Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

A decade ago The Greens had a very simple slogan - “No environment no economy”. Today that is even truer. "Ten years ago it was a warning. Now, in 2007; it is a description of our reality. And the farmers, the fishers, the tourism industry workers, the city dwellers on water restrictions – Australians everywhere – know this is true. Without the environment, there is no economy." Bob Brown

In northern NSW local communities are getting increasingly anxious about the effects of logging on their catchments. Recently a court refused to convict several people who had taken direct action to protect their catchment. Now the residents of another valley are preparing for action.

Until recently the peak oil debate in Australia has been largely confined to internet forums such as Webdiary. That situation has changed dramatically in recent weeks with the release of the Queensland Government’s long-awaited Oil Vulnerability Taskforce Report. World oil production is peaking – it’s official, at least here in Queensland.

Webdiary has been banging on about the dangers of peak oil for years now, largely due to the efforts of Ian McPherson, who went on to found Sydneypeakoil. The problem of quickly diminishing oil supply has been known about for decades, and was one of the reasons Dick Cheney wanted to invade Iraq. But Australian governments have buried their heads in the sand, to the medium and short term detriment of their citizens. Yesterday, the Queensland Government issued a report on peak oil, after lots of good work behind the scenes by activists.

With the drought ever deepening I know that many families are facing ruin this summer and will be forced off the land. Many have been there for generations but many of their sons and daughters have already left to seek a more certain future. It is never easy leaving the land and the ultimate pain is the clearing sale when the place itself has gone. I know that pain but one has to try and look on the light side.

On the signals so far, water is promising to be a major issue for the election campaign. Water will be a conversation around many barbecues, as we confront problems affecting our daily lives. We will have to decide whether we want the confrontational methods of Howard and Costello to come up with solutions, or to trust a federal Labor government to work in harmony with the States.

Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist (Kenneth Boulding).

Hello, and welcome to Spring! I'm finishing off my project this weekend before getting back to Webdiary, but just couldn't resist posting this transcript - an interview between Charles Wooley and the PM on the pulp mill. How tricky is this for our tricky PM?

Environmental change on earth is as old as the planet itself, about 4 billion years. Our genus, Homo, has altered earthly environments throughout our career, about 4 million years. But there has never been anything like the twentieth century. (J.R. McNeill) 

The Government's priority is to tackle climate change without damaging Australian jobs and living standards. Nuclear power could make a significant contribution to this challenge.

All questions of the limits, boundaries and scale of the human economic enterprise hinge on whether or not the economic system can be understood independently of its physical context. Can human economies grow forever? If not, what determines their boundaries? If so, what happens to the natural world?

"Australians should be proud of what we are achieving at home to meet the climate change challenge" Alexander Downer in the Age this morning. Is he right? UPDATE: CSIRO and BoM report on the future for Australia

[F]ederal Labor in Australia, following Nicholas Stern, has unofficially adopted the three-degree target in a climate change policy devoid of specifics and a world away from what Australia would need to do if we are to pull our weight in a global effort to avoid climate calamity. How should climate activists respond?

Susan Kiefel's appointment as a High Court judge is great for Australia, and one decision of Ruddock I not only applaud, but do so with gusto. Maybe after all his terrible deeds over the last decade he wants to leave something special in place as his career nears its end. I'm reminded of Paul Keating's appointment of Michael Kirby to the High Court just before he lost office. I met Justice Kiefel in the early 1980's in Brisbane, when she was a junior barrister and I was an articled clerk briefing her on a case. She told me then that Tony Fitzgerald had personally mentored her when she worked as a secretary in his chambers, convincing her that she talented enough to finish year 12 and take the bar exam.

Just seen the Network Ten news here in Queensland. I believe that Peter Beattie is single handedly destroying Labor's chances of winning office at the federal election.

Webdiary has done a bit of work on bad and allegedly corruptly procured development over the years. This is an issue that brings people together now matter who they vote for.

"Old forests usually have deeper more complex root systems. They capture rain and transport it deep into the soil and store it, they are not putting on a huge amount of bulk, they have done most of their growing, so they store more water than they use. The soil in such a forest is less compacted there is an increase in humic acid and as a result the soil holds more water. In dryer times when there is less rain, the old tree root systems are able to move the water up through the soil. But what is truly remarkable is that this water actually makes its way into creeks and streams and flows on down the rivers. So one of the main functions of an old forest is that it maintains water supply in dry times. It amazes me that the Government agencies still haven’t worked out that there is a connection between the groundwater and the surface water." Susie Russell

It is tempting to lay the blame on Howard and his government for what has been done in our name but, at the end of the day, it is the Australian public with whom much of the fault lies. We have been gullible and self-absorbed. As a nation, we do not really take the threat of global warming seriously. The disengagement by the public at large has allowed our politicians of both major political persuasions to give our big polluters a free ride.

On Webdiary we've gone round the the Peak Oil loop more than a few times over the last few years (eg here). A new point of interest has arisen over this week: for the first time in the last few years the oil futures price has come out of its persistent state of contango as it rose back over USD75. What does this mean? Well, the short answer is, for the first time in a long while, oil futures dealers are not on balance convinced that the next move in the oil price is necessarily up.

Hello.  I've been off line for five days traveling with a friend from the South visiting her friends and mine and chilling out. Thank you, thank you to Fiona, Richard and David for keeping comments ticking along. I hope everyone is content at how Webdiary is traveling but if not, let me know in the comments box.

No one strategy can do all that we need to stop dangerous climate change. We need to follow several strategies simultaneously - but which ones? And are there solutions without nuclear power?

Mark Lynas' "Six Degrees: our future on a hotter planet" works systematically through the impact of warming the planet one degree at a time through the range of predictions for the next century. Key sentence: "none of the continent of Australia - except perhaps the extreme north and Tasmania - will be able to support significant crop production in the four-degree world because of heatwaves and declining rainfall."

IPCC WG III Summary for Policymakers available for download here [Word Doc]: "The literature identifies many options for achieving reductions of global GHG emissions at the international level through cooperation."

Download a copy here. Still infested with ideas that are based on the hope that the rains will come back one day (despite the predictions in the IPCC WGII report that the long-term rainfall trend is down for (at least) the rest of this century).

A meeting with the World Bank International Advisory Group on the Nam Theun 2 Dam in Laos

The extensively-leaked IPCC WGII report on impacts was released on Good Friday.The draft full report (including the 61-pages of the full Australia/NZ chapter) was briefly available on the WGII website, but has now gone again: the Summary for Policymakers is now available here.

The fight to save Lao's environment is being quietly lost and the disappearance of a significant local environmental advocate may have just drawn the line in the forest.

For politicians in persistent denial about the need to act, including US President George W. Bush, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there is no longer any place to hide.

What is at stake is not protecting domestic producers, but protecting our planet. The changing climate on climate change provides political leaders in Europe and other potential members of this “coalition of the willing” an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond mere rhetoric. The time to act is now.

I reckon what Brown's tried to do is put a cat among the pigeons. He's trying to put a bomb under the unspoken underlying issues here, the collective delusion that's seeing us destroy the planet's capacity to sustain us as a species. No one mainstream is game. Brown has thrown up a real radical one, in the hope that we might finally get to some of those issues.