Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for May 2005

What About Water Desalination?

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Brisbane’s newspaper the Courier Mail published an opinion piece by me today titled “Drip-fed figures“. I raised the issued of desalination. Is it an option for Australian cities?

Anyway, the piece begins: “Late last month Queensland Premier Peter Beattie announced $2.3 billion worth of new water projects � the water component of the 20-year southeast Queensland infrastructure plan and program worth $55 billion.

Interestingly, while environment groups generally campaign vigorously against new dams, they have been surprisingly silent on the dams and weirs proposed for the southeast. In fact there appears to have been little critical assessment of the water proposal at all.

The plan focuses on increasing water supply to accommodate the growing population, estimated to increase by a million people over the next 20 years. The program’s budget includes $149 million for Wyaralong Dam, $2 million to investigate desalination options and $23 million for “urban conservation initiatives”.

Curiously, the list of 23 projects comes to a total of only $861 million. It is unclear how the remaining $1.4 billion, to make up the $2.3 billion announced by the Premier, will be spent.

Furthermore, it is unclear how much water the different components of this plan will deliver. I am curious to know how much water the Wyaralong Dam might deliver relative to a desalination plant.

Perth and Sydney are now seriously considering desalination as an option. Certainly the water supply is assured whether or not it rains. The cost of desalination as a source of water is reducing dramatically with improved thermal and membrane technologies.

Globally, desalination capacity has increased at about 12 per cent per year over the past 30 years. There are now more than 12,000 desalination plants world wide, with about 20 per cent of these in the US. Australia is an island with most major cities situated next to the ocean, making desalination a real option for urban water supplies. …”

My friend Warwick Hughes is a member of the Perth Water User’s Group and they are campaigning against the proposed desalination plant for Perth. I gather they recently sent a letter to Senator Campbell that began:

Dear Senator Campbell,

URGENT: Perth water policy crisis

Your input or that of your Department is urgently needed to bring some scientific balance into the debate over Perth water supply options. Current WA Govt policy with respect for Perth’s water supply flies in the face of common sense scientific observations on rainfall, groundwater and rivers.

Current WA Govt policy is taking us down a path to a water supply increasingly based on water costing three to four times traditional sources. Already the WA Govt is constructing one completely unnecessary seawater desalination plant at Kwinana (with more to follow) to produce 45GL of water PA at an investment of $387Mill and rising.

All this waste of our money is taking place when there are several other vastly cheaper options available to enhance our water supplies.

Australia can not afford this huge and pointless waste which is making WA less competitive. ….”

So what do you think about desalination?

Tall Trees

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This is my first trip to Tassie. I have sat through speeches from the Prime Minister and Premier Paul Lennon and today watched a helicopter carrying Kim Beazley rise above the Tahune Forest Reserve.

What I will probably remember most though,is the sheer size of the trees.

I am still coming to grips with the size of what I have always called black wattle but what is know here as blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon). The Tassie blackwoods are so straight and tall but at around 30m, not tall by Tassie tree standards.

Tasmania has a tallest tree registry with more than 50 individual trees registered.

I was fascinated by the height and girth of the stringybarks (Eucalyptus obliqua) in the wet Eucaptus forests of the Huon valley. I saw perhaps the tallest stringybark in Australia at 87 metres – and shrinking. The tree is dying from the top and predicted to lose about 3 metres in height over the next 5 years.

And Premier Lennon probably included this tree in the 100 million trees that he proudly declared on Saturday would be “protected forever”!

The tallest Tassie trees are the swamp gums (E. regnans) and apparently even taller in Victoria. The world’s tallest ever tree was perhaps a swamp gum felled at Watt’s River Victoria in 1872, however, the height of 133 metres is disputed.

But none of these trees can apparently ever qualify as the tallest Christmas tree – irrespecive of how well they might be decorated.

Anyway, the forests I saw today were extensive, magnificent and very tall.

Rethinking Environmentalism

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Following is an extract from my speech to the Timber Communities Australia Conference in Launceston, Tasmania:

“It is a fact of life that if you don’t have your own clear plan, your own vision, you will likely be recruited into implementing someone else’s plan.

Organizations such as WWF and Greenpeace don’t undertake much tree-planting or grow any organic food themselves. These organizations exist to recruit others to implement their plans, their vision of what is best for the environment.

The Federal Coalition Government has been bankrolling these organisations to promote their vision. For example the federal government provided grants to WWF of over $15 million during the period 1996-2003.

We need a new vision. We need a new environment organisation within which we can start discussing and debating the principles I have outlined.

And there is a new environment group just starting up, and working from a radically different value-set than the established groups. The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) has just formed and embraced the following 6 values based on my five principles:

1. Evidence – policies are set and decisions are made on the basis of facts, evidence and scientific analysis;

2. Choice – issues are prioritised on the basis of accurate risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis;

3. Technology – appropriate and innovative technological solutions are implemented.

4. Management – active management is used when necessary, acknowledging that landscapes and ecosystems are dynamic;

5. Diversity – biological diversity is maintained;

6. People – the needs and aspirations of people are balanced against environmental issues.

Working logically from these basic values and from my principles, could result in some radical outcomes. For example, if we value evidence, and if we are concerned about reducing our ecological footprint, then it logically follows that it is actually better to buy GM than organic. It might actually be better to support the Australian timber industry than to import timber from Malaysia and Indonesia.”

For more information on AEF and its soon to be launched website watch this web-blog.

Newest Tassie Forestry Deal

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Yesterday the front page of Tasmania’s Examiner read “End of war in Tassie’s forests?”. Today it is “Policy cut down: Environment groups attack forestry plan.”

The war was meant to end in 1997 with the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA). But the campaigning never stopped.

In the deal signed on Friday between Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon and the PM something like 90 per cent of the forest in the northwest know as the Tarkine will now be ‘protected’ from logging.

The campaigners, however, are complaining because the area won’t be World Heritage listed – not even given National Park status. I understand that while logging is now banned there is still potential for cattle grazing and mining.

The timber industry gets money for restructuring etcetera. In fact the $250 million package promised by the PM on Friday is a lot more than the $110 million which came with the 1997 RFA.

There are a whole lot of other components to the deal including banning the use of the poison 1080 in state forests from January. There is apparently no alternative effective control for ‘browsing’ animals who can destroy seedlings in new forest planting, but $4 million has been promised for research.

Here’s to a logger …

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I’m in Launceston, Tasmania attending the National Conference of Timber Communities Australia (TCA). It will be opened this morning by the PM, John Howard.

I got my conference bag last night. It’s contents included a stubbie holder with the verse:

Here’s to a logger
Who fills a need

From houses to paper
From one little seed

For those of you who
Wish to disagree

Try wiping your arse
without felling a tree.

Counting Koalas

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There are competing theories about how male koalas go about procreating. The ‘king koala’ theory proposes that a powerful male dominates breeding and ‘holds the fabric of koala society in the palm of his mighty paw’, to quote Koala expert Dr Bill Ellis. In contrast the ‘traveling salesman’ model suggests that well, it can be more opportunistic and egalitarian. I gather the ‘traveling salesman’ model is supported by DNA analysis but the ‘king koala’ believers have the numbers.

There are obviously significant implications for Koala conservation planning depending on the model used/applied.

It would also seem important for conservation planning that we know something about how many koalas there are in Australia and also where they are.

The Australian Koala Foundation claims there are fewer than 100,000 Koalas in Australia with numbers on the decline.

I get a total of 120,000 just by counting up a few know populations:
59,000 mulgalands of southwest Queensland,
25,00 southeast Queensland,
8,200 NSW North Coast, and
27,000 Kangaroo Island, South Australia.

According to Simon Baltais from the Wildlife Preservation Society the population in Redlands Shire (just south of Brisbane) is the premier koala population in Australia.” I wonder what he means?

I would be interested to know if anyone has any information regarding the size of the Koala population in Victoria? I gather it is/was huge? Has it recovered from the bushfires?

Also how many Koalas are there in the Pillaga-Goonoo forests of NW NSW?

I am right now trying to writing a piece on Koalas for the next IPA Review. Given the interest generated by my column in The Land some weeks ago.