Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Farms Run on Oil

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Farm Online has the following report on the impact of rising oil prices on Australian farm businesses:

Farm incomes have been tipped to fall by a third in 2005-06, despite the optimism generated from the winter crop comeback and good prices for many rural commodities.

As the Westpac-National Farmers’ Federation Rural Commodity Index rose 2.9pc in September on the back of improved sugar and grain prices and record high cattle prices, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) September Commodities report forecast the fall of net farm income in 2005-06 compared to 2004-05, driven by big fuel price increases.

“It is unfortunate that just as we look like we might be emerging from one of the worst droughts in living memory the farming sector is being slugged by record high oil prices which are feeding into fuel, fertiliser and chemical costs,” NFF Farm Business and Economics Committee chair, Charles Burke, said.

“Compared with the $13B farmers earned in 2001-02, net earnings of $4.4B this year looks fairly grim.

“With fuel costs up 34pc over this time and 20pc up on last year, it is not hard to see oil prices are having a big impact.

Australia: Best Place on Earth for Nuclear Waste

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After Bob Hawke suggested we should take the world’s nuclear waste, I agreed.

Geoff Hudson gives six good reasons why at Ockham’s Razor:

One. The site should be well away from any fault line. Storage sites would not be recommended for Japan, the San Andreas Fault, New Zealand or Indonesia. We should choose a country sitting in the middle of a large and stable tectonic plate.

Two. The site should be dry. Water can corrode metals given enough time, and time it will have. We want a site in a desert. This will also eliminate the risk of fire. Without vegetation you cannot have large naturally occurring fires which could destroy the safety systems you would want.

Three. The site should be well away from the sea. Preferably 100 kilometres inland. We have not seen tsunamis get 10km inland in recent history, but we need to think in terms of thousands of years, rather than hundreds.

The human risk to a repository of radioactive waste is more difficult to manage. One clear risk is the use of the waste by terrorists. Their objective would be to make a dirty bomb: conventional explosives mixed with radioactive waste. If this achieved the same effect as Chernobyl, but in London, New York or Paris, the consequences would be catastrophic. Imagine if the recent bombs in London had been radioactive. Mass evacuation, transport shutdown, businesses stopped. The effects would dominate the city and be felt as far away as Australia. In fact, this is the main threat which nuclear waste poses to Australians. Not to health or the environment, but to our economy. It might not cause a depression but it could come close. To prevent this, we need to impose further requirements on the site:

Four. The site should be very sparsely inhabited. If there are no people there, then there will be no infrastructure to support the people or the movement of people, so the chance that terrorists will get to the site and be able to remove waste from it will be limited.

Five. The site should be on an island, so a ship is needed to get the waste to a place where it could not do a lot of damage.

Six. The country governing the site must maintain the safety systems at the repository. It should have a stable government, preferably one with no history of civil war. The people in the country should be well educated and technologically advanced enough to know the risks of nuclear radiation, so that the protection of the site is preserved over changes in government.

Is there a place on earth which satisfies these six criteria?

The United States fails on three counts. The Yucca Mountain site, the intended US waste repository, is only 145 kilometres from Las Vegas and has three fault lines below it and volcanos nearby.

Japan, another heavy user of nuclear power, is also out. The whole country is on the geologically active Pacific Rim.

Europe has very few places where the population density is low, and equally fewer which are dry.

There are places in Africa which have few people and which are dry, but the continent is famous for civil unrest.

To my mind, the clear winner in this contest is Australia.

Glaciers Melting

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There is a new long article at BBC Online about variations in warming, melting, and thickening across Antartica and Arctica.

There is also info on glaciers, I was impressed by this graph:

_40881964_glacier_mass_gra203.gif

The graph was accompanied by the following text:

“The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), supported by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), collates records from across the globe and issues regular bulletins of area and volume changes.

Two years ago, they concluded that 30 major glaciers – assessed as being a representative global sample – had thinned by an average 6m between 1980 and 2001.

“It will have a major impact,” says Professor Hambrey, “mainly through reductions in the fresh water supply.

Will iconic mountains like the Matterhorn become ice-free?
“Cities like La Paz in Bolivia and Lima in Peru rely heavily on glacial meltwater from the high Andes brought down into dry arid areas.

“Switzerland, by contrast, uses meltwater for hydroelectric power generation. If the glaciers disappear, their generating capacity will be very much reduced.”

Neelum River Blocked by Falling Villages

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I was upset to read that 20 people, including 4 Australians, were killed in the Bali bombings of last week. I just can’t get my mind around the idea of 18,000 people dead from yesterday’s earthquake in Pakistan.

According to the Associated Press of Pakistan:

The earthquake that jolted parts of northern Pakistan, ranks fourth amongst the ten, over 7.0 magnitude earthquakes that hit the world in 2005 and is the severest in country’s history.

The worst earthquake that hit the country was on May 30, 1935, which almost destroyed Quetta in south- west of Pakistan, killing over 50,000 people.

He said the earthquake was very shallow and at a depth of around 10 kms and is prone to cause widespread damage in the area.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center, the quake originated 95 kms North North East of capital Islamabad at 8:50:38 a.m.

The Indian and Eurasian plates pass through Northern Pakistan.

Islamabad and Peshawar lie in the major damage zone.

According to ABC Online:

“Village after village has been wiped out,” said an official in Muzaffarabad, the main town in Pakistani Kashmir. “The Neelum River has been blocked because whole villages have fallen into the water.”

The scale of the disaster has shocked the international community and brought pledges of aid and expressions of sympathy but the time has already run out for many in the region.

Near the shattered town of Balakot in Northwest Frontier Province, the scene was one of total devastation with many villages lying in ruins.

Landslides blocked the steep mountain roads and powerful aftershocks sowed terror among survivors, dislodging huge boulders from further up the hillsides. Rain, hail and freezing temperatures added to the misery.

The Neelum River has been a point of dispute between India and Pakistan with India completing a 22 km long tunnel earlier this year in violation of the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 and taking water from down stream Pakistan.

Marie Claire Says No to GM

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Marie Claire is a popular magazine read by many educated and socially conscious young women in Australia. My daughter Caroline has just drawn my attention to page 170 of the November 2005 issue where readers are told to ‘Say No to Genetically Modified Food’. There is a link to the Greenpeace true food site.

Interestingly the paragraph in the magazine begins “Genetically engineered (GE) foods might mean your vegetables last a bit longer, but there is growing concern about the long-term environmental and health effects of this technology.”

But hang on, there are no GM/GE vegetables for sale in Australia!

Perhaps the most available GM derived product in Australia is vegetable oil from GM cotton seed. Australian cotton farmers that grew GM varieties last season, used on average 88 percent less pesticide than farmers who grew conventional varities.

Exactly how and why is GM bad for the environment? I can only see benefits in the technology?

Those who oppose GM technology, including on the basis that corporate farms are bad, may like this site … http://www.themeatrix.com/ .

The video is compelling and check out the expression on the pig’s face when he decides to join the crusade.

Camel’s Poo Too

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Just back from another day at the beach: this time Mooloolaba which is an hour and a bit north of Brisbane. The sky was a perfect blue and a terrific breeze chopped the tops off some of the waves.

There are no camels at Mooloolaba. But I see today a story at ABC Online about camels at Broome’s cable beach and how they will soon be fitted with ‘poo bags’.

I guess the bags can be emptied where the poo can be mulched – rather than washed out to sea? I don’t know about the ocean off the north west, but parts of Australia’s east coast are nutrient poor. I wonder what the decision to mandate ‘poo bags’ was based on?

I will be in Darwin later this week at a conference on ‘population’. In preparation I have been reading a paper by Ron Brunton titled ‘The End of the Overpopulation Crisis’. He quotes from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book ‘The population bomb’:

I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago … The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. AS we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scence a hellish aspect.

Brunton remarked “Clearly, Ehrlich felt some revulsion at the culturally unfamiliar use of personal and public space by a people who were physically different from himself.”

I reckon Ehrlich would also be intolerant of camel’s pooing on the beach.