The red 'A' marks Xanadu.

Climate Change at Xanadu

What are we doing to reduce our environmental footprint?

Water consumption: Our imported water decreased 10 per cent from 2008 to 2009. In February I am attending a Rainwater Harvesting Technical Workshop run by Marrickville Council and it appears that we can have three tanks; two harvesting the water from the garage and sheds, and a bladder under the house. If we plumb in two toilets and the washing machine and convert the garden irrigation from imported water, we should be able to cut back another 20 per cent.

Energy (electricity): All lighting is by energy saving bulbs. We don’t have air-conditioning but this summer the upper floor retained considerable heat so we are considering turbine ventilators (whirlybirds) in the roof to move the hot air out of the ceiling. Last winter we used the fireplaces burning surplus wood from the renovations.

The Australian Greenhouse Office has stated, “in terms of limiting net greenhouse gas emissions, firewood is generally more favourable for domestic heating than other non-renewable fossil fuel sources of energy” (http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3AIROGmHDXTGQJ%3Awww.homeheat.com.au%2Fpdf%2FHeating_Greenhouse_Gas.pdf+wood+fires+greenhouse&hl=en&gl=au).

And when this stockpile is finished we will probably convert to LNG.

Transport: Two people and two vehicles. One is a reasonably efficient Subaru but the other is a gas emitting disaster that:

• Is used to move dogs, rubbish and earn a modest income
• Requires a $6,000 dollar transfusion to fix the motor
• But is decreasingly used as we enjoy public transport.

I have been cycling less this summer due to the heat but anticipate this will change with autumn.

Sustainability: In 2009 we had time to work in the garden and had excellent crops of snow peas, rocket, basil, mint, tomatoes, and capsicums and chillies still to come. I walk to Borsellino Brothers for our F&V and am gearing up to preserving tomatoes after Easter (when the best are cheap).

Meat is an issue. We can’t determine if our beef is grass-fed; we buy cheap frozen chickens that are probably retired battery hens; who knows where the lamb comes from but the goat is halal. I have stopped buying pork due to concern about the treatment of pigs and the antibiotics used. And until recently, did not buy fish because of the dwindling populations of wild fish and the pollution caused by farmed fish. However, since discovering the Nature Conservation Council of NSW “Nice Choice” web site (http://www.nicechoice.org.au/) we have resumed buying the sustainable varieties.

Recycling: Our wastage is minimal; today our neighbours and ourselves put out one red bin (non-recyclable) and two green bins (recycled into mulch); that is for six people. Next week, it will be the plastics, glass and paper pick-up. I see that the Visy paper mill in Tumut converts our cardboard and newspaper into pulp but haven’t tracked down the glass and plastic recycling.

The compost processing is successful (see post on 23 September 2009 for photos of the compost factory). And last year I converted two cubic metres of clay into friable soil by mixing it with gypsum in the compost.

Micro-environment: We have considerable vegetation on three sides of Xanadu (see the satellite photo above) which is very bird-attractive. This has developed over 30 years; the grounds were lawn when we moved in.

Climate Change – Conclusion

This review over four days has been useful. I cannot see the negative aspects of reducing our environmental footprint and our greenhouse gas emissions. I constantly hear or read about the costs of change, economic and social, but they seem to be slight compared with the benefits. I want to see leadership, bi-partisanship politics, moderation of attacks on each other’s viewpoints and some meaningful and practical legislation to move us forward.

Peter Cosgrove, “Lecture 6: Australia’s Future: Paying it Forward”, Boyer Lectures, 13 December, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/stories/2009/2725189.htm#transcript

…I am very conscious of the huge change in direction and the expense and the turmoil and the impact on jobs, entailed in a radical move to non-carbon energy for Australia. But if we don’t do it, a country with our values, a country presently in the top 20 wealthiest countries in the world, a country depended on by millions of people who are our powerless friends and neighbours, how can we expect other nations to act and thus offset our lack of action.

…We can’t have governments and oppositions daily scrapping over the concerted and co-ordinated action we need to take across the national community, if on a balance of probabilities we need to start our action now to avoid the climate change ‘noose’ sometime later in the century….

Today’s Website

“Your Home Technical Manual”, Department of the Environment, Water Heritage and the Arts, http://www.yourhome.gov.au/technical/index.html

The environment for The Bleed – the film I have been involved in.

Notes from Xanadu

The filming continued yesterday – 10:00 to 17:00 with a break for lunch. It is hard work being an aged mute with a crook leg living alone, let alone for the others; my estranged son who had a lot of lines, and the team. All hand-held camera work with basic lighting and equipment, and again, I was surprised at their discipline – it wore me out.

A paradox was how they concentrated on making a very short, very good film, yet during the breaks at the motel and at the support house, they reveled in TV schlock. One was affronted when I told him the choreography in An American in Paris (which I watched at the motel) was repetitive and unrepresentative of the marvelous dance that developed in the USA. Frankly I thought the dancing in An American in Paris was crap, fluffed up with a lot of effects, myth and advertising. Gene Kelly is an impressive dancer let down by bad choreography. I am a Merce Cunningham, Alvin Alley, Martha Graham person so being taken back to this Hollywood rubbish was a shock; I had forgotten how bad it is.

I look forward to seeing the final production of The Bleed and would love this team to get a Tropfest award; they deserve one for discipline and creativity.

Climate Change

A summary of how the Climate Change data has been interpreted by some in the press. The trend is now ‘anti-climate change’ but with the same unsubstantiated ‘pro-climate change’ rhetoric we were subjected to pre-Climatgate and Copenhagen.

“Another bad year for predictions of global warming”, Cut & Paste, The Australian, 4 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/another-bad-year-for-predictions-of-global-warming/story-e6frg6zo-1225815745712

UK Met Office long-term forecast, September 25, 2009:
The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.

Britain’s The Daily Telegraph on Saturday:
BRITAIN is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16C, forecasters have warned. They predicted no let-up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating. And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder. Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.

Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times:
CALL me a cynic, but wasn’t it a bit premature of the climate change monkeys to have called 2009 the “fifth warmest year on record” back in November? We have now had the coldest December since Surrey was home to mastodons and pterodactyls and mammoths stalked the Lincolnshire Wolds….

Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph yesterday:
What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. Its then director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records…. The “Climategate” documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU-Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong. …. It is a state of affairs so bizarre that it cries out for political intervention. Yet our politicians…are so in thrall to this new religion that they cannot see evidence staring them in the face. How many more winters and summers will it take before sanity finally breaks in to put an end to this scandal?

Conrad Black in this week’s The Spectator:
What possessed [Malcolm Turnbull] and [Kevin] Rudd to sign on to this climate change rubbish? Global warming is not occurring; carbon emissions have nothing to do with it when it does occur; man doesn’t produce climate change fluctuations, trivial as they have been in the last 50 years. And Australia is a cameo player and brings little to this party, which it should not have attended and [which] has effectively ended in shambles. Copenhagen proved to be an unmitigated fiasco of pompous charlatans purporting to reach an agreement all will thankfully ignore, while the Chinese and Indians graciously pointed out the absurdity and hypocrisy of the whole exercise. Baron Black of Crossharbour is in a Florida prison convicted of criminal fraud.

And then there is this where he has ‘found himself’, (selectively quoted and my emphasis):

John Cox, “Modern green romanticism is misanthropic”, The Australian, 4 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/modern-green-romanticism-is-misanthropic/story-e6frg6zo-1225815743545

…I find myself nearly always opposed to the viewpoints taken by the modern greens who seem to trace their roots back to the 19th-century romantic period, which was a reaction against the scientific rationalism of the 18th century. This romantic view of nature has lead to the pervasive influence of an ecocentric rather than an anthropocentric life view in today’s world and was manifest in the Traveston Dam decision to put the possible effects of this dam on a few species ahead of the interests of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

I consider that India and China have been morally correct in their decisions to put present economic growth and the elimination of poverty ahead of possible future environmental benefits.

In my transport field I find myself coming up against environmentalists who cannot see the economic and environmental benefits of putting more traffic on freeways that have 30 per cent less fuel and greenhouse emissions, 50 per cent less particulate emissions, 70 per cent fewer crash fatalities and 30 per cent lower economic vehicle operating costs than on stop-start arterial roads.

I also find myself up against public transport advocates who cannot admit that the motor car has given people the freedom to work, travel and live where they want. They cannot admit that the car is the most equitably distributed form of transport that Australia has seen and that it was a major instrument for the promotion of gender equity in the 20th century.

It is also not well known that cars are a more sustainable form of transport than public transport as the cost of a car trip, including externalities, is lower than a public transport trip including government subsidies.

I also find myself in the camp of the sceptics with respect to anthropogenic global warning.

Today’s Website

An updated Australian Style guide – I am initially uncomfortable with it but it is worth exploring.

“Correction!” , Lingua Franca, 2 January 2010

The ABC Radio National website has an online content style guide, to provide rulings on spelling, punctuation and language usage to those who publish material there, but also for the many listeners who take standards of language expression seriously. http://style.radionational.net.au/about-guide