Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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Exotic Disease Threatens Australian Eucalyptus

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Exotic diseases represent a significant threat to Australia’s unique fauna and flora.

Dramatic declines in frog numbers in the 1970s were initially blamed on habitat destruction associated with logging.  It was not until twenty years later that the disease Chytridiomycosis caused by the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis was positively identified and is now officially recognized as the cause of four species extinctions.  The disease is thought to have spread from Africa.

The Myrtle rust is an exotic disease from South America with the potential to infest many Australian native plants including Eucalyptus.  The disease was first detected in Australia on the Central Coast of New South Wales in April 2010.   Recently it was found in southeastern Queensland.   In an attempt to stop the spread of the disease it is rumoured some National Parks could be closed to visitors.

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Questions over Snowy Hydro Water Management

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 It is the ultimate in hypocrisy for the Commonwealth government to be insisting farmers give back water under a new planning scheme to save the environment, while continuing to pocket millions from water wasted by Snowy Hydro for derivative trading on the electricity market. 

LAST night on ABC Television’s 7.30 Report, journalist Bronwyn Herbert explained how water was released from Eucumbene Dam by Snowy Hydro for electricity generation at the height of flooding in the Murrumbidgee late last year. At the time Eucumbene Dam was at less than 30 percent capacity while the lower storages were spilling. In releasing the water for non-essential electricity generation, Snowy Hydro not only contributed to the flooding, but was wasting water, water that could have been stored for the next drought. Lake Eucumbene is the central storage for the entire Snowy scheme with the capacity to hold the equivalent of nine Sydney Harbours of water.

Since June 2001 when Snowy Hydro Ltd was incorporated, the corporation’s priority has been revenue generation for its shareholders through electricity generation. The shareholders are the Commonwealth, Victorian and New South Wales governments.

During the recent drought years Snowy Hydro waters contributed to about 60 percent of inflows to the Murrumbidgee and 30 percent of inflows to the Murray River. But then and now, there is no imperative for the management of these waters to complement or accord with water allocations within the Murray Darling Basin.

Given Snowy Hydro’s shareholders are the government, it would seem sensible that these shareholders apply some pressure to the corporation and at least encourage the Managing Director, Terry Charlton, to operate the electricity generating business responsibly.

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Bronwyn Herbert Investigates Snowy Hydro

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Before the recent flooding, there was much lamenting about how there is never enough water in the Murray Darling Basin for both irrigated agriculture and also the environment.   Yet in all this discussion no consideration has been given to the more integrated management of Snowy Hydro waters with management of water allocations within the Basin proper.  

Over the recent drought years Snowy Hydro waters contributed to about 60 percent of inflows to the Murrumbidgee and 30 percent of inflows to the Murray River.   

Since its corporatisation, the priority for Snowy Hydro has been electricity generation and so now, while the catchments are flooding, water is being taken by Snowy Hydro from Eucumbene Dam and sent through turbines before being released into Blowering Dam which is spilling into the saturated Murrumbidgee catchment.  

An alternative management arrangement that gave precedence to water storage over electricity generation would undoubtedly see water being stored during this period of high flows in anticipation of the next drought. 

Given the high inflows over recent months it is indeed extraordinary that Lake Eucumbene, the central storage system for the Snowy Hydro scheme, remains at less than 30 percent capacity and that water is being drawn from this storage for electricity generation.

Bronwyn Herbert has been considering these and other issues and her investigation will feature tonight on the ABC Television 7.30 Report*. 

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*The program can also be watched from your computer http://www.abc.net.au/iview/?gclid=CJaDoMLCiacCFQU3pAod5DUydQ#/series/7.30%20Report?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=CORP_srch_iview

For background on Snowy Hydro scroll here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/tag/snowy-hydro/

What to Listen to, and Read, This Week

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1. How to die?

“If we remove faith from the equation, voluntary euthanasia presents a difficulty for the conservative dislike of change. In the broad sweep of Western history it is new, or at least newly popular, which means a conservative should regard it with suspicion. And yet often it follows on another new action that conservatives are happy to embrace – the extension of life through medicine, to the point where it becomes agonising. Why should one change be accepted and not the other?”

Read more here from Michael Duffy at Quadrant Online: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/02/simple-death
And look out for Michael’s new book ‘The Simple Death’.

2. Facebook

I’ve just been joined to a new Facebook group: Murray Darling Basin People Who Live in the Basin.  The group has been started by Peter Oataway a frustrated resident of the township of Hay on the Murrumbidgee River.    Are there other Facebook groups with an Australian rural focus?  If you know of one please provide the link as a comment.
 http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_188277774537703&id=188483771183770

3.  Blowering Dam Still Spilling  

Peter Oataway would like the Water Act changed so due consideration is given to rural communities in the Murray Darling Basin.   As Max Talbot wrote last week in The Land newspaper, the Act should also be changed to ensure the integration of Snowy Scheme water storages.  At the moment Snowy Hydro is still releasing from Lake Eucumbene and Blowering Dam is still spilling and as the hydrologists say: “a full dam doesn’t hold any water”.  More on this later in the week. 

4. Wind farming

I haven’t read: Why Wind Won’t Work?.  It’s a submission from the Carbon Sense Coalition to the Australian Senate Enquiry into Wind Farms.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/why-wind-wont-work.pdf and http://www.carbon-sense.com/ 
But I’m passing along the link on request from Viv Forbes.

5. Consider this an open thread

Let other readers of this blog know what you are listening to, and reading, this week by way of a comment.

And consider donating to the continued operation of this blog.   There is an orange button at the top right hand corner of this page.    It’s about community, and access to information that is not politically correct or even fashionable.

Thomas Kuhn on Novelty and Expectation

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The Harvard trained physicist and famous philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, often refers to a psychological experiment in his book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ whereby individuals fail to notice individual anomalous cards within a deck.   

The experiment illustrates the extent to which people can struggle when they are confronted with information that does not accord with what they have been taught. 

Kuhn suggests the experiment demonstrates the nature of the mind and also the process of scientific discovery. 

He has written:

‘In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.’

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Tim Flannery’s Failings Ignored

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‘The Government says it wants a “climate expert” to sell the message to the public, and who do they pick? A small mammal expert whose predictions on the climate are so wrong any normal person would slink off in shame. But not Flannery, the Teflon prophet, reality doesn’t stick to him.  How can it be that the outrageously wrong get away with it with reputations intact (and get rewarded too)? Blame the mainstream media. Blame also a government that thinks it’s a good use of public money to promote known failures.

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