pWe feel we have to set the record straight after some of our (Bradshaw’s) comments were taken grossly out of context, or not considered at all (Ritchie’s). A bubbling kerfuffle in the media over the last week compels us to establish some facts about dingoes in Australia, and more importantly, about how we as a nation choose to manage them./p pA a href="http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/experts-want-dingo-fence-torn-down/story-e6frea83-1226353369175"small article/a in the News Ltd. Adelaide Advertiser appeared on May 11 in which one of us (Bradshaw) was quoted as advocating the removal of the a href="http://www.gamecouncil.nsw.gov.au/portal.asp?p=Ferals1"dingo fence/a because it was not “cost effective” (sic). Despite nearly 20 minutes on the telephone explaining to the paper the complexities of feral animal management, the role of dingoes in suppressing feral predators, and the “costs” associated with biodiversity enhancement and feral control, there wasn’t a single mention of any of this background or justification./p pAnother News Ltd. article a href="http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2012/05/10/479991_opinion-news.html"denouncing Ritchie’s work/a on the role of predators in Australian ecosystems appeared in The Weekly Times the day before, to which Ritchie responded in full./p pSo it’s damage control, and mainly because we want to state categorically that our opinion is ours alone, and not that of our respective universities, schools, institutes or even a href="http://www.pir.sa.gov.au/biosecuritysa"Biosecurity SA/a (which some have claimed or insinuated, falsely, that we represent). Biosecurity SA is responsible for, eminter alia/em, the dingo fence in South Australia. Although our opinions differ on its role, we are deeply impressed, grateful and supportive of their work in defending us from biological problems./p pfigure class="align-right"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10768/width237/3ynqf2vs-1337299321.jpg"figcaptionAustralia's record level of mammal extinctions is thanks to foxes and cats. span class="source"shuttergirl/Flickr/span/figcaption/figure/p pIt is probably surprising to most Australians that a href="http://www.gamecouncil.nsw.gov.au/portal.asp?p=Ferals1"introduced species/a (and the mismanagement thereof) in this country have devastated many elements of our native ecosystems. With over 20 million pigs, 18 million cats, 7 million foxes, 2 million goats, 1 million camels, 300,000 swamp buffalo, 200,000 deer (from six species) and millions of rabbits, our native biodiversity has suffered immensely. Indeed, Australia has the worst record for a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2009/09/03/can-we-solve-australias-mammal-extinction-crisis/"mammal extinctions/a in the world, mainly due to foxes and cats./p pFurthermore, pigs, camels, buffalo and goats have heavily damaged millions of square kilometres of outback Australia. Even in northern Australia, where deforestation has been relatively light compared to the south, native animals are on the decline in part a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2009/08/21/shocking-continued-loss-of-australian-mammals/"from introduced species/a. And guess what? We are no closer to controlling them now than anytime in our past./p pSo why do we invest billions of dollars in feral animal control and the subsequent recovery plans for endangered wildlife using the same techniques for decades, when a more proactive and natural alternative exists? It’s a solution mired in controversy because it involves yet another “introduced” predator – the a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolf-is-the-dingo-friend-or-foe-587"dingo/a./p pThe dingo has long evoked fear and loathing in the hearts of Australians. Ever since we learnt that it was introduced around a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo"4,000 years ago/a by Southeast Asian visitors to our northern shores, we have developed an irrational opinion that this sheep-killing, baby-stealing, thylacine- and devil-displacing feral from Asia is a menace that should be eradicated at all costs./p pBut when you look at the evidence, you are compelled to question that image. Despite some high-profile incidences of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo_attacks_in_Australia"attacks on humans/a, they are perhaps one of the least-dangerous species to humans in Australia. The entirely coincidental disappearance of thylacines (Tasmanian tigers) and devils from mainland Australia when the dingo appeared also ignores that the climate was changing and Aboriginal populations a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.0343"began booming/a at the same time./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10769/width668/7yzrxwsy-1337299322.jpg"figcaptionThe dingos are kept out, but the rabbits run wild. span class="source"Peter Schilling/span/figcaption/figure/p pSo, what did we do? We built a fence, of course! Over 5,500km long and possibly the world’s longest human-built structure, the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo_Fence"dingo fence/a is a monument to predator xenophobia. Its role is controversial, because while it certainly has prevented an influx of a large number of dingoes into southern and eastern Australia, it has also seen a proliferation of competing native (kangaroos) and non-native (rabbits) herbivores where dingoes are absent or in low abundance./p pWhile the a href="http://www.gamecouncil.nsw.gov.au/docs/mcleod.pdf"roughly $10 million it costs/a each year to maintain the fence is lower than the cited $48 million per year pastoralists claim to lose to “wild dogs”, these costs don’t include the labour-intensive and expensive additional poisoning that accompanies the fencing. And poisoning is not the answer either. In addition to killing a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/WR01060"non-target native species/a, baiting dingoes might in fact result in increased dingo densities due to a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0006861"social breakdown of the pack/a, resulting in increasing attacks on stock, not to mention a higher likelihood of hybridisation with feral dogs. Baiting also leads to more juvenile dingoes. These less-efficient predators tend to target calves more than adult dingoes do./p pAnd of course the “costs” also don’t include the unquantifiable costs to our biodiversity. How many millions per year do we spend on native species recovery, and how many billions are lost from a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2008/09/02/classics-ecosystem-services/"depleted ecosystem services/a?/p pThere’s also the issue of the fence’s effectiveness – today dingoes are penetrating farther and farther south due to camel damage to the fence itself, and other weaker areas where dingoes can penetrate./p pfigure class="align-left"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10766/width237/6n4rrsnk-1337299316.jpg"figcaptionDingos are vital to maintaining healthy ecosystems. span class="source"Peter Gaylard/span/figcaption/figure/p pIt turns out that the dingo is in fact a sorely under-utilised weapon in our feral-animal arsenal. Pretty much everywhere we’ve looked across Australia, when dingoes are abundant, a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.3711"foxes and cats aren’t/a, and native marsupials are. It’s called the “a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2010/03/17/mesopredator-release/"mesopredator/a” effect, and highlights the important role of predators in maintaining healthy ecosystems./p pThere are other advantages to dingoes that might not seem obvious. Dingoes reduce herbivore densities and this can reduce the effects of climate change-induced drought by increasing a href="http://www.ecosmagazine.com/?paper=EC147p12"available plant cover/a. Dingoes can also benefit graziers by providing more vegetation to produce stronger, healthier cattle that can resist attack (indeed, dingoes prefer more passive prey such as kangaroos)./p pUnfortunately, most pest management in Australia lacks an integrated approach. We remove foxes, and cats increase; we remove cats, a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2011/12/21/surgical-conservation/"and rabbits increase/a. We remove dingoes, and we have more herbivore competition problems. This inefficient hopping from one single-species crisis to the next is, we argue, a waste of money and time. It lacks a long-term vision./p pWe need to recognise that species interact along complex pathways, and so the entire system should be managed as a whole (indeed, integrated pest management a href="http://search.pir.sa.gov.au/search?entqr=0amp;ud=1amp;sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1amp;output=xml_no_dtdamp;oe=UTF-8amp;ie=UTF-8amp;client=pirsaamp;proxystylesheet=pirsaamp;site=pirsaamp;proxyreload=1amp;q=integrated+pest+managementamp;search_channel=channel"is advocated in many areas/a by our own government biosecurity experts). Worldwide, the release of mesopredators after the persecution of higher-order predators is now demonstrating many adverse consequences for biodiversity and economics, from a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138657"sharks, rays and scallops/a in the Gulf of Mexico, from a href="http://dx.doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/23028"lynx, foxes and hares/a in Finland, from a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/23028"coyotes, cats and birds/a in America, to our own dingo-cat-fox-marsupial problem./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10767/width668/mzwpvfwz-1337299316.jpg"figcaptionWhere dingoes are, cats aren't: we should let dingoes work for us. span class="source"Tony Marsh/span/figcaption/figure/p pSo with too many herbivores, too many mesopredator foxes and cats, and costly management, why don’t we let the dingoes do the work for us? If we focus on ecological function, then dubious labels of good/bad or native/feral become irrelevant. The loss of mainland predators such as devils, thylacines and a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacoleo"marsupial lions/a means that the dingo is our one last hope to restore some ecological balance to our country’s highly disrupted ecosystem. Indeed, the solution is readily available and staring us in the face, if only we had the courage to employ it./p pIt is interesting that the Weekly Times held a poll asking readers to vote “yes” or “no” to the reintroduction of devils and dingoes to manage pest species; just before the poll closed, nearly 80 % had said “yes”. Clearly, sectors of the Australian community are receptive, including many pastoralists./p pOf course, stock losses will always remain a concern, because sheep and dingoes will never co-exist in harmony. However, advances in a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/watching-over-livestock-our-guardian-animals-6754"trialling guardian dogs/a show immense promise in this regard, even for remote and large stock populations. Indeed, guardian dogs have even been a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2111/1551-5028(2005)058%5B0329:PEOLDP%5D2.0.CO;2"successful in Namibia/a to protect stock from leopards./p pWe should shift our investment in pest control: let’s help graziers trial new and more effective solutions. The process will be slow and guarded, but we should be focussing on long-term solutions, instead of costly, questionably effective and ecologically myopic single-species interventions. In light of these arguments, each Australian should ask the question: is the dingo fence worth it?/ppemCorey Bradshaw receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the South Australia Premier's Science and Research Fund and the Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis./em/p pemEuan Ritchie does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/7101/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe recent meeting of European Energy Ministers has exposed a Germany-France rift on the role of nuclear power. Post-Fukushima, Germany is investing heavily in solar power; so is Italy. But a French spokesperson said efforts after 2020 must stay neutral on technologies – meaning they want nuclear power to be central to the mix. France has the support (for varied reasons) of the UK, Poland and the Czech Republic./p pPresident-elect François Hollande’s election manifesto calls for a reduction of nuclear’s contribution to domestic energy consumption to 50% by 2025. He says he supports “heavy” investment in renewable energies and their affiliated industries. And the Ministers' meeting confirmed renewables would account for at least 55% of EU final energy consumption by 2050./p pThese milestones will prove a tall order in France. Realistically, they are in the utopian category./p h2The status of French nuclear/h2 pThe status of nuclear power in France is well outlined on the a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html"World Nuclear Association’s website/a. Over 75% of domestic electricity consumption comes from nuclear power. This dominance is the product of a strategic move in the 1970s; the oil shock had compounded France’s long term (and continuing) dependence on oil imports. But nuclear energy is also the child of France’s emforce de frappe/em – in the context of the Cold War, how could one be a great nation without nuclear weaponry?/p pFrance currently has 58 reactors at 19 sites. More, France is the world’s largest net electricity exporter, with exports particularly to Italy and the UK./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10733/width668/83p977ws-1337220736.jpg"figcaptionFrench citizens may be uncomfortable with nuclear power, but that's unlikely to affect its expansion. span class="source"AAP/span/figcaption/figure/p pFrance employs an integrated package – reactor manufacture, fuel and waste processing and technical consultancy – domestically, but it also exports it. Last February, France and the UK signed a joint agreement on civil nuclear energy. France’s Areva will supply the reactor cores for a dramatic expansion in British nuclear capacity over the next decade. Perhaps the British deal will offset France’s long term contractual arrangements with the Japanese nuclear sector; those arrangements are possibly now worthless./p h2The nuclear establishment: immune from political influence/h2 pPresiding over the French nuclear network is a nuclear establishment. Areva (90% state-owned), a vertically integrated conglomerate, is a “national champion” par excellence (in spite of its recent blunderings and reported massive losses)./p pElectricité de France (85% state-owned) is synonymous with nuclear-generated electricity. As with Westinghouse and General Electric in the US, EdF pushed a consumerist culture that dramatically expanded electricity usage to cement the profitability of nuclear infrastructure. EdF’s motif became “Toute electrique! Toute nucléaire!”./p pAs the Americans have their military-industrial-intelligence establishment, immune from democratic and political influence, so too with the French nuclear establishment. It is a state within the state. This establishment is paying not the slightest attention to whatever formal commitments the French government makes to Europe concerning renewable energy targets. For the establishment, “renewable” (save for existing hydro and a token commitment to wind power) means the reprocessing and use of nuclear waste./p pIronically, EdF is now involved in solar power generation in Israel. But apparently the sun does not shine in metropolitan France./p pThe “nucléocrates” are committed to third-generation EPR reactors (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor"European pressurised water reactors/a), with the first begun at Flamanville in 2007. Smaller EPRs are planned for export to developing countries. Simultaneously in 2006, France committed to a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/safe-zero-carbon-and-proven-is-fourth-generation-nuclear-the-energy-solution-4204"Generation IV/a fast breeder reactors./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10734/width668/36ckvy56-1337220736.jpg"figcaptionFrench nuclear company EdF says nuclear incidents are a matter for internal experts, not the courts. span class="source"AAP/span/figcaption/figure/p pAs the World Nuclear Association website highlights, Generation IV reactors are seen as a key vehicle to “increase France’s competitiveness”. The government handed over, in 2009, €1 billion to CEA, the French Atomic Energy Commission, to further the cause. This complements other substantial subsidies to the sector. Traditional industries (steel, autos and so on) are facing further retrenchments. Civilian nuclear energy is apparently the new industrial force de frappe./p h2Storage, safety and sickness – can anything threaten nuclear’s success?/h2 pThe nucléocrates have also planned a massive deep underground storage facility in the clay soils of the commune of Bure, to store high level and long life waste. That the locals are opposed to the dump is inconsequential. Hollande himself has long played the NIMBY card, decrying the prospect of a large scale dump in his own power base, the picturesque Department of Corrèze./p pNicholas Sarkozy has been uncritically supportive of the status quo. During the recent Presidential campaign, Sarkozy lampooned François Hollande’s post-Fukushima proposition of immediately closing down France’s most dilapidated reactor at Fessenheim. Where is the beach in Alsace?, quipped Sarkozy. But the “joke” was on him. Fessenheim is located on a seismic zone and adjacent to the Grand Canal d’Alsace, whose flooding would be catastrophic./p pFesssenheim, with other older reactors, will close when new reactors come on stream. But the lethargy is representative of how the establishment downplays safety concerns. The line is that France is world’s best practice on risk control – Fukushima is irrelevant to them. So also, presumably, is a recent study by the French research institute INSERM that found increased rates of leukemia in children living within a three mile radius of French nuclear power plants./p pIn January and March 2010, there were separate incidents of radioactive material release at Golfech. The safety agency L'Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN) gave EdF the customary slap on the wrist. But, given 2006 legal facilitation, green groups took EdF to court. Outrageous, said EdF counsel – this is an internal matter, to be resolved amongst experts./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10737/width668/4scw3bm2-1337221689.jpg"figcaptionIf Australia wants to go nuclear, it will need to deal with waste; we struggle with even small amounts from Lucas Heights. span class="source"Peter Hindmarsh/span/figcaption/figure/p pAt Penly in April, there was another “above normal” leak of radioactive water. The ASN classed the incident at the top level 1 on a scale of 7. Totally minor, retorted EdF./p pAnd in February, a crucial pressure sensor at Paluel (100 kilometres from Great Britain) became faulty. The EdF delayed notifying the ASN for three days, and hooked up another sensor “temporarily” to monitor temperatures (it was still there two months later) instead of closing down the reactor as the rules demand (a reactor closed down costs the operator €1 million a day). EdF will die in the ditch over nuclear-generated electricity./p h2Hollande may love renewables, but democracy can’t win this one/h2 pHollande merely has a popular mandate; of what import is this against the real powers in France? The path to implementing his own and the European agenda is formidable. Michel Rocard, Parti Socialiste grandee and Prime Minister from 1988-91, fulminated in March that abandoning nuclear energy would destroy economic growth and generate civil war. In November 2011, Henri Proglio, CEO/Chairman of EdF and exemplary corporate heavyweight, went hysterical over the PS-Green accord./p pThe Greens want a dramatic reversal of nuclear power dependence. They also want Flamanville closed. But in the accord Hollande prevailed on both counts. So where is the mettle to achieve even his mild agenda?/p pMeanwhile, construction of the Generation III “flagship” at Flamanville (as with the first such reactor in Finland) is seriously behind schedule and seriously over budget. Two workers have died and a crucial cement pour has been botched. Project management has been chaotic. The genuine risky business lies ahead./p pThe French story has nothing to offer pro-nuclear advocates on Australian terrain (unless they are uranium miners exporting to France’s customers). Its massive nuclear infrastructure supposedly has the technology stitched up, yet it’s still leaking at the seams./p pAt its best, French nuclear infrastructure is an integrated package: it includes fuel processing, waste processing and storage. One can’t have nuclear electricity generation in Australia without accommodating the massive business associated with this entire cycle. But to date, we haven’t managed to accommodate even the trivial byproducts generated from Lucas Heights./p pMeanwhile, we get to watch dispassionately the inevitable schism that is unfolding in Europe regarding the commitment or lack thereof to genuinely renewable energy sources./ppemEvan Jones does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/7073/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pCoal remains an important energy resource for Australia providing around 75% of our electricity and some 20% of export income. However it is also responsible for approximately 40% of greenhouse gas emissions./p pOver the last decade, carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology has emerged as an essential pathway for countries dependent on coal for their energy supply but committed to reaching the targets for a carbon constrained global environment./p pPost-combustion capture (PCC) is the first stage in the CCS chain. a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine"Amine-based/a liquid absorbents, including ammonia, capture CO₂ from the flue gases before it is emitted to the atmosphere. The captured CO₂ product is pure enough that it is ready for compression, transport and storage./p pPCC pilot plants have been set up in other parts of the world, but Australia is a unique place to study this method. We have low-cost coal resources, a highly competitive electricity market, restricted water resources and limited emission controls at power stations./p pCSIRO has been working with industrial partners Delta Electricity and Stanwell Corporation, constructing and operating PCC pilot plants at Munmorah (New South Wales) and Tarong (Queensland) power stations to demonstrate carbon capture on actual flue gases during power production. (One of the advantages of PCC is that it can be retrofitted to existing power stations.)/p pAt the PCC pilot plant in Queensland, we used amines as the absorbent and focused on examining different process designs and flow configurations to identify the most effective use of the technology./p pThe NSW pilot plant demonstrated the use of aqueous ammonia as an absorbent. This is considered by some researchers as the most promising agent for CO₂ capture./p pIn both plants more than 85% of the carbon dioxide present in the flue gas was captured as a result of the chemical reaction between carbon dioxide and the absorbent. The carbon dioxide was released from the liquid absorbent by heating up the liquid absorbent to the point were the chemical reaction is reversed./p pSo heat is needed to run the capture process. We looked into using solar thermal energy as a heating source and found that renewables are able to reduce the additional electricity burden on the power station./p pIn parallel with the pilot plant program, laboratory studies examined more than 100 different commercially available amine based liquid absorbents. The team also explored the synthesis of “designer amines”. These are specifically designed and optimised for use as liquid absorbents for PCC./p pAs an alternative to amines, ionic liquids showed considerable promise. They are chemically robust, also at the higher temperatures needed for the release of the captured carbon dioxide. The absorbent robustness is particularly important in the challenging conditions of Australian power plants where there are limited emission controls. The ionic liquids we produced during this study improved CO₂ absorption capacity and reduced energy consumption by 70% compared to the standard amine based process./p pOne of the important aspects of the program was that the power companies taking part now fully understand how PCC technology can reduce greenhouse gas emissions./p pThere are still challenges before PCC can be commercially implemented. The capital cost of the PCC plant will have to come down. So will the “efficiency penalty” – currently the capture of 90% carbon dioxide results in a 30% loss in electricity output at the power station. PCC will also have to be demonstrated on a large and integrated plant as part of an overall carbon capture and storage chain./p pCSIRO is working on improving the capture process and reducing efficiency penalties. This should substantially reduce the costs of installing and operating a PCC system./p pWhile Australia continues to rely heavily on its low-cost and easy-to-mine coal reserves, technology can be retrofitted to the power sector to reduce its contribution to Australia’s CO₂ emissions./ppemPaul Feron receives funding from the Commonwealth Government of Australia./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6782/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pFrom time to time, new technologies are proposed to help us use even more of Australia’s abundant coal./p pMany of these technologies are designed to reduce emissions, either by drying the coal or capturing its emissions as it is burned. Other forms convert coal to cleaner burning fuels, such as synthetic diesel or methane./p pFor brown coal power stations, use of this technology promises to lower power station CO₂ emission levels to 0.8 or lower (from the 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ per MWh put out by a typical brown coal operation). The vision being put forward by government and industry on the back of this promise is that this technology could help to a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-19/latrobe-valley-the-next-major-mining-export-hub/3959940?section=business"increase our exports/a. Apart from the promised economic benefit, how real is the promise of lower levels of CO₂?/p pBodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains5-4.html"have suggested/a we need to limit atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to around 450ppm if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. At current CO₂ emission rates, we could reach this level by 2040, or even earlier if the global trend towards coal continues. Since 2000, global coal consumption has increased by 50%, while in China consumption has a href="http://www.bp.com/sectionbodycopy.do?categoryId=7500amp;contentId=7068481"more than doubled/a./p pAustralia is the world’s largest exporter of coal. a href="http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/earth-resources/coal/fact-sheet-brown-coal-victoria"Government figures say/a brown coal resources in Victoria are over 400 billion tonnes; 65 billion tonnes is located in the Latrobe Valley with the economically recoverable portion, the reserves of the resource, estimated to be around 33 billion tonnes. If consumed today, Victoria’s coal resources alone could emit sufficient CO₂ to reach the IPCC target of 450 ppm. The reserves of the Latrobe Valley alone have the potential to contribute at least two years’ worth of global CO₂ emissions./p pBecause it can take more than 50 years to reduce the CO₂ emitted to the atmosphere by a factor of 2 (and around 500 years by a factor of 4), emitting the same amount of CO₂ more slowly via lower-emitting technology is likely to make little difference to the climate change problem since it is the total amount in the atmosphere that matters./p pGlobally, the potential to increase atmospheric CO₂ emissions is even greater. Despite the claims of peak oil and declining reserves of fossil fuels, remaining reserves are sufficient to drive atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to unprecedented levels. a href="http://www.bgr.bund.de/EN/Themen/Energie/Produkte/annual_report_2011-summary_en.html"One estimate/a of the combined global fossil fuel reserves suggests they are equivalent to almost 100 years supply at the current rate of consumption. When estimates of the total resource base are added, this jumps to more than 1000 years, due primarily to the global resource of black coal./p pA further problem we face is the increase in energy consumption which results from population growth. In Victoria, for example, population is a href="http://www.dpcd.vic.gov.au/home/publications-and-research/urban-and-regional-research/Census-2011/victoria-in-future-2012"expected to grow/a from 5.6 million to 7.3 million over the next 20 years. To maintain CO₂ emission reductions, technological development and its deployment must keep pace with changes in demand. This is made more challenging by the a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/international-energy-agency-warns-weve-nearly-lost-our-chance-to-limit-warming-4255"very long operational life/a of much of this technology./p pOne benefit of low emission technology is that it might give us the time to further develop the zero-CO₂-emitting energy technologies that we must ultimately use, particularly those based on renewable energy. In a financially constrained world, where giving money to one project means taking it from another, achieving the right balance between these two approaches is no easy task. Many of the newer renewable technologies on offer are yet to be used on a large scale, and much of the technology being proposed for coal, particularly CO₂ capture and storage, is still under development, or at best, yet to be demonstrated commercially./p pUnless the push to develop cleaner coal is balanced by a greater push to implement zero emission renewable energy technologies, the risks associated with climate change will continue to grow./ppemDamon Honnery receives funding from the ARC and ACARP to develop a safer mining environment and is lead author in Working Group III of the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6726/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe Australian egg industry has seen a large shift in the proportion of chicken eggs coming from non-cage systems, especially free range. There is little doubt that some of this has been driven by consumer and retail demand. But some has been the result of new cage regulations introduced in 2008, which led producers to modify their cage facilities to free range and barn production. By removing cages, they avoided the high costs associated with new cage refurbishment./p pThis has left the industry with a wide range of very different facilities designated as “free range production units”. In its simplest expression, we could say free range provides birds with a range area. But if you’re interested in bird welfare, you should be asking what role bird density in the range area has on hen well-being./p pThis question has initiated strong debate in the egg industry, but what do we really know about the relationship between range density and hen welfare? A search of the literature suggests, not a lot./p pResearch efforts have been directed at comparing welfare of birds maintained in different housing systems. These look at measures such as behaviour, stress, health, plumage condition, biology, body injuries and mortality./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10659/width668/3hcv2dnd-1337044917.jpg"figcaptionFiguring out the right number of hens for happiness is a complex thing. span class="source"Kevin Utting/span/figcaption/figure/p pThe EU had a directive that conventional cages were to be banned from 2012. There was a rapid movement to floor based systems – such as barns and aviaries – especially in countries which implemented their own ban on conventional cages earlier than 2012. This rapid transition did, to some extent, leave researchers lagging behind in their efforts to evaluate welfare of hens in these facilitates. It is now obvious that floor based systems have a range of issues associated with hen welfare that need to be further researched./p pWhenever hens are housed in groups, there will a range of social interactions that occur. There will always be a href="http://www.mendeley.com/research/spacing-behaviour-ethological-approach-assessing-optimum-space-allocations-groups-laying-hens/"competition for space/a. The size of the group will a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159197000300"influence aggression/a and a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159103002168"recognition/a within the group. If resources – including space – are limited, competition for these can be intense./p pThe intensity that hens exert in an effort to maintain a larger space is a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0168159196010465"not great/a. However, when provided with alternatives, they a href="http://www.mendeley.com/research/cage-height-preference-and-use-in-batterykept-hens/"appear to prefer/a a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0168159186901267"increased space/a. This could suggest that hens will do without some comfort activities – such as dust bathing, scratching and wing flapping – if they have to make a large effort to get the space needed to perform them. Collectively, these observations indicate that the effects of stocking density are complex./p pMost studies on stocking densities have use a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016815919900057X"small scale facilities/a with changes in group size or floor area. They are often conducted in a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10405030"enclosed sheds/a such as barns and a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12047079"aviaries/a. Such studies may lack some relevance in large commercial facilities because of differences in the degree of aggressive behaviour./p pIt has a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016815919900057X"been reported/a that hens are can only identify about 100 individuals in a group, and that they prefer to be with a href="http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/applan/article/PIIS0168159105800863/abstract"familiar hens/a rather than a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347296904637"unfamiliar hens/a. This would imply that constantly changing group dynamics in large production units might create increased stress./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10075/width668/wn3fdgsr-1335755646.jpg"figcaptionChickens prefer to be in a small group. span class="source"Jay Bradshaw/span/figcaption/figure/p pThe density of the free range area is likely to have an influence on the degree of social stress. However, farmers don’t have total control over how densely hens are gathered. The way hens move from the housing unit to the range area, climate, management and the positioning of resources (such as shade) in the range are all going to influence the density of hens in various parts of the range and hen house./p pWhile it’s probable that the emmaximum/em densities in particular areas of the free range system are going to have more influence on hen welfare than the emaverage/em range density, we don’t know for sure because there are no scientific studies performed under Australian conditions./p pThe model code of practice identifies 1500 birds per hectare as the upper density limit but this has not been validated by scientific evaluation. For an informed debate as to what is an appropriate density in free range production systems more scientific evidence is needed./p pWhile debate about a suitable density for free range systems continues, there remains another consideration which is often left to one side. Egg production systems produce different a href="http://www.poultryscience.org/docs/PS_877.pdf"environmental footprints/a. A farm’s nitrogen and carbon production and the energy it uses will depend on the farm management, hen housing, manure handling and so on. There is meagre information concerning the environmental footprint for various production systems; it’s an area where more research is needed. There are environmental legislative constraints that need to be considered when deciding how to use the range area./ppemJeff Downing receives funding from The Rural Industries Reserach and Development Corporation, Australian Egg Corporation Limited and the The Pork Corporate Research Centre./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6530/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pOne of my most vivid and lasting memories as an ecologist dates back to 1997. I was in the office of the then Environment Minister. I was told by the Minister and his minders that “we already knew everything we needed to know about restoring vegetation on farms” and “all we needed to do now was get the trees in the ground”./p pScience was a dirty word then – much as it has now become in many areas of so-called environmental “debates” in Australia. Yet, after more a decade of detailed empirical science based on careful studies on hundreds of sites on hundreds of farms in south-eastern Australia, it is clear that back in 1997, there was in fact a lot that was important to learn about how to restore native vegetation and how to promote biodiversity conservation on farms./p pScientific research by The Australian National University and other universities, CSIRO, and organisations like Catchment Management Authorities, Greening Australia and Landcare, is helping to demonstrate why vegetation restoration is important on farms. It is identifying the features of good plantings for wildlife (such as native birds and reptiles), and how assemblages of animals differ between plantings, natural regrowth woodland, and old growth woodland./p pFor example, it is clear that when we manage a property by taking steps such as fencing and controlling grazing, it leads to readily quantifiable changes in vegetation structure and cover. These changes in vegetation result in marked changes in the type and number of birds in the area¹./p pWe can also determine which kinds of birds will benefit from these kinds of management interventions – small-bodied, non-seed-eating species¹ such as a href="http://bird.net.au/bird/index.php?title=Flame_Robin"flame robins/a, a href="http://bird.net.au/bird/index.php?title=Robin"redcapped robins/a and a href="http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Pachycephala-rufiventris"rufous whistlers/a./p pThis may sound trivial to some people, but it is remarkable how infrequently the effectiveness of management interventions has a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6770.htm"actually been documented/a – not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world. Documenting the impacts of management interventions is fundamentally important for determining what constitutes good management practice and what does not. Indeed, this kind of knowledge should underpin the effective expenditure of the billions of dollars of funds dedicated annually to environmental management in Australia!/p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10495/width668/64jk646t-1336613620.jpg"figcaptionBirds need regrowth vegetation too, not just old-growth forest. span class="source"Ray Christy/span/figcaption/figure/p pRecent research in the temperate eucalypt woodland belt of south-eastern Australia has indicated the type of native vegetation growing on farms makes a big difference to the types of birds that will be found. The bird assemblages typically found in old growth woodland a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034527"differ significantly/a from those found in plantings and those in areas of natural regrowth. Interestingly, birds of conservation concern are most likely to occur in plantings and regrowth rather than old growth./p pThis does not mean that old growth woodland has no conservation value. Far from it. Rather, a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6450.htm"it is critical/a for landholders to manage the range of vegetation on their farms to make sure there is habitat for a wide range of native species. This is especially important for the improved management of regrowth woodland which is often regarded as “sh*t” country by some landholders and targeted for clearing./p pYet other scientific work has helped uncover what makes a a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6716.htm"good planting for wildlife/a. Good plantings – those that support the highest diversity of native birds – a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6450.htm"will typically be/a:/p ul liblock-shaped (not narrow strips)/li liin gullies or flat areas/li linext to other plantings or areas of native woodland/li liestablished around large old trees./li /ul pPlantings set up like this can provide valuable habitat for a range of bird species of conservation concern. Many of these species a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6450.htm"will breed successfully/a in these restored areas. Again, this kind of information is critical for guiding the effective expenditure of billions of dollars invested by Federal and State Governments as well as non-government organisations and farmers in on-farm conservation programs./p pThe key lesson from past myopia is that science (and particularly long-term ecological research) has a critical role to play in guiding effective natural resource management, including the effective restoration of native vegetation on farms. When we do the long-term work and establish good monitoring programs, we can actually demonstrate to taxpayers that their investments in repairing the environment have had some positive effects./p pGood science and monitoring can uncover what needs to be done and how to do it, and quantify what is gained from particular investments (and how cost-effective those investments are). This is a key to gauging success not only for restoration programs on farms but in a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6770.htm"all environmental management/a./p pstrongReferences/strong/p ol liLindenmayer, D.B., Wood, J. Montague-Drake, R., Michael, D., Crane, M., Okada, S., MacGregor, C., and Gibbons, P. (2012a) Is biodiversity management effective? Cross-sectional relationships between management, bird response and vegetation attributes in an Australian agri-environment scheme. (Biological Conservation)/li /olpemDavid Lindenmayer receives funding from the ARC, AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT (DEPARTMENT OF SUSTAINABILITY, ENVIRONMENT, WATER, POPULATION AND COMMUNITIES, MURRAY CATCHMENT MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, CARING FROM OUR COUNTRY SCHEME, THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT'S ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP SCHEME./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6844/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pLast week my colleagues and I published a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22575462"a paper/a showing how methane emitted by dinosaurs could have affected the world’s climate. The media response was huge, with 100+ interviews by email and phone, and live radio interviews on three continents. Google news says a href="https://news.google.com.au/news/story?hl=enamp;gl=auamp;q=dinosaur+methaneamp;um=1amp;ie=UTF-8amp;ncl=dlgADhkj58rovxMkKdKKRPJIDXpcMamp;ei=-FuwT5_jBNCamQXV3fjFCwamp;sa=Xamp;oi=news_resultamp;ct=more-resultsamp;resnum=1amp;ved=0CDEQqgIwAA"nearly 600 outlets/a republished the story./p pWith the benefit of hindsight, it’s an obvious speculation, and one that must have occurred to other people in the past. Indeed, since publishing our paper, we have heard from a href="http://geology.indiana.edu/brassell/index.html"Simon Brassell/a (a geology professor at Indiana University, USA) that he made similar speculations in a conference talk over 20 years ago. But after receiving rather negative reactions to these ideas, he never pursued them to formal publication./p pSeveral things have changed since then. There is now a much greater realisation of the importance of the interactions between biology and the chemistry and physics of the planet – an area that has become known as a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/gaia-theory-is-it-science-yet-4901"Earth Systems Science/a./p pIn addition much of the data we used in our own study was only published quite recently; it would have been much harder to make these ideas quantitative at the start of the 1990s. Putting numbers to such an idea is a key part in trying to work out if it’s likely to be correct./p pIt occurred to my colleague a href="http://biology.st-andrews.ac.uk/contact/staffProfile.aspx?sunID=gr41"Graeme Ruxton/a and I that if modern cattle can potentially be a source of climate-altering amounts of methane then the extinct a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoda"sauropods/a, so much larger than any living terrestrial animal, could have been an important source of greenhouse gasses in the past./p pNeither Graeme or myself are specialist dinosaur researchers. Instead we are ecologists and are intrigued by sauropods because they are so different, in size and shape, from animals alive today. This makes thinking about them – and how their biology may have worked – particularly interesting./p pThe idea that methane from herbivorous dinosaurs may have been produced in quantities able to have a measurable effect on the global climate is an intriguing possibility, but how do you calculate the amount of methane produced by long extinct animals?/p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10596/width668/5ngthfzs-1336958846.jpg"figcaptionLeaf-eating lizards are a little bit like tiny dinosaurs, but comparing their methane emissions is tricky. span class="source"DDanzig/Flickr/span/figcaption/figure/p pIt turns out that there are equations which describe how methane production by microbes living in modern plant eaters is related to their body size. There are several such equations for different types of animals – such as various types of mammals with different digestive strategies and reptiles too./p pHow do you decide which to use for a dinosaur? The idea that dinosaurs are most closely related to birds is now well known, but birds don’t help much in this case. Their adaptations to flight make them a very specialised group and few of them eat large quantities of leaf material, as flight tends to require more energy rich foods./p pWhat about reptiles? Until recently most people assumed these were the closest living relatives of dinosaurs so they may seem a good “second best” if bird data isn’t available./p pHowever, it’s actually the microbes that produce the methane, not the animals. So – to us – the obvious question to ask was, were the conditions for these microbes in sauropods closer to modern mammals or reptiles?/p pBecause these herbivorous dinosaurs were so large most biologists think that they would have had a high and constant body temperature (as large animals lose heat slowly). From this microbial perspective, the modern mammal data is probably a better match. It has the additional advantage of including data from elephants; currently the closest terrestrial animal in size to a large dinosaur./p pBecause of these arguments we decided to use relatively conservative mammal equations to make an informed guess about the likely methane output of a large sauropod (some mammals, such as ruminants like cows, produce even more methane than the mammals we based our sauropods on)./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10597/width668/rhc8mph7-1336959085.jpg"figcaptionElephants are the closest thing we have to sauropods - size wise - and their body temperature and resultant microbes may be similar to dinosaurs'. span class="source"Shachi Sitaram/span/figcaption/figure/p pOther scientists had estimated the likely biomass – that is the weight of sauropods – that might have been found living on a given area of land, mainly based on theoretical arguments about energy use, along with a limited amount of fossil data. Taking these figures we estimated global methane production by sauropods and – with the help of a href="http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/euan-nisbet_2ff4ba1e-64af-450c-b39d-eb64b7f809d1.html"Euan Nisbet/a, a geologist and methane expert from London University – worked out what this implied for methane levels in the Earth’s atmosphere./p pOur result is obviously an educated guess – but to our surprise the answer was extraordinary! The methane output of these dinosaurs may have been equivalent to total amount of methane produced on Earth today, that is from both natural and man-made sources! Even if our results are twice as large as reality, these animals would still have been giving out climatically significant amounts of methane./p pWe know the climate of the time was very warm and that some sort of greenhouse effect is the likely explanation for this. Our results cannot prove that dinosaur methane played a role in these warm conditions but it does show that it’s an idea certainly that needs taking seriously./ppemDavid Wilkinson does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6995/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe recent furore about the carbon tax in this country has not been a celebration of enlightened debate./p pI think much of the debate misses a vital aspect of carbon use, namely, that using carbon to make metal is an effective way of storing energy and that whatever approach we use to move industry to a lower carbon future should reflect this principle./p pLet me explain./p pCarbon, in the form or coal or hydrocarbons we recover from underground, is a form of stored energy. Once we recover these materials from the earth’s crust, this stored energy can be used in two major ways. We can use it to generate heat, which in turn, we can use to produce work (that is, we can generate electricity). Or, we can make it react with ores to produce metal./p pThe conversion of energy into heat and work is the focus of a major science: thermodynamics. In fact, the science of thermodynamics was initially developed by a French Engineer (a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/96401/Lazare-Carnot"Carnot/a) who was trying to make sense of why English steam engines used coal more efficiently than their French counterparts./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10436/width668/ffxstwys-1336440235.jpg"figcaptionWe have a limited amount of carbon we can turn into power. Is this the best use of it? span class="source"Glenn Halog/span/figcaption/figure/p pCarnot and several brilliant scientists in the 19th century established the key principles of how energy is transferred into heat and work. These general principles hold true for rocket engines, solar panels, coal powered electricity generators and even our bodies. Sadly, most people discussing energy in the media haven’t studied thermodynamics!/p pWhat thermodynamic analysis tells us is that there are limits to how effectively we can convert energy into work. In the case of coal powered electricity generation, this analysis tells us that we will lose over half the stored energy in coal as waste heat during the process. In the case of some of the old power plants used in Victoria, this waste figure is well over 60%./p pThis level of loss is typical in thermal processes (such as fires, stoves, combustion) and difficult to overcome. In most cases, the heat and work released by burning coal is dissipated or lost directly after its use. To compound the problem, there are significant losses associated with transferring electrical energy in power lines over long distances./p pLet’s compare this way of using carbon with its use in metallurgical production. In the blast furnaces at Whyalla and Port Kembla, the carbon (in the form of coke) is used to break the chemical bond between oxygen and iron in iron ore to form iron, which is then converted to steel./p pThe coal also provides heat required for the ironmaking process. In efficient furnaces, roughly 600kg of coal is used to produce 1 tonne of iron. Blast furnaces are quite efficient in terms of energy, with heat losses being closer to 20% than the 60 to 70% associated with power generation./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10435/width668/6nsxw963-1336439433.jpg"figcaptionWe've stored energy in this metal, so let's not throw it away. span class="source" Kai Yan, Joseph Wong/span/figcaption/figure/p pThere is also another major difference with this use of coal compared to power generation. Metals can be readily recycled. In fact, steel and aluminium (the world’s two major metals) can be recycled many times over. When they are recycled, far less energy is used than that is initially used to make virgin metals. In the case of steel, this saving is about half. For aluminium, the savings are over 90%. Once you have made a metal, you have effectively embedded the energy associated with the coal into a new form./p pWe should value metal more highly. Throwing away an aluminium can or dumping a car in a forest is, effectively, throwing away energy. Every tonne of steel that we recycle saves us having to dig a couple tonnes of ore and another tonne of coal from the ground. I would argue that once have done the hard work of converting the coal into something useful and recoverable, we should show more respect for the value of the embedded energy in that object./p pRecent discussions and policies around carbon usage do not distinguish between these two activities. Our laws and policies don’t differentiate between the impact of burning a tonne of coal to generate electricity for providing light for empty offices at night and using the coal to make some metal, which we can re-use over and over again./p pPart of the problem is the unsophisticated public discussion of energy issues in this country. The embedded energy argument, familiar to many engineers and scientists, is not widely appreciated and certainly rarely discussed in public life./p pIn a carbon constrained future, we will need to consider very carefully how we use the carbon we do have available. We need to start questioning not just how much carbon we use for a particular activity but how much of the energy we have just used can be recovered later./p pIn short, we need re-think how we use the carbon resources available to us./ppemGeoffrey Brooks receives funding from the steel industry (currently, Tata and OneSteel) for fundamental aspects of steelmaking. He also receives funding for various projects on the fundamental aspects of metals recycling from European based trechnology companies. /em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6802/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pAre sustainability-dependent executive bonuses the answer to saving the planet? Research recently conducted by the a href="http://www.ccg.uts.edu.au/"Centre for Corporate Governance/a at the University of Technology, Sydney, examined whether a sample of Australia’s leading corporations are rewarding their executives for achieving sustainability targets as well as financial targets. The study was based on annual report disclosures and assessed twelve leading Australian companies in terms of their structures and processes for communication, commitment, leadership and implementation of sustainability. The companies (Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Bluescope, Orica, ANZ, NAB, Qantas, Telstra, Woolworths, Wesfarmers, Coca Cola and Foster’s) were benchmarked against each other using a scorecard system./p pThe question of how sustainability might be linked to executive remuneration was part of a broader study of how companies are integrating sustainability objectives into their core business strategies./p pMost large companies in Australia have developed sustainability strategies over recent years, but in a rather piecemeal fashion in response to specific external demands – reducing greenhouse gases, implementing family-friendly policies and so forth. They are now looking to find ways of measuring, monitoring and integrating these programs into their overall business planning./p pThe a href="http://www.catalyst.org.au/campaigns/full-disclosure/126-steering-sustainability"research report/a, entitled Steering Sustainability, was commissioned by think tank a href="http://catalyst.org.au/"Catalyst Australia/a as part of its Full Disclosure campaign. The campaign’s objective was to explore the growing influence of corporations in society and assist communities in articulating what standards and behaviour they expect of companies./p pGiven that most academics and practitioners struggle to define sustainability and/or corporate responsibility in a meaningful fashion, it is not surprising that the concept is poorly understood by non-specialists./p pThe terms “corporate sustainability” and “corporate responsibility” can be used interchangeably and, at their simplest, mean that a company is committed to acting in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable manner. To achieve this, a company has to balance the needs of all of its stakeholders (those with an interest in its operations: shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, local communities and the environment)./p pThis is not an easy balancing act as there will inevitably be circumstances when the interests of the different groups will come into conflict. In the past, many company directors believed that they were under a duty to give priority to shareholders’ interests: profit maximisation./p pHowever, a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Custom_Contents/SenateCommittees/corporationsctte/completedinquiries/200407/corporateresponsibility/report"two/a a href="http://www.camac.gov.au/camac/camac.nsf"inquiries/a conducted in 2005-2006 confirmed that this was not the case – that Australian directors have the discretion to take other interests into account in order to promote the best interests of the company in the long term./p pThe argument is that a company is likely to do well financially in the long run if it acts in a responsible manner. This could include maintaining a good reputation with customers; training and developing its workforce appropriately; not squandering natural resources; and engaging with local communities affected by its operations./p pThe UTS/Catalyst study explored the mechanisms that boards of directors are using to assist in this balancing act. It looked at how corporate governance systems are being adapted to integrate sustainability initiatives into core business strategy./p pThe study focused on the structural frameworks supporting sustainable practice because the actual meaning of sustainability will vary significantly depending on a company’s operations. A mining company, for example, will need to reduce damage to the natural environment and ensure its miners work in safe conditions; a bank may focus on treating its customers fairly and retaining its skilled employees./p pThe study did not try to compare apples and pears, but looked for evidence of structures and processes for governing and communicating sustainability./p pThe twelve companies were assessed in four areas and given a rating of below average, average or above average: (1) communication processes and methods; (2) voluntary commitment to measuring and reporting; (3) evidence of leadership structures; and (4) evidence of processes for implementation of sustainability, including incorporation into remuneration systems./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/9512/width668/94z3mzqs-1334206383.jpg"figcaptionspan class="source"Catalyst/UTS Centre for Corporate Governance/span/figcaption/figure/p pstrongCommunication:/strong The study found a variety of communication methods. In particular, there was a move away from standalone sustainability reports towards integrated reporting. In 2011, four of the twelve companies produced only one annual report including both financial and sustainability information and, for three of these companies, this was the first year of doing so. All companies referred to engagement with their stakeholders but only a handful went into detail on exactly how they communicate with each different group and the results of such communication. Companies received “below average” ratings if it was difficult to find sustainability information online or if it was poorly organised./p pstrongCommitment:/strong There was a strong commitment to sustainability reporting in terms of voluntary use of standards and guides such as the a href="https://www.globalreporting.org/Pages/default.aspx"Global Reporting Initiative/a (GRI) and the a href="https://www.cdproject.net/en-US/Pages/HomePage.aspx"Carbon Disclosure Project/a. Ten of the 12 companies reported formally against the GRI, with seven of these 10 obtaining independent verification of their use of the GRI. A very positive finding was that all of the companies were members of the Carbon Disclosure Project, meaning that they measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions in a way that enables international benchmarking./p pstrongLeadership:/strong In terms of leadership of sustainability, 11 of the 12 companies had either a board sub-committee or senior management committee responsible for sustainability issues. This is key to ensuring that sustainability issues are discussed, – and strategies developed – at the highest level of the company, in conjunction with wider business strategy. Wesfarmers did not refer to a committee and hence received a “below average” rating, whereas companies that explained how their committees functioned, or gave examples of topics addressed, received an “above average” rating (NAB, Foster’s, BHP, Orica, ANZ and Woolworths)./p pstrongImplementation:/strong Information on processes and structures for implementing sustainability strategy at the lower levels of the company was hard to find, with only two companies explaining, for example, that they had site-level committees (Orica) or business unit leaders (Foster’s) responsible for sustainability./p pstrongRemuneration:/strong A key question for the research was whether (and to what extent) companies are incorporating sustainability performance into their remuneration schemes. If employees are only rewarded based on measures of short-term financial performance, it sends the message that sustainability comes second./p pThe researchers were pleasantly surprised to find that nearly all of the companies did mention some aspect of sustainability performance when describing their remuneration policy. Most commonly this was an element of the short term incentive (STI) plan – a small (although possibly very small) proportion of executives’ bonuses were linked to non-financial indicators such as safety performance or customer satisfaction./p pDetail on exactly what proportion of overall pay was dependent on non-financial indicators and how these were measured was very unclear. Industry-specific differences were apparent, with service and retail companies including measures of customer satisfaction in their STI schemes, and the resources and manufacturing companies including occupational health and safety. Interestingly, only two companies (Bluescope and Rio) described the actual measure used (for example, lost time injury rate) and no company explained any incorporation of environmental performance./p pAs the study was being conducted, several of the companies in the sample received negative publicity in the area of corporate responsibility./p pOrica was slow to alert the authorities regarding a toxic chemical spill, Qantas hit a low point in industrial relations, and the mining companies were dealing with striking workers in South America. This reminds us that systems, structures and reports can never fully reveal whether a company is fostering a positive culture and value system for its employees. On the other hand, we know from corporate governance case studies that, without formal systems for communication and accountability, companies will flounder when faced with challenging circumstances./p pBecause the meaning of corporate responsibility/sustainability depends on the nature of a company’s operations, general guidance on implementation is hard to find. However, the structures and processes necessary for developing and managing sustainability strategies are universal. Companies need to engage with stakeholders in a consistent manner and ensure that the information gathered is fed into high-level decision making, ideally through a board or senior management committee./p pOnce strategies are decided upon, lines of responsibility and accountability must be clearly defined such that progress is monitored, measured and fed back into strategy development and reward schemes. Rewarding executives for sustainability performance could be the answer to ensuring companies do what they promise. As the old saying goes, companies need to “put their money where their mouth is” – in more ways than one./ppemThe Centre for Corporate Governance received funding from Catalyst for this research./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/5322/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pIn 300 BC, the Syrian city of Antioch had public street lighting fuelled by olive oil. At the 1900 Paris World Fair, German inventor Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his engine powered by peanut oil./p pBiofuels are not new, but many of the technologies are, and interest in renewable, sustainable biofuels has recently been rising due to worry about peak oil and price pressures, vulnerability of energy supplies, dependence on imports, and greenhouse emissions./p pIn April this year, a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/qantas-makes-its-first-flight-on-refined-cooking-oil-to-reduce-reliance-on-traditional-jet-fuel/story-e6frg95x-1226326010304"Qantas made its first flight/a using a 50-50 blend of refined cooking oil and regular jet fuel. Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce told the Australian: “We need to get ready for a future that is not based on traditional jet fuel or frankly we don’t have a future … And it’s not just the price of oil that’s the issue – it’s also the price of carbon”. Australia’s tax on carbon emissions is scheduled to come into force on 1 July 2012./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10550/width668/dfpk9t36-1336701984.jpg"figcaptionThe black gold of petroleum is taking a back seat. span class="source"Flickr/jurvetson/span/figcaption/figure/p pBioethanol produced mainly from sugarcane replaced 40% of gasoline used in Brazil in 2008, with the introduction of a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible-fuel_vehicles_in_Brazil"flex-fuel vehicles/a allowing high-blending of bioethanol with petrol (all petrol blends in Brazil contain 25% bioethanol). The first generation of biofuels was produced from starches, sugars and oils of agricultural crops, including corn, sugarcane, rapeseed and soybean. It must be noted, however, that Brazil’s biofuel industry has been a href="http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/07-1813.1"plagued with problems/a such as air pollution due to burning, deforestation, soil degradation and competition with food crops such as soybean. Indonesia has sparked controversy, also, with orangutan habitats being cleared for palm oil production. In Australia, biodiesel is being produced from used cooking oil (an agricultural by-product), tallow and canola seed; and bioethanol is produced from sugarcane molasses, grain sorghum and waste wheat starch, but availability of feedstock is the main limitation to widespread use./p pfigure class="align-centre zoomable"a href="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10544/area14mp/7gvgsvp3-1336700520.jpg"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10544/width668/7gvgsvp3-1336700520.jpg"/a figcaptionThe advanced biofuels value chain. span class="source"L.E.K.Consulting 2011/span/figcaption/figure/p pDue to its abundant reserves of uranium, coal and natural gas, Australia is nominally self-sufficient in energy except for transport fuels and heavy oils. Currently, bioethanol and biodiesel are being imported as renewable replacements for petrol and diesel, respectively. Australian annual a href="http://www.biofuelsassociation.com.au/index.php?option=com_contentamp;view=articleamp;id=74amp;Itemid=91"bioethanol production/a capacity is 440 ML, and a href="http://www.biofuelsassociation.com.au/index.php?option=com_contentamp;view=articleamp;id=59amp;Itemid=67"biodiesel production/a is 500 ML, although not all production facilities are operating at full capacity due to a shortage of feedstock./p pIn times of global concern about food security, there is a serious ethical debate about using food crops and arable land for biofuel production. In the USA, almost one-third of the corn crop is grown for bioethanol production. Brian Fleay of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (a href="http://www.aspo-australia.org.au/"ASPO Australia/a) calculated that if the entire sugarcane and wheat crop in Australia is converted to ethanol, it would only supply 20% of Australian transport fuels. This means that by burning our food for fuel, we would have no bread or sugar and very little fuel./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10545/width668/79fksrtx-1336700611.jpg"figcaptionThe University of Sydney’s Graeme Rapp (left) and Prof Richard Trethowan (right) are breeding Indian mustard for biodiesel production at Narrabri. span class="source"R. Trethowan./span/figcaption/figure/p pDue to food and energy security concerns, many countries – including Australia – are promoting biofuel crops that can be grown on land not suited for food production, so that the two systems are a href="http://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/intranet/libpages.nsf/WebFiles/ITS+-+biofuels+article+Odeh/%24FILE/ethanol+article+Odeh.pdf"complementary rather than competitive/a./p pThe recent a href="http://www.ret.gov.au/Department/Documents/clean-energy-future/advanced-biofuels-study.pdf"L.E.K. Consulting Advanced Biofuels study/a proposed several alternative biofuel feedstocks that do not compete with food production. Microalgae are being developed as a biodiesel feedstock, but a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958166910000443"there are still challenges/a such as the high capital and production costs of scaling up from laboratory to commercial production./p pPongamia (iMilletia pinnata/i) and Indian mustard (iBrassica juncea/i) are oilseeds and have been suggested as a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/154131408"feedstocks for biodiesel/a. Pongamia is a tropical tree legume native to India and Australia; plantations have been established at Gatton and Caboolture in southern Queensland, Roma in south-central Queensland and Kununurra in Western Australia. A breeding program for elite varieties from existing superior a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germplasm"germplasm/a is now being undertaken by the a href="http://www.cilr.uq.edu.au/"ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Legume Research/a at the University of Queensland. Indian mustard is an annual oilseed crop closely related to canola and rapeseed. An Indian mustard breeding program for biodiesel production was established in 2006 at the a href="http://sydney.edu.au/agriculture/plant_breeding_institute/index.shtml"University of Sydney Plant Breeding Institute at Narrabri/a by Professor Richard Trethowan. Indian mustard is now part of the four-year rotation there and there are two biodiesel batch processing plants to provide biodiesel self-sufficiency at Narrabri. The breeding program has been successful and 600 new advanced lines based on Pakistani/Australian crosses were tested in 2011. Promising high yielding lines with high oil content are now being tested in multi-locational pre-commercial regional trials./p pAnother potential bioethanol feedstock is agave (iAgave/i spp.). Agave uses a type of photosynthesis called a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism"Crassulacean Acid Metabolism/a (CAM); agave plants open their a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/ktorii/stomata.html"stomata/a (microscopic pores) at night and take up carbon dioxide in the dark to form a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malic_acid"malic acid/a, which is then metabolised to release carbon dioxide for a href="http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio104/photosyn.htm"photosynthesis/a during the following day. By closing the stomata during the day, less water is lost and water use efficiency may be as much as six times greater than a a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/biology/phoc.html"C3 photosynthesis species/a, such as wheat. Hence, agave is adapted to semi-arid land not suitable for food production./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10546/width668/t8rypqjm-1336700683.jpg"figcaptionBlue agave at Kalamia Estate, Queensland in 2011 during the crop’s second wet season. span class="source"D. Chambers/span/figcaption/figure/p pI conducted a study in collaboration with the University of Oxford, showing that bioethanol a href="http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2011/ee/c1ee01107c"derived from agave/a has a positive energy balance: the bioenergy created is five times the amount required to produce it. In June 2009, Don Chambers and Joseph Holtum of James Cook University planted a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-1707.2010.01083.x/abstract"the first trial of blue agave/a (iAgave tequilana/i) at Kalamia Estate, near Ayr in north Queensland. The plants are now two years old, and have survived two wet seasons as well as Cyclone Yasi. Growth rates have been higher than agave planted at the same time in Mexico./p pNew and novel feedstock conversion technologies are being developed such as fast a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis"pyrolysis/a and supercritical water treatment that can now convert any biomass feedstock such as wood residues (e.g., iEucalyptus/i spp.), agricultural residues (e.g., wheat and corn stalks), woody plants (e.g., poplar and willow coppice) and herbaceous C4 grasses (e.g., switchgrass, iMiscanthus/i and sweet sorghum) into a green biocrude that can be processed into jet fuel, biodiesel, and bioethanol. Professor Thomas Maschmeyer at the University of Sydney is now developing a a href="http://ussc.edu.au/ussc/assets/media/docs/other/1201_02_ThomasMaschmeyer.pdf"commercial supercritical water treatment/a for processing forestry waste and seaweed (macroalgae) into biocrude for companies such as a href="http://www.igniteer.com/"Ignite Energy/a and a href="http://www.licella.com.au/"Licella/a./p pThe transport sector uses 60% of global oil production and has relied on fossil-based liquid fuels for more than a century. Large-scale biofuel production has been criticised for replacing food production and consuming arable land. Hence, we should promote sustainable biofuel feedstocks growing on non-arable land to produce future renewable bioenergy in harmony with continued food and fibre production./p pemComments welcome below./em/ppemDaniel Tan does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pEarlier this week, Marrickville City Council in suburban Sydney a href="http://www.afr.com/p/business/companies/inner_sydney_council_blocks_csg_qQboBsrjWxK89nFRSxWxcI"blocked an attempt/a to mine coal seam gas on privately owned land in the inner-city area of St Peters. The Council imposed a condition on the development application order for the land, purporting to ban the land being used for coal seam gas mining. This ban raises a number of important issues: who owns the CSG under private land, and what does the decision mean for other NSW councils opposed to CSG mining?/p pDart Energy holds numerous exploration licences across Sydney (including at this St Peters site, where the land is owned by Dial-a-Dump). These licences have been granted in accordance with Part 3 of the a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/ma199281/"Mining Act 1992 (NSW)/a. The validity of the exploration licence and the power to carry out exploratory drills for coal seam gas is, in turn, premised on the notion that coal seam gas is a mineral that comes within the scope of this Act./p pThe development application and the subsequent condition was imposed by Marrickville City Council because of the power it has under Part 3 of the a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/epaaa1979389/"Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 (NSW)/a(EPAA). This act authorises a council to issue development applications in accordance with local environment plans. But there are a number of reasons why a condition attached to a development application which purports to ban mining would be ineffective./p pThis condition is arguably outside the scope of the EPAA and the relevant local environment plan. Any such condition would be inconsistent with rights already conferred upon Dart Energy as part of its exploration licence (issued under the Mining Act 1992 (NSW)). And the condition would, if valid, only apply to the landowner and not the the licence holder, Dart Energy./p pThe condition may result in the landowner, Dial-A-Dump, having limited powers to enter into a land access agreement with Dart Energy. But it could not in itself stop Dart Energy from exercising rights provided by its exploration licence./p pThe prominence of this dispute indicates the strong level of community concern regarding the proliferation of coal seam gas mining throughout New South Wales. It also raises more fundamental questions concerning the ownership of coal seam gas in New South Wales. These issues are not entirely straightforward./p pThe starting point for assessing ownership issues lies in the basic common law principle that ownership of private land extends up to the heavens and down to the centre of the earth (emcuius est solum eius est usque ad coelom et usque ad inferos/em). This principle means that the private landowner has complete ownership over the physical land and the minerals contained within that land as well as the space above that land. The breadth of this concept is, however, subject to three qualifications./p pFirst, the private owner has never owned what are known as the “royal minerals” of gold and silver. These are owned by the Crown./p pSecond, many states have introduced specific legislative provisions to give the state ownership of sub-surface minerals. This has occurred, for example, in Victoria, where legislation (s9 of the a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/consol_act/mrda1990432"Minerals Resource (Sustainable Development) Act 1990)/a, confers ownership of all minerals, other than exempt minerals, upon the State of Victoria. A similar vesting provision used to exist in New South Wales (s5 of the Coal Acquisition Act 1981 (NSW))./p pThe Coal Acquisition Act 1981 (NSW) was introduced by the New South Wales Government at the time so that lucrative coal royalties could be collected from private landowners. Over the life of the scheme, these royalties amounted to approximately $10.5 billion./p pPrivate land-owners affected by these vesting provisions could apply for compensation, and a Coal Compensation Board was set up to administer these payments. Over the life of the scheme the board paid millions of dollars in compensation. In 2007, these acts were repealed and any minerals which belonged to private landowners prior to the statutory re-vesting reverted back to those owners./p pThe third qualification is that many land grants issued by the Crown in New South Wales are subject to reservations that prevent minerals in the land from passing with that land. Minerals which have been reserved by the Crown will never pass to the landowner. These are defined in the Mining Act 1992 (NSW) as “public minerals”. Any sale, lease or other disposal of Crown land does not include any minerals contained in the lands./p pThe combined effect of the first and third qualification means that in New South Wales, most minerals may now be regarded as owned by the Crown. However, minerals which are not royal minerals or which have not been reserved by the Crown will continue to be owned by the landowner. To this extent, the common law right of a freeholder to minerals in his or her land has not been impaired./p pThe difficulty with coal seam gas is that, arguably, it isn’t a mineral under section 4 of Mining Act 1992 (NSW). This means that coal seam gas is not a mineral which has been reserved by the Crown and therefore, in New South Wales, ownership of coal seam gas remains with the landowner. There are a number of reasons why this position may be argued./p pFirst, the concept of a “mineral”, as defined under Schedule 1 of the a href="http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/sessionalview/sessional/sr/2010-619.pdf"Mining Regulations 2010/a, includes coal but not explicitly coal seam gas./p pSecond, while some have argued that coal seam gas is an inherent part of the coal, because it is absorbed onto the coal and the bond is so close that the two cannot be separated, others have argued that the chemical composition of coal seam gas is nearly identical to that of natural gas./p pThis means that the right to produce coal seam gas from coal is no different to the right to remove natural gas from other subsurface formations. In this respect, coal seam gas retains its independent identity as a gas rather than a solid mineral./p pThis argument has been supported by cases in the United States. In a href="http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar_case?case=16841562966965894351amp;hl=enamp;as_sdt=2amp;as_vis=1amp;oi=scholarramp;sa=Xamp;ei=OW6sT4eVJNCfiAepsOWvAwamp;ved=0CB8QgAMoADAA"Carbon County v. Union Reserve Coal Co/a, the Montana Supreme Court overturned an earlier decision and concluded that coalbed methane gas “is separate from coal and is not a constituent part of the coal estate"./p pIf coal seam gas is not a constituent of coal, this will have significant ramifications for the regulation of this resource in New South Wales. Such a situation may give the landowner control of the resource and, potentially, confer greater regulatory power upon relevant councils./ppemSamantha Hepburn does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6969/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pEvery year, more Australians – particularly in cities – are riding to work. More cyclists means fewer cars on the road, less congestion, less pollution and fewer health problems. But every year more people are injured riding bikes, many of them following crashes with opened car doors. Are we doing enough to keep cyclists safe?/p pOfficially known as “cyclist-vehicle door opening crashes” (but usually called “dooring” or being “doored”) these crashes happen when the door of a vehicle that is parallel parked on the side of the road is opened into the path of an approaching cyclist. The cyclist collides with the door, falls off their bike, and is sometimes then in danger of colliding with moving traffic. In Victoria, one person has died in a dooring incident./p h2Who’s getting hit by doors, and how much does it hurt?/h2 pBetween 2000 and 2010, both police and hospitals reported an increase in dooring crashes in Victoria. The police reported 1,088 cyclist-door crashes, with an increase in these crashes of 125% from 2000 to 2010./p pOf these crashes, 82.8% were during the week, 81.1% during daylight hours, and many in peak travel times (8-10am 18.7%; 5-7pm 22.2%)./p pHospitals reported 401 cyclists presenting to hospital after a crash with a car door. Of these, 65.8% were males, and 70% were aged 20-39./p pThe body region most commonly injured was the shoulder (16%). Seven cyclists (1.7%) sustained an intracranial injury. Most cyclists were treated and discharged (83.8%), with 16.2% admitted to hospital./p pIn Victoria, this crash type affects adults almost exclusively: police reported 99.1% of cyclists involved were aged 16 years of older. All hospital presentations were cyclists aged 15 years and older./p pThis is also a mainly metropolitan crash type. The majority of police-reported cyclist-car door crashes occurred in the Melbourne CBD (22%) or metropolitan Melbourne area (73%)./p pCyclist crashes with unexpectedly opened vehicles doors can be fatal. In March 2010, James Cross, a 22 year old arts-law student at Monash University, was killed as the result of a car door crash. James was riding along Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn when a driver unexpectedly opened her vehicle door in front of him. James hit the door and was thrown from his bike and hit by a truck in an adjacent lane./p h2Will fixing parking help?/h2 pThe two main contributing factors in cyclist-car door crashes are the environment: road design, and the way road users (particularly drivers) behave./p pRoad design is a significant factor in cyclist-car door crashes. On many roads with a bike lane, when a driver suddenly opens their door there isn’t enough space for a cyclist to safely swerve without moving into the adjacent vehicle lane./p pThere are engineering solutions that could reduce or eliminate these crashes: wider bike lanes, angle parking or reconfigured bike lane/parking bays that position the bike lane away from parallel parked vehicles./p pBut redesigning roads can create new issues. For example, in Albert Street, East Melbourne, the bike lane was moved from the drivers' side of parked cars to the passenger side. This has eliminated cyclist-driver side door conflict. But it has increased cyclist-pedestrian interactions, as all vehicle occupants now have to cross the bike path to reach the footpath./p pThere is no single engineering solution for all sites. To increase cyclist safety while still making it easy for cars to drive and park, we need a comprehensive review of current parking options. Most importantly, any changes to parking must be accompanied by appropriate education for drivers and cyclists./p h2How to improve the situation: drivers/h2 pDriver behaviour is a significant factor in cyclist-opened vehicle door crashes. The most obvious and direct solution is for drivers to always check for cyclists before opening any vehicle door. To change the habits of many drivers will require extensive investment in behaviour change and driver education campaigns./p pOne way to stop such habits from forming is to train new drivers to interact safely with cyclists. We could take some lessons on driver training from countries with high cycling participation rates, such as Denmark and the Netherlands./p pWhen drivers are parallel parked they should stop and check for cyclists, then wait for a gap in cyclist traffic before opening any doors./p pWhen you’re getting into or out of the car, you should:/p ul liopen the door as little as necessary, and shut it as quickly as possible/li liopen the door with your left hand; this makes you twist in your seat and head check for cyclists before opening the door/li lialways walk around your vehicle by walking towards the traffic: this will increase the likelihood that you will see a cyclist/li litell your passengers to get out on the curbside/li lipack your belongings in the left side of the car so you don’t have to open the driver side rear door to get to them./li /ul pIf you’re driving your car past parked cars and cyclists, you can help too. If you give cyclists at least a metre clearance, they will have some space if they need to swerve to avoid an unexpectedly opened vehicle door. “a href="http://www.amygillett.org.au/a-metre-matters"Leaving a metre/a” makes sure cyclists have a safe space around them whether there is a bike lane or not./p pAvoiding tinting vehicle windows also helps cyclists to observe driver/passenger behaviour and gives them time to respond sooner./p pImproved vehicle technology could also help. To date, the majority of vehicle technology and safety features have focused on vehicle occupant functions and protection. More could be done to protect people outside the vehicle. Manufacturers are now developing sensors to detect other vehicles in the vicinity. This could be extended to alert drivers of cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians. Vehicle technology that improves the safety of all road users is immeasurably more important than technology that allows a vehicle to self-park./p h2How to improve the situation: cyclists/h2 pOf course there are things cyclists can do to protect themselves too:/p ul liAlways ride within your bike handling skills – make sure you always have control of the bike./li liTravel at a speed that allows safe braking or direction change./li liBe vigilant about drivers/passengers opening car doors; check for heads through rear and side windows and side mirrors./li liIncrease your visibility by using front lights, especially at twilight and on overcast or rainy days./li /ul pFinally, the role of enforcement is essential in creating a safe space for cyclists. The current rule in Victoria is that “car drivers and passengers must not cause a hazard by opening their car door”. The current maximum penalty for this offence is three penalty units. The current infringement able to be issued on the spot by police is one penalty unit. Currently one penalty unit is valued at $122.14 (until 30 June 2012). This is one of the lowest penalties in Australia. In NSW and Queensland, the maximum penalty is 20 penalty units and in South Australia, drivers incur 3 demerit points./p pIn addition to the low penalty, there also seems to be a reluctance to enforce penalties for this offence. When James Cross was killed, the officer who attended the crash scene told the state coroner that “her ‘bosses’ at her station informed her that a charge against [the driver] would not be authorised”./p pIf the existing laws regarding driver behaviour are not currently effective or not actively enforced, it is essential that these laws are reviewed to ensure that cyclists are judicially protected./ppemMarilyn Johnson is also the Research Manager at the Amy Gillett Foundation. /em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6918/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe image of the bearded, grubby ecologist, out-dated spectacles askew and sporting an eccentric grin of geeky, scientific relish, is one that is shared by many, including novice ecologists themselves./p pBut as ecology has matured into a full-fledged, hard-core, mathematical science on par with physics, chemistry and genetics (and is arguably one of the most important sciences of our times given how badly we’ve trashed our only home – planet Earth), its sophistication now threatens to render many of the traditional aspects of ecology redundant, or at least, much less important./p pAs a person who cut his teeth in field ecology (with all the associated dirt, a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2011/04/11/crocodiles-spiders-leeches/"dangers/a, bites, stings, discomfort, thrills, headaches and disasters), I’ve had my fair share of fun and excitement collecting ecological data. There’s something quaintly Victorian about the romantic and obsessive naturalist collecting data to the exclusion of nearly all other aspects of civilised life. The intrepid adventurer in some of us takes over (probably influenced by the likes of David Attenborough) and we convince ourselves that our quest for the lonely datum will heal all of the Earth’s ailments./p pErr, probably not./p pAs I’ve matured in ecology and embraced its mathematical complexity and beauty, the recurring dilemma is that there are never enough data to answer the really big questions. We have sampled only a fraction of extant species, we know embarrassingly little about how ecosystems respond to disturbances, and we understand next to nothing about the complexities of ecosystem services. And let’s not forget our infancy in quantifying extinction synergies and predicting how human endeavour and climate change will affect ecosystems of the future. Multiply this uncertainty by several orders of magnitude for ocean life./p pThe upshot is that ecologists have been searching for proxies and indicators of biodiversity patterns and processes. The ultimate aim is to predict how they work (or fail) based entirely on decidedly non-biological features./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10504/width668/v34x57cw-1336616190.jpg"figcaptionCollecting data in the field is hard work. span class="source"Ben Rawson/Conservation International/span/figcaption/figure/p pA case in point is one that I’m most familiar with – the use of “a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020141"surrogates/a” in marine ecology. This uses a relatively easy-to-sample species (or group of them) to predict the distribution of many more species. We have also done some work to a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2009.00513.x"predict coral reef fish diversity/a using little more than the position of the reef (latitude and distance to shore), and we have inferred the extinction risk of coral reef fish using nothing more than the a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/10-0267.1"shape and isolation of reefs/a on which they live./p pI even remember once that a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/profiles/hugh-possingham-3107"Hugh Possingham/a wished out loud at a conference that he hoped we’d never have to collect real biological data again if we got our maths right. That might be a little far-fetched, but it highlights my main point./p pA new study we published recently demonstrates this component well. Thanks to the hard work of one of my a href="http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/camille.mellin"post-doctoral fellows/a and several clever colleagues, a href="http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-2105.1"the paper/a tests a fairly simple idea – by taking a photo of an area where animals hang out, one can estimate how many different species are there./p pWe used datasets comprising painstakingly collected surveys of coral reef fish in the Great Barrier Reef, and compared these to habitat photos taken at spatial scales ranging from single transects to entire reef complexes. We then measured the amount of “complexity” in the photo using something called the “mean information gain”. This metric essentially measures how complex the image is; in other words, it’s a proxy for habitat complexity, which tends to correlate rather well with the number of species in that particular area./p pIt turns out that we could explain up to 29% of the variance in fish species composition, 33% in total fish abundance, and 25% in fish community structure./p pNow, this might not seem like a terribly high predictive capacity, but in ecology, it explains a remarkably large component of these biodiversity measures relative to most other studies. And all this from merely taking a photograph./p pI’m not suggesting (as the title of this exposé implies) that we need to abandon all ecological sampling studies; however, we should be constructing ever-more-efficient ways to estimate biodiversity patterns and processes using such short cuts. They’re less time-consuming, more cost-effective and potentially cover areas that are difficult or impossible to sample directly./p pemA version of this article appeared on Corey’s blog, a href="http://conservationbytes.com/2012/05/09/no-more-ecology/"ConservationBytes/a./em/ppemCorey Bradshaw receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the South Australia Premier's Science and Research Fund and the Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6949/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pNot surprisingly, there was little excitement on the environmental policy front from this year’s Federal budget. This partly reflects the extensive environmental policy in the government’s a href="http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Consolidated-Final.pdf"Clean Energy Future Policy/a (CEFP) and partly their obsession with achieving a surplus in 2012/13./p pAs I am sure is intended, I get lost in the quagmire of forward estimates, appropriations and the shifting of resources from one portfolio or program to another and cannot gain a quick and reliable understanding of what exactly has happened./p pEven the way the government and each portfolio reports the changes to the budget defies logic. For example, each portfolio, such as the a href="http://www.ret.gov.au/Department/Documents/budget/12-13/Portfolio-Budget-Statements-2012.pdf"Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism/a or the a href="http://climatechange.gov.au/en/about/accountability/budget/~/media/publications/budget/1213/2012-13-pbs-pdf.pdf"Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency/a, reports the revised 2011/12 budget, the new 2012/13 budget and the forward estimates. It doesn’t include what was announced in 2011 as forward estimates for 2012/13 so we are unable to see, without great difficulty, what has been delayed and what has been expanded (although they usually promote the latter)./p pHowever, what has become clear is that renewable energies have been hit hard. In a report on the a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/federal-budget-environment-battered-bruised-and/2951200"ABC today/a it has been estimated that approximately half a billion dollars has been cut from the industry “over the forward estimates”, that is, after considering the new additions, the delays in spending until future years and straight cuts in spending./p pFor example, the Solar Flagships program, aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of large scale solar parks, had 650 million dollars cut from the 1.5 billion dollar program over the forward estimates./p pOf course, the government claims that these funds will be restored and returned in future years but this can hardly be assured given the uncertainties over future revenues and expenses and the desire to achieve future surpluses. One program, the a href="http://www.ret.gov.au/energy/clean/acre/vcf/Pages/default.aspx"Renewable Energy Venture Capital Fund/a, which aims to provide venture capital to encourage the commercialisation of renewable energy technologies had its funding shifted to 2023-2024!/p pThese cuts simply delay the movement of the Australian economy to a sustainable future. The government, like most economists, may be relying on the impending carbon price to lead this charge but the carbon price needs the support of other policies which promote renewable energy. The carbon tax only works as expected in a world of perfect information, zero transaction costs, and perfectly competitive markets which, of course, is not the reality./p pEven then, according to the a href="http://archive.treasury.gov.au/carbonpricemodelling/content/report/downloads/Modelling_Report_Consolidated_update.pdf"Treasury modelling/a used to estimate the impact of the CEFP, domestic emissions of carbon remain at roughly today’s level as far out as 2050. While this corresponds to a lower level of emissions than an economy without carbon pricing, reaching the target of 80% below 2000 levels by 2050 requires a huge amount of internationally sourced carbon offsets (foreign abatement)./p pIncurring a greater budget deficit now and in future years to achieve more domestic abatement and therefore a lower carbon deficit would be more impressive than a budget surplus and exactly why the government is obsessed with a surplus in the uncertain global economic environment is beyond reason (and I am an economist). They have effectively passed the ball of aggregate demand management over to monetary policy (using interest rates to change aggregate demand and stabilise the economy) and this was highlighted in the statement by Treasurer Swan when he suggested that the surplus would allow the Reserve Bank to continue cutting interest rates./p pBut fiscal policy (government revenue and spending initiatives to change aggregate demand) still has a role to play especially given the commercial bank’s reluctance to pass on interest rate cuts which reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy./p pWhile Australia may be more advanced in their recovery than other advanced economies, the uncertain economic environment and good economic sense suggests that a modest fiscal deficit is still required. Moreover, government spending to boost economic growth could coincide with spending on renewable energy thus achieving economic as well as long-term environmental gains, which has been referred to as Green Keynesianism./p pIn terms of deficits and surpluses it would be much more impressive if the government announced measures to reduce the carbon deficit of the country than measures to increase the budget surplus./p pemYou can read more by Neil Perry in his column at The Conversation, “a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/columns/neil-perry-1435"Maintaining the commons/a”./em/ppemNeil Perry does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6943/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/02/184055.htm"co-ordinating a new venture/a to tackle short-lived global warming agents such as black carbon./p pShould we be paying more attention to black carbon?/p pYes, indeed we should, because black carbon plays complicated and multi-faceted roles in global carbon dynamics. It also poses some deep research challenges and moral conundrums./p pBlack carbon in the form of aerosol soot from wildfires and anthropogenic sources such as diesel exhausts is believed to be a large contributor to global warming, directly by positive radiative forcing (because it absorbs the solar radiation that is reflected by the surface-atmosphere-cloud system) and indirectly by the snow/ice albedo effect (because soot deposited on snow and sea ice darkens and enhances solar absorption by the icy surface)./p pAnother form of black carbon is solid charcoal. Black carbon has been made by nature for some 400 million years in open vegetation fires. During each fire event a fraction of the carbon in the vegetation is released back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and a smaller fraction is transferred to the long-lived (hundreds to thousands of years) global black carbon reservoir, because fires always produce emsome/em charcoal and soot./p pIn fact, conversion of a href="(https://theconversation.edu.au/can-biochar-save-the-planet-1099"waste biomass to charcoal/a in kilns and distribution of the charcoal in soils a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/biochar-like-gold-dust-for-firms-ready-to-profit/story-e6frg6xf-1225827287311"has been advocated/a as a method of removing and sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere./p pBut is charcoal really a carbon sink? It is by no means certain that the world’s black carbon reserves are not actually a net source of atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than a sink./p h2Charcoal can be a CO2 sink or a CO2 source/h2 pCharcoal accumulates in soils and sediments only if its rate of formation exceeds its rate of oxidation. Otherwise charcoal is a net emsource/em of atmospheric carbon dioxide, not a net sink for it./p pfigure class="align-right"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10369/width237/xkfhmsnm-1336110228.jpg"figcaptionAerosol soot affects global warming. span class="source"James Perkins/span/figcaption/figure/p pThis brings us to the first “charcoal challenge”: what are these rates? How much charcoal is produced globally from fire activity per year? We need reliable estimates for these quantities in order to determine whether human intervention to escalate charcoal production on a grand scale could backfire (as it were) disastrously as a carbon dioxide sequestration strategy./p pGlobal carbon management strategies and geoengineering schemes involving black carbon therefore need to be based on a thorough understanding of the role of fire in regulating carbon cycles. Vegetation (including peat) fires are great movers and shapers of the terrestrial environment and significantly influence global carbon balances./p pSuppressing vegetation fires reduces the rate at which carbon can accumulate in the black carbon pool and enhances the rate of return to the atmospheric carbon dioxide pool by decay, or respiration./p pThis introduces a second “charcoal challenge”: Is nature’s use of fire to distribute carbon between long-term black carbon and short-term atmospheric carbon dioxide pools fundamentally incompatible with humans’ need to suppress fire?/p h2Are we prepared to have more fires?/h2 pThe widespread and frequent conflagrations that create charcoal in nature are at the very least a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/the-worst-fire-season-ever-until-next-year-3452"disagreeable, and often deadly/a, to humans. Human society – our health, aspirations, economic and cultural activity – and wildfires cannot coexist in harmonious equilibrium, so human activities tend to suppress fires./p pAre, then, the human imperatives to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and curb wildfires fundamentally incompatible? Have we cornered ourselves?/p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10361/width668/cmwxnrw8-1336108344.jpg"figcaptionWhile forest fires are still regular in South-East Asia, humanity is likely to want less fire in future. span class="source"Ann Devereux/span/figcaption/figure/p pRegionally and in the short term human activities promote fire. In the Amazon basin human activity has promoted fire since 1970. The occurrence of forest fires in Southeast Asia is believed to have increased greatly since the 1960s. Currently prevailing socioeconomic conditions are likely to promote tropical biomass burning in the short term./p pYet charcoal accumulation studies clearly show that vegetation fires declined globally from 1 to 1750, and abruptly further after 1870, the latter reduction being due to agricultural and pastoral expansion and fire suppression in intensively farmed areas./p pHuman-mediated suppression of fires is likely to continue and increase globally. The widespread fires that have been used to clear tropical rainforests for the planting of crops and create settled communities with higher standards of living are a transient phenomenon. Once settled, it will be in those communities’ interests to suppress fires./p h2Say we want it; can we do it?/h2 pSuppose we resolve the “wicked problem” of the first charcoal challenge and determine that black carbon is indeed a global carbon sink, and suppose we come to some sort of accommodation with the second charcoal challenge, we are then faced with a third./p pIs it possible to produce and distribute enough charcoal, over and above that produced by nature, safely and without otherwise adding to environmental problems, to significantly lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in a time frame compatible with human responses to climate change?/p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10363/width668/fcgkk9z5-1336108525.jpg"figcaptionWe would have to feed a lot of kilns to make a serious impact on emissions reduction. span class="source"Montana State University Library/span/figcaption/figure/p pSome authors see a realistic potential for charcoal production to a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7141/full/447143a.html"remove about 1 Gt/a (10sup9/sup tonnes) of carbon dioxide a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211310050029"per year/a from the atmosphere. Terrestrial biomass is produced at a rate of about a href="http://www.acrim.com/%5C/Reference%20Files/CLIMATECHANGE%202001%20-%20The%20Scientific%20Basis.pdf"120 Gt per year/a. The carbon content of dry vegetation is about 50% by mass, that of charcoal is a href="http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/070070"about 80%/a. Charcoal conversion efficiencies range from about a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ie0207919"30% for kilns/a to about 1 to 10% when produced by a href="http://www.biogeosciences.net/3/397/2006/bg-3-397-2006.pdf"open vegetation fires/a. A back-of-envelope calculation finds we would need rates of vegetation thermoconversion ranging from about 2.3 Gt per year (for making charcoal in kilns) to 6.8-68 Gt/year (open vegetation fires)./p pCan we subject about 2–6% of the terrestrial biomass per year to charcoal-producing thermal treatment, in kilns and/or by managing open vegetation fires to promote charcoal formation? Should we? And, to go back to where we started, what are the effects of changing fire management regimes on aerosol soot levels?/ppemRowena Ball receives funding from the Australian Research Council./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6788/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe ABC recently ran the documentary I Can Change Your Mind About … Climate Change, exposing Nick Minchin, former conservative politician, and youth activist Anna Rose, to science and argument in favour of and opposed to climate change and the need to do something about it./p pIt would surprise no social psychologist that neither Minchin nor Rose changed their minds. Strong minds do not change easily or willingly. As Ecker and Cook a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/no-one-likes-to-change-their-mind-not-even-on-climate-6674"eloquently describe/a, people generally engage in emmotivated cognition/em rather than approach information rationally./p pThe documentary, as well as continuing media coverage of debate in Australia about climate change, creates the impression that national opinion is strongly divided over climate change. Australians’ opinions are actually more aligned than we think. In reality the nation is close to a consensus that climate change is happening./p pA a href="http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Climate/Adapting/Climate-change-attitudes-online-survey.aspx"national survey by the CSIRO/a sheds some light on public beliefs about climate change and support for government action. The survey of more than 5,000 people was conducted in July and August 2011, before legislation was put to parliament to introduce a price on carbon. The survey follows a similar survey done in 2010./p h2Australians’ beliefs about climate change/h2 pMost Australians – nearly 9 in 10 – accept that the climate is changing. Less than 1 in 10 say they think it isn’t./p pThis 90% majority is roughly evenly split between those who think climate change is mainly due to human activity and those who think it is a natural phenomenon. The proportion of Australians accepting climate change has altered little in the last year, despite the heated debates that have occupied the country and the mainstream media./p h2Australians’ beliefs about others’ beliefs/h2 pHumans generally are poor judges of how widespread their own and others’ opinions are. When it comes to climate change, the majority view is that climate change is happening. Yet everyone underestimates how common this view is./p pMost Australians grossly overestimate the proportion of the population that denies climate change. On average, people figure that about 22% of Australians are “deniers” – more than three times the actual proportion!/p pThe two minority positions (climate change is not happening; don’t know if climate change is happening) are especially overestimated./p pfigure class="align-centre zoomable"a href="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10417/area14mp/vt4s233b-1336373827.jpg"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10417/width668/vt4s233b-1336373827.jpg"/a figcaptionspan class="source"/span/figcaption/figure/p pfigure class="align-centre zoomable"a href="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10416/area14mp/2mqvbnfp-1336373827.jpg"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10416/width668/2mqvbnfp-1336373827.jpg"/a figcaptionspan class="source"/span/figcaption/figure/p h2Why do these misperceptions happen?/h2 pOne possibility is that these misperceptions reflect the airplay and column inches given to those opposed to climate change. When confronted with evidence that a consensus does not exist, it is common for people to think that those that who don’t share their opinion have something wrong with them: a phenomena seen on all sides of the climate change debate./p pWhatever the reason, the misperceptions suggest that the real consensus is being ignored; meanwhile, a false consensus is being constructed that a significant proportion of Australians reject climate change./p pThe CSIRO survey also revealed another important effect in how we think about our own beliefs and others’: people always think that their own belief is the most common belief in the country. This overestimation of the commonality of one’s belief is most evident among disbelievers./p pOverestimating how common our beliefs and opinions are is a well-know phenomenon in social psychology. It exists across many different domains. There is nothing unique about climate change that is causing this effect in the CSIRO survey data./p pWhat is unusual in the CSIRO survey data is the gross overestimation of how widespread rare views are./p pPerhaps these misperceptions about Australians’ beliefs about climate change are a major reason why debates get heated and polarised, and why it is hard for people to change their minds./p h2Australians support action on climate change/h2 pThere seems to be a polarisation of views around support for human-induced climate change, and about the costs and implications of actions such as putting a price on carbon./p pIn reality, there is much greater public acceptance of human-induced climate change than many would have us believe./p pMisperceptions and misinformation about public beliefs about climate change are helping fuel division and dissension in the national debates about climate change./p pThe climate science is clear. Climate scientists are clear. It appears that the Australian public is also quite clear, but does not yet realise its own clarity./ppemIain Walker previously worked at Murdoch University and has received funding from the Australian Research Council and other government agencies for work unrelated to the work reported in this article./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6886/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pWho would have thought the Melbourne Theatre Company would get into bed with Andrew Bolt?/p pThe MTC’s new play a href="http://www.mtc.com.au/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=4266"The Heretic/a, which premieres on 17 May, tells the story of climate scientist Dr Diane Cassell at a north of England university, whose research in the Maldives shows that sea-levels are not rising. On that basis, it soon becomes clear, she believes she has nullified the entire corpus of climate change science./p pDiane Cassell is presented by playwright Richard Bean as the lone figure of integrity who has the courage to stand up to the climate science establishment, scientists who are cravenly manipulating their research to stay on the gravy train./p pBean recycles every discredited trope of the climate denial machine. But instead of coming from the mouths of the usual rat-bags, like Lord Monckton, Alan Jones, Janet Albrechtsen and the spokesmen from Exxon-funded think-tanks, they are spoken by the only character in the play we are invited to admire./p pNone of it is ironic; a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/fighting-catastrophilia-with-wit/story-e6frg8n6-1226345167184"Richard Bean has swallowed/a, without chewing, all of the climate denier talking points favoured by the Tea Party. He must have spent a long time clicking from one denier website to the next, without ever bothering to look at any real science — you know, the science endorsed by every scientific academy in the world./p pSo every one of the absurdities echoed daily by the conspiracy theorists, fossil-fuel industry hatchet men, and cyber-bullies can now be heard on stage at the MTC Theatre. Our heroine parrots the claim that the a href="http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/the-hockey-stick-lives/"“hockey stick” graph/a showing recent warming has been discredited. Bean forgets to tell us that the hockey stick data have been subjected to the closest possible scrutiny and found to be sound./p pInstead, Bean has Cassell’s boss Kevin, also a climate scientist, confess that “we are all sceptical of the hockey stick”. That calumny against climate scientists is trumped by the play’s reversal of the a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/climate-scientists-the-target-in-culture-war-1692"facts about death threats/a. In The Heretic it is Diane, she who has proof that global warming is a hoax, who receives the death threats, this time from green fanatics./p pIn the play we hear nothing of the real climate scientists who have had to upgrade their home security and change their children’s bus routes, or the a href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/06/more_on_the_threats_on_and_abu.php"young woman/a who after speaking about carbon footprints at her local library emerged to find her car smeared with excrement spelling out “climate turd”./p pInstead it is the climate “sceptic” who is the victim of a href="http://www.readfearn.com/2011/06/emails-reveal-nature-of-attacks-on-climate-scientists/"a hate campaign/a, a distortion of history that can only embolden the shit-spreaders./p pIn the play all of the incredible claims culled from denialist websites are uttered by the play’s only credible character. “The IPCC is a political body and should be ignored.” “Climate scientists used to claim we would now be in an ice age.” “There is no evidence that CO2 is the cause of 20th century warming.” The peer review process is corrupt. On it goes./p pDiane is convinced those who believe climate science are “disaster junkies”. Armageddon has been prophesied a thousand times “and has always turned out to be wrong”. Environmentalism is “the perfect religion for the narcissistic age”. No wonder Andrew Bolt a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/arts-warming-to-climate-sceptics/story-e6frfhqf-1226332124002"admits/a to “gloating” about The Heretic./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10423/width668/wrf6h4c4-1336380243.jpg"figcaptionThe Melbourne Theatre Company presents a "fleet-footed black comedy". span class="source"/span/figcaption/figure/p pFor our heroine the scientific consensus – itself often a href="http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_2_confecting_an_alarmist_consensus"the subject of attack/a – proves nothing because there used to be an “overwhelming consensus” that the Earth was the centre of the universe. And in an unwitting exposé of the essential denialist fallacy, when Kevin says “the vast majority of climate scientists have no doubt …”, Diane cuts him off with “the vast majority of people on earth believe in God, and they’re all wrong”./p pFor deniers there is no difference between a scientific truth and a personal belief./p pThe typical MTC audience member doesn’t read the Murdoch tabloids or listen to right-wing shock jocks. If they stumble on them then their bullshit antennae are on full alert. Yet when the same fantastic claims are retailed in a play by the MTC the antennae are down. That is why, between the clever lines, The Heretic is so insidious./p pThose who decide to see The Heretic ought to be aware that as they take their seats they are in for an evening of climate denier propaganda wrapped in a “funny, provocative and heart-warming family drama”. Bean doesn’t balk at writing the grubbier accusations into the lines of his heroine. Al Gore is a “carbon trading billionaire” — a revelation that prompts Diane’s greenie daughter, Phoebe, to declaim “What a cunt!”. Greenpeace wants to price the poor off the roads, which will be “a good day for totalitarianism.”/p pThere is even a replay of the Climategate computer hacking scandal. This time the heroine’s student — whom she has turned from an unthinking green loony into a sceptical seeker of the truth — hacks into the computer of a rival scientist at another university. Of course they find that he has been fiddling his data./p pEchoing the three most famous words picked out of the Climategate emails, “a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254660/Climategate-professor-Phil-Jones-admits-sending-pretty-awful-emails.html"hide the decline/a” (words seized on by Sarah Palin and right-wing shock jocks across the United States), the nefarious rival is caught sending an email to a colleague saying he has manipulated his data in order to “bury the downturn”./p pIn another distortion of history, Bean excludes the dénouement of the Climategate story — that every accusation of misconduct and malpractice was subject to the a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm"most rigorous investigation/a, by nine official inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic, all of which exonerated the scientists involved and concluded that nothing had dented the authority of climate science. But, hey, this is art./p pThe MTC is patting itself on the back for staging The Heretic. It thinks it is being heretical itself, daring to unsettle many who make up its usual audiences. But the MTC is not being bold; by capitulating to the comforting feelings that flow over those who reject the scientific warnings, it is being cowardly. Brave theatre companies don’t run from unpleasant truths, they rub our faces in them./p pPerhaps Richard Bean’s next project will be The Heretic 2, another “funny, provocative and heart-warming family drama” in which the maverick academic David Irving, a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4757506.stm"lone defender of the truth/a, uncovers definitive evidence that the Holocaust never happened. Sent to Coventry by his fellow historians — a spineless lot who have for years been manipulating the evidence to protect their funding and their reputations — David is in the end vindicated; the Holocaust was a Zionist plot after all./p pStaging that would be courageous./p pCutting-edge playwrights have always set out to debunk orthodoxies and shatter conventions (Bean himself has said he thrives on causing offence), but the orthodoxies they attack have been ones that are in some way oppressive, stultifying and against life; in short they use their craft to undermine the dominant powers./p pIn The Heretic, Bean crosses to the other side to make himself the ally of Exxon-Mobil and the Tea Party. That’s a price Bean seems willing to pay to flatter himself as the writer who resists the tide. Rarely has an exercise in artistic wanking had so little regard for the social cost./p pYes, it’s heretical to reject the overwhelming consensus among those qualified to judge, but only in the way it is heretical to deny that HIV causes AIDS or smoking causes lung cancer. It’s not about being a liberal or a leftie or an environmentalist; it’s about having a basic respect for the truth on a question of the utmost importance for the future of civilised society./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10448/width668/7m7bjg6h-1336459365.jpg"figcaptionOther side of the climate turd: morning commuters pass near the cooling towers of a coal-fired power plant in Shuozhou, Shanxi Province, China. span class="source"AAP/EPA/Qilai Shen/span/figcaption/figure/p pNow the MTC has joined the deniers’ parade. The play has plenty of sharp lines, to be sure, but the humour only sweetens the spoonfuls of poison. Like a performance by a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/oct/21/lord-monckton-sacha-baron-cohen"Lord Monckton/a, The Heretic is an evening of slippery falsehoods covered over with theatrical lines./p pIn its publicity the MTC writes that “the play questions what is important to us”. Well, it certainly is about the most important issue around. But the play’s “questioning” is not about why our politicians won’t provide leadership, why much of the public is so apathetic, or why the fossil fuel lobby has been so successful. It doesn’t ridicule the a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/i-can-change-your-mind-if-its-experts-youre-after-look-elsewhere-6558"conspiracy theories of Nick Minchin/a, parody the fantasies of Monckton or expose the threats to real climate scientists./p pNo, the question the MTC believes it must tackle is: why are scientists, including every science academy in the world, feeding us a pack of lies about global warming?/p pApparently, that’s what an avant-garde theatre company does these days. But by participating in this historical travesty everyone associated with it — the director, the programmers, the designers and the actors — will have to accept their little share of the blame for the world that’s coming./p pemClive Hamilton is currently an academic visitor in the philosophy department at the University of Oxford./em/p pemComments welcome below./em/ppemI have no conflicts of interest./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6871/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pAustralia knows how to provide public leadership in the complex coordination of public events. Just look at the a href="http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/Article/258464,la-traviata-sydney-harbour8217s-massive-floating-opera.aspx"recent staging/a of the opera La Traviata on Sydney Harbour. It was a one-off event that required building a massive stage over the water, with coordination between the NSW State Government, the International Foundation for Arts and Culture, and Opera Australia. It was all carried out efficiently and to perfection./p pBut when it comes to government coordinating programs for the building of necessary infrastructure, we go from the top of the class to the bottom. The a href="http://www.ret.gov.au/energy/clean/sfp/Pages/sfp.aspx"Solar Flagships program/a is the latest in a series of examples to illustrate this fundamental Australian weakness./p pIn December 2009 the Rudd government announced its $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program. This was, we were told, the dawn of a new era in serious commitment to large-scale solar in Australia. In the two-and-a-half years since then, not a cent has been spent on construction and not a clod of earth has been turned./p pThe two projects awarded the “prize” of government grants have not been able to close their financing. In February of this year the first project, involving concentrated PV, was re-opened for tenders. The other project, a href="http://solardawn.com.au/about/"Solar Dawn/a, involving concentrated solar power, was given an extension of six months to close financing and take up the offered subsidy from the federal government./p pTwo-and-a-half years of incompetence, waste and missed opportunities – that’s the sorry story of renewables in Australia./p pMeanwhile overseas, concentrated solar (CSP) goes from strength to strength. In Spain, the world’s first a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemasolar"commercial-scale CSP/a towers have been built. They have heat storage that enables them to generate electric power 24 hours a day. In the US, plans are steadily advancing for 250+ MW CSP stations in Nevada, Arizona and California. These will bring CSP to the point of competing directly with thermal power generated from burning coal./p pWhat then has been the problem in Australia – a land where solar energy is super-abundant?/p pIn a word, it has been a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/time-for-government-to-pick-a-renewable-energy-winner-6476"lack of political will/a. More to the point, it is lack of seriousness of purpose on the part of the government. They have been going through the motions without apparent commitment to the proposed outcome./p pThe Solar Flagships program was premised on the government contributing up to 33% of upfront construction costs to ease financing issues. This sounds impressive – but it ignores the reality that financing at this scale always requires a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a retail electricity company. Such an agreement (also known as an offtake commitment) provides a guaranteed level of demand for the power generated. The Solar Flagships tenders were submitted, and awarded, without the requirement for explicit PPAs. (The government’s tender document had a section for “offtake agreement” but this was advisory, not mandatory.) This was a design fault of massive proportions directly attributable to the federal department./p pThe result is that the selected projects have floundered. In retrospect, it is clear that the existing retail electric power suppliers in Australia (an oligopoly made up of AGL, Origin and TRUenergy, all of whom are committed to their existing fossil-fuelled power generation systems) never appeared to have any intention of providing PPAs to the Solar Flagships prospective producers in its first round. The take-home point is this: by not making the PPAs an essential part of the tenders, the Federal Government virtually colluded in this disastrous outcome./p pSurely a government department that believed in its Solar Flagships program would undertake the necessary background research to establish the importance of PPAs in financing such proposals. It would take steps to involve the power retailers in the process. Supply and demand – it’s as simple as that. A smart government – or at least one that was serious about achieving results – would make it clear that continued public support for electricity companies would depend on their cooperating with a “flagship” proposal to accept the power generated./p pThe latest step in this saga is more promising. The PV projects in the Solar Flagships program have been invited to resubmit revised tenders. Now they can be budgeted at much lower costs (due to the learning curve in PV a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/solar-will-force-coal-and-nuclear-out-of-the-energy-business-2557"bringing down costs/a) and PPAs will be at the core of the restructured proposals. Pacific Hydro, a party to the a href="http://www.moreesolarfarm.com.au/"Moree Solar Farms/a project, has secured a retail electricity distributor license of its own, and can provide a PPA with itself in its restructured tender./p pThe case for government leadership in introducing large-scale solar thermal power generation is as powerful as ever. It is as a low- or zero-carbon alternative to thermal power generation, and provides the basic infrastructure for the low-carbon economy that we all want – a href="http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/clean-energy-future/"including the government/a./p pThe steps required are simple enough. The government will need to select several large projects with proven technology for assistance. This assistance should be government guarantees needed to secure finance, or a tendering process that calls for consortia to provide a business plan and a PPA as a condition of their submission. Successful tenders should be announced every six months, with government support lapsing after six months if the project has not closed its financing. The whole program need cost no more than $1 to $2 billion per year – a level of subsidy much lower than existing subsidies targeted at a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/cutting-subsidies-to-fossil-fuels-could-help-australia-meet-its-financial-climate-commitments-4026"gas, oil and coal production/a./p pAfter five years operation, with regular addition of new projects, such a revitalised program would transform Australia from a solar power laggard to a world leader. We could have an energy economy that is well on the way to becoming zero-carbon in the power sector, as well as accelerating progress towards such a goal in the industrial and transport sectors./p pIf it were combined with a sensible strategy to create new manufacturing value chains to build CSP power plants and components, a revitalised Solar Flagships program would lay the foundations for a low-carbon economy and industrial system fit for the 21st century. Tender resubmission could start a new round of seriousness in building large-scale solar./p pCome on Martin, Greg and Penny – let’s get real in our support for a clean energy and low-carbon economy. The relaunched Solar Flagships program provides the opportunity to build an effective CSP and concentrated PV promotion program, with a focus on building an Australian export platform for low-carbon technology as much as on reducing carbon emissions. The exports should grow as the carbon emissions reduce. Nothing else is acceptable./ppemNo conflicts to disclose/em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6636/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pTrue innovation is rare in agriculture. Most farmers are willing to improve the way they work, but these improvements are typically small adjustments to established practice, rather than fundamental changes in direction./p pBut farmers throughout Australia have recently begun experimenting with a radical new solution to one of their biggest problems: attacks on livestock by wild predators, mainly dingoes, other wild dogs and foxes. This is the most significant threat faced by many sheep, goat and free-range poultry farmers, and is a major headache for cattle farmers./p pThe conventional response is to try to kill as many of the predators as possible, usually by distributing baits laced with a href="http://www.dpiw.tas.gov.au/inter,nsf/webpages/rpio-4zm7cx?open"1080 poison/a. This happens on an industrial scale over vast areas of Australia, but many farmers a href="http://www.abc.net.au/rural/sa/content/2011/12/s3397261.htm"are complaining/a that the predator problem is just getting worse./p pThe innovation is to use guardian animals, like dogs, alpacas or donkeys. Dogs are the most radical option, because farmers who use them have to stop spreading poison on their farms. The dogs belong to ancient breeds like the Maremma sheepdog that have been protecting livestock for thousands of years./p pfigure class="align-centre"img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/10124/width668/smyhhzvt-1335766230.jpg"figcaptionPuppies are raised alongside lambs, forging a pack relationship between the animals. The puppies grow to protect their adopted family. span class="source"Flickr/Charles Roffey/span/figcaption/figure/p pThey are prepared for their work by living with livestock from puppyhood, so that they bond to them rather than to people or other dogs. Because they go through their social development with livestock as their closest companions, they grow into adults who choose to live with “their” livestock and provide full-time care and protection. They do this using complex behaviour and independent decision-making. For example, they may bring the animals into yards to keep them safe during nights when packs of wild dogs invade the farm, and at other times keep watch over injured or distressed animals until the farmer can find and help them./p pFor these reasons, they provide a more complete solution than other guardian animals like alpacas, which are effective only because they are aggressive to predators and provide indirect protection for sheep or goats when placed in the same paddocks with them./p pFor the last three years, my PhD student Linda van Bommel and I have a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/WR11135.htm"been researching/a the use of guardian dogs in Australian livestock industries. Our first question was: do they actually work? After interviewing more than a hundred livestock producers who use guardian dogs and visiting a series of farms for in-depth study, we found the answer. They work superbly./p pAlmost all farmers reported that predation dropped after they introduced guardian dogs, and in most cases it stopped completely. This was true even on very large properties of many thousands of hectares, with high dingo populations. Many farmers said that their dogs made the difference between viability and ruin for their businesses. We did a benefit-cost analysis showing that the dogs paid back their purchase and maintenance costs within a year or two./p pSo, the figures show that using guardian dogs is a good business decision for Australian farmers with a predator problem. The stories that individual farmers tell of their success make that obvious. But in my own conversations with farmers who use guardian dogs, I notice something else about them, something quite unusual. They are happy. Not just pleased that they have one less problem on the farm; they seem more deeply satisfied with farming life in general./p pI suspect the reason for this is that farmers love working with animals, and guardian dogs provide them with a way to use animals to solve one of their biggest problems. This gives deeper satisfaction than crude technical fixes like poison could do, even if they worked./p pThere are lots of good things to say about this particular innovation. Because it reduces use of poison, it is clean and green. It means less animal suffering, so it is ethical. And once guardian dogs are established on a farm, they continue to work with minimal input, so it is sustainable. But maybe its most important value is that it enriches the connectedness of people and animals, and improves the lives of both./p pemIf you would like to know more, you can download a a href="http://www.feral.org.au/guardian-dogs/"free guide/a to using guardian dogs, written by Linda van Bommel./em/ppemChristopher Johnson receives funding from The Hermon Slade Foundation./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6754/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/

pThe inversion of reality and morality has been a long-standing attribute of the climate “debate,” which reached a new watershed low a few days ago with the latest travesty from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago “think” tank./p pHeartland a href="http://climateconference.heartland.org/our-billboards/"posted on its website/a that “the people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”/p pMurderers, tyrants, and madmen./p pIn support of this assertion, Heartland a href="http://www.readfearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/heartland_unabomber.jpg"launched a billboard/a that featured Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, accompanied by the slogan “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Future billboards were to show Charles Manson, a mass murderer, Fidel Castro, a tyrant, and “other global warming alarmists” including Osama bin Laden./p pMurderers, tyrants, madmen, and terrorists./p pAll of them global warming “alarmists”./p pOutside this inverted universe, in a land called reality, the laws of physics that underlie the fact that the globe is warming are accepted by the Vatican’s Academy of Science; the UK Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific body; the National Academies of Science of all G8 countries; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and virtually every other scientific organisation in the world. The consensus is supported by more than 90% of all experts and by all but a tiny handful of peer-reviewed scientific papers./p pThe chimerical construction of an ideologically-driven topsy-turvy reality by Heartland and its Australian equivalent, a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/think-tanks-talking-points-deepen-the-divide-over-climate-change-5119"the IPA/a, is neither new nor surprising. And it is no more bizarre than the hallucination of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr Strangelove”, that a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcHNYenN7OY"fluoridation was a Soviet plot/a to poison American drinking water./p pIt is also no different from the inverted universe of the tobacco industry, which in an a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/vob81f00"internal memo/a described medical research as “a vertically integrated, highly concentrated, oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence.” No wonder Heartland and IPA are also long-standing a href="http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/523/smokescreen-%27passive-smoking%27-and-public-policy"champions of the tobacco industry/a./p pThe novelty of Heartland’s billboard campaign is that it signals the public convergence between ideologically motivated denial of science and the more robustly sociopathic fringe groups that believe, among other psychological nuggets, that Prince Phillip runs the world’s drug trade and is culling us for mass slaughter (or a href="http://cecaust.com.au/pubs/pdfs/flyer/20120116_A4_Anglicans_with_Satan.pdf"something like that/a)./p pThose fringe types recently waved a a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWVFHJUYVcE"noose/a at a visiting climate scientist in Melbourne, perhaps pre-emptively volunteering as Heartland’s henchmen to execute all those murderers and tyrants who accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that the climate is changing due to human influence./p pWestern history’s only precedent for such confluence between vested interests, extremist ideology, and outright abdication of reality is the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s./p pIt now appears that the Heartland billboard may have been a watershed event./p pPublic outcry has forced Heartland to withdraw the Unabomber billboard. However, the tobacco tank a href="http://climateconference.heartland.org/our-billboards/"refused to apologise/a, and its website is still referring to those who accept the geophysical reality of the planet as “murderers, tyrants, and madmen"./p pMicrosoft described the billboard as “a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoftupblog/archive/2012/05/04/microsoft-s-commitment-to-addressing-climate-change.aspx"inflammatory and distasteful/a” and reaffirmed its commitment to climate action. Diageo, one of the world’s largest drink makers, has a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/06/diageo-end-funding-heartland-institute"terminated funding/a for Heartland, stating that it “vigorously opposes climate skepticism.”/p pWhat will be next?/p pFor now, Heartland still has a href="http://pinterest.com/climatebrad/heartland-institute-sponsors/"some sponsors/a. It remains to be seen when they, too, will withdraw from this list of infamy. What is clear is that Heartland is imploding and that its tax-exempt status as a “charity” may be in jeopardy — labeling the world’s scientists “murders, tyrants, and madmen” is unlikely to qualify as charity work./p pWhat will become of climate denial?/p pMuch is known about what passes for cognition among those who deny overwhelming scientific evidence by resorting to conspiracy theories and scurrilous accusations against actual scientists./p pThe overwhelming tenor of this psychological knowledge is that, by definition, such denial will remain impervious to evidence as it is a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/why-do-people-reject-science-heres-why-4050"based on ideology/a and frantic defence of worldviews rather than the rational scepticism of actual science./p pAs the evidence for climate change continues to pile up, and as the frequency of severe weather events a href="http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyNormalization.html"continues to sky-rocket/a, we can therefore be fairly certain that climate denial will take ever more scurrilous forms./p pThat much is certain, but given that even the conservative American commentator Andrew Sullivan a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/the-right-and-the-climate-a-new-low.html"has described/a the current American Right as “close to insane as well as depraved” over the Heartland billboard, exact predictions of this forthcoming maelstrom must elude rational grasp at the moment./ppemStephan Lewandowsky receives funding from public organizations (primarily the Australian Research Council) to conduct research in the public interest./em/pimg src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/6888/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/