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Tag: Environment

15/09/2021

Uncontested Grants for NT Gas Exploration Despite Court Proceedings in Progress

15 September 2021

Federal Resources Minister Keith Pitt gave $20 million for gas exploration for fracking in the Betaloo Basin in an uncontested grant. The grant was to Empire Energy that donates to both major parties, but seems to prefer the Liberals as they flew Energy Minister Angus Taylor and Liberal fundraiser, Ryan Arrold around the NT site (Guardian 20/8/21).

The Betaloo Basin is in the centre of the Northern Territory, and the grant application was the subject of Court proceedings brought by the Environmental Centre (NT) and the Environmental Defenders Office. It seems that undertakings were given not to give the grants, but they went ahead despite the assurances given to the Court. The Australian Government Solicitor (AGS) said somewhat lamely that they can only do what their clients say. The Resources Minister, Keith Pitt was criticised by the Federal Court judge, Justice John Griffiths, but it seems that this will make no difference either to the outcome or to the Minister’s career. Presumably the idea that he would be charged with contempt of court is fantasy.

We seem to have reached the point of a third world country where the Government gives whatever it likes to its mates and due process is a distant memory.

Labor might be marginally better, but the benchmark has now been set very low. Companies are becoming accustomed to governments bending to their will and will be reluctant to leave the ‘new norm’. The only answer is a Swiss-style democracy with referenda as the main source of power and citizens able to overturn government decisions. We need proportional representation and an end to the two-party duopoly so that all decisions are made on the floor of the parliament, not in back-room deals. This will take a change to the Constitution, but this well overdue in any case, and we might as well do a thorough job of it. The Swiss also have provisions to change their constitution without a fuss.

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/14/no-satisfactory-explanation-court-blasts-keith-pitt-over-grant-agreement-with-gas-company?fbclid=IwAR3v_4oGwTWFkiQ2xYp_l9Mjw2alDLARFN_St8hwoDbEp_MRup44fFbfXaU

19/03/2021

Murray-Darling Farce- Another Summit.

19 March 2021

One of the more absurd ideas of neo-liberalism was to privatise ownership of all the water in the Murray-Darling and then rely on ‘the Market’ to allocate the water optimally. All that happened was that water was another commodity to be traded with its price more related to its possible future price than any physical or environmental constraint.

I learned a bit about this many years ago from my grandparents. One of my grandfathers was a retired metallurgist who would tell me about world trends in metal demands and buy shares accordingly. His wife, my grandmother, knew nothing about this but would buy shares based on what the market was doing and tell me separately about how she despaired of my grandfather’s share investments. After a few years, she was much richer than he from a much lower base. The moral was that the share price had little to do with reality.

Why anyone would think that turning water into a speculative commodity would optimise its use is beyond understanding. But that was what happened. Joh Bjelke-Peterson built Cubby dam on the Queensland border and used the water to irrigate cotton, so NSW was behind the 8 ball from the start. NSW cotton farmers used surface water and took water from aquifers with no supervision of their meters. Brokers with mobile phones bought and sold water entitlements, and famously recently a Singapore-based company sold a lot of water rights to a Canadian superannuation fund, who felt that growing almonds (which are heavy water users) would be a good thing to do. (SMH 3/12/19) Hey, the price of almonds is good at present and you cannot smell rotting fish from Canada.

The idea that if you fix the money, everything else will come right seems to permeate every aspect of our neo-liberal, managerial society. I think of it as a religion, that ‘the market knows best and will allocate optimally with the unseen hand’. It also seems that religious folk are more prone to believe this, happier to believe that an unseen force can magically fix things and that it morally worthy to suffer now for some future redemption.

But in politics, we do not even have to debate these things; there is another option, ‘kick the can down the road’. Having the CSIRO produce a report in 2008, ‘Water Availability in the Murray Darling Basin’, led to an inappropriate Murray-Darling Basin Authority report in 2009. The CSIRO’s scientific response in 2011 was ignored. There was a Royal Commission inquiry by Bret Walker which found that the Authority has shown ‘gross negligence’. So they had another ‘Summit’, just last month.

All this is not to mention that Angus Taylor spent $80 million in taxpayer money to buy back water rights from a company called Eastern Australian Agriculture registered in the Cayman Islands and run by an ex-rowing mate, with the deal signed off by Barnaby Joyce. (The Guardian 19/5/19)

It is a worry, when the senior counsel assisting Walker inquiry writes a book called ‘Dead in the Water’ and still comes back with an opinion piece like this.

www.smh.com.au/national/murray-darling-basin-summit-a-laughable-response-to-finding-of-gross-negligence-20210318-p57brq.html

19/03/2021

Interested in Clean Air?

19 March 2021

NSW has a draft Clean Air Strategy and have invited comment.My contribution will be to help solve the climate crisis by introducing electric cars as a major policy initiative. If they were principally charged using renewable energy they could lessen emission from transport, lessen emission from coal fired power and also even the demand for power by plugging in to homes in the peak period and discharging their batteries. The average home battery has less than 10kWh. The new Nissans about to be released have 40kWh. If they were programmed to charge when power is cheap and renewable, and discharge when power is expensive they would be a very major power store, when the fossil fuel lobby (not to mention the Federal Govt.) is talking about needing (fracked) gas for peak load reliability.

www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/air/clean-air-strategy/draft-nsw-clean-air-strategy-public-consultation

06/03/2021

Insurance for Farmers with Coal Seam Gas

6 March 2021

I have minimal faith in insurers. Many years ago, one of my friends was killed falling down a crevasse hiking on a NZ glacier. A meticulous person, he had checked his AMP insurance before he left- the only exemptions were scuba diving and private flying. The company told his widow with her 6 month old baby that it was a dangerous sport and he was not covered and the broker he checked with had no right to say that he was covered. They offered her half. She was of substance, hung on and they settled on the steps of the Supreme Court rather than go on with their unwinnable case.Another friend had his house burn down, and was only given the depreciated value rather than the replacement, which was about half; small print as usual- do you feel like fighting Goliath?An acquaintance, who was a merchant banker with a lot of money got a nasty brain tumour and needed expensive chemotherapy. The gap between his Top Cover health insurance and what the bills were was so great that he left St Vincent’s Hospital and readmitted himself to Westmead as a Medicare patient. (Sadly the medical outcome was as expected).Every day I see people injured in Workers Comp or motor vehicle accidents have their treatments denied by insurers on grounds that could only be called spurious. In my practice’s statistics IAG (NRMA) refuse a higher percentage of treatments than any other insurer.It is, of course, impossible to say that fracking for Coal Seam Gas is safe. It involves breaking the rock strata to let the gas come up. Presumably these fractures will also let the water move to a lower level and be less available to the surface. And chemicals are pumped in so that the water may not be fit to drink, and there is no natural mechanism to purify it. Now unsurprisingly the insurers do not want to cover the farmers. For once I am on their side. Fracking is simply not safe. The gas companies will get their gas and move on-the farmers may have land that is useless, or at best less productive than it was before. Because of the nature of the law, farmers only own the surface of the land- mining rights are a separate thing, which is why the government can give companies the right to do what they like below the surface. The government needs to stop this- it should not be left up to the farmers. What a neat piece of nonsense that they are now supposedly protected from Public Liability claims- it might protect them if they are defendants, but it is far more likely that they will be plaintiffs!

www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-05/big-on-spin-light-on-detail-as-gas-industry-touts-new-insurance/13216226?fbclid=IwAR26XpOCZk9aqusgrEukN44T-esmX-OhNFe4sgj4X7A9-Drtt9_3V-L6SxY

06/03/2021

JobKeeper becomes an Unaudited Subsidy to Big Business

6 March 2021

It seems that while JobKeeeper did help employees, some businesses did not actually need it, but got it anyway. Now it is ‘moral issue’ that they give it back- that is to say it is voluntary. If they have already taken it as executive bonuses or shareholder dividends it is probably not refundable.

The welfare recipients who had spent money and were accused retrospectively of Robodebt could not repay it either, but were hounded till the end. All that will happen to the big end of town is a few days of newspaper articles.

It is surely a reasonable principle that if taxpayers’ money is given away there should be monitoring of where it goes. If it was too hard to set up a monitoring system quickly, the obvious solution would be to make a regulation that it had to be used for purpose and would be checked and there would be prosecutions if it were misused. This would have allowed follow up, a few prosecutions and majority compliance. This government seems incapable of any sensible management of anything, unless you think that deliberately handing money to mates is an unwritten policy.

Now even small businesses are annoyed.

www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/pretty-close-to-theft-small-business-slams-big-corporate-jobkeeper-profits-20210304-p577sn.html

05/12/2020

Global Dimming- another climate problem 5/12/20

Global dimming is the reduction in the amount of sun energy hitting the surface of the Earth. Research shows that the amount of sun energy reaching the surface of the earth has fallen 9% in Antarctica, 10% in the USA, 16% in the UK, 22% in Israel and 30% in Russia since the 1950s. Water evaporates correspondingly more slowly. The results are from long term studies and data, and two relatively rapid studies, the change in temperature differences during the day when planes were all grounded in the USA after 9/11 in 2001 and a study comparing sun energy received in the north and south of the Maldives.

It seem that the particles in the air allow smaller water particles to be suspended on them as clouds, and these reflect more heat and light back out into space, hence shielding the earth. This affects evaporation of ocean water and may have caused the droughts and famines in North Africa.

There has been a real effort to lessen air pollution particularly in Europe which may have helped African monsoonal rainfall, but if the dimming lessens and more sunlight comes into the atmosphere, it will mean that the greenhouse effect will worsen.

Revised calculations show that global warming may be 10 degrees Celsius in a century, because the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the release of oceanic methane, which is 14x worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas will make the global warming phenomenon irreversible.

The answer is that we have to stop burning fossil fuels. We need electric cars, renewable energy, and to replace planes with trains as much as possible. It a shame we have a Liberal Government!

This 49 minute video is from the BBC Horizon program.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=57D2ii5HKxA&list=PLe6EP38qqR0af4fPQGy1LzbR6-8gY8KgA&index=11&fbclid=IwAR2eKLs9Jx2jgksiFy4rkgTaS1jRG2ZgU3Pvs7cGB5Ot9CdyDGLmqtvkyVc&t=0s

30/05/2020

NZ Environmental Law Disappoints

The Conversation has an article about how NZ rivers are degraded and a package to improve them has been disappointing as it did not take expert advice. The Conversation only takes articles from academics and the author admits he was one of the expert panel whose advice was ignored. He does not write of other […]

27/12/2016

Doctors for the Environment Recommend Load-Based Licencing for Polluters 27/12/16.

Today I reconnected with Dr Ben Ewald from the Hunter, who has been working with Doctors for the Environment. He has been lobbying for a Federal EPA and wrote a submission on the load-based licensing system, which is another name for polluters paying a levy per tonne of pollutant that they produce. There is some charge for each type of pollutant, and the charge can also be loaded for how close the pollutant is to population centres, as this relates to its health impacts. NSW has had such a scheme for years, which is fact the best developed in Australia, but NSW keeps the rate of this tax very low otherwise NSW would merely end up importing electricity from other states that pollute more but had no such tax. Hence the need for a national system. The current NSW fee is only 0.82% of the sale price per megawatt.

Other facts were that there is 1.1 million tonnes a year of Sulphur dioxide produced in Australia, 51% from coal-fired power stations. They also produce 380,000 tonnes of Nitrous oxides, 52% of all produced annually in Australia. Coal-fired power stations produce 8,900 tonnes of PM2.5, which is however only 29% of the national output of PM2.5, which is 31,000 tonnes. PM2.5 is particles of 2.5 microns in diameter, which are the smallest ones measured. There used to be a lot of emphasis on how much pollution in the air by how much weight of pollutant there was per cubic metre of air. Then researchers realised that big particles get caught in the nose, whereas small particles continue down into the lungs and have bigger health effects. So the absolute weight of particles is not as important as the number of smaller particles. Hence the new interest in PM2.5!

It also turns out that while the coal-fired power stations are the ones with the load-based licences, the open cut mines produce the most carbon particle pollution but are exempt from fees! That is a political decision of course. Doctors for the Environment need to be supported as they beaver away producing the submissions and organising the facts that the governments need to be told and that the activists need to amplify! Here is the submission:

http://dea.org.au/images/uploads/submissions/NSW_-_Review_of_the_load-based_licensing_scheme_submission_12-16.pdf