Michael Green

Journalist, producer and oral historian

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

Fields of dreams

In Community development on

They’ve started dirty wars, inspired beat poets, ruined lives and eased pain. Poppies are the planet’s ‘most dangerous plant’ and they’re grown in Australia’s smallest state.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

OUT the back of Campbell Town, across the railway tracks, down a gravel lane – somewhere in Tasmania’s golden triangle – the Lyne family are preparing their fields for a covert crop. Shh! On the other side of town, off the highway and over a hill, the youngest son, Angus, has been ploughing another paddock. The family recently bought this extra land so they can grow even more of the state’s most lucrative, secretive harvest.

They’re growing opium poppies. I’m a witness.

Lyne is 28 years old; a handsome, wholesome, 6-foot-5-inch, “very uncoordinated reserve ruckman” and 8th generation farmer. His father, Crosby, grows poppies, and so too does his brother, Sam. We’re sitting in the front of his ute, looking out over the dry midland valley to the green hills beyond.

“There are probably twenty families in the area that could tell you the same thing,” he says between bites of his sandwich, utterly bewildered by my interest.

No – it isn’t really a secret. But opium poppies are, however, Australia’s least known, most successful, least dispensable and, potentially, most dangerous industry.

Tasmanian farmers grow half the whole world’s supply of poppies for pain relief. Morphine, codeine, oxycodone, oxymorphone and more; if it hurts real bad, you’ll be treated with the Apple Isle’s best.


“For some reason people don’t like to be quoting this, but it’s the only Tasmanian industry in which we’re a significant world player,” says Rick Rockliff, from Tasmanian Alkaloids, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, and one of the major poppy processors on the island.

Rockliff was the company’s first employee in Tasmania, way back in 1975. His family grows poppies too, on the rich red soils at Sassafras, west of here, south of there, somewhere else in the golden triangle.

“It’s really been the salvation of Tasmanian agriculture,” he tells me, early one autumn morning. “It’s the only thing farmers can make a few dollars out of. Most of their income comes from poppies.” Rockliff is speaking with pride – this is the high point of our conversation. Otherwise, he is polite enough, but keeps his arms crossed and his sentences clipped.

Inspector Glenn Lathey doesn’t want to talk to me either. He’s from the Tasmania Police poppy squad, which guards against “diversion” of the crop. “It’s not something we talk about, for obvious reasons,” he says. “I’m not going to talk to you on the phone. You could be anyone.”

***

Humans have been using poppies since we began farming and maybe before – the seed pods have been unearthed at more than a dozen Neolithic sites, settlements from several thousand years BCE, way back in the New Stone Age. Later, the Sumerians cultivated it in Mesopotamia – modern day Iraq. They called it hul gil, the “joy plant”. The Egyptian goddess Isis gave opium to Ra, the sun-god, to cure his headache.

According to the opium poppy’s botanical name, Papaver somniferum, it’s the sleep-maker. Over centuries, it’s been used to treat everything from bad eyesight, coughs and sleeplessness, to asthma and diarrhoea, and by everyone from the Ancient Greeks and the Islamic Empires, to injured soldiers and beat poets.

The plant contains dozens of alkaloids – a kind of chemical compound that does profound things to the nervous system of humans and animals (other alkaloids include caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, strychnine, quinine and mescaline).

So far, scientists have deduced uses for only a handful of the poppy alkaloids, but as research continues, they’re likely to find more. Morphine was the first – it was isolated from opium gum in the early 19th century – and it takes its name from the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus.

But the plant has also caused nightmares, too many to comprehend.

Among the ethical abominations perpetrated by the British Empire, the Opium Wars rank particularly highly: at the time, one parliamentarian said there had never been “a war more unjust” or “more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace”. Having introduced the habit of smoking opium with tobacco to the Chinese, the British then fought wars to stop the Qing Empire from outlawing it. Twice in the mid-19th century, they attacked the Chinese coast to defend their right to sell large amounts of the drug into the country, and take out boatloads of tea in profit.

Shortly after, a British chemist named C.R. Alder Wright synthesised heroin from morphine. He was searching for an alternative that wasn’t addictive, but he failed very, very badly. This spring, 140 years later, Afghani farmers are likely to produce a record opium crop, which will find its way through traffickers and corrupt officials and onto the streets, in an illicit heroin trade bigger than three-quarters of the world’s economies.

***

On 29 January 1986, a small group gathered in working class Devonport, on the northern Tasmanian coast, wearing suits on a sunny morning. They unveiled a bronze plaque to a man – long since dead and from far, far away – named János Kabay.

In his speech, the Hungarian diplomat Pal Ipper expressed his official astonishment: “That here in Tasmania there are people who want to dedicate a memorial to a Hungarian from 20,000 kilometres and 50 years away is practically unbelievable,” he said.

The memorial was sponsored by the local poppy growers and processing companies. Without Kabay, there would be no poppies in Tasmania.

During the great depression, not long after his country was defeated and broken-up in World War I, Kabay worked speculatively and feverishly in Budszentmihaly, the small town where he was born. Trained as a pharmacist, he discovered a way to extract morphine from dried poppy capsules.

The original process for doing so – now used only in India – requires the production of opium, initially, by scoring the head of a green poppy and scraping the sap that seeps out.

Kabay’s method, however, bypasses the opium stage. Farmers leave the poppies in their fields until they dry on the stem. Then, once harvested, the “poppy straw” can be stacked and stored for months before processing. His insight allowed the creation of a commercial industry, one where the production could be more easily controlled and monitored.

In Devonport that sunny morning, Kabay’s son and daughter – who emigrated after he died and made Sydney their home – were listening as seven different speechmakers praised their father. Sir Edward Williams, from the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board, paid tribute: “Today we honour a great pioneer,” he said. “Here is a man who really made an industry.”

While he was alive Kabay did not receive so many accolades. Tormented by ill health, family disputes, money shortages and bureaucratic hurdles, he died young, in great pain, on 29 January 1936. In his final hours, he refused morphine.

***

“So what’s the process?” I ask Rohan Kile, casually. We are in the belly of the triangle, where it all began: a town called Latrobe, somewhere near Devonport. Kile is the crop-supply manager for pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smith Kline, and he’s leading me into a giant shed – about 70 metres long and 40 wide – which harbours a three-storey mound of dried poppy straw, ready for processing.

“For extracting alkaloid? I can’t really tell you that,” he replies, with an inscrutable grin. “As an industry we don’t advertise how we extract alkaloid out of plants. People do try different things.”

In the shed, we stay well back from the precarious poppy chaff cliff. It’s a monstrous pile, but it’s only the remains of the harvest; ten times this amount has gone through here in the last two months.

Kile’s job is to make sure exactly the right quantity is grown. Each autumn, he calculates the contracts with growers, specifying the acres they’ll cultivate come springtime.

It’s an uncommon industry: obsessively regulated and managed at every stage. Together with state and federal bureaucrats, the processors licence, register and monitor the exact amount produced. Prospective growers must pass a police check to qualify for a licence, which is administered by the Poppy Advisory and Control Board. When the plants are in flower, from late spring, the board’s inspectors roam the back roads and fields, searching for signs of tampering.

Their numbers are fed all the way to the top. “Globally, the United Nations keeps track of how much legal opiate material is available,” Kile explains (he too, must pass regular federal police checks). No more than a year’s supply is stockpiled.

The processors hire their own contractors – not the farmers – to sow the seed and do the harvesting. Kile supervises a dozen field officers, who counsel the growers week by week, if need be, until the year’s job is done. “They advise on everything from pre-planting and ground preparation right through to managing the crop and harvesting,” he says.

Kile was born in the year of Tasmania’s first commercial crop, 1971. Twenty years earlier, in the aftermath of World War II, the Allied countries were seeking a stable, secure source of poppies for morphine. The drug company Macfarlan Smith hired an agronomist called Stephen King to conduct trials in England. After several washouts, he continued the quest in the southern hemisphere, with experimental crops in South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales and New Zealand (Victoria said no). “On a couple of days Stephen had spare, he came to Tasmania to have a look around,” Kile says. “He decided he liked what he saw  – and the rest is history.”

King set up his headquarters in Latrobe, and began to grow. It’s grown ever since: the pain business is good business. As global population and incomes rise, so too does the demand for painkillers. The poor put up with it, or die – or both. But once you’ve got enough money, you’ll pay what it takes for blessed relief.

***

For decades, all over the country, young people have been leaving the land. Farms are growing bigger, and farming communities, smaller.

“Anyone who’s half-smart realises they could get more money elsewhere than the rural industry can afford to pay them,” Angus Lyne says. “They go to the mines.”

Not him, though. After several years travelling and farming in Australia and Europe, he returned home five years ago. “I wouldn’t do anything else. I feel very lucky to be a farmer,” he says. “It’s the whole package really, all the clichés: being your own boss and working outdoors.” He saw his opportunity in poppies.

Since then, the family has significantly increased the acreage they devote to the crop, and Lyne has begun share-farming to expand even further. He stewards a hefty harvest on other people’s land.

“Back in the drought I started doing that so there’d be enough work for all of us,” he says. “Now, with the way the industry is going, we’ll probably have to employ someone else here because we’ve got so much work on.”

They grow other crops too – barley, wheat and canola – but the return on poppies is much higher. Per hectare, he says, the margin is about five times that of wheat. On the Lynes’ land, poppies account for less than one-tenth of the territory, but half the farm’s income.

“They’re more intensive to manage. But the reward is there if you grow a really good crop,” he says.

Today hasn’t been Lyne’s best – he spent the morning dead-bored behind the wheel of the tractor, ploughing and talking on the phone to pass the time. It’ll be another three days before his digging is done. Now, he’s wolfed his sandwiches, and it’s time to get back on the machine.

“Is there anything else I should include?” I ask, searching for some intrigue to smuggle back across the border from the golden triangle, a good yarn gleaned from these taciturn Tasmanians. He’s silent, so I press again. “Got any curious stories?”

Only this: “If you eat them you’ll die.”

Food Know How

In Greener Homes on

A new scheme aims to get our food out of the bin

NEAR the pig pen at Collingwood Children’s Farm, there’s a compost pile 20 metres long and over a metre tall. At one end, the mound is cluttered with cabbage leaves and straw. By the time it reaches the other, it has transformed into rich, dark humus: the sign of prosperity for food growers.

“It’s all just billions of microbes eating and breeding,” explains Kat Lavers, chief composter with Cultivating Community, as steam rises from pile. “A good hot compost like this could be ready in a month.”

The compost windrow, together with two giant worm farms in the shade of nearby peppercorn trees, is a community compost hub. It’s the first of four to be built in the City of Yarra, as part of a new project called Food Know How.

The neighbourhood composting hubs are just one element of the scheme, which was launched in June. Together with Yarra council, Cultivating Community is seeking 500 local residents, 32 cafes and 3 offices to participate.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Right now, food waste comprises more than half the average household rubbish bin in the municipality. That means we’re all squandering good soil, food and money, from the residents through to the authorities. We’re paying to offload a useful resource to landfill, only for it to rot into methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

“We’re dooming all those nutrients and embodied water and energy to no man’s land, where we can’t recover them,” says Pete Huff, from Cultivating Community. “By learning some simple skills in our households and businesses we can cut the Yarra waste stream in half. It makes good financial and environmental sense and it makes good sense as citizens as well.”

He says the first skill is to avoid food wastage in the first place. The program’s website carries links to recipe ideas for leftovers and odds and ends.

If your salad greens often go slimy or your packets pass their use-by date, Mr Huff recommends making a meal plan and a shopping list to match it – after you check the pantry to see what’s already there. “They’re all simple things, but it’s about smart shopping, clever cooking and storing food correctly,” he says.

When it comes to unavoidable waste – the not-so-edible food scraps such as lemon peels, banana skins or eggshells – the answer is compost. Participants in the program will be subsidised to purchase a worm farm or composting system to suit their needs, and then helped to do it right with workshops and advice.

“Well-managed compost and worm systems don’t smell and they take up little room and time,” Mr Huff says. “We want these systems in people’s backyards, on balconies, or laneways. And if that’s not an option we’ll put them in their neighbourhood so they’re part of the fabric of the community.”

At the Collingwood Children’s Farm, volunteers will collect food scraps from cafes in the area, and pedal them to the compost hub on specially designed Trisled cargo trikes, which can lug up to 100 kilos at a time.

As well as the food scraps, Ms Lavers adds animal bedding and cardboard to the mix to provide a source of carbon. It’s a serious operation: to turn the pile, she pilots a bobcat.

“We see compost as a real asset, particularly in an urban environment where fertility can be an issue,” says Mr Huff.

Read this article at The Age online

Unburnable carbon

In Environment, Social justice on

This is an edited version of a talk I gave at the Wheeler Centre on June 6, 2013

AWAY from the glare and confusion on climate change, there is a deeper conversation going on. It is changing the way climate activists plan their campaigns, and it is changing conversations behind the doors where money talks.

Here is one example: on Tuesday, I went to a lunchtime meeting at Goldman Sachs, at 101 Collins Street, the swankiest office building in town.

In Rolling Stone, in 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs like this: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But, arguably, this meeting on Tuesday was an unusual one. It was organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change. There were about 100 people from the superannuation and fund management industry, in a big teleconference in Sydney and Melbourne, and they were there to talk to the American climate activist Bill McKibben.

Now McKibben, who is touring Australia this week, also writes for Rolling Stone. In one article last year he wrote this: “We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth.”

McKibben got arrested twice last year for his climate activism. The event went for nearly 2 hours – McKibben gave a short spiel, and then there was an extended discussion session with a panel of super fund managers and investment analysts. Why were they engaging with this guy?

Watch this video at the Wheeler Centre website

Before I get to why they’re all willing to be there, I want to offer one small update on our current climate projections.

Turn Down the Heat: World Bank report

Late last year the World Bank put out a report called ‘Turn Down the Heat’ report, which stated that even if all nations fulfill their pledges to reduce emissions, we’re still on track for 3.5 to 4˚C warming by the end of the century.

A 4˚C world means: “Extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” They concluded that there is no certainty that it’s possible for humanity to adapt to a 4˚C hotter world.

It’s a terrifying thought – put out by a very conservative public institution. It’s also hard to really comprehend what kind of changes that would involve, and what kind of suffering it would entail. But one thing it makes me think is that we need to do a better job of avoiding that situation.

Carbon budget: we’re blowing it

And that’s why I come back to that meeting at Goldman Sachs. The reason I was there and those finance types were there, is that a different way of thinking about the climate crisis has sharpened the debate. It’s the idea of a carbon budget. In 2009, scientists from the Potsdam Institute in Germany produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

Their paper says that to keep an 80 per cent chance of staying at 2 degrees or below, we can only release about one-fifth of the carbon dioxide in current proven fossil fuel reserves.

It’s worth noting that at the rate we’re going, we’ll have blown the budget by mid next decade. And of course, the fossil fuel industry is always searching for more.

Even for a 50-50 chance of going over 2 degrees, the report said, two-thirds of our coal, oil and gas must stay in the ground.

Subsequently, a British organisation called Carbon Tracker added to that analysis. They released some research saying that the reserves held by the world’s 200 largest listed coal, oil and gas companies alone is more than enough to exceed that threshold.

The moral case

Since the carbon budget idea has become more common, there have been two kinds of responses: the moral case and the business case. I’ll cover each one, and then the way they cross over, because that’s particularly unusual and relevant for us as citizens.

As I’ve mentioned, Bill McKibben is the person most associated with the moral case. Simply put, his argument goes like this: “if it’s wrong to wreck the planet, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage”.

Based on the unexpected popularity of his Rolling Stone article, he and others started a new campaign for calling for universities, churches, cities and pension funds to sell out of fossil fuel companies. It’s called Go Fossil Free, and it’s spread like wildfire across the USA. In just over six months there are already several hundred campaigns, and a dozen or so institutions have agreed to divest.

The argument isn’t so much that they’ll bankrupt the companies, but that they’ll undermine their social licence, and that open up room for regulation.

People are working on this moral divestment case here already. If you haven’t seen any yet, you can expect to. As with the US, it’s not only targeted at universities, but also churches and local councils, and for banks not to fund new fossil fuel projects.

They’ve had two wins so far: the NSW Synod of the Uniting Church has announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. And a couple of years ago, ANU students successfully campaigned for the university to sell stocks in a coal seam gas company called Metgasco. Those students are a cheeky bunch – they’re part of the national Lock the Campus campaign and they’ve since filed FOI requests for all the details of the university’s fossil fuel holdings. Now they’re moving onto the ACT government.

But most of all, the campaign here is aimed at superannuation funds.

There’s a campaign called the Vital Few – which is run by an organization chaired by former liberal leader John Hewson. It hasn’t had much success yet, but they say it’s early days. The Vital Few campaign says that across the super industry, about 55 per cent of funds are held in high carbon investments and only 2 per cent in low (although there’s no standard definition for what that means).

One plank of their campaign is a moral call to action for citizens: there’s no sense in greening your home if you’re investing in climate change all the while. You’ve got to change the way you invest.

All these campaigns have different approaches and different targets, but share a common thread – there’s a moral reason not to invest in fossil fuels, both for us as individuals and for our institutions.

The business case

But there’s another way to look at those numbers, and it’s this: “Holy heck, if four-fifths are going to stay in the ground, then someone is going to lose a lot of money.” Essentially, the argument is that investing in fossil fuels is risky, and you’ll want to sell down your stake, because if you don’t, at some point you’ll lose it.

In the case of listed companies, the value of their reserves is factored into their share price. Those reserves are assets on their books, and investors currently have an expectation that they will deliver an income stream in the future. And of course, it’s not just fossil fuels – all kinds of industries have a lot of assets tied up in the carbon economy.

Climate risk

This is one element of a broader set of risks that are described as “climate risk” – the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change.

The first, as I just mentioned, is the “carbon bubble” or the “unburnable carbon” scenario. It’s the prospect that we’ll get our act together to prevent emissions, and fossil fuels will lose value. That could be due to tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing or regulations, here, in China or elsewhere.

There are other kinds of climate risk too. For example, the risk that cheap clean technology will out-compete fossil fuels. Or, curiously, if you’re a long-term investor, there’s a risk in the possibility that others will switch away from fossil fuels.

Then there’s the mother of all climate risks: the physical impacts. At the lower end of the scale – which, as we’ve seen around the world already, is by no means low – perhaps it’s a flood that destroys infrastructure. But remember the World Bank’s scenario of a 4-degree hotter world: it’s safe to assume that a climate to which humanity can’t adapt is not consistent with steady returns for investors.

Reports on reports on reports

When I started researching this stuff, I was overwhelmed by the vast quantity of reports on it. The finance world is rife with warnings about it. Most of the words spilled have been about climate risk in relation to “asset owners”: pension funds, super funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds, such as the Future Fund. Among investors, they have a uniquely long-term perspective. In Australia the average super member has 20 years before they’ll retire.

Last year, the Asset Owner’s Disclosure Project – the organisation chaired by John Hewson, and which also runs the Vital Few campaign – released ratings of the way the funds are dealing climate risk. Australia had six of the top ten funds around the world (Local Government Super, CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper).

But there’s no cause for celebration. The report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”. The highest rating fund, Local Government Super, estimates that it has about 10 per cent of its money in low-carbon assets, and 45 per cent in high.

The head of sustainability for Local Government Super, Bill Harnett, was at that meeting at Goldman Sachs, and he said this: “There is an inescapable logic that there are more fossil fuels on balance sheets around the world than we will ever be able to realize in our investments. There is an inevitability. We don’t know when, but we know it will come.”

And yet, his fund’s portfolio is still a long way from investing in a way that is consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees.

Why isn’t there change?

At that meeting at Goldman Sachs, everyone in the room accepted the broad numbers that McKibben stated – that four-fifths must stay in the ground. I’m assured that all the big Australian superannuation funds accept that this risk exists, in a broad sense.

Much of the discussion was about how they don’t know how to evaluate it. A couple of large financial analysts have tried. In recent months, HSBC in London did some modelling that showed a deflating carbon bubble could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. Citi Research did a similar exercise for the Australian stock exchange and found that 14 per cent of value of the ASX200 is in coal, oil and gas, and related industries.

But the superannuation funds in the room say they don’t know how to incorporate those scenarios into their investment decisions.

Ian Wood from AMP Capital said there are two broad reasons. One is that conventional financial modelling gives greater weight to short term earnings. Future dollars are discounted, so if a coal project is making money now, then that matters more.

The other reason is the immense uncertainty about how those scenarios could play out. What will government policy be, here and around the world? If the carbon price spreads, what will it be? When and where will it be brought in? What will happen to technology? What will China do?

Here’s the upshot: for the time being, almost all of our superannuation funds are taking a position that that we won’t limit warming to 2 degrees. They’re betting that we’ll exceed the safe threshold for human civilisation. And they’re not just betting on the game, they’re playing it as well. Their investment policy helps shape that 4-degree world, and helps us on course for a world where they won’t get a good return on very many of their investments.

With a couple of minor exceptions, they’re all just sitting there, watching each other and saying they accept that it’s all true, but they can’t do anything about it.

Bad news and good news

I left the meeting with two conflicting thoughts. The 100 people there that day, they’re the ones in the whole industry who are the most engaged. And even they can’t find it in their modelling to take account of a risk they all acknowledge to be real. They’ll figure out a way at some stage, but it’s clear the change isn’t happening fast enough. Right now, the business case isn’t enough to convince super funds to change.

But there was something else. The really interesting thing about that meeting on Tuesday was this: McKibben was in the room. And the fact that he was in the room made the climate risk more significant for everyone there who was listening. The same goes for all of the campaigns, both the moral and business ones, the civic and corporate pressure.

As McKibben put it at Goldman Sachs: “For our purposes the fight is as good as the win.”

There’s a kind of vicious cycle in the way we’re investing at the moment – it reinforces the systems that cause climate change.

But the carbon bubble idea is so uncertain at the moment, and public policy is so uncertain, that the more people are talking about the carbon bubble, the more likelihood there is one.

So there’s a virtuous circle too. If these big institutions move their money, and if individuals badger their funds and their friends about it, then it becomes more of a reality for the people who are deciding how money is invested. It becomes more likely that governments will implement policy and regulations consistent with 2-degree warming.

Because of the nature of investment decisions, the tipping point isn’t the day when all governments sign off on a radical climate justice agreement. It’s the day when enough people think that significant action is possible. Or when they believe that China really is shifting away from coal. Or when they accept that the cost of solar panels has come down so fast that our centralised, fossil fuel energy system is going to change. Or when they get frightened that others are going to trade out first.

There is a deeper conversation occurring, and it is one that accepts the science, and one that includes both climate activists and market analysts. It has the potential to shift rapidly. It is happening – the only question is whether citizens can make sure it happens in time. 

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website

Read this related article: ‘Bursting the carbon bubble’

Energy use portals

In Greener Homes, The Age on

Quarterly bill shock could become a thing of the past – if you can pay attention instead.

WHEN a smart meter was installed at Tim Forcey’s house in Sandringham in March, he decided to turn the extra expense into information.

He signed onto the free ‘Energy Easy’ web-portal offered by electricity distributor United Energy.

Mr Forcey is a chemical engineer and a member of the Bayside Climate Change Action Group. With his family, he’d already made some changes – installing insulation, external awnings, double-glazing and solar panels, and switching halogen lights for LEDs, among other things.

But the portal helped the Forceys understand even more about their bill. “You can compare your electricity use hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month. And you can also compare your use against a neighbourhood average,” he explains.

Their usage in May – about 16 kilowatt-hours per day, for four people – was about average for their suburb. But in the details, they found motivation to do better. With the help of hourly consumption data, Mr Forcey twigged that he’d been running two modems day and night. He switched one off, and put the other on a timer.

The new information also gave him a reality check. While he’d been “hunting for watts here and there”, he figured out that the family’s spa accounts for half their energy use. “People with pools would find similar things,” he says. “Those luxury items use a lot of electricity.”

Smart meters will be installed in every Victorian household by the end of the year. Retailers are beginning to offer flexible pricing, where you can choose to pay different rates at different times of the day. Depending on your capacity to understand and alter your habits, it will prove an opportunity or a threat.

Dr David Byrne, from the University of Melbourne, says most of us don’t have a good idea of how much we electricity use.

“People tend to underestimate their own energy consumption, relative to others’,” he says. “But there’s significant error on both sides. There’s a decent number who overestimate as well.”

He expects our knowledge will improve, as better billing information becomes a matter of competition between retailers. “We’re going to be more informed about our bills – there’s going to be much less scope for bill shock,” he says.

So far, several electricity retailers and distributors have launched web portals, of differing quality. You can find more information and links on the state government’s Switch On website.

Together with his colleagues in the economics department, Dr Byrne has been studying the way householders use Billcap, an electricity information portal used by retailers Click Energy and Australian Power and Gas.

Drawing on smart meter data, Billcap allows customers to view their usage, set energy budgets, estimate bills and compare consumption with similar and efficient households. It can also offer tailored conservation tips, as well as incentives to help shift peaks in demand.

Dr Byrne says that the households who were offered the service reduced their daily usage by 3 per cent, on average.

Those customers who used the site regularly did even better. “If you’re actively looking at the information, we found a 7 per cent reduction in daily energy usage,” he says.

The researchers are working to identify exactly how the participants cut back their usage, and who engaged most. “We’re digging further into the data, but these estimates are consistent with what has been found internationally,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online