U.S. and other large, wealthy economies, and;
4) A long-run sustainable economy requires its establishment at a size small enough to avoid the breaching of ecological and economic capacity (especially during supply shocks such as droughts and energy shortages) to promote the efficient use of energy, materials and water, and enable an accelerated shift toward the use of renewable energy sources, and;
5) A sustainable economy supports economic development, an increase in human welfare through strategic changes in the relative prominence of economic sectors and techniques (e.g. renewable vs. non-renewable energy) that maintains the human economy within the regenerative and assimilative capacity of the larger earth system, and;
6) While establishing a sustainable economy, it would be advisable for the U.S. to assist other nations in moving from the goal of economic growth to the goal of a sustainable economy, beginning with those nations currently enjoying adequate per capita consumption, and;
7) For many nations with widespread poverty, increasing per capita consumption through economic growth and often via more equitable distributions of wealth remains an appropriate goal."
[End of press release.]
Good grief. With a State Senator in Hawaii who supports a Steady State economy and a Democratic Socialist Senator in Vermont who wants closed borders and an end to runaway population growth maybe, just maybe there is hope that enough people in America want to stop the train from speeding off the tracks.
Tim Murray August 10/08
Oz Wildlife sacrificed as political and economic palliative
The Nature of Greed
Greed cannot be defined in conventional terms exclusively as a quest for more money or material possessions. It is simply a desire to have more and more. More than one needs. More than one can use. We know that billionaires don’t need and can’t use four yachts and a fleet of twenty antique cars but most North Americans have affluenza too. And our greed is manifested not just in our insatiable material appetites, but in our need for more activity. More hobbies, more “courses”, more “lessons”, more structured leisure events, and volunteering. All this in tandem with a double income work schedule.
Something must give. So what is deemed expendable? Small talk with friends. (Sorry, gotta go). Real talk with family. Time with pets. (North American dogs average a 20 minute nightly walk). Reading time. (remember novels?). Writing letters.(Emails mutilate the language ) Our sleep. (Canadians slept 9 ½ hours a night a century ago). Our health. (Indigenous people averaged 2 hours of work daily---the industrial revolution turned us into mindless robots.) In our contemporary society it is a sin to be seen not to be busy. I recall the words of Thoreau:
“If a man should walk in the woods for love of them of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
Above all we must be “goal-oriented”. We must have “plans” and “objectives”. The impression must be left that my life is not something to be experienced but rather like a career in the Cub Scouts where I get various performance badges to mark my “progress”. Just like the people who plaster their cars with the decals of National Parks to prove they had a good time. Well, I am an not a Japanese tourist and I feel more like just experiencing the moment rather than ruining it by recording it. I don’t think life is like a carport that you have to fill up with junk ---activities---so much to the point that there is no room for your car, that is, for what is essential.
In the 1950s people found time for people. Because they were satisfied with less. Satisfied and happy for the most part. When people had problems, my recollection was, hey, come over for a cup of tea, dear, and let’s talk about it. Grandparents and their concerns were an integral part of the family. Mom was always home waiting for me to arrive from school with a cup of cocoa and a peanut butter sandwich, wanting to know how my day went. She could do that, because it took only one income to deliver what we wanted. A 950 square foot house, with three small bedrooms, one small bathroom, one icebox and one car for seven people. And no foreign vacations. A typical middle class lifestyle. Rich in time and quality of life.
But times have changed. 950sq feet is now a telephone booth for today’s Canadians. Bathrooms are that size it seems. Some kids today have their own ensuites. I had to share my bathwater with two brothers, third in line, and one bath a week sufficed for hygiene. Many people in my boyhood were of the belief, like my parents, that Canada’s wealth was not fairly shared, and that it was outrageous that there were poor among us who did not even have shelter or medical care. This situation is even worse today. But with one difference.
While folks like my parents, the socialists of the 1950s, believed that government services should assist the needy, they did not think, as apparently many people now do, that government should substitute for the care and assistance that friends, neighbours and relatives used to provide in the 1950s. The role of government in their view was to supplement what was already being done. Nothing is so debilitating as the notion that one has no individual responsibility, or community responsibility, to help people because we can just sit back and leave government to carry the ball. Or that we must await “funding” from government to proceed. In the post-carbon era we will have to return to the old Canadian pioneer ethic, get off our butts and help people ourselves. Barn-raising was not done by government employees. But by neighbours and friends who found time to help neighbours and friends. For nothing. No “funding” was available.
Presently, when an individual in obvious need of help or assistance is encountered the reflexive response is to offer the recommendation that he seek the help of some government agency or counseling service. That cup of tea that was offered in the 1950s is never proffered. There is a comfortable and convenient belief about that “these people” will be taken care of “if only” they will seek help. The fact is that if we spent 50% of our GDP on psychologists and counselors it would not take the place that stay-at-home moms, live-in-grandmas, and kindly neighbours did 5 decades ago. And given the choice between the fashionable trauma counselor of this century and my grandmother’s apron, I’ll take my grandmother any day of the week. The people who survived the London blitz didn’t need psychologists---maybe if they had had them , they would have surrendered to Hitler. As it was, they just spent the time to help each other.
But the 50s will never return, you say. Just wait until the oil economy is done. You’re going to get a crash course in Amish living and I am going back to the future.. You’ll have lots of time to slow down then and get re-connected with the people around you. But hey, you can do that now. You have time for me. Your day is 24 hours long just like mine. The point is, you will not MAKE time for me because you have put too much on your plate and I am not a priority.
Now, I most probably should not be a priority. You have your family after all. But realize that is not external forces that are making you run so quickly on a treadmill. It is the force of your own greed to have it all. The bigger more expensive house, the higher paying more stressful job, the two cars, your yoga classes, the two kids, their music lessons, their soccer practices, your Mexican vacations that have to be financed by working over-time. etc. I didn’t twist your arm to make those choices.
You “gotta go” because you are as “Type A” and wired into the system as is any Vancouverite, who at least doesn’t have the hypocritical trappings of Island culture.
Have another expresso.
But one day, please read Leo Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”
Tim Murray
June 13/06
The Rubber band snaps at 140 USD-per-barrel?
Oil Superspike and Forecasting Fatigue
If we take a flashback view on “official forecasts” from one year ago – in June 2007 – the unreality of those Cheap Oil Hopes jump from the page. While the OECD’s IEA is mutating quite fast into a Peak Oil friendly organization, able to admit that future oil supplies will not meet likely or probable demand, the US EIA and other diehards, ironically including the OPEC Secretariat and its far out underestimates of world oil demand growth, have not yet made that cultural revolution.
The chart below, from the US EIA’s June 2007 forecast, which for natural gas set a truly unreal forecast or wish-list 2008 average price, Henry Hub, of about 7.40 USD/mln BTU, is typical of how far out of line from reality some of the ‘official forecasting’ fraternity has got. For 2007-2008, the US EIA in June 2007 was hoping, very hard, the upward price spiral for oil was going to be trimmed back, to highly moderate, almost zero growth of average prices.
From Q3 2007 the graph of crude oil price change from previous year goes straight up – in the real world – not close to zero, as the US EIA hoped and wanted for 2008 and for 2009. For obvious reasons, the US EIA’s faith-based forecasters expected “nonOPEC supply” to ramp up, because OPEC was set to stay recalcitrant about unleashing its massive-mythic pent-up supply capacities. The US EIA placed its bet on new hopefuls like Angola and Azerbaijan + Kazakhstan, and tarsand grubbing Canada, and perhaps even hoped Russia, too, would ramp-up exports in a quest to grab petrodollars. Or maybe they would do this to please the outgoing G W Bush administration? Or because NOPEC producers have a special urge to exhaust their resource pile at record speed, drive down the oil price and national revenues, ending up as Price Takers peddling their cheap and tacky Sunset Commodity like they did for 15 years through 1985-2000. Dream on !
We all know that ‘supply side economics’ is the only economic policy music since at least 20 years, but supply siders also have one demand-side idea on oil. This is ‘price elastic’ demand shrinkage due to oil demanding consumers, habituated to cheap oil, waking up to unreal and exotic prices and suddenly using less. Certainly since 2005, as oil prices have racked their way up, the consumer-nation energy agencies led by the OECD’s IEA and the US EIA have manfully done what they could to talk down demand – on paper.
It might have been high last year but Boy ! Have we got news for you next year ! The slump in demand forecast for last year didn’t happen, as the world’s regular Teflon Herd consumer kept on gulping their gasoline, gasoil, cooking kerosene, aviation kerosene and other fuels, but this year everything is different. Rivaling each other in unreal forward demand estimates, and joined also by OPEC’s Secretariat for whatever dark or hidden motive, by the investment banks and by almost all analysts, the forecasting crowd today claims world oil demand in 2008 is “unlikely” to grow more than 1.1 mln b/d to 1.3 mln b/d.
Maybe these ‘experts’ don’t know the world automotive industry is in full-flood, with a likely 2008 output around 70 million cars, 27 million motorcycles and scooters, 8 million heavy vehicles including trucks, buses, tractors, harvesters and construction site vehicles, and 2 million other road and off-road vehicles. To be sure, 4WD monsters with 350 HP engines trundling round shopping mall car parks are no longer in vogue, in the US or Europe, but cars arent going out of fashion. The first thing buyers do with a new car is fill the tank, and the same for buyers of ‘Capemax’ cargo ships using up to 10 tons of oil per hour, or buyers of Airbus, Boeing and business jet planes and the bulldozers needed to build new airports for them to land on their oil-based tires.
Real world demand growth in 2008 is likely closer to 1.6 or maybe 1.7 mln b/d than 1.2 mln b/d, immediately swallowing June’s largesse from King Abdullah, to grace the world’s consumers with another 0.3 mln b/d (or was that 0.2 mln b/d ?). The headline number for world oil demand as a year average daily number, is likewise and constantly underestimated. One big reason for this is ignoring the rate of loss-to-production and losses through all downstream steps in the well-to-wheel chain. These add by my estimates to a year average near 1.4 mln b/d and are increasing at least 2 times faster than production growth (around 4% annual increase of losses for 2% production growth). By late this Summer, the peak annual bulge of demand can lift global demand beyond 90 mln b/d. Will production meet this ?
WORLD OIL DEMAND 2005 - 2008
NOTES:
1.Daily demand in Million barrels/day (Mbd) on “all liquids” base, including NGLs, refinery gains, other condensates, tarsand and syncrude oil, GTL (gas to oil), CTL (coal to oil) and the biofuels
2. Total demand includes all loss-in-production, loss in transport, storage and loss in break of bulk operations, estimated at 1.4 Mbd.
Net final demand for 2008, for example, is a day average of 89.5 – 1.4 = 88.1 Mbd.
3. First annual peak, 2007, was depressed due to exceptionally warm winter conditions in northern hemisphere.
200-dollar oil by Christmas ?
Since late April 2008, gathering numbers of analysts have come around to the simple logic I noted many times previously. From Jan 2007 to Jan 2008 oil prices swung from a month-low of 49.50 USD/bbl in 2007 to a month high above 100 USD/bbl in 2008. Doing that doubling operation one more time generates a Jan 2009 target of 200 USD/bbl. After Jeff Rubin of CITIC, we had GS analysts led by Arjun Murti, in a 5 May report titled “Has the Oil Super-Spike Endgame Begun ?” which concluded 200-dollar oil is not impossible. The few European analysts following Patrick Artuis of Natixis Bank, who more than 2 years ago forecast that 200-dollar or 300-dollar oil was far from science fiction by around mid-2009, come to the same ballpark estimates as Murti’s report.
Maybe we need to spike-up to 200 USD/bbl to achieve finance sector and global economic meltdown, but maybe also we don’t. Prices above 130 USD/bbl are going to do impressive things for US monthly oil trade deficits, on its 13 or 13.5 mln barrels/day of crude and products imports. India imports the same percent of its total consumption, about 65%, even if this only adds to a modest 2.2 mln b/d, but paying for cooking kerosene in a country where 300 million persons – exactly the same number as USA’s total population – live on about 1 dollar 50 cents-per-day means very big subsidies. If not, the rubber band breaks and India’s vanishing forests disappear even faster as firewood, and social tensions will burn in a country with a Muslim minority big enough to make it the third-biggest Muslim nation in the world, if it was a separate entity. Oil subsidies in India, loudly decried as market distortion by OECD finance ministers worried about gasoline prices for their consumer horde car fleets, and worrying fall-out in the airline industry, have spiraled to about 3% of India’s GNP. China’s impressive foreign exchange cashpile, like the US trade deficit but in exact reverse – China is a creditor nation – will surely start shrinking as 130 dollar-oil eats into it, but nowhere near so fast as shrinkage of Japan’s ‘traditional’ monthly trade surplus, already down 33% on one year previous. As economic growth slows, quite fast in India and also in China, quite fast in several European countries, very fast in some Latin American countries, inflation rises – usually described as ‘only due to oil’, but now surely helped by oil.
The club of big economies and countries with 20%+ annual inflation has now reached more than 20, and is growing. Inflation is not uniquely due to oil prices but helped by energy cost push, specially at over 100 USD/bbl, and when added to falling economic growth is the signal we have the rubber band of “seamless global growth” stretched near its limits. The detonator for a global economic explosion, triggering a crash landing for growth and inflation at 10% pa right across the OECD, and many times that outside the OECD, is easy to project. When sudden and repeated interest rate rises are brought to close proximity with existing high inflation the global economy can replicate 1979-1980. This was the last time oil prices in 2008 dollars were anything like today’s, probably around 95 to 110 USD/bbl when corrected for inflation. The real difference was that interest rates, at the time, were sky high, at over 10%pa in all OECD countries when the second Oil Shock hit.
Stress and Storm Signals
To be sure the situation is grave. June’s G-8 finance ministers meeting in Osaka, at which the Russian and Canadian ministers were perhaps not sincerely sure they wanted cheap oil, due to oil’s miracle effect on their budget balances, foreign exchange reserves and value of their national moneys, was held under special crisis conditions. The ministers posed for the family photo without neckties – a new Japanese custom for office-based salarymen who, without ties, can take temperatures at least 10°C higher than nekutai colleagues hooked on air conditioning. As everybody, or at least finance ministers believe, airconditioning is a big oil user in advanced economies burning 140 million-year-old fossil residues to change the world’s climate. We can ask: at 200-dollars for the barrel will the ministers pose naked ?
World finance and business leaders have to date in mid-June not come around to telling us what oil price is needed to make the band snap, which in fact is the real and interesting question. There are several parameters in the mix deciding when and how this happens, all of them daily-commented by finance and business players, analysts, and by consumers in the street, whether driving their car or buying food or anything else.
One way global economic explosion can happen is when or if the USD versus EUR, or Dollar/Euro struggle gets vicious. Today even Ben Bernanke wants a strong dollar, to curb both imported and domestic inflation, and is fast losing interest in bailing out subprime-addicted investment and other banks, asset reinsurers, and other Wall Street wailers for billion dollar Federal Reserve handouts. The Euro Central Bank’s Monsieur Trichet created the Euro in a pure atavistic dream of “saving Europe from inflation”, forever of course. This hasn’t worked. The outrageously overvalued Euro does not protect against inflation – it might even favor or generate it by its own heavy presence. No country feels the money is its own, and everybody feels they were cheated by the fiat exchange rate they had to accept, to get Euros.
As in Argentina, Venezuela, Russia or the GCC countries, real world inflation has really slipped out of Al-Din’s petro lamp in Europe, trashing ECB and official, as well as “consensus” CPI figures produced by consensus forecasters anxious to please the ECB. Europeans no longer believe inflation is low because, after all, flat screen TVs always cost less and “the Euro is strong”.
The USD/EUR pivot is exactly 1.50 USD for 1 Euro; when the Euro gets there it can fall and fast, with no floor, like it rose against the US dollar with no ceiling – which is par for a fiat money The Trichet gang will not take this lying down and will crank up interest rates. So will Bernanke. Pretty soon the US goes into real economy recession, like the Eurozone was already “but nobody knew” because 1.5%pa economic growth is normal for Europe’s obsolete, oil-intense and energy-intense “postindustrial” countries living like the USA with unreal dreams of economic power.
In the Europe of June 2008, retail gasoline and diesel prices around 9 to 10 US dollars per US gallon are already generating daily protests by the biggest energy-using and wasting industries and professions, from fishing and trucking through farming to taxis and ambulances. With a Euro buying only 1.18 USD, the famous “target rate” the ECB itself set, back in 1998 at the Euro’s launch, this shifts up to 11 dollars-a-gallon or more. How long do consumers take that ?
The Oil Price Trigger
The important point is this: current global oil supply/demand conditions can bring 2009 Super-Spike prices to the present anytime we get a geopolitical shock to layer on the shifting mix of factors making the rubber band very fragile. Even without this, completely spooking average analysts and business-as-usual deciders, pure physical shortage might tilt oil prices into Super-spike realms by mid-2009. Constantly underestimating demand, and overestimating new supply is a sure way to experience bad surprises.
We can say that if 130-dollar oil is a really bad dream for the real world economy, 200-dollar oil will be even more traumatic. With the USA’s oil trade deficit running at maybe 2 billion dollars-a-day, the Obama gang will need a lot more than friendly winks and gifts from Wall Street backers – and will have to radically cut US oil import demand. Exactly the same applies to European leaders painfully trying to fool European consumers they need a European passport and army, not affordable food, lodging and energy. In other words, the pussyfooting with bolt-on gadget “soft energy solutions” as our heartfelt contribution to fighting climate change will need to give way to simple and straight oil-saving and energy-saving. This will be the equivalent of what Jimmy Carter called a cultural revolution – and like his administration showed, these don’t happen without crisis.
Copyright Andrew McKillop, 2008
Andrew Mckillop
Also published at http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=1798
Anti-greed candidate to contest Western Australian state seat of Cockburn
This e-mail was sent to me by Mary Jenkins. We will endeavour to keep you posted on further news from Mary.
Dear People who care for our community,
I have decided to contest the state seat of Cockburn at the next election as an independent candidate. I am seeking support from those who are fed up of the like minded two major parties that are in bed with big business at the expense of community needs. Where is the community voice today? In the democratic process an independent can speak for their community while party hacks follow party lines at the expense of their electorate.
Being a safe ALP seat has done nothing for Cockburn. My aim is to make Cockburn a marginal seat to improve the status of Cockburn. Fran Logan the minister for the Gas debacle has been the member for Cockburn for too long. He is not a local popular member but has blind union support. To realise to win would be a miracle! But the ALP must be shaken up.
The ALP twenty year transport plan left rail out of Cockburn completely.
The new plans for Phoenix redevelopment and North Coogee will mean around 100,000 more residents in Cockburn without a good transport system. Public infrastructure like energy and water, deep sewerage, health, education, justice and welfare services can hardly cope now. Some of us are still waiting deep sewerage or elective surgery.
Pensioners in Cockburn still wait on a decent venue. Cockburn Bowling Club has been earmarked for high rise development. High density in the Coastal plan robs community of access to their beach. Cycleway and bushland between Woodman Point and Fremantle no longer exist. The plan offers little parking for existing residents.
Many Wetlands have disappeared, turned into housing eg. The Ski Park. Bushland become industrial parks that threaten existing Wetland chain and lakes. Also future climate change.
Plans are rushed through council and endorsed by the State government at rapid speed without due social impact and environmental studies done on the existing community. Global warming and climate change are ignored by the State.
There is nothing in place in the State to address climate change or carbon trading for low income families who today face rapid increase in living costs. No one reports rising suicides or increase in violence anymore!
I have been working on my profile for many years in the local Herald.
I seek donations that will be repaid if I get more than 4% on polling day.
I intend to put out a Blog on the Web of my published letters and past “Thinking Allowed” in the Herald. I do not intend to waste money on the WEST or Gazette who only promote the major parties. No one can match the Government’s latest press propaganda exercise - just look in this weeks Gazette and West its unethical, pages of ministers spending sprees!
I have been a member of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) for a few years. I will include SPA information on my website Blog. I will also promote OZSP to inform folk . I have also been endorsed by Conflict resolution principles in the past. I welcome help in this battle against greed.
Yours truly, Mary Jenkins 08 94182117
P.S. I am working on a Blog any help will be appreciated.
I have set up an Email address for the campaign. It is antigreed [AT] eftel com au
For further information: 08 94182117, antigreed [AT] eftel com au
Port of Melbourne Corporation on 'go slow' again with the facts
Blue Wedges media release of 1 Aug 2008
Revelations today (Friday 1st August 2008) that the Port of Melbourne Corporation (PoMC) has failed to clean up after itself at The Heads is not surprising, nor was it a surprise that the Corporation was slow to reveal the facts on the issue.
"The Port Corporation has a long history of failing to disclose information until the eleventh hour" says Jenny Warfe Blue Wedges Spokesperson.
No penalty for this breach of the 'rulebook' has been applied and PoMC officials are reportedly confident that "minimal environmental damage" would have occurred to nearby colonies of rare sea sponges ... Just as they hailed the 2005 Trial Dredge a success, but later had to admit the trial had caused serious rockfall events and ongoing disintegration of the Port Phillip Heads seabed.
In 2005, The Port Corporation claimed only 20 m3 of rocks had fallen during Trial dredging. In fact around 6,000 m3 of rock tumbled over rare and delicate sponges into the canyon 100 metres below. It wasn't until independent divers were able to access the area that the full extent of the damage was revealed to the public.
In 2007, the Corporation again failed to disclose crucial documents regarding toxic sediments, water quality and bioaccumulation studies during the Public Inquiry. Those documents underscore inadequacies in the human health risks assessment presented to the public in the SEES released earlier that year. What's more, on the last day of the Inquiry, a report by consultants SKM was produced, revealing ongoing damage at The Heads from rock scour and erosion as a result of the 2005 Trial Dredge. The report even admits that mobile rocks will be an ongoing hazard to shipping, with rock mounds up to 2 metres height accumulating in the Great Ship Channel.
"Due to the Port Corporation's tardiness in releasing these documents (and who knows what else hasn't been released) the public is mostly unaware of many additional risks well known by the PoMC but only revealed after the Supplementary Environmental Effects Statement (SEES) was released" says Ms. Warfe.
"It's time for Mr. Brumby and Mr. Garrett to call a halt to the dredging project" says Ms. Warfe. "Federal Environment Minister Garrett has a moral imperative to protect those 120+ unique sponge species at The Heads, many of which would take hundreds of years to re-colonise, and which exist nowhere else on earth. If he can't do that, what use is he as an Environment Minister""
"Mr. Brumby has just announced that Victoria cannot cope with current growth rates, so what better time than now to re-evaluate the need for a project whose projected economic benefits are entirely reliant on quadrupling trade through Melbourne in the next 25 years. Melbourne cannot cope with its current congestion level, so how would we cope with the projected quadrupling of trucks trundling through portside suburbs which are already suffering more than 8,000 truck trips per day outside their homes"
Today's announcement from the PoMC gives Mr. Brumby a wonderful opportunity to re-think the future.
"We are allowing the Port Corporation to risk the health of the Bay and our community, based entirely on their fervent hope that more big ships will come here at some point in the future. The Port's growth projections were never well justified and are even less so now. We might be digging a big freeway through the Bay that will never be used" says Ms. Warfe.
Tiny Lampedusa struggles with tide of clandestine immigration
July 2008
Lampedusa is a tiny Italian island near Malta. It is located 205km from Porto Empedocle in Sicily, 167km from Tunisia and 167km from Libya. It has only 6,000 permanent inhabitants. With the recent failure of Libya to honour a 2004 agreement the Island's resources are being overwhelmed by clandestine immigrants from Africa en-route to Europe.
The immigrants come through Lampedusa, as if through a permanently open door. They do not want to stay too long. Their objective is to go somewhere else, to the rich cities of the north of Italy or of Europe. It is a problem for the European Community, as much as Italy's problem.
At the beginning of July, 1000 clandestine immigrants reached the shores of this little island, in just 12 hours. Two women died, one was pregnant.
The Mayor of Lampedusa Bernardino De Rubeis comments: "It is an uninterrupted influx, we cannot cope. The immigrants are escaping war or famine. This is the nearest port from North Africa, that is why they all end up here. And here nothing functions anymore: the rubbish collection, the sewers, the water supply, the hospital. With 6,000 inhabitants plus the tourists, we must ration even the water to provide for the immigrants. The desalination plant cannot cope. Meanwhile, there are thousands of other refugees ready to leave from Libya."
Another official asks for the help of the European Commission, but what Italy gets is criticism for its handling of the emergency that has overpowered the Italian Government, accused of racism.
Nobody criticises the Libyan Government for not respecting previous accords with the last Government, which included the surveillance of the coast, especially the port of Zwara, from where the immigrants leave, undisturbed and uncontrolled by the Libyan authorities.
During the night about twenty clandestines, escaped the Immigration Centre and terrorized the locals by going into shops to buy alcoholic beverages, and then getting drunk.
The island is torn between immigrants, inhabitants and tourists, because the resources do not grow with the growth of the population, a truth that is ignored at our peril, even at the global level.
However, if we do the numbers, we find out that every clandestine immigrant brings the Immigration Centre 36€ a day. Every day in Lampedusa there are about 400 clandestine immigrants, which means about 60,000€ a day, all in the pockets of the association "Lampedusa accoglienza" (Lampedusa Reception) which administers the Centre.
A new business.
See also: Migrant swell hits Lampedusa of 31 Jul 08, About 800 illegal immigrants land in Southern Italy of 31 Jul 08, Malta receives proportionately 18 times more migrants than Italy of (undated) from the Malta Independent, Italy: 1,000 illegal immigrants moved from overflowing holding centre of 1 Aug 08, Boat migrants swamp Italian island of 31 Jul 08.
Rod Quantock in "First man standing"
It's 40 years since Rod Quantock first graced the stage and The Herald (remember the Herald) said ...
"Quantock is an amiable buffoon." An incisive wit, as well, the once ubiquitous bedroom-dwelling Captain Snooze, grown up now, pops up in surprising places, defending the undefended and attacking the indefensible. How could a comedien not get involved in Victorian politics?
Rod's new show is called, "First Man Standing".
'First Man Standing'
Playing:
Wed to Sat, 6 Aug to 6 Sept, 8:00pm
Trades Hall, Carlton
Tickets: $20 - $35
Bookings: comedyattrades.com.au or 03 9659 5699 or at the door. (Rod recommends 'at the door')
Property analysts again confirm immigration used to inflate housing prices
Brisbane's Courier Mail of Thursday 31 July reported that house values had dropped by 1.3% in the June quarter whilst the value of units had dropped by 3% over the same period.
As this fall has been largely brought on by higher interest rates and the lack of consumer confidence it is unlikely to provide any practical relief to ordinary Brisbanites who have seen housing prices rocket completely beyond their reach in recent years.
True to form the Courier Mail, an ardent promoter of the property 'industry', reported this threatened momentary pause in the upward movement of the cost of a basic human necessity as bad news:
And the worst was still to come, Australian Property Monitors' (APM) general manager Michael McNamara#main-fn1">1 said.
Nationally, the market was at its weakest in four years.
...
He expects values will drop 10 per cent over the year, cutting almost $44,000 in value from the average priced home.
He said high borrowing rates, finance being harder to get and a big drop in consumer confidence were hitting hard.
And Mr McNamara warned that if banks continued to increase mortgage rates and the Reserve Bank lifted cash rates then price drops would be even more severe.
However, Mr MacNamara's pessimism was not shared by RPdata residential research director Tim Lawless, who predicted that Brisbane will have a 'softer landing'.
"Ten per cent sounds a bit pessimistic to me and ignores the strong population growth (my emphasis) and limited supply#main-fn2">2 in Brisbane," Mr Lawless said.
He predicted price declines will be forgotten by this time next year with prices increasing late in the year and early in 2009.
Notwithstanding this Mr MacNamara maintained that strong migration patterns were not enough to attract either first home buyers or investors.
In other parts of Australia, the effects of the credit shortages and lack of consumer confidence have, so far, manifested themselves differently. The Sydney Morning Herald of reported that house prices had slumped by 2% in the past year whilst the ABC on 24 July reported that Perth rental prices have risen 17 per cent, while rents for units have increased 25 per cent. The Canberra Times of 25 July reported that "median weekly asking rents for houses and units up by 5 and 10 per cent respectively in the past year."
Whether Michael MacNamara or Tim Lawless are correct in their predictions of the property market, this story further confirms what critics of immigration have been arguing for years. The principle motivation behind immigration is not as a charitable act towards other people or even to serve any vital economic need, rather, it is nothing more than a crude device to drive up the demand for housing to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the broader Australian community and from other countries into the pockets of land speculators and property developers and related industries such as financial institutions and manufacturers of building products#main-fn3">3.
#CourierMailCensorship" id="CourierMailCensorship">Postscript: Censorship by Courier Mail?
On Saturday 2 August, I posted a comment to the comments section attached to the abovementioned story in the Courier Mail and it has not, as of now, been published. As I did not keep a copy, I will reproduce it from memory as best as I can:
I agree with Lionel Theunissen of Brisbane (Comment 87 of 103)
Why does the Courier Mail always regard it as good when the price of house go up and bad when the price of houses go down?
As one for whom the cost of housing has gone completely out of my reach, I find it personally offensive when others rejoice in the price of housing going up.
Lionel Theunissen's comment referred to above follows:
Great news, but house prices in Brisbane could halve and they still wouldn't be cheap.
A 10 per cent drop is just the beginning. With the tightening of credit property will return to its intrinsic value, where potential rent can pay the interest on a 100 per cent mortgage. That means a property that might rent for 400 dollars a week is worth around 220,000 dollars, with prevailing interest rates at 9.5 per cent, not the 440,000 or so that might have been the market value up until recently.
For those saying "demand is still high, supply is low" in the hopes that somehow we will avoid the global trend, that is a naive, at best, interpretation of the laws of supply and demand: All demand can do is push buyers willingness to pay towards their capacity to pay, which is directly linked to their capacity to borrow. Willingness to pay has been maxed out for some time. With the tightening of credit and increases in interest rates the capacity to borrow has been greatly reduced and the market must come down to meet this.
The days of easy credit will not be returning any time soon, and the property market will not show any significant recovery until it does. The party is over folks!
My comment upon further reflection: Lionel Theunissen may not be taking into account the factor of high immigration referred to in the article above. Whether or not immigration will fulfil all the hopes of property speculators, if not dramatically reduced, will certainly serve to keep housing prices beyond the reach of most of us.
Footnotes
#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Whilst, we at candobetter.org do not have a high regard for the property sector, we believer that credit should be given to those who, in a manner out of character with most in the industry, demonstrate compassion and decency. This appears to be the case recently with Michael McNamara. In Don't abuse rates excuse, landlords told of 25 July 2008, Sydney Morning Herald Sunanda Creagh Urban Affairs Reporter reported:
AS MANY as half of all landlords have paid off their mortgages and should not be using interest rates as an excuse to push up rents, one of Sydney's top property analysts says.
Michael McNamara, the general manager of Australian Property Monitors, said the principle of supply and demand influenced rents more than interest rates did.
"Let's face it: investors have a profit motive in mind and they don't necessarily need a reason like interest rates to put up rents.
They do so because they can," he said. "The question becomes: are they simply trying to achieve market rents or are they profiteering from the current shortage of housing?"
#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ This does raise the measures now being demanded by property developers as the 'solution' to housing unaffordability, that is, for more land to be released for subdivision. Whilst this measure could serve to partially negate the inflationary effet of furhter high immigration, it would be at a cost to the environment, food security and our quality of life that many consider unacceptable. For further discussion of this, see my article Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 June 2008.
#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ This phenomenon was the subject of the 2002 Masters' thesis The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and Franceby population sociologist Sheila Newman It is available as a single 2.5MB PDF file here or as at Swinburne University.
See also: Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 June 2008.
The new case against immigration: A Comment on Mark Krikorian's thesis by James Schipper
This commentary on Mark Krikorian's latest book on immigration is typical of James Schipper's fresh and independent outlook. He shows the problem of assimilation from a different angle. It is not simply a matter of "too many too soon". Other factors come into play as well. Why is integration of newcomers important from an environmental perspective? Dr. William Rees, co-author of Our Ecological Footprint, said that social cohesion will be necessary to meet the upcoming ecological challenges that will face us. - Tim Murray
Hello. I just received and started to read “The New Case Against Immigration” by Mark Krikorian. His central thesis is that mass immigration is undesirable, not so much because immigration today are quite different from those in the past, but because the US and the world are different.
One difference that he mentions is that modern means of communication and transportation make it much easier for immigrants to remain in contact with their country of origin and practice what he calls trans-nationalism, which hinders their assimilation.
I think that the problem of trans-nationalism is vastly overstated. What matters more for purposes of assimilation are the frequency of contacts between immigrants and the natives of the new country than those between immigrants and their country of origin.
Let's take two Polish immigrants: Karol and Tadeusz. Both speak Polish at home, are members of a Polish club and a local Polish Catholic church, phone Poland twice a week, e-mail people in Poland regularly, read Polish newspapers on-line, receive a Polish TV channel at home and visit Poland every summer for 4 weeks. We can say that they have not been cut off from Poland.
Karol lives in a Polish-dominated neighborhood, his co-workers are mainly Polish and his children go to a school where over 50% of the pupils are children of Polish immigrants. Tadeusz, by contrast, lives in a neighborhood which has only a few Polish families, his co-workers are all non-immigrants and his children go to a school where there are only a few Polish children. I would say that Tadeusz is subject to constant assimilatory pressure because for 48 weeks per year most of his contacts outside the home are with natives. The same applies to his children.
It may be useful to make a distinction between additive assimilation and substitutive assimilation (my terms). With additive assimilation, the immigrant masters the language and culture of the new country without losing those of the old country. With substitutive assimilation, the language and culture of the new country replace those of old country.
I don't see a problem with additive assimilation as long as it is not carried forward to the second, third, fourth, etc generation. Of course, this refers only to objective assimilation, that is, mastery of the language and familiarity with the culture of the new country. Subjective assimilation, that is, going native, feeling like natives and identifying totally with them, is another matter. I would say that very few adults immigrants, regardless of circumstances, attain full subjective assimilation.
It should be pointed out that modern means of communication can also favor assimilation. TV and radio from the new country can enter the immigrant home at each hour of the day. I know a Greek woman whose TV watching essentially consists of a channel from Greece. When I asked her once whether her children watch that channel too, she laughed. "Are you kidding", she replied. This woman speaks nearly perfect English, so seems to be a case of additive assimilation.
In Paraná, my home state in Brazil, there were dozens of Polish colonies, many of which remained Polish for over a century. This occured, not because those Poles had such frequent contacts with Poland, which of course they didn't, but because they had such infrequent contacts with native Brazilians. They tended to live in largely self-sufficient rural communities with their own church and school.
In Southern Russia, the Germans imported by Catherine the Great in the second half of the 18th century resisted Russification for many generation.Mind you, many if not most of them were Mennonites. In Eastern Europe, many Jews lived in separate Yiddish-speaking communities for several centuries. I would say that those three examples illustrate the importance of contacts with the host population for assimilation.
One important difference between the world today and the world of 1900 is that schooling is much more prolonged. This favors rather than hinders assimilation. When children of immigrants have to spend 12 years in schools of the host country, they are are subject to constant assimilatory pressure, unless the children from one immigrant group are the overwhelming majority at the school.
It is generally assumed that Hispanic immigrants in the US are the least assimilated. If that is true, it isn't because they have more frequent contacts with the homeland than other immigrants but because their large numbers and their concentration in a few states allow them to have contacts mainly with their own kind.
The lesson in the above is very simple. If you want your immigrants to be assimilated, don't import too many of them from one country or from countries that are similar, such as the Spanish-American countries.
James Schipper is a resident of London, Ontario (August 2/08)
Submitted by Tim Murray, Director Immigration Watch Canada www.immigrationwatchcanada.org
Topic:
Murdoch & Fairfax press spit dummy at Brumby's population 'limits'
On 28 July Premier John Brumby came out and said that he thought that Victoria had reached its population limit. A couple of days later he said that he didn't plan to increase immigration. He didn't say that he intended to decrease it though. Australia’s net rate of immigration is higher than it has ever been. Victoria has its own internet site which invites immigrants from all over the world, promising to facilitate entry and settlement. If Brumby doesn't decrease immigration, this means that the population will continue to grow at a very rapid rate in Victoria.
The sector which has goaded Victoria into overshoot typically shirks responsibility.
You might think that the people who run the country - the property developers, the mainstream press, and the banks - would be satisfied with this, but you would be suffering from the same kind of illusion that so many partners of addicts have lived under. Our unofficial rulers, the big end of town - are no more likely to accept limits than a heroine addict or a two year old child. It doesn't matter that their dose is still being constantly augmented; the very idea that it will not be continuously compounded, will send them into spasms. They will seek to place pressure on their supplier, the Victorian government.
Will other Premiers stand on their hind legs too?
Other state premiers, under the same orders, must be watching Victoria avidly, wondering why Brumby has stuck his head up over the parapet. This could put them on the spot too. After all, there isn't a State government in Australia that isn't pushing a very fragile envelope with population, resources, water, petroleum, shaky banks, and infrastructure. The whole lot of them must spend much of their time with their hands in their mouths, fingers stifling nervous screams. And what about the Federal government? No sooner did he hit the Lodge, the Prime Minister practically promised to increase Australia's population to 30 million by 2030.
Is Brumby very brave, or is he surrounded by such cowards that he simply seems brave? Has he recently actually tuned his ear to public discontent?
In our July 1, 2008, "Open letter to John Brumby on his admission that Victoria has an overpopulation problem," we predicted that
"(...) the corporate drivers of [the Victorian] government's program - such as the banks and the engineers in the Academy of Technological and Scientific Engineering (ATSE), and the developers and their allies in the Property Council of Australia, who have dug themselves very deeply into the housing and infrastructure economy, which is costing the rest of us so much - will continue to try to push the government into more unsustainable growth."
And we said that,
"We know that the mainstream press will not be your friend if you start to represent the public democratically in this matter."
We said that because we know that the mainstream press is the mouthpiece of the corporate world which, in Australia, is preponderantly interested in the expansion of mining, primary industry, housing and infrastructure, and that it attempts to manipulate the drivers of this kind of expansion by getting governments in Australia to increase Australia's population through immigration and pronatalism.
Right on cue, came The Herald Sun's really appalling editorial of July 29th 2008, "Premier goes off the message." This Murdoch-gem of pollie-heckling, needs to be acknowledged as an archetypal hysterical response, completely irrational, not even acknowledging the reality that Brumby is talking about, which is that Victoria is in overshoot and we should not be placing more pressure on the State's resources and capacity.
Let us examine the hyperbole:
Firstly, the Herald-Sun puts words in Victorians' mouths, saying that the Victorian people, "(...) expect the Premier to come up with answers, not run up a white flag of surrender."
"The message that Victoria is struggling to cope with the increasing numbers of people who want to live here is not the one John Brumby should be sending out."
Pardon? The writer seems to be saying that they know what lines the Premier was given to recite and that he has read from the wrong cue-board, or, zounds! he has ad-libbed.
Then the Herald-Sun editorialist seems almost to whine:
"If we take his words at face value Victoria is not "The Place To Be"."
This reminded us of a quip by Mr Thompson, the Liberal Member for Sandringham, "
"The topic is that the house congratulates the Brumby government on making Victoria a great place to live, work and raise a family for a million more migrants. Fundamentally," he said, "it should be retitled 'a great place to live, work, raise a family and speak in clichés'"
But, back to the Herald Sun editorial. The writer goes even further over the top, calling it, "an admission of failure" that "Twelve months after his elevation to the premiership, Mr Brumby has surprised us by saying in a Herald Sun interview: "I think we are probably at the limits (of growth)."
Hearteningly, the Herald-Sun also finds Mr Brumby's assessment of the situation, "curious".
"It is also curious, given Mr Brumby has been a vigorous and sometimes brave leader in his first year. "
One might almost hope that Brumby was actually sincere and that his remarks were independent.
Of course, in the end, we may find that Brumby was just holding out for more rewards from the infrastructure moguls.
We hope not.
Even though Brumby has taken his foot off the accelerator pedal, he hasn't put it on the brakes and the country is still running downhill.
Perhaps the most unreal part of this very unreal article was the insistence that the newspaper was representing what the people wanted. In fact, the Herald-Sun had just conducted a poll, "Is Melbourne's population growing too fast?" (In our opinion the poll should have asked, "Is Melbourne's population too big?" and the actual wording of the poll was yet another example of marketing a biased initial assumption, that growth was not in question; just the rate of growth. Nonetheless, the results of the Herald Sun poll at 5.30pm on 31st of July were:
Herald Sun Poll: Is Melbourne's population growing too fast?
Yes
82% (760 votes)
No
17% (163 votes)
Total votes
Total of 923 votes
Furthermore, the first Brumby article, "Premier John Brumby warns of dangers in growing too fast," elicited 62 comments of which approximately 60 were resoundingly negative about population growth. So it all adds to the unreality when the Herald Sun editorial presents the view that Victorians would be impatient at the idea that Mr Brumby might reneg on continuously racheted growth.
"Ultimately Mr Brumby must recognise that while Victorians will tolerate difficulties in fixing the state's problems, there is a limit to their patience. They expect the Premier to come up with answers, not run up a white flag of surrender."
What did The Age have to say about Brumby's views on limits to growth?
We were also interested to see which of half a dozen familiar ways the Fairfax press might choose to punish Mr Brumby.
It did seem a bit desperate of them to bring Ted Baillieu into the discussion right away, and have him apparently trot out the slur in "Brumby 'blaming' migrants," by David Rood, on August 2, 2008.
The slur was disappointingly predictable, and appears to have come from a deplorable press release from the Victorian Liberals the day before, "Brumby's panicked population backflip". In it Ted Baillieu correctly observed that the ALP Government had failed to cater for its population push for Melbourne. He then, however, took the low ground, referring to 'Fortress Victoria' and accusing Brumby of "slamming on the brakes and slamming the door on migrants, who contribute so much to our economy and society."
Although in Parliament the opposition have been continuously deploring the impact of high immigration in Victoria, their leader, Ted Baillieu, without actually saying how many Victorians he wants, came out and said, according to the Age, in ("Brumby 'blaming' migrants") that the Premier was making migrants into scapegoats in an "appalling" attempt to cover for his failure to deliver basic services such as public transport, hospitals and water."
Ted did not sink as low as he might have, however, since, "when asked [by the Age] if the Premier was "playing the race-card", Ted said he was not.
Why did the Age ask whether Brumby's comments could put Victoria's social cohesion at risk?
"Asked whether Mr Brumby's comments could put Victoria's social cohesion at risk, Mr Baillieu said some pretty ordinary messages were being sent overseas at the moment. He said some international students from India and Asia had been the victims of violent attacks," quoth The Age.
What has this got to do with the Premier's recognising that Victoria's population is in overshoot of its resources and infrastructure? Is Mr Brumby expected to continue to ramp up immigration until the city is completely overwhelmed, traffic at a standstill, with shanty towns in the parks and people sleeping in the subways and streets?
Why doesn't the Age admit that the social cohesion of Victoria has been damaged by the ramming through of intensification measures such as in Melbourne 2030. The Age could not have remained unaware of the plethora of negative submissions to the government on Channel Deepening, the Melbourne 2030 audit, and the Land and Biodiversity White Paper, to name a few issues arising from artificially stimulated population growth plans.
A case could be made that the Age is threatening Victoria's social cohesion by quoting Ted Baillieu's words in what seems like an irrelevantly racist beat-up. Why didn't the Age ask the Premier for the real reasons for his apparent epiphany of caution? What about some thoughtful interviewing for a change? Why pretend that this is anti-immigrant? What about pro-stability? It looks from their slant like The Age would like to shut the public up on the subject of population numbers by making it seem a dangerous and unsavoury topic, and to put Brumby off any independent thinking by dragging Ted Baillieu ostentiously across the path like a bait. In other words, it seems like The Age is using unfair tactics to influence or silence political debate.
"We have to send the right message. Scapegoating migrants for a failure to plan and a failure to deliver basic services is wrong, it's appalling, it's pretty low," Mr Baillieu said.
Why did Baillieu suggest that the Premier was 'scapegoating migrants'? What evidence did he give for that statement? Why did the Age print it without strong supporting evidence?
When asked if the Premier was playing "the race card", Mr Baillieu said "I'm not suggesting that.
It shows how over the top the attacks on Brumby are when even an immigration spokesperson, the Chairwoman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, Voula Messimeri, finds that there is nothing wrong in what he said, noting, unfortunately, that immigration is at a very high rate still.
""I don't think slowing the rate of growth is blaming immigration or ethnic communities," she said. "Victoria has absorbed a large number of migrants and done a pretty good job in making sure that cultural diversity and migrants are seen as valued," she is reported to have said, by The Age.
The Age article continued with their strange beat-up:
"Despite his attack on the Premier, Mr Baillieu would not nominate a figure for which he thought Victoria's population growth rate should be set. "You have growth rate you can accommodate," he said. "I'm not going to lay a figure on the table and say 'that's it and then you shut the door'."
Of course Mr Baillieu isn't going to nominate a figure; presumably he knows that whatever figure he cites it will not be enough for the Age or the Herald Sun, but it will be too much for the voters.
The journalist observed,
"Nor would the Opposition Leader say whether he thought national migration levels should increase."
And nor did the Age journalist apparently canvass the opposition leader's opinion as to whether he thought national migration levels should decrease. Why not?
National migration levels have increased above any previous levels already, and the Prime Minister is obviously under instructions to pump them up even further. It is well known that ATSE and the Multicultural Foundation of Australia and the Scanlon Foundation, would like our immigration rate to increase annually.
The Age subsequently ran a poll about Victorians' attitudes to Australia's population growth, with this result:
Is Victoria's population growing too fast?
Yes - 77%
No - 23%
Total Votes: 934 (on 2 August 2008 at 11.20pm)
Once again the public are only given a choice about 'rate' of growth, not 'growth' per se.
Their answer is pretty unequivocal though.
We can probably expect more articles soon which will suggest that Victorians are becoming racist because they think the population is growing too fast, and there will be some familiar faces from the growth lobby talking about how Victorians need to be educated [again] about the benefits of immigration.
Hopefully Mr Brumby will withstand the pressure. Let us dare to hope against hope that this is just a prelude to a much lower population growth rate in Victoria. Staying at the current very high growth rate is courting disaster. Wouldn't it be wonderful to STOP growing? And, wouldn't it be fabulous if Mr Brumby were to actually govern for the people instead of for the media and the rest of the big end of town? That would make him a truly unusual 21st century western politician.
See also: Open letter to John Brumby on his admission that Victoria has an overpopulation problem of 31 Jul 08.
G8 biofuelling biofeudalism
1. What did the Global Food Security Statement say?
I want to start by taking a look at a little part of the recent G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit G8 Leaders Statement on Global Food Security#ee0000">1:
#000080">7. We fully recognize the need for a wide range of mid- to long-term measures to tackle the issue of food security and poverty, inter alia, the importance of stimulating world food production and increasing investment in agriculture. To this end, we will:
7. (g) accelerate research and development and increase access to new agricultural technologies to boost agricultural production; we will promote science-based risk analysis including on the contribution of seed varieties developed through biotechnology;
9. (i) ensure the compatibility of policies for the sustainable production and use of biofuels with food security and accelerate development and commercialization of sustainable second-generation biofuels from non-food plant materials and inedible biomass; in this regard, we will work together with other relevant stakeholders to develop science-based benchmarks and indicators for biofuel production and use;
Firstly the underlined part of the short paragraph 7. (g) (don't ask me about the numbering system, I don't understand it either) has a number of problems. I do not want to go into it very deeply, except to say that I think it is supposed to convey the message, "We are going to do a risk analysis on the use of GE (GM) crops," without the slightest intention of actually doing so. In fact, the clause is so garbled it is hard to see what is meant at all, and perhaps the only thing we can really get from it is that there is an intention to push GE crops. Please feel free to comment if you think you can come up with a more comprehensible interpretation of this paragraph.
Paragraph 9. (i) is much more complex. Firstly, there is a bow in the direction of the food security problems that have been occurring; rising prices of grains, possibly because the use of maize and soybeans for the production of biofuel (essentially bioethanol or biodiesel) in the USA has driven up the prices of those grains. Just exactly why the prices of grains are rising is not clear, and the situation is complex; rising crude oil prices (which are driving the biofuel boom), low world stocks of grain, reduced production due to adverse weather conditions in some countries, people in developing countries eating more animal protein, grain speculation, and so on.
Then it appears that development and commercialization of sustainable second-generation biofuels from non-food plant materials and inedible biomass is to be accelerated. "Development and commercialization" means that large corporations are going to be involved, and in the context of paragraph 7. (g) this must mean GE crops for biofuels. In fact, it has already started, and in addition it might not be unfair to say that most GE food crops that have come onto the market thus far function just as well as biofuel crops as they do for human food crops. "Sustainable" is really not appropriate here, and I will explain why later. "Second-generation biofuels from non-food plant materials and inedible biomass" refers to the ability to process cellulosic plant materials into ethanol, not a whole new and different biofuel. The idea is to use the non-food part of the plant - leaves, stem, and so on - for the biofuel, while using the food part, the grain, for food. This may, and probably will, involve genetic engineering of the plant to make it in some way more favourable for ethanol production, e.g. by trying to raise the total amount of biomass produced per plant, raising the proportion of cellulose in the plant, and so on. That is the "inedible biomass" part. Just exactly what is meant by "non-food plant materials" is uncertain. It could refer to non-food, specialist biofuel crops, or it could refer to any kind of plant cellulosic material, such as wood. In fact a bioethanol plant started up in Osaka in January 2007 making ethanol from construction waste materials using a GE bacillus coli to break down the cellulose2.
Finally, we have "we will work together with other relevant stakeholders to develop science-based benchmarks and indicators for biofuel production and use." "Other relevant stakeholders" are presumably corporations. "Develop science-based benchmarks and indicators for biofuel production and use" means a legal regulatory framework for the production (i.e. with GE crops) and use of biofuels. "Other relevant stakeholders" does not mean you and me. We do not need to "develop science-based benchmarks and indicators for biofuel production and use," as I shall explain below.
2. What are they trying to do and what are the problems?
What can we learn from this reading between the lines? I think the main messages are this:
a) Bioethanol, and to an extent biodiesel, is here to stay and will be an important energy source in the future energy mix,
b) GE crops for food and bioethanol are strongly linked,
c) Crops for biofuel, in the US at least, will continue to be staple grains, maize and soybeans, grown on good cropland,
d) Big corporations are going to do it; you are not a "relevant stakeholder".
There are several problems with this:
i) This method of producing bioethanol/biodiesel probably uses more energy than the resulting ethanol contains.
ii) This will take place on the best cropland regardless of the effects on the poorer sections of the world's population OR the viability of the soil, our most crucial resource base.
iii) The monopolisation of food through the monopolisation of seeds will be expanded to and linked to the production of fuel.
Let's take them in order. i) There is a debate raging over this, but I'll spare you the details3. It is sometimes quite reasonably said that when we are eating the produce of modern, energy-intensive, chemical-mechanical, industrial food, then we are "eating oil." That's fairly accurate, since at least 10 energy units of fossil energy resources are needed to put one energy unit of food on your plate. The nitrogen fertilizers that are used to grow the crop probably derive from natural gas, but the statement about "eating oil" is, by and large, correct. Probably 2.5 to 3 of the more than ten units of energy are used on the farm in the direct production of the crops. The interesting thing is that what we do next is take those harvested food crops and process them into ethanol, using more energy along the way. Even with just this very simple explanation, it already looks like the energy in the alcohol produced this way is going to be less than the energy used to produce it. However, energy assessments of this nature are notoriously hard to do, and depend on the assumptions made about the farming method and the crop processing method, what to count and how to caount it, and so on. Pimentel's papers generally claim a net energy profit ratio (EPR) of roughly 0.7 to 0.77, while others claim an EPR of roughly 1.2 to 1.4 4.
Even the EPR of 1.4 is not really all that wonderful. The EPR of crude oil is at least 10, depending on the kind of extraction, the quality of the oil and so on. Why go to all that much trouble when you can just use the oil or natural gas as the energy source? Come to think of it, if oil and natural gas (oil/NG) are necessary to produce the ethanol, then what's the point, since one of the main reasons for using bioethanol in the first place was to create an alternative to fossil energy resources and to start to reduce dependency on fossil energy as early as possible? The conventional methods of producing bioethanol do neither. All that is being done is the conversion of oil/NG into ethanol on a roughly 1:1 energetic basis. In terms of energetics, this is plainly nonsense, even if it does make a profit when government subsidies are available, for instance. So why do we do it, apart from trying to make a fast buck, and are there not better ways of doing it? I will deal with these questions below.
Let's move on to ii) This will take place on the best cropland regardless of the effects on the poorer sections of the world's population OR the viability of the soil, our most crucial resource base. When the use of "inedible biomass"5, cellulosic materials such as leaves and stems (called "stover" in the case of maize) comes into use, there will be more plant material available from each hectare of crop, and the EPR may rise, but since there is no by-product from the ethanol-producing process that could be used as a fertilizer, no plant material would be available for returning to the soil, and the use of chemical fertilizers will be necessary unless the crop is grown 'organically'. (By the way, you probably noticed from the mention of a plant making ethanol from construction waste materials above that the processing of cellulosic materials is already possible. In this case a by-product of lignin pellets, a biomass fuel which is used to fire the boilers in the plant and also sold as a fuel, is being made.)
Modern maize growing methods are not good for the soil anyway, but becoming unable to return the stover to the soil, and thereby becoming reliant on chemical fertilizers for fertility is a quick way to ruin the soil. Once crude oil/NG become really scarce and expensive, perhaps in a few years' time, then there will be little option but to farm organically. There are alleviating measures, such as not taking ALL the stover for alcohol conversion, or rotations with soybeans and other crops, but this alone will not resolve the problem of dependence on oil/NG to grow the crops6. Organically grown crops, by definition not using petrochemically-derived fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, will do the job, but for example, in the case of the USA, I find it hard to imagine organic farming on the scale of Mid-Western maize fields. Unless, perhaps, even after crude oil/NG are unavailable, traction can still be provided - using bioethanol to fuel tractors, harvesters, trucks, and so on. This will make farming without oil/NG possible, without having to rely on farm animals for traction7. But there are some agricultural processes that require electricity; irrigation, post-harvest drying and processing of crops and processing of feedstock crop material to produce ethanol. Where will that come from? You may have noticed that in mid-July Al Gore made a proposal for 100% of USA electricity to be produced from renewable energy sources (PV, wind, hydro, geothermal and so on, and he did NOT specifically mention nuclear energy, so please check it out for yourself at the URL given in the note if you are suspicious about this) within ten years8. Now we begin to see what the USA and other countries may be planning over the mid-term, approximately the next five to thirty years.
As this scenario unfolds, as I think it will in the years to come, and countries like the USA become unable to export basic grains for food because of biofuel/biodiesel production, what considerations will the countries who implement this weaning of themselves from oil/NG have for food-importing countries which are now experiencing problems with the rising prices of basic grains? None, probably. Exports of any basic and/or essential commodity are carried out on the basis of a surplus over domestic needs. If there is no surplus, there is generally no export. It does not matter what the commodity is; food, crude oil, cotton, timber, you will not ask your fellow citizens to suffer in order to feed, fuel, clothe, or house people in another country or another continent. I do not think asking the WTO to ensure that grain exporting countries continue to supply grain to importers is going to be of much use. If there is an energy crisis, will you be able to ship it to them anyway? The global economy is cooling off and winding down. Who knows how far it will go? Countries like Japan, and many Middle East and African countries, will simply be "off the map", left to fend for themselves.
3. Where is all this heading?
Now let's see how this ties in with iii) The monopolisation of food through the monopolisation of seeds will be expanded to and linked to the production of fuel. Actually, here I need to quote one more sentence from the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit G8 Leaders Statement on Global Food Security:
This is an interesting statement. It reveals just about how far humanity has come down the road to stupidity. If we look at this from the point of view of Japan, the statement may be true. Japan was about 80% self-sufficient in food in 1960. That means that if there had been a sudden cessation of food imports Japan could have probably survived without starvation, just as Cuba did in the mid-1990s. Since the 1950s, the USA had been cajoling Japan into importing large amounts of its agricultural surplus, maize, soybeans and wheat, thereby bringing about a substantial diet change in Japan towards an increased intake of bread, pasta, processed foods and animal protein, and away from rice and other traditional foods. The mood in the 1960s, the "era of high economic growth" in Japan, was that it would be possible to import nearly all raw materials, including large amounts of food, and get rich by manufacturing and exporting industrial goods. Export earnings would easily cover the import of basic essentials, such as food. With a few minor hiccups (oil crises and adverse growing weather either in Japan, USA or elsewhere) the system has worked well for about 40+ years, but very few people at the Japanese end have ever given much thought as to how long the system could continue before collapsing under multiple crises caused by the depletion of fossil energy resources, rising world population and so on. It seems that we are now fast approaching the crunch point.
It is, of course, possible for people to grow food for local consumption without the need for 'a robust world market and trade system for food and agriculture,' but not if you live in a large city much over about 250,000 people (people in cities smaller than this in Japan are generally within walking distance of agricultural land) or if you live in a food-importing country which does not have enough agricultural land to support its population. Japan's population in 1960, for instance was just under 93.5 million and food self-sufficiency was around 80%. Japan's population peaked in 2004 at 127,777,777 people (Really? It's my little 'joke', but quite accurate and easy to remember)9 and the food self-sufficiency is now 39%. Many Middle East and African countries may be in a similar situation (though their populations may be rising rapidly, and not declining). Undoubtedly, these countries are now dependent on the world trading system for food (or like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [DPRK - North Korea] face starvation), but will somehow have to find the means to pay for the imports, including transport, despite the high prices and decreasing availability of oil/NG and probably coal as well. These countries will clearly also not have the luxury of using their cropland for the production of biofuels. Effectively, they have 'allowed' their populations to rise beyond what their cropland endowment could support. In Japan, there has been no public debate on this issue. In my experience, the general public has very little knowledge about cropland areas and population, although recently many people seem to know the 39% figure for food self-sufficiency.
This looks like a real recipe for disaster; a substantial 'dieback' of population due to starvation, as has occurred to a certain extent in the DPRK. What solutions could there be? a. Humane, natural, but controlled population reduction by reducing the birth rate through the expanded use of contraception and so on (instead of a population crash by starvation). I think this will either take too long, or will be impossible to implement due to cultural or legal enforcement problems. Under current population scenarios, Japan's population is due to fall to between 90 million to 100 million by 2050. Is it possible that this could be speeded up so that Japan could be effectively 100% self-sufficient in food by, say, 2030? I doubt it. One only need recall the experiences in India and China ("Having one child is good") to see how effective these policies are in actually reducing the population. On the other hand, negative population growth, abhorred by governments including Japan's, does exist, but mostly in advanced industrial countries which have high degrees of food self-sufficiency (France, Germany, UK, Australia and so on).
b. Expand the cropland horizon. Almost unthinkable. In Japan, there is a case for a certain amount of rehabilitation of former cropland, from golf courses and so on, but not a lot. The roughly 4.7 million hectares (m ha) of cropland in Japan now, could perhaps be increased to 5 m ha. The cropping ratio (number of crops grown on a certain plot of land per year) is currently around 95% (meaning that not all available cropland is being used) but in the 1950s the average over the whole of Japan was around 135%, and where I live was 160% in 1960. So at 5 m ha x 135% = 6.75 m ha. If 10 people are fed on one ha, then theoretically 67.5 million people could be fed. If you calculate the number of people that could be fed at 80% self-sufficiency and a population of 93.5 million (the situation in Japan in 1960), you get about 75 million people. Call it 70 million. That's 55% of the current population. What are the other 45% supposed to do? No one knows. Even in 2050 this will still be at least 20 million people 'too many', if the statistics still hold in 50 years time. I suspect that, given desertification, decreasing availability of water, population rise, and so on, many Middle East and African countries are in roughly the same situation. The 'AIDS epidemic' is thought to be resulting in declining population in some African countries, but who really knows?
c. Increasing land productivity of crops. The 'Green Revolution' in staple grain agriculture since the Second World War has resulted in a roughly 50-year interval during which the increase in unit area yields of the main staple grains, wheat, rice, maize and soybeans rose faster than the world population. This was at the expense of 'modernising' agriculture - really 'industrialising' agriculture through the use of fossil energy resources to mechanize, chemicalize and electrify agricultural (food) production. But by the early 2000s the 'Green Revolution' was losing effectiveness, and by 2008, although yields are still rising by possibly 1.5% per year (3% per year in the 1960s), the world appears to be slipping back down in terms of grain production per person. This is, however, not the place to go into the 'meanings' and ramifications of the 'Green Revolution', which has been adequately dealt with elsewhere10.
A few days ago, my mother-in-law showed me the front page of the well-known Asahi Newspaper for Sunday July 20, 2008. The top article, about a quarter of the front page, and then spilling over to even more on page two, was about GE crops and food. The headline was "Tilt towards GE" and was part of a series called "Environment Year Zero". (Everything is in Japanese. These are my translations, including below.) So apparently 2008 is the year we start thinking about the environment in Japan. That was 'news'. The article is reasonably balanced, but a little bit 'tilted' towards the possible future promise held out by the developers of GE crop plants. In one part, the article states. "By 2030, seeds of three of the main agricultural items, maize, soybeans and cotton, will be developed such that yields of these crops will double in comparison to those of 2000, and the amounts of land, water and fuel needed to cultivate the crops will be decreased by one third." Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant is quoted as saying, "We must fill the increasing demand for grain while protecting the environment. We will play this role." The GE seed developing corporations are notorious for their statements on "feeding the world," but most of the readers of the Asahi Newspaper do not know this.
What's the betting on the "By 2030..." statement above being realized? And at what 'price'?
It would be 'nice' to think it could be possible, but the seed companies face opposition to their patented seeds on three grounds. The first is that foods produced from GE crops may be hazardous to human health. Despite industry claims to the contrary, humanity does not understand genetics sufficiently well to guarantee the safety of GE plants and foods. At the very least, the protein content of the GE produce will be different to conventional (non-GE) produce, and the presence of novel protiens increases the risk of allergenicity for some people. Other unpredictable changes in the genome of GE plants may occur as a result of the genetic engineering process, and the spread of antibiotic resistance due to the vectors used in the GE process will continue as long as the antibiotic markers are used. Effectively, the fact that immense amounts of GE foods now being consumed by unwitting consumers (because their countries will not enforce a strict labelling system) is tantamount to a monstrous live experiment on the human race. Do we want to continue with this?
Secondly, the massive introduction of GE crops, already happening in the USA, Canada, Argentina and Brazil, will cause biodiversity to decrease. It will drive out traditional and conventional varieties, leaving mankind very vulnerably dependent on a much smaller number of GE varieties, which will almost inevitably have more unstable genomes than their traditional and conventional ancestors. This kind of biological and ecological instability is something we would be insane to walk into with our eyes open.
Thirdly, there is the problem of the monopolisation of seeds, and therefore the monopolisation of the world's food supply in the hands of a very few multinational companies. Imagine that you could control food on a global scale. I do not think I have to spell it out for you.
4. What's all this fuss about "second-generation biofuels"?
I think the part in the G8 Leaders Statement on Global Food Security that says, "accelerate development and commercialization of sustainable second-generation biofuels from non-food plant materials and inedible biomass," despite the fact that the technology is already developed and established enough for full-scale commercial plants to be starting up recently, means that "we are not going to start the really serious part of the changeover from the fossil energy resource economy to the biofuel economy until the biofuel GE crops that are now being developed are ready to go in the fields."
The explanation of why that is and what it means is the subject of the remaining part of this article.
I do not think there's much doubt that the greatest problem with GE crops is the third one, the monopolisation of the food supply through patented seeds. The purveyors of the seeds ought to be betting that the first and second issues are really not all that serious, since it may well be themselves and their descendants who have to live with the problems along with all the rest of us. However, the promise of global control, which now seems to be within their reach as country after country, region after region succumbs to GE crops and food, completely overrides the first two issues.
If you want to get an idea of how the corporations get a toehold on a country, the first is through the media, as in the example of the Asahi Newspaper given above. It's not hard to find farmers and journalists who will push the GE agenda. The second is through the contracts and patent system. The GE seed company owns the seeds. The farmer cannot replant the seed from this year's harvest the following year; a new batch of seed must be bought. The farmer signs a contract with the company, giving the company many rights over the farmer's agricultural practices and bookkeeping. If GE seed from a neighbouring farmer's field finds its way onto your field, and if the company investigators find the GE plant growing there, you will be in violation of the patent and liable to litigation11. Contrary to what the companies and GE proponents claim, there is no co-existence with conventional, organic, or any other kind of agriculture. Once its in your area, it's just a matter of time. Neither do these people give a hoot about global food security. If their "feed the world" statements turn out not to be true in twenty years' time, who is going to hold them responsible for it? How about you?
Farmers will have no say, no control, over what they do or how they do it. Any farmer that does not toe the line will not be renewing the seed contract the following year. The same will also be true for biofuel crops. They will all be GE crops, the companies will control the farming, the processing and the distribution of the biofuel. What is more, and possibly crucial, opposition to GE food will be impossible because we will be told that without GE crops there will be no biofuel for transport, farm machinery, construction equipment, domestic heating (including water heating), and so on. Food and biofuel crops may be identical and growing in the same field, one part for human food and other parts for biofuel. If you want fuel, you must eat the food. You do not want to go back to living in the Middle Ages, do you?
How do I know this? Ethanol is not a new "product". Humans have been fermenting stuff to get drunk on for millennia. We just did not have cars to run it on. Almost every Japanese person with a brain has heard of the Ford "Model T". What they do not know is that it was designed to run on both gasoline and ethanol. Apparently, Henry Ford was more in favour of ethanol than gasoline, but ethanol was pushed out of the market by the Prohibition, partly funded and supported by John D. Rockefeller. Another fact people do not know is that the Model T had a 'spark advance lever' just behind the steering wheel, roughly where the windscreen wiper lever is on many cars now. When running the car on ethanol, or simply when accelerating, the ignition timing could be advanced, as ethanol needs advanced ignition timing compared with when running the car on gasoline. The later Ford "Model A" had a 'knob' just below and to the right of the dashboard that you could pull or push to retract or insert the needle in the carburettor's jet. Running a car on ethanol requires a slightly larger aperture jet. There are photographs of these features of the Models T and A in David Blume's book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas!" (p.12 and 430)
The Ford Models T and A were the first FFVs - Flexible-Fuel Vehicles, cars that can run on any mixture of ethanol and gasoline from 100%:0% to 0%:100%. Interestingly, Blume says that there are about 6 million FFVs on the road in the USA now, but most of the people who are driving them do not know they own one, and most of the dealers do not know they are selling them! (p.429) Blume's book is a revelation; over 500 pages of detailed information on all aspects of ethanol and other fuels. Blume is what we would call in Japan a true "ethanol otaku" - an ethanol maniac, but more, someone who has invested a huge part of her/his life in finding out about and gaining expertise in one particular subject. A living ethanol encyclopaedia. Even if your car is not an FFV, it can be converted for ethanol use fairly easily by a car mechanic who knows what s/he is doing. But then the car will not run on gasoline unless you convert it back again. The main point about conversion to ethanol for recent cars is the alteration of the fuel injection system. Blume's book gives details.
But Blume's book is not just about converting your car to run on ethanol. It contains information on sources of ethanol (crop plants, waste products, and so on, including cellulosic materials), how to ferment them and how to distil the ethanol. You, or a small group of you and your friends can start to do all of this for a few $1000s (a few 100,000s yen) provided someone in your group knows how to look at David Blume's book and set up the fermentation and distillation equipment. Then it would be handy if one of your friends is a fairly competent car mechanic, and another one a lawyer. But the G8 and their corporate friends do not want you to know about this or to read this subversive material! If you've bought or read "Alcohol Can Be a Gas!", please comment. I bet I get very few such comments! I heard about it on a certain Internet podcast, not through the regular mass media.
So what's going on? The main reason, it appears, that the cultivation of biofuel crops suddenly increased in the USA a few years ago was because of the rise in gasoline, i.e. crude oil, prices. Just exactly why crude oil prices are rising is hotly contested. I believe it is happening because the peak of annual world extraction of crude oil has been reached; the so-called "peak oil". However US$140 a barrel looks too high to have been caused by "peak oil," (Andrew McKillop says crude oil's real equivalent price of the early 1980s, corrected for competing asset prices and the US dollar's world value is probably around 175 USD/bbl) so there are other factors involved. Speculation, manipulation by oil companies for higher profits, manipulation by other powerful groups for their own reasons, and so on. It also appears that the increased use of maize for biofuel production has driven up the price of maize and other basic grains, but again the situation is more opaque than that, speculation and other manipulation being blamed for at least some of the price rise. What certainly has happened is that biofuel is now a dirty word. Almost everyone is happy to see that the EU, the UN, the World Bank and the G8 is talking about food security in the context of biofuels since the food riots started to occur in April this year. Just see your friends' faces crease up in disgust when you mention 'biofuels'.
So, the situation now is that far fewer people are interested in knowing that biofuel crops do not have to be maize or sugar cane or soybeans, do not have to be grown on prime cropland, do not have to be GE crops, that they can be grown on marginal land, in sewerage swamps, as one part of a viable rotation, gathered from the sea (seaweed and so on), can be processed, fermented and distilled as a small local enterprise and do not have to be (and are perhaps better off not being) converted to fuel by large transnational corporations. David Blume shows quite convincingly that as long as we do not fixate on biofuel from edible crops grown on prime cropland using 'modern' energy-intensive agricultural methods, and do not allow big business to control everything from the field to the end-user, then we will not have a problem fuelling basic necessities for a fairly good lifestyle..
You don't believe me? A few examples:
Cattails: Blume gives the example that 15 ha of cattails (Typha sp.) can treat 20 million litres of secondary sewage a day. It is possible to produce a total of over 90,000 litres of ethanol per ha from the rhizome by ordinary fermentation and the leaves and stem by cellulosic processing. To get an idea of how productive this is, Blume asks us to suppose that 2580 ha of cattail ponds be used to treat the sewage for each US county (there are 3141 counties in the US). That would result in over 750 billion litres of alcohol. The US annual gasoline consumption is about 540 billion litres12. (p.127) Energy needs to be used in the processing of the cattail rhizome, leaves and stem. This can be supplied by wood, providing forests are managed sustainably. Quite appropriately, some communities will not want to harvest cattails grown as part of the sewerage system as they will want to return the sewerage (human wastes) to the land.
Kelp: Could produce close to 340 billion litres of bioethanol a year just from the coast of California. (p.159)
Castor beans: Jatropha curcas L. I have some personal experience with this. The photograph in Blume's book (p.125) does not look like the same plant, but the description fits. It is a low tree, two to three metres in height. The fruit looks like a black plum, and it contains a nut that is 33-35% oil. The nut can be chopped, dried, pressed and filtered to give a diesel fuel. No processing, no machinery, except for the end-use diesel engine. Incredibly low-tech. Planting 1250 Jatropha trees/ha, gives 10,000 kg of nut per harvest, 4 kg gives 1 litre of diesel oil, so 2500 litres are harvested per ha for each harvest. However, the tree is often planted as a hedgerow around fields or gardens, or along roadsides, taking up zero cropland.
Feel better now?
5. Defining the broad strategic horizons
The role of the G8 has always been to define the broad strategic horizons through which the next wave of planetary capital accumulation can occur13.
So what is so subversive about all this? The feature of Blume's vision of biofuels, especially, bioethanol, is of course its decentralized and democratized vision of energy production. G8 leaders have a problem with this? According to the authors of The 2008 G8 on Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment:
It is critical to bear in mind that the ultimate aim of their (G8) policies is never to create community but to introduce and maintain divisions that set common people at each other's throats. The neoliberal project, which has been their main instrument for doing so for the last three decades, is premised on a constant effort either to uproot or destroy any communal or democratic system whereby ordinary people govern their own affairs or maintain common resources for the common good...13
Blume's vision represents a real alternative to corporate-monopolised energy provision; and therein lies its greatest sin:
Alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form; this is why it becomes an absolute imperative of global governance that even small viable experiments in other ways of organizing communities be wiped out, or, if that is not possible, that no one knows about them... If nothing else, this explains the extraordinary importance attached to the security services and preemption of popular struggle. Commoning, where it already exists, must be made invisible. Alternatives... must be made to disappear, if not squelched or destroyed, then marginalized to the point they seem irrelevant, ridiculous13.
For me, that just about sums up where we are going, but I want to make a few more comments.
1) With the global food and fuel situation stitched up as described above, I think the abolition of cash and introduction of electronic money only will provide sufficient control of the global population for microchipping of the population to be not even necessary. The replacement for the US dollar, the amero, thought to be the new currency for the upcoming 'North American Union' of Canada, USA and Mexico will perhaps be the first electronic-only money?14
2) For the last few centuries the global game has been 'growth'. Now that the end of cheap and geographically/geopolitically easily available fossil energy resources is in sight, and for many reasons 'growth' appears to have outlived its usefulness, the new game is now 'world population control'.
3) Remember the 'new ice-age' scares of the 1970s? Nevertheless, climate change appears to be really happening and possibly cannot be stopped. Are the people who attribute climate change to sunspot activity and not CO2 or CH4 and other greenhouse gasses wrong? They might not be. And anyway what better way to "fight" global warming/climate change than to be able to control the fuels and to be relying on the most carbon neutral fuels, bioethanol/biodiesel, for liquid fuel, and 'renewables' for electricity. (There's always wood/charcoal for some other uses.) Draw your own conclusions.
4) There has been a green debate on 'crash or soft-landing'. Interestingly, the above scenario appears not to be on the 'crash - soft-landing' spectrum, but something quite different. Population control, while maintaining the infrastructure for the elite, fuelled with biofuels and kept in place with electronic money. Microchipping being the 'final solution'. Neo-feudalism. Population crashes may occur in some areas that are irrelevant to the elites' needs.
5) Some have suggested that high energy prices cause increases in transportation costs15, offsetting lower labour costs in other countries (one of the main reasons for globalization), and that therefore the globalization project is on its knees and about to collapse before our very eyes. I think not. The answer is to use labour where the production is most convenient, but reduce the labour costs there. This agenda will do exactly that.
6) What to do as we approach the fork in the road to a feudal agrisystem or self-sustainable communities? Many are pointing out that those who have the power are troubled by the prospect of MASSIVE disobedience by the populace. Why bother with all this control if it were not so? However, as the man from Kentucky said, "You can't get there from here." What do you think? Is it still possible that large numbers of us will stand up and resist corporate rule, or are we already down for the count?
Notes:
1. See the Statements
2. See information, unfortunately in Japanese only, on the plant. Several similar plants are being built or are just starting up in different locations in the world. The technology has now become fairly well established and high energy prices are making the process economically viable. Note that the costs of the feedstocks for these processes do not necessarily rise as food prices rise and that they often produce their own process energy, so the cost of producing the ethanol is not necessarily linked to oil prices.
3. For a review of biofuel production energy balances, please see the two files attached below. The pdf file is a fairly short review, about 12 pages including the tables and references, and the Excel file is the data from the papers reviewed all converted into (unified) metric system units in order to make comparisons a bit easier. The Excel file shows the conversion factors and how everything was calculated. Please leave a comment to this article if you see any mistakes and so on. Thank you.
4. Pimentel, David, Ethanol Fuels: Energy Balance, Economics, and Environmental Impacts are Negative, 2003.
Pimentel, David and Tad W. Patzek, Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower, 2005.
Lorenz, David and David Morris, How Much Energy Does It Take to Make a Gallon of Ethanol? August 1995.
Shapouri, Hosein, James A. Duffield and Michael S. Graboski, Estimating the Net Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol, 1995.
Shapouri, Hosein, James A. Duffield, Andrew McAloon and Michael Wang, The 2001 Net Energy Balance of Corn-Ethanol, 2004.
EPR is energy obtained divided by energy used to obtain the energy. 1 means that the energy obtained was equal to the energy used to obtain it, so there is no net energy gain. Below 1 means that less energy was gained than the energy used to obtain it, net energy loss, and above 1 means that there was a net energy gain.
5. Lignocellulose, the structural material that comprises much of the mass of plants, is composed mainly of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin.
6. For a much more thorough discussion of the problems of the current
bioethanol system, see Alice Friedmann, Peak Soil
7. "In mechanical terms, matching the 1985 power of American tractors with horses would require building up their stock to at least 250 million, 10 times the record total of the 1910s. Some 300 106 ha, twice the total U.S. arable land, would be needed to feed the animals." Smil, V., General Energetics, John Wiley and Sons, 1991, pp.233-234.
8. See a video of the entire speech by Al Gore, about 27 minutes.
9. Information in English on Japanese population available at the website of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Especially, see page 1 of the huge (22MB) pdf file "Population Statistics of Japan, 2006"
10. For information on grain productivity, see the Japanese "World Food Situation and Japan's Food Security". For a critique of the Green Revolution, see, e.g. Siva, Vandana, The Violence of the Green Revolution, Zed Books, 1991. This wiki page on the Green Revolution is interesting and provides more references.
11. For information on litigation against farmers, see: Center for Food Safety, Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers for a full pdf file, and the experience of Percy Schmeiser or just enter the keywords "Percy Schmeiser" into any search engine.
12. The Energy Information Administration gives U.S. motor gasoline consumption as 390 million gallons per day in 2007. Multiply by 3.7854 to convert gallons to litres and then 365 to give the value for one year results in 539 billion litres.
13. This intereting but quite long document, The 2008 G8 on Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment is well worth the read for one perspective on what is going on.
14. See, e.g. North American Union for background on this issue.
15. See Elfael's Another World is Inevitable, But...
Your home... secure haven or up for grabs?
The following articles #YourHome">Your home... secure haven or up for grabs? and #GreaterGood">The Greater Good - whose? both by Greg Wood appeared in the Gympie Times of 18 July 2008. The letter from a Brisbane resident included as an #appendix" id="appendix">appendix is an illustration of how the resumption of land for inappropriate projects is by no means confined to the Gympie region,
#YourHome" id="YourHome">Your home... secure haven or up for grabs?
Australians take home ownership very seriously. We get upset when title and use of our houses and businesses are put in doubt.
Native Title triggered widespread concern about loss of freehold rights. Less widely, but even more ferociously, so did regulations regarding vegetation clearing and forestry management.
Why then does silence reign as hundreds of people, in various locations around Queensland, are being forced from their homes to make way for a range of projects of ‘significance’.
Over four hundred Mary Valley households have already been displaced by the grossly flawed Traveston Dam project. Many of these people are neither happy nor comfortable with the result. More than a hundred households remain staunchly resistant but are deeply disturbed by the immediate stress and and anxious about an uncertain future.
The Gympie bypass threatens up to two hundred homes, leaving occupants as uncertain and confused about their future as Valley residents are.
A new coal conveyor to Tarong Power station is displacing about fifty families.
Hundreds of properties have been resumed to make way for Brisbane’s new north-south tunnel and air- port link.
Add in the Sunshine Coast Powerlink project, rail corridor, water pipelines etc. etc, and you have a fraction of a growing list that threatens to sweep ordinary people aside like a tsunami.
It is not just fair to ask to ask some searching questions. It is imperative.
#question1" id="question1">Question 1: Does the project provide real value? Is it worth the agony?
Obviously this varies, but some are clear stinkers, not least our infamous dam.
The real problem is the complete lack of genuine consultation being taken ahead of hatching and adopting mega-project plans. This lack also applies to the broader planning policies that generate need, or the excuse, for specific projects.
Public comment, if allowed, always occurs too late to change anything of substance. How can plans and projects hope to deliver maximum public value when the public are never asked what they value most?
Plans should be subject to fair, competent and transparent cost-benefit analysis. We accept less at our peril.
#question2" id="question2">Question 2: Is land resumption a fair and humane process?
Sadly, never.
Whilst processes are each different, they all work to isolate households within extended, high pressure negotiation where the agency holds all of the cards.
Well coordinated, experienced teams confront individuals with offers and claims that they do not have the skill, support or resources to verify. People are played off against their own doubts and fears.
Market value is touted as a standard for payment, but this is open to wild interpretation.
Much fairer, more humane land purchase processes are desperately needed... assuming of course that projects are genuinely worthy to begin with.
#question3" id="question3">Question 3: If a project is poor at its stated purpose, what is the real purpose?
If questions 1 and 2 were properly dealt with as a matter of course, we’d not have to ask this question. But they aren’t and we do.
No project better illustrates the matter than the Traveston Crossing Dam.
It’s not really a reliable water supply, so what is it?
A political stunt?
A cooling pond for a nuclear reactor?
A property development scam?
Part of a breathtakingly cynical plan to develop a water grid asset for sale to a private corporation?
Informed, rational review favours the last one. How good can the exiled, traumatised families feel about that?
#GreaterGood" id="GreaterGood">The Greater Good - whose?
The incidence of social dispossesion due to unsound planning and development is not an isolated, occasional circumstance, says Melbourne based sociologist and land-use planner, Sheila Newman. She says the condition is systematic and escalating.
Ms Newman says, “Melbourne and Sydney have both reached the stage where local residents, and local authorities, are being completely written out of having any say over the deluge of planning applications that seek to radically change their life and investment in the place they live... homes and values that might be generations old.”
“Pressure to keep up with the demands unleashed by unmanaged growth is creating a permanent state of emergency”, say Ms Newman.
“This crisis mentality is used to justify extreme options, including dispossession with zero consultation and settlement transactions that are more mafia than management”.
Ms Newman says local people need to demand that local interests are not ignored within any grand plans for the greater good.
“‘The Greater Good’ has a lot to answer for over history”, says Ms Newman. “Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all their ilk have invoked its power. If the greater good does not care about you or the things you love, then it is probably a fraud”.
#appendix" id="appendix">Appendix: Letter from elderly Brisbane resident facing home resumption
Cars eating our homes
This letter appeared in Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper of 29 July 08. The Courier Mail newspaper is a strident promoter of both population growth and the large number of road and other infrastructure projects that population growth necessitates. As a consequence, hundreds of homes around Brisbane, including that of Eileen Urquhart, are being resumed.
HOW ironic and tragic that a home in which you have lived for 86 years; a home that your father created from a huge hole in the ground and took years to prepare for a building, can be resumed by the powers that be.
My uncle fought the enemy in France and my brother was a Rat of Tobruk in the last war to defend us.
Where can an old lady of 87 years and her handicapped daughter live? We have been used to half an acre of land with lovely gardens, created by my dad, and having every facility we require at Toowong Village, only a short bus ride away.
Whatever happened to good public transport?
Quite possibly it could take some of the private cars and trucks off the road, instead of losing our homes to them.
Eileen Urquhart, Toowong
Biofuels threaten to turn Kenya's Tana Delta into ecological wasteland
Ecosystems matter more than biofuel
By Climate Ark, a project of Ecological Internet - July 22, 2008
In partnership with Rettet den Regenwald e.V. -- Rainforest Rescue
Kenya has recently approved plans to destroy some 20,000 hectares of the globally important and ecologically sensitive Tana Delta for sugar and biofuel production. Covering 130,000 hectares, these wetlands' diverse riverine vegetation -- forests, swamps, dunes, beaches and ocean -- will be forever altered by widespread vast fields of toxic, monoculture sugar cane and biofuel mill. The project threatens 350 species including birds, lions, hippos, nesting turtles, elephants, sharks, reptiles and the Tana red colobus, one of 25 primates facing extinction globally.
Mumias Sugar Company, the nation's largest sugar company, owns 51 percent of the project, while most of the rest is owned by state-run Tana and Athi River Development Authority. Local people live in an intricate relationship with the delta’s ecosystems, and are generally opposed to the mill. Irrigation would cause severe drainage of the Delta, leaving local farmers without water for their herds during dry seasons. The Kenya Wetlands Forum is calling on the Government to cancel its approval given to the project. "We cannot just start messing around with the wetland because we need biofuel and sugar," Kenyan Nobel laureate and environmentalist Wangari Maathai has said.
Biofuel production worldwide continues to destroy crucial natural ecosystems required for local and global sustainability. While hailed as a climate change remedy, this destruction of natural habitats for biofuel production almost always releases more carbon than saved. Using food such as sugar for fuel has raised food prices, leading to riots globally, including in Kenya. Let the Kenyan government know destroying ecosystems for toxic monocultures is unethical, ask them to please follow their own environmental laws, and respectfully request the project be permanently cancelled.
Reproduced from original article of 22 Jul 08 on www.climateark.org.
What you can do: Let the Kenyan government know that destroying ecosystems for toxic sugar monocultures is unethical, and ask them to please follow their own environmental laws, and permanently cancel the project.
See also: Agrofuel company violently represses communities in Guatemala of 12 Jul 08, Public Hearing against Agrofuels in Valle del Cauca, Colombia of 25 Jun 08, Evo Morales re-nationalises energy and telecommunications companies, denounces biofuel-driven starvation of 12 May 08.
Snowy Hydro CEO uses shareholder funds to push privatisation in defiance of shareholder wishes
Snowy CEO should stop using public money to push sell-off
NSW Greens Media Release: 31 July 2008
The CEO of Snowy Hydro has again used his Corporation's resources to push for the sell-off of Australia's largest renewable energy generator, according to Greens NSW MP John Kaye.
Dr Kaye said: "Snowy Hydro CEO Terry Charlton has should either get on with the business of running a publicly-owned entity or he should resign.
"He lost the privatisation debate in 2006 and there has been no shift in community attitudes since then.
"He refuses to accept the judgment of the people of NSW, local residents and even the NSW government who have ruled out privatisation of Snowy Hydro.
"The latest glossy newsletter, circulated to thousands of Snowy Mountains residents, contains a two page 'Company Vision' from Mr Charlton, #PrivatisationPropaganda">arguing that Snowy must be sold off to generate 'extra capital [it needs] to keep up'.
"He tried a similar trick in the March Newsletter when he threatened the people of the Snowy with the spectre of a degrading publicly-owned asset, isolated in a sea of privatised generators.
"His rhetoric did not work then and it will fail again.
"Mr Charlton's behaviour is outside what people expect from the management of a publicly-owned corporation.
"He has a clear conflict of interest. He would be in the box seat to head a privatised Snowy with a good chance of a much bigger pay packet.
"It is time Mr Charlton decided his future with the Snowy. If he can't make a go of it as a publicly owned entity, he should step aside for someone who can.
"He cannot continue using the Corporation's assets to push his pro-privatisation propaganda after his shareholders have told him that a sell-off is not on the table," Dr Kaye said.
The July edition of Snowy Hydro News is available at: www.snowyhydro.com.au/files/SHLNews_July08.pdf (1.5M)
For more information: John Kaye 0407 195 455
#PrivatisationPropaganda" id="PrivatisationPropaganda">Appendix: pro-privatisation propaganda in the Snowy Hydro News of July 2008
In order to demonstrate that the material referred to above by John Kaye were not a careless paragraph or two in the midst of a broader article, we are including it here. The explicit unambiguous pro-privatisation material ocupies one and a half pages of a two page article Company Vision by Terry Charlton CEO & Managing director in a very glossy 12 page magazine.
We may not like privatisation and we may even be ideologically opposed to it in regard to the electricity industry but it has largely already happened across the industry and is not going to be reversed. We may also not like the large energy companies becoming larger and more efficient and we may not like multinational companies owning some Australian businesses but this too has already happened. We may not like the realities of drought, and we might be confronted by the many competing but valid community and economic demands that now limit what can be done quickly for the environment, particularly for our rivers. But there are numerous realities that have to be recognised and accepted. Governments have recognised that they don’t run businesses well and that businesses, such as Snowy Hydro Limited, are best transferred to private sector ownership through either “trade sales” or transformed to publicly listed companies. “Social service” activities such as schools, police, hospitals, basic roads and community infrastructure are, arguably, the province of Governments and rightly so.
understanding and support...
I am very positive that we can achieve our full potential. I am, however, very unhappy about the delayed time frame. The world in which we operate is changing around us and changing fast.
We need extra capital in order to keep up. Our shareholders have indicated they won’t inject extra capital and we can’t expect them to forego dividends forever. The only option is privatisation and I accept this is a shareholder matter.
There is an undeniable truth that given the constraints we confront, we have no better way forward if the vision for the Snowy Scheme, the Snowy Hydro Company and our people is to be fulfilled.
Solutions that promise return to single Government ownership are no solution at all, unless new capital injection is provided, up front along with further capital when the business case justifies it.
Greater borrowings are not prudently possible. Reverting the business to a “water authority” would not sustain existing local employment, nor career growth, nor enable the electricity business to continue to subsidise the water operations and hydrological asset maintenance requirements. Our options are limited indeed… if the vision is to be fulfilled!
I am also often asked about what the local communities can now do to assist Snowy Hydro in securing a long term successful future?
Our response is that we ask for your understanding and support. We want to know that there is a positive community environment and some affirmation that we are doing a good job for all stakeholders. We are in a difficult business at a difficult time. We are doing well against the competitive odds and we are offering a very good working environment. We are supporting our communities. Gone are the days of job insecurity and industrial accidents.
Should options for Snowy Hydro Limited’s future be discussed, and if an option of some form of privatisation of the company, separated from the “icon” dam and tunnel assets, be suggested, if it is not by then too late, we ask that it be positively considered by our communities. Such consideration will include an awareness of the changed and changing realities of our industry and the benefits privatisation of the Company can provide to Snowy Hydro and all its stakeholders.
Open letter to John Brumby on his admission that Victoria has an overpopulation problem
Dear Premier John Brumby,
Candobetter.org welcomes your statements acknowledging the problems that Victoria now faces as a result of past population growth as reported in the Herald Sun article Premier John Brumby warns of dangers in growing too fast of 28 July.
Indeed, Candobetter contributor, Sheila Newman, who is a population sociologist and past President of the Victorian branch of Sustainable Population Australia, has been warning for years of precisely the problems which you have now acknowledged.
We think, however, that you should have been well aware of the trends:
The government has received submissions and press releases from various groups about petroleum depletion projections and oil prices and there has been a Senate enquiry into oil depletion.
The Australian CSIRO study by Barney Foran and Franci Poldan, Future Dilemmas: Options to 2050 for Australia's population, technology, resources and environment, published in 2002, was already flagging problematic trends. See Chapter 4, "Natural Resources and the Environment".
The 2007 VAMPIRE study (pdf, 1.2MB) from Griffith University, Queensland, drew attention to Melbourne for its oil-reliant transport vulnerability.
Apart from that, explosive oil prices and depletion fears are constantly in the news. One would therefore be entitled to expect the Victorian government by now to be aware that business as usual has gone completely off the radar.
One has only to go to amazon.com to find a hundred or so books written in the last ten years about the coming energy and fuel crisis, most restating and reaffirming projections made for peak oil production and then decline to start around about now.
If that were not enough, in the past few days, on July 11, 2008, the CSIRO came out again and warned that the cost of petrol could rise to $8 a litre in the next 10 years. “A new report by the CSIRO has warned the cost of petrol could rise to as high as $8 a litre in the next 10 years.”
Those are the energy trends.
The trends against democracy have also been more than evident, with a proliferation of groups horrified by Victorians' loss of control over their local and wider environments in the face of corporate backed population growth and its accompanying infrastructure. The changes to State and local government powers have been traumatic to our faith in government and our sense of safety in the long-term.
The trends in housing unaffordability, as land-prices responded to the inflationary pressure of forced population growth, have had profound repercussions socially, creating an asset-rich/poor divide and making life unnecessarily tough for many people, old and young, but especially young people on the threshold of independence, who now find themselves inextricably in debt to HECS, Housing and car purchase for unavoidable commuting in the absence of adequate public transport.
The trends in wildlife and natural ammenity loss have been especially grievious. You personally received in 2006 news of how poorly kangaroos near your electorate were fairing among the industrial estates of Thomastown. Nothing effective has been done by the Government to assist these animals. Did you consider that activists have put their lives and happiness on hold just in order to confront unflinchingly a searing reality which government inflicts through its negligent administration and cognizance of the real biodiversity situation?
Some of us activists have put our lives on hold just to try to combat the policies for population and high consumption which preceded your government in Kennett's, but for which you have had responsibility in the long term in your capacity as Treasurer and now as Premier. We felt a personal responsibility to try to halt by any civil means what we could see was infinitely harmful in the long term to our social and biophysical capital. Without any government support we have laboured to point out the existence of the lobbies which your government has been responding to, to the disadvantage of democracy.
We would also like to point out that if population were stabilised it would not be necessary for the Victorian Government to take water away from the Goulburn Valley against the heated objections of local farmers (see www.plugthepipe.com) or to build an energy-intensive, stupidly located, massive privately operated desal plant on the Bass Coast (www.yourwateryoursay.org), or dredge Port Phillip for a growth project for an artificially bloated population, or to deprive city and suburban dwellers of the right to a local solution to the predicament posed by oil depletion, in the right to water for growing food.
Although you are reported to have stated in the Herald Sun article, "I think we are probably at the limits of growth," we feel we must also ask you whether you intend to continue to make the problems worse or whether, from now on your government will abandon its official encouragement of population growth. The first thing your government should do is to remove your www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au web-sites and related programs, which encourage high immigration.
It seems likely that the corporate drivers of your government's program - such as the banks and the engineers in the Academy of Technological and Scientific Engineering (ATSE), and the developers and their allies in the Property Council of Australia, who have dug themselves very deeply into the housing and infrastructure economy, which is costing the rest of us so much - will continue to try to push the government into more unsustainable growth. We know that the mainstream press will not be your friend if you start to represent the public democratically in this matter. If, however, the government can gain our confidence in its committment to refrain from talking up or importing additions to our population, then candobetter and many other organisations and alternative sites will support you solidly in this.
I look forward to your response and hope to be able to publish on our web site at http://candobetter.org/node/699 so that we can share it with the wider public.
Sincerely,
James Sinnamon for candobetter.org, a website for reform in democracy, environment, population, land use planning and energy policy.
See also: Brumby's call for 'pause' in rate of population growth insufficient of 1 Aug 08, Premier John Brumby warns of dangers in growing too fast in the Herald Sun of 28 July 08, Brumby 'blaming' migrants in the Age of 2 Aug 08
End Hale Street Bridge congestion nightmare
This has been cross-posted to www.notunnels.net.
Premier Anna Bligh must not allow Brisbane City Council to have tolling powers over the Hale Street Bridge. The impact statement for the Bridge shows that it will create massive increases in traffic in her electorate compared with a "no bridge". For example traffic on Cordelia will increase by more than 110% with the bridge, compared with only 50% with no bridge. Refer to the attached file for more information. Community Action for Sustainable Transport (CAST) are proposing an alternative that will actually reduce traffic on the south side. Key initiatives proposed include increased train frequencies on the Beenleigh and Cleveland lines, major bikeway and bike lane expansions and transit priority for buses travelling in from the outer-south. CAST have written to the Premier urging her to oppose the bridge and you can do so too by writing her at South.Brisbane [AT] parliament.qld.gov.au .
See also: www.stopthehalestreetbridge.com, Managing car use in cities, Courier Mail story $55 million overpass to link with Riverside Expressway of 15 July 2008 together with readers' comments (132 in all).
Shoalwater not Coalwater - Meeting Wednesday 30 July 2008
The Premier Anna Bligh recently announced a Coal Port project which is proposed for development within Shoalwater Bay.
The high environmental values of Shoalwater Bay are well known and the historical threat of sand mining back in the 1980's was vehemently opposed and quashed by an active community voice and conservation lobby. The Commonwealth Commission of Enquiry 1994 found that Shoalwater Bay provides significant intangible benefits to society through the existence of its highly significant conservation values.
These high environmental values are associated with its relatively undisturbed state, coastal landforms, size and health of its component ecosystems and arise from the area as a whole rather than considering individual parts in a fragmented way.
Capricorn Conservation Council is shocked that a project which would see fragmentation of this important wilderness could even be considered and questions the Premiers declaration of support. Such large tracts of wilderness are rare along Queenslands east coast and conservation of this area should be a priority for the Government.
Capricorn Conservation Council is inviting members of community to come along and have their say on Shoalwater Bay at a Public Meeting at Yeppoon Town Hall, Normanby Street, at 7 pm on Wed 30 July.
For more information please call Sara Hanggi Coordinator on (07) 4927 8644 or email ccc [AT] cqnet com au
See also: www.shoalwaterbay.org, www.cccqld.org.au, Shoalwater Bay Wilderness Awareness Group opposes new coal terminalCapricornia Conservation Council fights expansion of Queensland coal industry, Coal port proposal another insult to Queensland's biggest wilderness region.
What you can do: attend public meeting at Yeppoon Town Hall, Wednesday 30th July at 7pm. Phone 07 4938 1818.
Shoalwater Bay Wilderness Awareness Group opposes new coal terminal
Shoalwater Bay Wilderness Awareness Group media release Mon 21st july
Locally based Shoalwater Wilderness Awareness Group (SWAG ) is deeply concerned about the recent announcement of a coal terminal in Shoalwater Bay. SWAG has been assessing currently available information released by the premier Anna Bligh and Waratah Coal, regarding the coal facility at Port Clinton 40km north of Byfield adjoining the National Park. Information released indicates plans are further developed than SWAG was previously led to believe. While details are still sketchy, the scale and purpose of the project, the proposed site inside a military reserve surrounded by Great barrier Reef 'Green Zones" all raise grave concerns for the environment and for public health.
"Port Clinton is one of the most important parts of the Shoalwater/Byfield Wilderness Area", SWAG spokesman and Byfield resident Steve Bishopric said."It is a 20km by 10 km sheltered , very shallow bay with a rock bar running across its middle and a moving sand bar across its mouth. It is home to a diverse range of flora and fauna.The Shoalwater Bay region, with RAMSAR listed wetlands and subject to two migratory bird treaties ,includes seagrass meadows that feed Queensland's endangered dugong population. The massive dredging required to make this a deep water port would have devastating consequences on the Great Barrier Reef."
"Port Clinton is less than 10 km from the Waterpark Creek catchment, which is the Capricorn Coasts water supply and any coal dust pollution will be carried via Waterpark Creek to the Byfield National Park and Yeppoon beaches. Other sites proposed even closer to the Byfield National Park pose an even greater risk."
Australian Defence forces regularly use Shoalwater Bay for major international combined forces training. This involves closure of the entire area and exercises, some involving USA Aircraft carrier battle groups some vessels nuclear powered, Airforce and Army. It is total madness to even consider this proposal with Bulk carriers anchoring in the middle of Australia's largest war games, in a green Zone of the GBRMNP and adjoining the Byfield National Park." Steve concluded.
SWAG will be supporting the Capricorn Conservation Council's public meeting and panel discussion, with invited guests, at the Yeppoon Town Hall on Wednesday 30th July at 7pm. All Welcome.
See also: www.shoalwaterbay.org, www.cccqld.org.au, Capricornia Conservation Council fights expansion of Queensland coal industry, Coal port proposal another insult to Queensland's biggest wilderness region, comment added by CoalPortal on 17 Nov 2011 and reposted here.
What you can do: attend public meeting at Yeppoon Town Hall, Wednesday 30th July at 7pm. Phone 07 4938 1818.
Iemma hangs on to power sell-off fantasy
NSW Greens Media Release: 26 July 2008
It's time for NSW Premier Morris Iemma to admit that the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme combined with widespread community opposition has fatally damaged his plans to privatise the state's electricity industry, according to Greens NSW MP John Kaye.
Commenting on a story on page 8 of today's Australian ('Iemma admits to sell-off doubt'), Dr Kaye said: "Morris Iemma is causing havoc in NSW's power industry in a futile attempt to position it for a sell-off that is increasingly unlikely to receive parliamentary approval.
"Pushing administrative staff out of state-owned retailer Integral Energy into generator Eraring could prove to be an expensive and disruptive political stunt.
"Given yesterday's report that 25 percent of the nation's coal-fired power generators will be forced out of business by the Commonwealth government's emissions trading scheme, NSW Coalition leader Barry O'Farrell will have little choice but to oppose the sell-off legislation when it come to parliament in late September.
"The news will have caused the sale value of NSW's three generator companies to have plummeted.
"Neither government nor Opposition can pretend that there is any financial benefit in the privatisation.
"Meanwhile, voters are increasingly focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and controlling rising household electricity bills.
"On both counts, the sell-off is bad deal.
"The political window of opportunity for the privatisation is slamming shut.
"The Premier should listen to his backbenchers, put his Treasurer Michael Costa on a tighter leash and abandon the power sell-off," Dr Kaye said.
For more information: John Kaye 0407 195 455
See also: ABC gives free kick to Iemma, NSW electricity privatisation of 21 Jul 08.
Canadian media gushes when couple has 18th child
God chooses Canada's ruin while we remain mum
Once again the silence was deafening. One might recall that in March of 2007 the Canadian census report was released and revealed that immigrant-driven growth made Canada the fastest growing country in the G-8 at a ruinous pace of 5.4% in 5 years. 70% of that portion was attributable to immigration and its effects were evident in farmland and species loss as well as pollution and pressure on landfills and fisheries, among other things. But not a single environmental organization chose to counter what became a cheerleading chorus amongst editorialists and commentators across the country for our record growth.
Now it seems that the cat still has environmentalists' tongue. On Saturday July 26th, 2008, in a story that was repeated in many other news outlets, The Canadian Press reported that a Romanian immigrant couple in Abbotsford, British Columbia had their 18th child in 23 years, 13 of whom have been born since they came to Canada in 1990.
They explained that they "never planned how many children to have.we just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that's the reason we did not stop life."
Seeing how it is God's personal choice, apparently neither the Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation, or the other major environmental groups are making mention of the environmental impact that this Romanian couple, the "Ionces", are having on the planet. Even so, by living in Canada rather than Romania, each Ionce child is , by 2003 footprinting data, contributing 2.73 times more GHG emissions to the atmosphere than he or she is had he or she stayed in Romania. The total cost to the planet for God's personal choice, and the Immigration Minister's decision to let the Ionces emigrate to Canada, is 314.82 metric tonnes per year for the 18 children.
British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell and his Environment Minister Barry Penner just finished spending a bundle of taxpayer money on glossy propaganda pushing his fancy "carbon tax" scheme which is supposed to do wonders to counter climate change in this province. Oddly, no comment issued forth from his office about God's personal choice in Abbotsford to thwart the good effects of the carbon tax scheme.
I think that could be for the very good reason that neither the Premier of British Columbia nor any politician in Canada nor any environmental organization in our country will ever acknowledge a link between population growth via the maternity ward or the airport and increased greenhouse gas emissions.
As could be predicted, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporatian (CBC), the public broadcasting network that we are constantly told is necessary to give us a critical perspective that commercial broadcasting doesn't give us, failed to offer any critical commentary of the story, but just parroted what the Canadian Press already provided, as a heart warming human interest tale.
Didn't Simon and Garfunkel do a song called "The Sounds of Silence"? Could have been the theme song about our population debate.
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 27, 2008
Postscript: The British newsmedia gave similar treatment to woman pregnant with her 14 child in the story of 21 July 2008:
Mother of 13 pregnant with number 14 just seven months after she last gave birth
Just seven months after giving birth to her 13th child, size zero mother Joanne Watson is delighted to be pregnant again.
The slim 37-year-old says she loves being pregnant and is lucky enough to have regained her pre-pregnancy figure of 7st 5lb after the birth of every child.
Just five days after giving birth to child number 13, daughter Tallulah, the supermum had no problem squeezing into a pair of size six (American size zero) jeans.
'I'm lucky because I always sail through my pregnancies and have no symptoms whatsoever,' says Joanne, who is three months pregnant.
Husband John, a 42-year-old haulier added: 'I feel like I'm the happiest daddy in the world. To have so many healthy happy children and a wife who has such a fabulous figure is amazing.'
See also: Pronatalist Policy in Australia: 1945-2000 of 28 Jun 08 by Sheila Newman
Paul Sheehan hits the nail on the head
How is increasing the population by a million people every three years going to contribute to lowering Australia's carbon footprint? Don't ask big business, or the ALP machine, both addicted to "growth" defined by corporate fundamentalism, which means higher per capita consumption and more consumers.
So says Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald, in an unusually frank and honest article in today's edition.
See also A reality check on Rudd's rhetoric of 28 Jul 08 by Paul Sheehan.
Paul Sheehan, commentator at the Sydney Morning Herald has published an excellent opinion piece A reality check on Rudd's rhetoric on disparity between the Rudd government's green rhetoric and 'brown actions'.
Mr Sheehan should be congratulated on having the fortitude, rare among his journalist colleagues, to state the bleeding obvious.
Below, are some excerpts:
Could someone point out to me where, in last year's election campaign, Kevin Rudd or his Labor cohorts announced they were going to commit Australia to a gang-busters immigration program?
Where was Labor's policy announcement that Australia, with its stressed bread basket living from winter rain to winter rain, was going to increase its population by 1 million people during the three-year term of a Rudd government? I can't find it.
...
This is the largely unmentioned elephant in the room in the debate about Sydney's housing affordability and availability, because Sydney is Australia's No.1 immigrant destination. The overseas-born population in Australia is already 25 per cent, the highest in history, and the Rudd Government is intent on increasing that figure. This puts Australia out of alignment with most other advanced economies, and is a major policy which the Rudd opposition did not mention during the election campaign.
I'm coming to the conclusion that our new Prime Minister is both dissembling and disingenuous. He has certainly misled the Parliament and the people on some big issues ...
...
... during this year's 2020 ideas festival at Parliament House ... Professor Ian Lowe ... was struck by the divergence between rhetoric and reality, and by the foregone conclusions built into the process.
...
How is increasing the population by a million people every three years going to contribute to lowering Australia's carbon footprint? ...
...
Despite the enormous amount of froth that has come from the Rudd Government about the environment, no hard truths or hard decisions have been embraced as policy. Instead, incrementalism has been presented as boldness.
...
For more, see A reality check on Rudd's rhetoric of 28 Jul 08 by Paul Sheehan.
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