Kinglake residents came out of the fire and into a plan – it just wasn’t theirs.

LAST Sunday, over seventy people gathered in the renovated, rebuilt hall at Kinglake Central. David Engwicht, a placemaking expert, told the audience that the fire was an opportunity “to burn the triviality” from their lives. They could create community, relationships and “systemic resilience”, however they wanted.

It was the first week of a free, two-part event called Regenerating, sponsored by RMIT University, Australian National University and CSIRO.

The speakers – under the themes of people, place, prosperity and preparedness – covered an extraordinary range of disciplines, from firestorm physics and vulnerable ecosystems, to regional economies and social media.

The event was organised by Daryl Taylor, from the Kinglake Ranges Community Resilience Committee. He says a common thread emerged: the need for communities to take back control of decision-making. And that’s a lesson relevant for citizens elsewhere, with many towns and suburbs facing uncertain futures.

The latest report by the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather, stated that climate change is already increasing the intensity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts, storms and sea-level rise. “The southeast of Australia, including many of our largest population centres, stands out as being at increased risk,” it said.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Kinglake, Mr Engwicht said no one could be sure which challenges will come first. Planning only for specific threats can, counter-intuitively, make you more vulnerable to unexpected ones.

The second day of the event will be held on Sunday May 5. The speakers include historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, and psychiatrist Paul Valent, author of From Survival to Fulfillment.

Mr Taylor says that, in organising the event, the committee members were motivated by their experiences since the fires – especially the contradiction between locals’ willingness and capacity to act, and the stifling nature of the assistance they received.

“A disaster is a tragedy, but also an opportunity to regenerate, to rethink and redesign. We lost unique opportunities because state government, corporations and NGOs had pre-determined agendas and one-size-fits-all strategies,” he says. “‘Engagement’ was too often about engaging with someone else’s prefigured plan.

“Our communities were incredibly creative after the fires. We self-organised to meet our fundamental human and social needs – often without external help, and by flying under the radar. But as we became exhausted, it became difficult to act outside the government matrix.

“People don’t really need welfare and command-and-control directives. They need empowerment. They don’t really need donated undies and toothbrushes. They need to be supported to collaborate and make critical decisions about their communities’ futures.

If he could, he’d bypass the idea of “recovery” altogether. “Recovery can be a dog-whistle for counselling, welfare agencies and dependency. It’s backward looking and doesn’t address what makes communities truly flourish,” he says.

This year, Mr Taylor and his family are renting in Eltham. They’d been living in temporary housing until a few months ago. His daughter can now walk to high school, but it’s been a difficult transition in other ways.

“I’m really feeling the anonymity of the suburbs,” he says. “In Kinglake, when I came home, it was nothing to see several cars at our property and people everywhere. We got through the last four years on the strength of our social relationships – we did everything together.

“The experience has been extraordinary. While you wouldn’t wish it on anyone, it’s been rich with learning.”

Read this article at The Age online

Living local includes shifting your shares too.

IT’S Friday evening, and four residents are sitting around a broad wooden table in Thornbury, talking money. They’re at the regular monthly meeting – bring a plate – of the “community economics” group from Transition Darebin.

The organisation is part of the worldwide Transition Network, in which local volunteers begin to “adapt to diminishing resources and a rapidly changing global climate”.

The March meeting was held at Serenity Hill and Kirsten Larsen’s house. They’ve already retrofitted their home – solar panels angle down the north-facing roof and veggies grow in their front yard – so Ms Hill reported on their latest sustainability scheme: self-managed superannuation.

“We’ve done all these other things – our lifestyle and even our work – everything is about trying to change the world,” she says. “It doesn’t feel right for our money to be locked up doing stuff we don’t control. Between us, we have $100,000 and we can now decide where it goes.”

They began investigating self-managed super after the global financial crisis. “We worried that it could easily vanish. We wanted to get it out of that system and also, to invest it in concrete things in the community.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Self-managed superannuation doesn’t get much press, but it comprises nearly a third of all super assets. Until now, it’s been the province of the wealthy – the rule of thumb is that it’s too expensive to be worthwhile unless you have more than $200,000 stashed away. (In June 2010, the average self-managed super fund was worth nearly $900,000.)

Ms Hill found a way around the high costs. They use an online business called Esuperfund, which provides streamlined documents for $700 per year. There can be up to four members in a self-managed fund, so they can split the fee between them.

The couple haven’t decided how they’ll invest all their money, but they’re considering options: a community solar energy project, a small share in a dairy farm in the Goulburn Valley, and taking a commercial lease to house a local food hub.

“On the Australian Tax Office website there’s a long list of things you can and can’t invest in,” Ms Hill says. “You need to have a well thought out, audited investment plan. If you’re going to do it, you need to take responsibility to do it properly.”

Their plan is just what US economist Michael Shuman is promoting. Last month, the author of Local Dollars, Local Sense spoke in Melbourne and Ballarat about finance and local prosperity, sponsored by the two councils.

In Australia, he says, small businesses provide two-thirds of all jobs, but receive precious little investment. Most rely on debt for funding, which adds to their costs.

“Your whole system of superannuation is a massive subsidy for capitalising global companies to the disadvantage of local business – even though we know local businesses are more common and more likely to produce jobs. It’s a terrible skew in the system.”

Local businesses are better options for green-minded investors, he argues: they tend to buy inputs and sell locally, so their products have a smaller footprint; and they’re less likely to flee at the prospect of strict environmental standards.

Mr Shuman’s book details the growing trend of local investment in the US, including peer-to-peer investing, crowdfunding, pre-sales and local stockmarkets and investment clubs. “Most of these tools can be used in Australia too,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Read a related article about superannuation’s carbon footprint

If you insulate your home against the climate, insulate your money too.

YOUR carbon footprint comprises emissions from household energy use, transport, food, shopping and waste. But is that all?

A new social media campaign called The Vital Few argues there’s something we’ve overlooked: “Are you accidentally investing in climate change?” it asks.

“Maybe you reduce, reuse and recycle. Maybe you’re into using renewables… But are you even remotely aware of how your pension contribution is being spent on your behalf?”

The campaign is coordinated by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project. It’s a not-for-profit organisation, with board members including John Hewson, the former Liberal Party leader, and Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

Dr Hewson says The Vital Few is about “empowering superannuates to contact their directors and trustees, and ask them why they are investing so intensively in carbon-heavy industries”.

He says an average pension fund now invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

But those numbers must change: “These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low–carbon intensive industries.”

Julian Poulter, the executive director of the Disclosure Project, says it’s not only a worry for the environmentally concerned. It’s also about protecting your nest egg.

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Last December, the organisation launched an index of the world’s largest pension funds, rating them on their management and disclosure of climate risk in their investment portfolios.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, in New South Wales. There were five other Australian funds in the top ten: CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper.

Even so, the report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”.

Mr Poulter says the average fund member is 20 years from retirement. “By 2030 our climate and energy supply are going to look very different, under any scenario. Either the climate will be in such trouble that we’ll be into panic mode, or the fossil fuel industry will be in trouble,” he says.

Switching away from fossil fuels might mean a short-term sacrifice on returns, he says, but it’s the only way to avoid a long-term loss.

“When it comes to retirement, most baby boomers think they’re going to escape the climate crisis. Unfortunately, they’ll probably just be moving into the retirement home or the hospice by the time the impacts kick in. Economically, climate change could be very inconvenient for their superannuation,” he says.

He says that for most people, their home is their largest asset – followed by their super. There’s no sense in greening one while the other is actively brown.

“We think that once people join the dots, as customers of these funds, they will be in a position to influence the debate and drive change in the industry.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Read this related article: ‘Bursting the carbon bubble’.

If you want to go green, is changing your household habits enough?

IN The Story of Change, an animated short film by Annie Leonard, a shopper is hauled before a judge for the contents of her trolley. “Wait a minute,” Ms Leonard says, in the voiceover. “My fault?”

The typical story of “going green” by shopping smarter has serious shortcomings, she argues. If we’re really going to make change, it’s our “citizen muscles” we need to exercise, not our “consumer muscles”.

Last month, Ms Leonard visited Australia from the USA to speak at the Sustainable Living Festival in Federation Square, sponsored by the phone-recycling program MobileMuster.

In 2007, Ms Leonard – a long-time environmental advocate – made her first video, The Story of Stuff. The 20-minute clip was an astounding success: it’s now been viewed over 15 million times. Altogether, the eight animations in her series have been seen more than 36 million times. They cover topics from electronics, cosmetics and bottled water, to the economic crisis, cap-and-trade policy, and corporate funding in politics.

Ms Leonard says that while the details of our dilemmas are complex, the big picture is straightforward: “We’re simply using too much stuff. Our use of fossil fuels has dangerously altered the entire planet’s climate, threatening millions and millions of people immediately and potentially destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life. That is a really big problem.”

The trouble with responding only by altering our consumption – the idea that our dollar is our vote – is that corporations have much more money and influence.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

That’s where her latest film, The Story of Change, comes in. It explores the steps beyond greening your home, with reference to great social movements such as the campaigns for civil rights and Indian independence, and against apartheid in South Africa.

“We stress about buying the least toxic products, driving fuel efficient cars and changing our light bulbs. While those are all good things to do, they aren’t commensurate with the scale of the problem,” she says.

“The decisions that have the greatest impact are not those made in supermarket aisles, but those made in halls of government and boardrooms of businesses – and that’s where we need to be using our citizen muscles to work for bigger, bolder change. We can’t shop our way to sustainability.”

Even shopping less isn’t sufficient. Sharing instead of buying, growing your own food and composting at home are all “good places to start, but they are terrible places to stop”.

“We need to move from making change in our kitchens to making change in our communities,” she says.

But how? “Pick an issue that excites you,” Ms Leonard suggests. “Better bike lanes? Ending government subsidies for the super-profitable coal industry? Figuring out how to reduce packaging? Investments in clean energy? It’s always easier – and more fun – to do things with others. So once you have figured out what you want to work on, join with a friend or call an organisation working on this issue.”

Ms Leonard recalls that as a university student three decades ago, she thought working on environmental issues was just one option among many ways to contribute in the world. But since then, the problems have grown so dramatically that “we all have to be environmentalists wherever we find ourselves”.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment; we need to work together in every way we collectively can.”

Read this article at The Age online

To get to zero emissions, residents need to walk and talk.

IN 2008, the City of Yarra set a target to be carbon neutral by 2020. Not just council headquarters – the entire inner-city municipality.

But how does a whole district go carbon neutral?

It can’t rely on government subsidies, or an unforeseen technological breakthrough, says Alex Fearnside, CEO of Yarra Energy Foundation, the organisation established in 2010 to make it happen.

Instead, it needs to start with residents pounding the pavements, knocking on doors and sharing their knowledge. That’s the cornerstone of the foundation’s campaign, called Yarra Project Zero.

“We have some very active citizens already. We know that about one-in-ten households and one-in-twenty businesses are well on the way to zero emissions,” he says.

“Yarra Project Zero is about recording those stories and making them known to others. It’s about amplifying them, and showing that retrofitting is a normal and practical action to take.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

As a baseline, the foundation calculated Yarra’s carbon footprint from electricity and gas use in 2008-09. About a quarter of those emissions come from households, and the rest from businesses, large and small.

(The zero emissions target also includes the impact of transport, consumption, food and waste – but the project starts with electricity and gas.)

To cut out the carbon, Mr Fearnside has a rule of thumb: one-third will come from efficiency, one-third from low-carbon energy and one-third from offsetting.

In time, he expects efficiency will play a greater role. He says four simple improvements – installing efficient lighting, windows, heating and cooling, and hot water systems – could cut household energy use by more than two-thirds.

Retrofitting those measures across the municipality would cost about $350 million, or $12,000 per home. “We believe the vast majority of that must come from the private sector,” he says. “It’s about getting people to engage, learn and share their learning, and invest wisely and strategically.

“Over a period of eight years, homeowners could choose to invest that amount to get a more comfortable, efficient and affordable home.”

Since 2008, Yarra’s emissions have fallen by nearly one-fifth, but most of the reduction came incidentally, from the closure of Amcor’s paper mill at Alphington.

Getting all the way to zero won’t be so easy, and that’s why the project involves some old-fashioned community organising. “We’re getting trusted sources in the community to carry the message for us. That’s where people get their information from,” Mr Fearnside explains.

He’s encouraging residents and local workers to register online and participate any way they can. One option is by studying: employees can learn about carbon auditing, and budding communicators can enrol in a multimedia and sustainability course, in which they’ll document the stories of citizens who are taking action.

Meanwhile, corporate volunteers have begun spruiking the project to businesses up and down the area’s busy shopping strips: Swan, Victoria, Brunswick, Smith and Gertrude Streets.

It’s a model many councils could follow, but there’s a catch. Under the federal government’s cap-and-trade system, the City of Yarra’s target won’t reduce Australia’s overall greenhouse emissions. It’ll just free up permits for polluters somewhere else.

Mr Fearnside is undeterred. “The people who work, live and play here will reduce costs, increase comfort and build a stronger more resilient local economy.

“We’ve talked to businesses and households in Yarra and they’re very excited about accelerating change and getting to zero as quickly as possible.”

Read this article at The Age online

Communities need to think about climate extremes before they come.

IT’S 2037 in Anglesea, on the Great Ocean Road. Jim Li, a tour operator, is describing the heat waves, bushfire threats and intense storms that interrupt his work, and which have doubled his insurance bills.

“I probably cancel or completely change five trips a summer because of the fire risk,” he explains. “I’m afraid I’ll get a bus caught along the road and we’ll all get cooked like that guide from Lorne did six years ago – and that was in November.”

The scenario comes from a project run by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, at the University of Melbourne. It is working with two communities, Anglesea and Creswick, to explore the possible impact of climate extremes and the ways residents would best like to adapt.

Along with Jim Li’s account, they presented the fictional stories of a local surfer and a retiring viticulturalist.

Che Biggs, the program’s coordinator, says the scenarios were based on the upper end of projections for climate change within 25 years. “We were trying to translate that hard data so people in the community could really understand what it would mean for their town,” he says.

“It’s not about prediction – we don’t know precisely what the future will be like. But we’ve recently been hit by a number of extreme weather events in Australia and around the world, and with climate change we’re going to see many more.

“Our planning standards and institutions are based on an assumption that the world we live in is fairly stable. Climate change is already re-writing those standards. Uncertainty will be the norm.”

In Anglesea, residents brainstormed over 100 possible responses. Mr Biggs condensed these into several visions, which are open for comment online. They range from a community mentorship program, designed for younger and older people to share skills, to an inland rapid bus system, and flooding the existing coal mine for a lake.

In the second stage of the project, the Eco-Innovation Lab will work with authorities, such as the local council and emergency services, to figure out how they’d implement those adaptation plans – and if not, why not.

“Those scenarios and strategies become our test cases to ask relevant institutions: ‘Can this be put in place? What’s stopping us?’” Mr Biggs says.

“We need to get communities exploring beforehand how they would respond and still maintain their sense of identity. It’s no use just rebuilding things the way they were, because we’ll just become more vulnerable.”

But adaptation isn’t the only answer. A report released last November by the World Bank, called Turn Down the Heat, said our current trends put us on a path to a 4-degree hotter world within the century. That would mean a world stricken by “unprecedented heat waves, severe drought and major floods in many regions, with serious impacts on human systems, ecosystems, and associated services”.

One of the bright ideas from the Anglesea residents is for a green building cooperative, which would retrofit homes and protect them against fires and floods. It’s an example of reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and climate vulnerability.

“Clearly adaptation is only part of the response,” Mr Biggs says. “The level of change involved in a 4-degree hotter world would be untenable for civilisation. We need to cut our carbon emissions while we adapt. The good thing is, the solutions do exist.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Residents can take urban planning into their own hands.

IS there a streetscape near you where no one goes? Somewhere ugly to look at, hard to walk, and too scary to ride?

Just go ahead and fix it. That’s what Jason Roberts did in Oak Cliff, a rundown part of Dallas, Texas.

In 2010, with a crew of volunteers, he staged a one-off community event, called Better Block. For a weekend, they widened the footpaths and brought in tables and chairs and trees in pots. They started pop-up cafes and shops, and painted temporary bike lanes on the street.

In the process, they broke all kinds of council rules. But people loved it. Their “guerrilla art” idea has spawned a movement: in the last two years there have been 41 Better Blocks held all across the United States.

Mr Roberts is visiting Melbourne this month as one of the keynote speakers at the Sustainable Living Festival, which began yesterday and runs until February 24.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“By doing all those things, we created a more humane environment, and that made more people come out and use the space,” he says. They created permanent change, too. Many of the zoning rules have been scrapped, and some businesses have stayed on.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Dallas or Australia or Bangladesh, we all enjoy sitting outside drinking a cup of coffee and watching a musician play. We all love strolling through outdoor flower stands,” he says. “They’re universal things.

Mr Roberts was an IT-consultant and musician. Then, ten years ago, he and his wife visited Europe. They were astonished by the vibrant life of the cities: the bike riders and buzzing markets, the street-side cafes and public plazas where old people lingered with their grandchildren.

He returned and saw with new eyes the concrete freeways and barren footpaths of his own city, and resolved to make them “more like Paris”.

His first project was an impromptu art show, called Art Conspiracy, in an abandoned, boarded-up theatre. It happened fast: the artists painted one day and sold their canvases the next. Unexpectedly, 700 people showed up to see the old theatre back in use.

Next he set up a website – the Oak Cliff Transit Authority – promoting the reconstruction of the old tramcar that used to run through town. He was the only one in the “authority”, but no matter. A journalist wrote about it, and other enthusiasts joined in. Their crazy plan has come true: the city is actually building the tramcar line. With the help of a large federal grant, construction should be finished by 2014.

Then, a couple of years later, Mr Roberts founded Bike Friendly Oak Cliff – even though he didn’t own a bike at the time. “We just said, ‘We’re the bike part of town’, and it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he explains. “With time, people started buying bikes, and people who liked bicycling started moving into the area.”

He’s got three tips for would-be urban activists: show up to your local community groups; give your event a name; and set a date and publish it – that way you’ll be forced to make it happen.

“The projects have been successful because we commit to quick action and get local people working together to make a better place,” he says. “Even if it’s temporary, people keep talking and they say, ‘Why don’t we fix this street permanently?’”

Read this article at The Age online

Too much cooling is putting the heat in our bills.

AS the summer begins to sizzle and you reach for your air conditioner’s remote, there’s something you need to know.

A big chunk of rising energy prices is caused by surging demand on the hottest few days of the year.

In its report on electricity regulation, the Productivity Commission states that just 40 hours of peak use during the year account for a quarter of our bills.

“We invest in the capacity of the network – the poles and wires – so we’re able to turn on the air conditioning when it’s incredibly hot,” says Dr Lynne Chester, from University of Sydney. “But it’s used for a very small proportion of time.”

In the last few years, our overall demand for electricity has fallen, but the peak level continues to rise.

The reason? Air conditioning has gone through the roof. By 2020, it is forecast to double from 2000 levels.

The Productivity Commission (PDF) attributes the change to rising incomes, cheaper air conditioners, bigger new homes and the trend to install more than one unit, “particularly by higher income households”.

It’s an equity concern too: because everyone pays higher network costs, people who don’t use air conditioners at peak times are subsidising those who do.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

But Dr Chester says there’s a broader problem. “As our lifestyles change, we’ve taken things like water and electricity for granted. It’s there whenever we turn on the tap and the switch.”

If we’re to avoid excess investment in the network – and the inevitable higher prices – we need to reduce peak demand first. And that means a shift away from a “predict and provide” approach to electricity, to something more complex.

Householders can expect a more active role in the way we manage energy production.

Smart meters allow electricity retailers to charge more when demand is high. “Time-of-use pricing means that when demand goes up, the price will go up,” Dr Chester says. “The most expensive time will be late in the afternoon, when the kids are home, the TV is on and you’re preparing dinner – that’s when the daily peak is occurring.”

That’s the stick approach, but there’ll be carrots too. Some retailers will alert you in advance of a critical peak, and offer discounts or incentives for switching off, if you can.

In South Australia, distributor SA Power Networks has been trialling “direct load control”, which takes the day-to-day decision out of customers’ hands. If residents agree – in exchange for $100 – they install a widget on their air conditioner and, at critical times, remotely switch off the compressor (but not the fan) for about ten minutes every half hour.

The results are significant: among participants, they’ve been able to reduce peak demand by more than one-third without people noticing any loss of comfort. To make a dent in the overall spike, however, they’d need residents to sign on in large numbers.

Dr Chester says the problem will keep growing, unless our consumption habits change. For that, we need different norms and different buildings.

“We’re treating the symptom and not the cause,” she says. “We don’t build houses with eaves and verandas, or design them for natural breezes. We’re turning on air conditioning instead.

“We’ve got to improve the efficiency of existing stock. We could start by retrofitting public housing; what better way to help low-income households improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills?”

Read this article at The Age online

The carbon revolution is being advertised, but it’s not really happening.

APPLE has got the Earth covered. It’s even got a bright green slogan: “Bigger Picture. Better Products. Smaller Impact”.

But is that really so? The iPhone5, tipped to be the highest selling gadget of all time, has a greenhouse gas impact two-thirds higher than the old iPhone4.

In fact, the total carbon footprint of Apple’s products is rising very fast, says academic and author Guy Pearse, from University of Queensland. “It’s the world’s biggest company, it’s selling itself as green and its emissions have doubled in two years.”

He suggests Apple replace its slogan with “something closer to the truth, like ‘More Products. Bigger Impact’.”

This example is just one of scores uncovered by Dr Pearse in his new book Greenwash: Big Brands and Climate Scams.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Until now, the greenwash debate has spotlighted sins in the marketing of individual products. Dr Pearse took a different tack: he chose to investigate the companies’ total carbon footprint.

For four years, he subjected himself to mind-bending quantities of big business advertising material. He checked the fine print, trawled through hundreds of annual and sustainability reports and drew on documents lodged with the Carbon Disclosure Project. He analysed companies operating in all categories of consumer spending, from banks and beer, to sports and sweet treats.

His verdict is unequivocal. “When you look at the overall carbon footprint, almost none of these companies can claim their emissions will be falling anytime soon. It was a very depressing picture. The climate-friendly revolution being advertised is not really happening.”

Even worse, he says, most big businesses are using an identical greenwashing template to create the opposite impression.

Typically, a company will exclude the impact of the products they actually sell and, instead, only count the environmental impact of corporate headquarters. It’ll install low-energy lighting and solar panels, switch off for Earth Hour, and champion a glossy report.

“By narrowly defining your carbon footprint, you can give the impression the emissions of the brand are shrinking, when they’re growing,” he explains.

“The supply chains of these companies almost all lead back to the developing world, to countries that aren’t constrained by any carbon prices or emission caps. There’s a trail of emissions that’s being offloaded by the big brands.”

Another common tactic is to highlight a clean green product line, to the exclusion of the messy rest.

Take cars, for example. While some companies hype their hybrid or electric vehicles (the Holden Volt has just been released in Australia), they sell them in minuscule numbers, compared to gas-guzzlers.

“The growth that’s occurring in the market is such that the total emissions are going up dramatically,” he says. “Minor improvements in overall fleet efficiency will never lead to overall reductions in emissions from a growing industry.”

Or take Origin Energy, which got good coverage for its Green for Footy campaign with the Australian Football League. It’s the biggest retailer of GreenPower, but nearly half of its electricity generating capacity in Australia is coal-fired.

And, as Dr Pearse notes, it is part of a coal seam gas joint venture in Queensland’s Darling Downs, with a plan to export liquefied natural gas. He says Origin’s share of that scheme equates to “roughly eleven times the carbon footprint of the products [it] currently sells”, and dwarfs the emissions saved by all the renewable energy it has ever sold.

Dr Pearse says householders must understand that “we can’t shop the planet green”. But he argues that individual action – reducing consumption – isn’t sufficient either.

“Ultimately this book is all about why the politics matters and why we need to be angry and active. Real step-changes are the only things that will lead to the emissions reductions the scientists say are essential.

“They’re not going to happen while we’re kidding ourselves with greenwash. The incremental change being embraced by big business just isn’t going to cut it. It’s a reality check that consumers, governments and environmental groups need to have.”

Read this article at The Age online

Will our poles and pipes lead down the road, not out of town?

FOR generations, our essential services have come from afar. In cities, especially, our electricity, gas and water arrive from elsewhere and our waste goes away.

But it won’t necessarily stay that way.

Last month, at the Thriving Neighbourhoods conference held at the Melbourne exhibition centre, post-graduate students and industry types collaborated in a workshop on “decentralised district infrastructure”.

This was the scenario: what if E-Gate – the wedge of land between Docklands and North Melbourne station – was developed as a sustainable precinct? How could it generate electricity, treat wastewater, retain stormwater and deal with rubbish?

Peter Steele, from Moreland Energy Foundation, led the discussion on infrastructure. He says a big shift has already begun.

“At its most basic level, solar panels and water tanks are forms of decentralised infrastructure, and installations are taking off,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

For a large-scale example, Mr Steele points to Hammarby Sjöstad, in Stockholm, Sweden. Its re-development began the late 1990s, when the inner-city land was converted from an industrial shantytown.

“They looked at the infrastructure as a sort of ecology, assessing the inputs and outputs and how they could be reused locally,” he says.

All the heating and cooling for the precinct, which is home to 26,000 people, comes from solar panels and heat extracted from waste treatment. Biogas captured from sewage is used to power local buses, and treated “sludge” is used as a fertiliser.

Mr Steele says we’re lagging behind Europe, but there’s potential to cut carbon emissions quickly and deeply by matching the needs of different buildings: say, heating a pool and powering nearby office blocks.

One way to do that is gas-fired cogeneration or trigeneration – producing heating, cooling and power together. “It makes sense for buildings to share infrastructure that provides their needs more efficiently and with a far lower carbon footprint,” he says.

“A lot of people question whether cogeneration is locking us into another fossil fuel. But it also has the potential to be used with renewables, such as biomass and biofuels.”

Tosh Szatow, from power services business Energy for the People, says much of our established infrastructure is getting old. “It’s time to overhaul it, but gee that’s going to be really expensive. Is there a better way?”

Mr Szatow was a co-author of CSIRO’s Intelligent Grid report, which assessed the prospects for distributed energy in Australia. He says the change will come first to new suburbs and infill developments, such as E-Gate.

“Cost is a big driver for doing it differently. And carbon emissions are part of that cost. Our system is premised on coal and gas being cheap, and it being okay to burn them. Now those premises are questioned we have to find alternatives,” he says.

He’s tipping a future where our low-density suburbs are off the electricity grid (courtesy of solar power and battery storage) and our high-density zones plug into large-scale renewables.

What would the neighbourhood look like? “It could be solar panels on the roofs, battery banks on the streets, local food gardens, and water catchments or waste management wetlands down the road,” he says.

But it won’t just happen – Mr Szatow says householders must demand change from governments and utilities, join community energy groups and install renewables at home. “We don’t have to sit around and wait for change; we can be active in bringing it about.”

Read this article at The Age online