Michael Green

Writer and producer

Billions and billions

In Blog on

I’M on a winter search for the sun, a few weeks of warmth to help me through to spring. With my friend Roger, I set off north on a drizzly Friday afternoon. We drove to Tocumwal, on the Murray River, and camped in state forest on the Victorian side.

Roger has bad knees, so he can’t walk much. But what he lacks in mobility, he makes up for in curiosity. That’s why we bumped all the way to the end of the muddy track in the dark before deciding on a camp spot: he wanted to see what was round the next corner. I took the wheel next morning, windscreen still foggy, my attention on the conversation, and promptly got us bogged. We got bogged a second time that day, driving off-road to look at an interesting house we’d glimpsed from the freeway.

Our drive to Brisbane, on the Newell Highway – mostly – continued in this fashion: detours, pauses, slow circumnavigations of every town and back again. Ooh, look at that old building! Maps. More maps. A lazy morning spent on the sloping balcony at the Imperial Hotel in Coonabarabran. Fried food. Bains-marie. We got to Brisbane in five days.

Along the way, I finally began to learn about stars. (Here’s Leunig’s take, for the election.)

I’d never before understood the movement of the night sky. I like to look for the Southern Cross, but I’ve never been sure where it would be, or why. I remember reading a picture book called My Place in Space over and over again, and understanding the smallness of Earth had a profound effect on me. But on the whole, I didn’t pay much attention to what was overhead, besides special occasions – school camps, summer holidays at the beach, or travelling here and there.

I’m only partly to blame. Growing up in the suburbs and then living in the city, stars are the exception, not the rule. When Galileo was stargazing on a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way was bright enough to cast a shadow. It still is – but not where people are, not where lights crowd out the cosmos.

The Newell Highway is an observatory tour, of sorts. It passes the Dish, at Parkes; the big telescope near Coonabarabran and the radio telescope compact array near Narrabri.

We bypassed the Dish, but visited the second two. And in the evenings, when we stopped for camp, Roger looked up. He explained how to find south using the Southern Cross and its pointers, talked about the varying expansion rate of the universe, and sung the galaxy song from Monty Python. He also sung the praises of Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer, whose Cosmos television series he’d watched as a young man. “There have been others since with better graphics, but none with better politics,” Roger said.

At Roma, in western Queensland, Rog turned north for Carnarvon Gorge and eventually, Cairns. I hitched further west, to Charleville.

There’s a tourist site on the edge of town called the Cosmos Centre. I think it’s the best attraction I’ve visited. And there, I found the sun – but not in the way I’d bargained for.

I saw it through a telescope. I was in a group and each of us, in turn, peered, paused, and gasped. A rough looking man wearing tracksuit pants and thongs limped up and put his eye to the telescope. “I see it,” he said. “Oh, wow.”

Through the filter, the sun appeared molten red. I saw dark sunspots, only pinpricks on the lens but larger than Earth in reality; and huge solar flares on its edge, like wisps in the wind.

(The Sun: a photo on my phone through the eyepiece of the telescope – it’s nothing like what I saw, but you get the idea.)

I returned to the Cosmos Centre in the night time too, and saw Saturn and its rings through a telescope, and a globular cluster – stars as bright and close as a field of flowers – and the Swan Nebula, a great dust cloud from which stars are born. The guide pointed out a puff of white in the sky, the Small Magellenic Cloud, and suddenly I could see another galaxy 200,000 light years away with my naked eyes.

It is several days ago now, but it still feels like revelation.

The final episode in Sagan’s Cosmos was called ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ He despaired that it might be inevitable for technological civilizations to self-destruct. For humanity, he was alarmed about nuclear war, and later, about the hole in the ozone layer and about the greenhouse effect. He died in 1996.

But he did have hope: “A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet,” he said.

“One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the Earth, finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.”

Shouting from the rooftops

In Greener Homes on

One million Australian households now produce solar electricity

IN March 2012, Sian Dart had solar panels installed on her roof in Footscray. But it was late May before the system was finally connected to the grid. In the meantime, she spent hours chasing paperwork between the installer, the electricity distributor and the retailer.

It took another four months before the last mix-up was resolved. “It was very frustrating, and I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken if we hadn’t followed up so doggedly,” she says.

Earlier this year, the 1 millionth Australian household – about one in nine across the country – installed solar photovoltaic panels. There are half a million with solar hot water services too.

The process doesn’t always go as expected, for reasons both practical and political: rebates and feed-in tariffs have been in flux in every state. But now there are so many systems on roofs, solar homeowners are gaining a stronger public voice.


Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Victoria, the electorate with the most solar households is Lalor, held by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, with just over 10,000 homes out of 80,000. Other solar strongholds include regional seats McEwen, Indi and McMillan. Altogether, Victorian homeowners have invested about $1.3 billion in solar electricity.

Those statistics have been gathered by advocacy group 100% Renewable Energy, which has prepared “solar scorecards” rating each member of parliament before the federal election. The organisation has also started Solar Citizens, a community project to transform the growing people-power into pressure for solar-friendly policies.

“As individual consumers, we’re isolated and relatively powerless compared to big energy companies who have enormous influence over governments,” says Geoff Evans, from Solar Citizens.

“We want to unite solar households, and people who like solar, to call on decision-makers to grow this technology that enables people to save money and produce clean energy.”

Dr Evans argues solar electricity is unfairly blamed for increasing power prices, and that solar owners must not be lumped with high fixed connection fees.

The Productivity Commission’s recent report on the electricity network, released in late June, supports his claim about price rises. It attributed most of the jump in bills in recent years to “spiralling network costs”, caused in part by poor regulation of the industry.

Regulators and utilities here have so far resisted the shift to distributed power generation, but in New Zealand there are signs of change. Vector, the electricity distributor for Auckland and surrounds, has begun a pilot programme offering a 3-kilowatt solar panel system together with battery storage. It costs $2000 up front, with a monthly fee of $70 for 12 years.

For an average household, that equates to about the same or less cost than normal bills. Participants remain connected to the grid, but the battery storage will help reduce the evening peak demand on the network.

In Footscray, with her panels in place, Ms Dart’s electricity bills have fallen by more than two-thirds. Unexpectedly, generating her own power has also made her more “militant” about avoiding unnecessary waste.

“Since we got the glitches sorted, it’s been drama-free – they’re sitting there doing their job,” she says. “If it’s sunny during the day, I feel good knowing we’re making a few dollars.”

To help avoid the trouble she had, you can prepare yourself with the Clean Energy Council’s guide to buying household solar panels, which includes a step-by-step installation checklist.

Read this article at The Age online

Seams of discontent

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Farmers, teachers and retirees are fighting controversial gas exploration plans in South Gippsland.

ON a rainy Saturday morning in early June, three-dozen men and women, nearly all middle-aged and wearing sensible shoes, sit in the council chambers at Leongatha, learning how to be activists. “The battle lines are drawn at Seaspray,” says Wendy, from Poowong, a dairy town in South Gippsland. “Something will happen, and we need to know how to conduct ourselves.”

Julie Boulton, a dairy farmer at Seaspray, a tiny town on Ninety-Mile Beach, explains that she’d been involved in a flash blockade a fortnight earlier, confronting the gas company Lakes Oil. “It was scary,” she says. “I want to learn heaps today and take it back to my community.”

Participants have arrived from all over Gippsland. Farmers, teachers, doctors and retirees, there to learn the basics of non-violent, direct action protesting. They hear about all manner of civil disobedience – blockading, locking-on, sitting-in – techniques employed successfully by residents in NSW’s northern rivers, where two coal seam gas companies recently suspended their operations.

South Gippsland is blanketed with more than a dozen licences for unconventional gas exploration – which uses controversial techniques to access hard-to-extract resources. For now, nothing is happening. In August 2012, the state government announced a moratorium on coal seam gas exploration and on the drilling method known as fracking, in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground at great pressure to fracture coal or rock, and release gas.

Even so, people are worried, fearful about risks to water supplies and local health, as well the price and productivity of their land. Poowong has declared itself “coal and coal seam gas free” and six other towns are likely to do the same before the year is out. The South Gippsland Landcare Network – which comprises 18 smaller groups – has publicly opposed the industry. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve never been against anything their life and they’re willing to go to jail over this,” says Mark Walters, the network’s vice president.

The training session in Leongatha is coordinated by the Lock the Gate Alliance and Quit Coal, a Melbourne group affiliated with Friends of the Earth. Julie Boulton listens intently, anxiously twirling her ponytail. For the last three months, she has been leading the campaign in Seaspray. When the facilitator from Quit Coal warns the Gippslanders that the police will probably keep track of them – as “activists and trouble-makers” – Julie turns to her daughter, who is a teacher, wide-eyed.

Ray, from the Strzelecki Ranges, has no such concerns: “If we stop ’em at Seaspray, we’ll stop ’em all over Victoria!”

Lakes Oil had been preparing to frack a well to the west of Seaspray, on land adjoining the Boultons’ dairy farm, in October 2012. The company wants to exploit an unconventional gas resource known as tight gas – which is held in sandstone, much deeper below ground than the coal seams – but the moratorium scuppered its plans.

Local angst has not abated. Over summer, Seaspray Primary School refused a cash donation from the company. In May, the board members – including former Liberal Party leader Alexander Downer and outspoken climate change denier Ian Plimer – visited the site to watch the flaring of a well, but were confronted with protestors instead.

Rob Annells, the CEO, is undeterred. He says he understands locals are worried, but believes their concerns are based on misinformation. “Wells all over the world are always drilled through water tables. Providing the regulations are good and adhered to, there’s no danger.”

“There is some disruption to the farmland at the time of drilling and fracking, but once it’s in place and the land is restored, you can hardly see where we’ve been.”

Annells is urging the government to lift the moratorium. He says the company could re-commence testing within six months, and if all goes according to plan, begin production within two or three years.

In late May, the Napthine government released its response to an inquiry into mineral exploration in Victoria. Its two-dozen recommendations are largely designed to secure resources, speed up approvals and reduce costs for miners.

The day before the meeting at Leongatha, energy ministers from around the country agreed on regulatory guidelines for the coal seam gas industry. In Gippsland, there’s growing apprehension that the moratorium will soon be lifted.

Ursula Alquier, from Warragul, is a coordinator with the Lock the Gate Alliance. She says the Minister for Energy and Resources, Nick Kotsiras, has refused to answer calls from Gippsland residents. “The main reason people are frustrated is because they’re being totally ignored,” she says.

Kotsiras, however, insists there will be “proper and thorough community consultation” before any decision is made about the moratorium. He says his department has begun identifying the changes necessary for Victorian rules to match the new national standards for coal seam gas, but it has no plans to assess tight gas.

Meanwhile, the federal government has funded new research, including a bioregional assessment of the Gippsland basin and a study of the chemicals used in fracking, but it will be about two years before they’re complete.  

Kotsiras says he will pay close attention to the science, but won’t promise to wait for those studies before deciding. The ban on fracking and coal seam gas is likely to remain in place until the end of the year. An announcement about community consultation is expected within weeks.

Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Peter Ryan is the member for South Gippsland. He maintains the government won’t “abandon those rolling green hills”.

“We are not going to risk our aquifers, or put farming in jeopardy – let alone our liveability – for the fact we may or may not have this resource underneath us,” he says. “This will be done very appropriately and in a timely manner.”

North east of Seaspray, Gregor McNaughton runs sheep on one of the largest farms in the area. He’s familiar with miners: they’ve been drilling on his property since the early 1980s and pipelines from Esso’s offshore oil and gas fields pass beside his paddocks.

For the last decade, he has received rent for ten gas wells on his land, which are now owned by a joint venture between Ignite Energy Resources and Exxon Mobil. As well as the income, he’s enticed by the prospect of new irrigation water, which would be created by the extraction process, should the companies go into production.

“We’ve never had any problems with mining companies here,” he says, as we bump over his paddocks towards the wells. “I’d be dead against them drilling on a small farm or close to town, but on broadacres like ours, I’ve got no objection. They’ve been very kind and they’ve kept up with their commitments.”

The wells haven’t yet produced anything. There’s a strong chance they never will, because Victoria’s resources are far from proven. Over the next two years, Ignite and Exxon plan to drill seven new wells in the area, continuing the search for coal seam gas.

Rick Wilkinson, from the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, expects that onshore gas production here, from “whatever the rock – shale, coal or sandstone”, won’t occur for “another five to ten years at the earliest”.

All of Gippsland’s coal is brown. Wilkinson is not aware of brown coal seam gas having been produced anywhere in the world. “It would be particularly difficult and quite surprising if it actually comes to fruition,” he says.

Even if the gas flows, water may not. Most of the brown coal in Gippsland is subject to a groundwater cap, managed by Southern Rural Water. Producing gas is a thirsty business, and as it stands, miners will be forced to buy water rights from an existing user.

But the industry argues that exploiting unconventional gas is necessary to avoid shortages in coming years. Exxon Mobil spokesperson Chris Welberry says conventional gas fields in Bass Strait will diminish by mid next decade.

Critics of the industry, such as Mark Ogge, from the Australia Institute, say that any pressure on supply isn’t due to local demand, but rather, the lure of exporting gas to Asia at higher prices. “No one would consider drilling for gas in Seaspray if we weren’t about to begin exporting liquefied natural gas.”

Given our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he argues, it makes more sense to phase out gas in favour of renewable energy.

The Climate Commission last month released a report stating that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. “Why burn gas when renewable energy has no emissions, is often cheaper and getting even cheaper just as gas prices are about to skyrocket?” Ogge says.

At 66 years old, Gregor McNaughton remains a keen tennis player. He noticed recently that friends from the tennis club in Seaspray have put up Lock the Gate signs. The yellow triangles are appearing on more and more properties, bearing this warning: “Entry to this property is prohibited to coal and gas companies”.

“Something like this, it splits towns,” McNaughton laments. “People need to get educated about the facts.” But then again, he admits, others would say the same about him.

And whose facts, anyway? Last month, the Australian Water Association hosted a capital city tour on unconventional gas, featuring Dr Ian Duncan, a geologist from the University of Texas. In Melbourne, he told regulators and industry attendees that in the USA, where there are hundreds of thousands of shale gas wells, there was almost no evidence of adverse effects on groundwater or human health. The risks associated with coal seam gas, he suggested, were even fewer.

Wilkinson, from the petroleum association, ascribes worries about safety to “fear of the unknown”. “If half the so-called facts I’ve seen flying around were true, I would be worried about it as well,” he says.

But in a well-regarded report released last October, Dr John Williams, the former chief of CSIRO’s land and water division, concluded that the risks to water systems, agricultural land use and biodiversity were serious. Our piecemeal approach to regulation is leading us towards “degraded and collapsing landscapes”, he wrote.

Similarly, the National Water Commission has warned that coal seam gas poses significant risks to surface and groundwater systems. Recently, the commission’s chair, Karlene Maywald, said that while regulators had begun playing catch up on the science of coal seam gas, they were neglecting to prepare for tight gas.

In Queensland there are over 4500 coal seam gas wells – projected to increase 40,000 within two decades – which now provide a third of the gas used in eastern Australia.

Dr Gavin Mudd, a senior lecturer from Monash University’s engineering department, has been speaking about the risks at community meetings across Gippsland.

He says projects in Queensland have been approved without adequate background studies. “It’s absolute blindness to pretend there have been no impacts so far,” he says. “The problem is that evidence is often anecdotal, because the industry has been developed and regulated on the belief that there won’t be any impacts – so why waste money on monitoring?”

Down a dirt road out of town, Julie Boulton is showing me the spot where the locals blockaded the Lakes Oil board members, when a four-wheel drive comes the other way.

Bob Thompson, liaison officer for Lakes Oil, is taking a departmental inspector on a tour of the wells. “What’s your concern?” Bob asks, tersely.

“I’m concerned about our groundwater,” Julie replies quickly. “I’m concerned you’ll take a risk and damage our aquifer and we won’t be able to farm and live here anymore.”

“We don’t touch the aquifer,” Bob says. “There’s steel casing and concrete on the well.”

“But how long will that last?”

Bob brushes it off. He turns away and complains to the government man that she won’t believe him.

Afterwards, at her house, Julie and her husband David say Bob was right about one thing: “We don’t trust them. It’s too risky.”

On their table they have the results of a door-to-door survey conducted by local volunteers. All but a handful of residents agreed; they’ll to fight to keep Seaspray “gasfield free”.

GAS IN GIPPSLAND

Coal seam gas: Methane trapped in coal deposits.

Tight gas: Methane held deep underground in hard, impermeable rock, sandstone or limestone.

Fracking: A drilling technique used to extract gas by injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to fracture coal or rock. Fracking is always used to produce tight gas, but only sometimes for coal seam gas.

Read this article at The Age online

Bill McKibben

In Environment, Social justice on

Interview published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

Writer and activist Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change. Now he’s piloting the fastest growing social movement in the world: the campaign to sell out of fossil fuels. This is how he explains it:

IN the mid-1980s I was reading the early science about global warming and thinking about it. Then came the ungodly hot summer of 1988, among the worst in North American history to that date. Crops withered, barge traffic on the Mississippi ground to a halt. It wasn’t as bad as 2012, but at the time it seemed horrific. Suddenly the science felt very real.

The next year I published my first book, The End of Nature. In part, it was the first book-length piece of reporting about climate change, but it was also part philosophical essay about its meaning. I was interested in the way that suddenly no place on Earth was unaffected by human presence – that’s what the title meant. My dominant emotion was sadness, not fear. Over time I’ve come to have more practical reasons for working to slow climate change, but that sadness lingers.

For me, a new line of thinking opened up last year once I saw the numbers put out by an organisation called Carbon Tracker. I’ve followed this all closely, but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of the story was written. That unless we somehow change it, there is no room for speculation or wishful thinking. The fossil fuel industry has five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn.

Once you understand that, you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.

The other side is that – at least in American politics – the same companies whose business plan guarantees that the planet will tank are also the ones who are most efficient at corrupting our political system. They give the most money in campaign donations and spend the most money lobbying and advertising. They are the reason we never get anything changed.

So it seemed to me it was high time we went on offense against this industry, instead of forever playing defence.

In November we launched the Go Fossil Free campaign with a tour of the US, calling for universities to sell their shares in fossil fuels. We started the night after the presidential election. We sold out big concert halls every night, all across the country. That was exciting, but the most exciting thing was helping midwife an explosive movement. When we started there were a handful of campuses thinking about it, and now, there are more than 300.

So far six colleges have divested, but it’s early days. It’s actually happening faster than we thought. The City of Seattle divested its funds too. A number of religious denominations are thinking about it.

Divestment in this country has a real history – it’s a tool we use every once in a while. Most of the time when you have a problem with a business, it makes more sense to pass a shareholder resolution, hold a boycott, or run a petition, because it’s something the company can easily fix. If we’re mad at Apple for paying low wages to Chinese workers it’s not because we hate iPhones. But in this case, it’s not like there’s a flaw in the business plan; the flaw is the business plan.

But we’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon – a group of colleges selling their stock is not going to do that. We’re trying to take away their social licence, trying to reduce their power to dominate events, trying to make people understand that these guys are now outlaws against the laws of physics.

These are hard fights. It took Harvard seven or eight years before they partially divested during the campaign against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. It won’t happen easily. All these students know that. But they also know this is their future.

One of the reasons that universities are such a powerful place is that it makes little sense to pay for people’s education with investments in companies that guarantee they won’t have a planet to carry out that education on.

The same goes for retirement funds. Unless your goal for retirement is to work in endless emergency response to fires and floods, you can make wiser choices about where to put your money.

The movement is getting bigger and it’s spreading around the world. There’s something on our side: public perception that climate change is real has shot through the roof.

In the US, more than three-quarters of us are worried about global warming. It’s hard to get three-quarters of Americans to agree on anything – half of America thinks Elvis is still alive. It demonstrates that there’s a limit to how much money the fossil fuel industry can spend and how much damage Rupert Murdoch can do. At a certain point, who are you going to believe: Fox News or your own lying eyes?

If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. In January, you guys broke every temperature record, day after day.

I’m visiting in June, listening to people talk about their experiences with the changing climate and showing the basic math that makes our predicament so difficult. If there’s one lesson I’ll try to draw, it’s this: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Literally. It’s time to stop digging up new coal deposits.

Read these related articles: Bursting the carbon bubble and Unburnable carbon

Kulin calendar

In Greener Homes on

Budding wattles and bellowing koalas reveal the change in the weather

BY our upside-down European calendar, spring starts in September. But look carefully at your backyard or street, and you’ll see changes before then.

In Victoria, keep your eyes open for the flowering of silver wattles. The bright yellow flowers, which usually bloom in August, mark the coming of Guling, or Orchid season.

“We’re nearly there,” says John Patten, from Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at the Melbourne Museum. “We’ve already come through the highest rainfall, but we’re in the lowest temperatures.”

Mr Patten is showing me a display in the museum’s forest enclosure, which describes seven different seasons understood by the Kulin people – the five Aboriginal nations in the area we know as Melbourne and central Victoria.

The Kulin calendar, like all Aboriginal seasonal knowledge, is defined by the interactions of plants, animals and weather, as well as the length of the days and the movement of the stars.

The cold, wet time of year – Waring or Wombat season – lasts from April until July. Days are short and nights long, and wombats emerge to bask and graze when it’s sunny.

Next, around August, Orchid season lasts only a month. Wattles bloom, orchids flower, and at night, male koalas bellow and the caterpillars of the common brown butterfly feed on grass. Then, in September and October, Poorneet or Tadpole season arrives, in which days and nights are of equal length and the pied currawongs call loudly and often.


Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Mr Patten is a Yorta Yorta (northeast Victoria) and Bundjalung (northern New South Wales) man. He says it’s important to recognise that the traditional seasons vary greatly between places.

“For example, non-Indigenous audiences understand that we have wet and dry seasons in the Top End, but some groups up there identify with a calendar of six or even 12 different seasons.”

The Kulin calendar at the museum is a modern interpretation, pieced together by Koori people and academics. “The records for the seasons in Victoria are incomplete. We have records that suggest there were five, six or seven seasons. It was in flux, because people were reacting to what was happening around them,” he says.

As well as yearly cycles, the Kulin people observed a regular fire season, which occurred every seven years on average, and a flood season, every 28 years.

Also in the museum’s forest enclosure, just a few metres from the exhibit on the Kulin seasons, stands the chimney of a homestead burned down in the Black Saturday bushfires. Traditional knowledge helps us understand and stay prepared for natural disasters, Mr Patten says, noting that many of our cities and towns have been built on flood plains or in bushfire zones. “A lot of people don’t appreciate the complexity in the way this continent works.”

The science of the timing of natural cycles is called phenology. As temperatures rise and weather patterns shift due to climate change, these cycles are moving.

In 2010, a study showed that a one-degree increase in Melbourne’s temperature had led to the common brown butterfly emerging from its cocoon ten days earlier than it did mid last-century. That’s significant because mismatches with other species could have cascading effects in the ecosystem.

Citizens can help scientists understand what’s happening by taking part in ClimateWatch, as website where participants monitor and record the behaviour of common species of birds, plants and insects.

Read this article at The Age online