(no subject)

I don't know if World Aids Day is today or was yesterday. Either way, I'm about to leave for another day of climate unchanging, so here's a bunch of links worth checking on it: http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2006/12/no-japery-todaye.html What Geoffrey says about sloth applies to anything, I suspect. Global warming, abuse, epidemics - giving into hopelessness is couch-potatoness of the soul. Maybe we can't do much sometimes, but even the tiniest things make a difference, when enough of us do them.

I think my New Year Resolution for 2007 might have to be to not let my soul become a couch potato. My resolution for tonight is to get some sleep.

(no subject)

I'm so tired I dislike myself. Why do I like myself more when I'm wide awake?

No, this is not relevant to today's outcomes, and neither is the fact that I have so many papers that I have had to put them in a small briefcase to carry them about and that I promised myself to read them before bed because tomorrow we wrap everything up. The lemon margarita I drank earlier is also not relevant to anything. Also not pertinent is the terrible trio who kidnapped me last night and made me eat Ethiopian food (I have just the best friends, you know).

The weather has finally changed and sleep is finally in the universe of the conceivable. A bit late for this post to make any sense, but you can't have miracles.

Forum #2

Today we interrogated nine speakers and had tomorrow explained to us. We have generated so many multicoloured notes and ideas that they threatened to spill right down the corridor into the main part of the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery. But where did it all come from? Who spoke to us? What did they say?

This report is in no order because my mind is disordered and almost non-functional. I need to make sense of things for tomorrow though and I know a few people are hanging out for what happened, so I'll finish this before I got to bed.

Today was full of useful hints. I will pepper my posts with them as they come to mind. The first is that insulation on something as simple as a coffee maker can save you up to 80% of running costs. The second is for ACT friends: if you ring HEAT (in the phonebook) you can get a $30 energy audit. You could save money on heating, cooling and general misery. If your energy audit doesn't save you from general misery I will feed you coffee and chocolate, which should do the trick.

Now for a couple of the speakers.

Hugh Saddler was from Energy Strategies and talked about greenhouse emissions and energy policy from a regional perspective. Australia's greenhouse gas emissions have not much increased overall since 1990, but oh, the proportion produced by energy combustion has increased. Not good. Very not good. As our landcare improves, we burn coal and coal and more coal. We are coal-dependent for so much of our electricity and our economy depends so much on electricity. Tasmania is better than the ACT, as its hydro schemes are actually big whereas ours only looks big and we end up buying most of our power from Newcastle. This means we need to look at supply options as well as end use efficiency in particular in our region. Saddler also encouraged us to think about how we can move to low and zero emission energy sources. And apparently the Federal Government doesn't want a complex strategy to do all this: it wants a silver bullet and the one thing the experts seem to have agreed on is the shortage of silver bullets. (I am not saying anything about other uses for silver bullets.)

Our region has some natural advantages (yay!). Sunlight. Lots and lots of sunlight. And wind - not just the hot wind from Parliament House, but much of the region is suitable for wind farming.

After Saddler (and I did not refrain from whispering comments about Tenterfield to one of my neighbours) we talked to Tracy Rich from the Eurobodalla Shire Council. She discussed the problems they face with a growing population and the need to maintain the 80% of the shire that is National Park and pristine beaches and exquisite coastline. Eurobodalla has eleven endangered ecological communities. What's impressive is that they also have a special officer (Tracy) whose whole job is to make climate protection *happen*.

The Eurobodalla talk fitted yesterday's paper trail into perspective. Eurobodalla belongs to the Cities for Climate Protection Program (CCP) and has specific milestones to reach. The Shire Council is working through the milestones steadily. From greenhouse gas inventory; to an emissions reduction target; to a local action plan; to implementation of the plan (which is what they're doing now, from the sound of it); and then to monitoring and reviewing. Their target for corporate emissions is 25% reduction by 2012. Their community target is 50% reduction in emissions and 50% use of renewable energy by 2020.

If the numbers above are the sort of thing that rock your boat then apparently Newcastle (our Newcastle, not anyone else's) has put its community emissions inventory online and you can find even more numbers.

And tonight I'm going to break my posts into digestible lumps, since I'm obviously not going to remember how to do cuts before the Forum finishes. So don't go away :).

Forum #2 part 2

Rohan Nelson was our third CSIRO bod to talk. He dragged some of the stuff we had been learning into possible policy directions. I particularly liked his comment that science provides pathways to solutions, rather than answers all by itself. He led us through the impacts of global warming and yes, it made sense. Climate change (specifically rainfall, temperature and wind) impacts biophysically (crops/pastures, water, forests, fire being of particular importance) which has an economic impact (on productivity, farm income, regional economies, for instance) and then social outcomes (employment, social capital, vitality and well-being all being affected).

What I liked about his talk and our questions of him was that science was making sense as a communications medium and as a tool to help us deal with the effects of global warming. Not a silver bullet, but something very useful.

Rohan also gave the tidiest explanation of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) I have ever heard. He uses the SOI to help governments sort out possible problems before they occur and to provide early responses to them and help farmers adapt better to problems. Science as a risk management device. Kind of like history, really :).

After Rohan Michael Smith spoke. We gave him extra time and asked him for notes, which was just as well, because he was terribly nervous.

Michael wants to change the world in five minutes flat and has a ton of ideas for doing it. Note to organisers of future fora, make sure you include a child care worker *always* because it was she who thought to ask Michael for a list of the things he had talked about so we can evaluate them and work out what we can use in our response. He threw ideas at us and we loved it - but paper helps :).

Michael was not positive about climate change, but he was sensible in how to go about changing reponses to it. He looks at what works and tells people about the success stories. This means that there are positive examples and people have paths they can tread. He wanted to tell us how to think, but he also has a bunch of good information in his brain and yes, we're going to think for ourselves but pick his brain.

What I liked in particular is that he is part of a team making energy efficiency case studies open source. He explained that this is the work of several bodies, including CSIRO and Engineers Australia. I've never seen any reason why the rest of the world can't get its development without making the stupid mistakes we made, and using open source is one way towards this, especially when the group is working specifically with China and India to help this happen.

In Canberra he and others are setting up "see change hubs" where groups of 10-20 people work together in each suburb to disseminate ideas and to link with experts. He explained it was the environment version of Neighbourhood Watch. It made me think of blog communities :).

Following him, Ayesha Razzaq from ACTEWAGL gave us a quick run-down on actual energy administration. Some lovely bubbles were burst at this point. We have a wind farm and not enough Canberrans want to pay the extra for energy from it, so it's sitting idle, for instance. Despite the fact that 98% of electricity in the ACT is from the national grid (ie fossil fuel), getting people to demand green energy is not as simple as saying "we want this to happen".

The two big areas we need to reform in Canberra proper are home energy usage and transport fuels. Only 8% of commuters use the bus system. And renewable energy costs 3-4 times the amount of coal energy. Lots and lots of equations started floating through our minds as we thought about how to deal with all this.

There are some government initiatives. Federal government goals (the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target) are low - 4.8% by 2010. The NSW/ACT state based Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme is all about carbon trading. GreenPower is for those not happy with Australia's national policies and creates choice for green products (I have notes somewhere on how it works, but I lost them - at this stage I was listing what was going on and looking for where we can do more rather than sorting out scheme specifics) and the Greenhouse Challenge is industry and government working together. Someone noted later in the day that industry and state governments were much more willing to work on these issues than federal government. Victoria and NSW for instance are both working on renewable energy targets which intend to top up the low Commonwealth targets to something more useful: 10% by 2016 for Victoria and 15% by 2020 for NSW.

Useful tidbit: The ACTEWAGL website apparently has an energy saving calculator.

Ayesha briefed us on the cost of solar panels. The scientists had been waxing enthusiastic about them and she poured quite a bit of cold water on that. Private households would be able to get about 10% of their power from solar panels and the panels would cost thousands that would not be recouped in savings. Until solar panels come down a great deal in initial cost, they are just not practical for widespread use. Solar hot water systems are more affordable, apparently. And ACT scientists are working on that price problem.

Other tidbit: if you're going to buy green energy, google for "Green Electricity Watch" because not all green products are equally beneficial to the environment.

This is not the most orderly report I've ever produced, is it? I think it shows that my mind is still trying to put things together in various configurations and try to sort out what we can do. One thing that is very clear is that doing nothing about global warming is not an option. Only one more section to go, though, for today. See you in the next blog entry.

Forum #2 part 3

Jonathan Banks visited us from Pialligo Apples. Pialligo was the unpronouncable name of the day.

Jonathan (we have already made apple puns on his name, so please refrain) is a climate witness for the WWF. He was good. He didn't talk about policies: he made sense of the science. We learned the role of frost in creating a good crop and in destroying a crop (basically, no frosts are good after the apples have set) and we discovered that Canberra has two different types of frost and that the descending frost is more closely linked to global warming. I never knew that Binalong farmers plant after Melbourne Cup Day. We talked about the saw "Seven years good, Seven years bad, Seven years average in between." This was concrete realisation of what we had been told yesterday on distinguishing between normal fluctuations and long term changes.

Almost-useful tip: Jonathan also gave us 3/4 of a recipe for a fruit fly trap. Alas, he forgot an ingredient, but you take a lemonade bottle, poke holes in it and add a mixture of vanilla, sugar, urine and whatever the other ingredient is. Being a modern organic farmer, he suggested finding the missing ingredient on the web.

He was like a breath of fresh air - he related the theory to things we knew and made many dry jokes. He brought samples of frost-affected apples in so we could see that theory has an everyday reality and the everyday reality is not nice. This was much more sensible that Adrian Whitehead from the Zero Emission Network. Adrian cares so intensely he wants to scare everyone into immediate radical change. If Jonathan had not been immediately before him we would have wondered if it was worth it or if we should just go gently into that good night.

Fortunately Adrian was folowed by George Browning in bishoply purple. George admitted to us that he had once been a jackaroo and talked about the morality behind fighting global warming. Some of the group really needed to hear what he had to say - for others it was an additional emotional burden. Me, I was distracted by the thought of a bishop as jacakaroo.

He basically talked about morality. Not the seven deadly sins, but the reponsibility of wealth (not just monetary wealth) to make wise choices so that down the track there are choices left for others to make. I kept thinking of olam habah - that we need to leave things better than we found them. He pointed out something which I have been increasingly worried about this weekend and that had hardly made an appearance - that the impact of global warming is going to be disproportionate heavy on the poor.

I have just found my papers on Peter Ottesen from the ACT Office of Sustainability, and very useful they are too: they translate to the ACT region what the CSIRO scientists said about Australia as a whole. Which, of course, I didn't summarise for you. But surely you've had enough thoughts about the Forum? Even if you haven't, I'm afraid I'm off to bed.

Tomorrow we have to put all this together, make sense of it and try to move on from there. By the end of tomorrow we'll have a full paper for government and the thought of that appearing in just three days is terrifying. Mind you, the other participants at the forum are bright, informed, thoughtful and all seem to tackle ideas from different directions. I am increasingly impressed with the choice jurors. Lots of good contributions from lots of interesting directions. So it will come together. I just want to be awake so I can do my share!