Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

Save the Carbon, Harvest the Forest?

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Government policies across the world generally favour locking-up forests for carbon sequestration. But a new study by the NSW Government’s Department of Primary Industries suggests: Total greenhouse gas emissions abatement and carbon storage from a multiple use production forest exceed the carbon storage benefit of a conservation forest.

The report stresses that to quantify the climate change impacts of forestry, the entire forestry system should be considered: the carbon dynamics of the forest, the life cycle of forest products; the substitution benefit of biomass and wood products, the risk of leakage resulting from deforestation and forest degradation in other countries.

The study compares the overall greenhouse gas balance for two coastal harvested versus two conservation forests. The accounting method used shows that most of the savings for the harvested forests is in the area of “product substitution”; the idea being that substitution of wood through the use of cement, steel and aluminium creates emissions.

If you are interested in the crooked business of carbon accounting, or looking to justify the harvesting of forests for more fashionable reasons than economics, the report is worth a read:

Harvested forests provide the greatest ongoing greenhouse gas benefits. By Fabiano Ximenes et al. NSW Government, June 2012.
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/434643/Harvested-forests-provide-the-greatest-ongoing-greenhouse-gas-benefits.pdf

Act Locally to Axe the Tax

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Dear Supporters,

In the next few days we will be launching a poster campaign to coincide with the introduction of the Carbon TAX.

The campaign will consist of distributing this poster http://www.galileomovement.com.au/images/poster_campaign_800c.jpg to shops and business in your local area and asking them to display it prominently in their windows or notice boards.

We have chosen this method of communication as we think it will reach more people than will a letter box drop and needs less effort.

We need your help in two ways:

Firstly, you can request us to send you by mail between 1-5 posters for you to take to your local shops. (More if you are really confident)

Additionally, you are welcome to download and print your own copies and ask businesses to hang them in their front windows.

And secondly, we are looking for 100 supporters to donate $5.00 each to help cover the costs of printing and postage. (All money donated will go towards this campaign only).

Link to our Donations Page http://www.galileomovement.com.au/donations.php

A special big thank you to Steve Hunter who has allowed us to use his illustration.

If you have any questions, or want to show your support or order posters, please email us at Galileomovement@gmail.com

Thank you for your support!
The Galileo Movement

Rio+20 Was Different

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‘APPARENTLY, the Rio + 20 Conference ended on Friday. The word apparently is used jokingly. Saturday’s headlines of both the New York Times and the Washington Post failed to include any mention of the closing of the conference. These “newspapers of record” focused on sensational sex trials instead. It seems the conference did not end as the editors wished. According to reports, the conference was tightly controlled by the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – particularly Brazil which headed the conference. The leaders of Brazil, India and China have made it clear that they will not punish their citizens by stopping economic growth. Russia needs revenues from exports of oil and gas to maintain its budget and government spending.

The conference was different than past conferences for several reasons. There was no grand announcement of Western governments committing huge sums to the governments of the third world. There were no political rock-stars flying in at the last moment to put a deal together. There were no all night sessions extending far beyond the scheduled close of the meeting.

The European ministers were disappointed in the failure for the world to adopt their agenda. The non-government organizations (NGOs) were largely locked out of the process of reaching an agreement, their demands were ignored. The disappointment, even despair, expressed by a number of environmental groups is indicative of the success of the BRIC countries.

Those in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under whose auspices this conference was given, are no doubt disappointed that they will not have a $100 Billion a year Green Fund to manage. The leaders of some third world countries are no doubt disappointed they will not be receiving huge sums from the UNFCCC, dashing their hopes of expanding their Swiss bank accounts or obtaining that special villa in the south of France. But the conference gave some political leaders the opportunity to stay at a luxurious resort while preaching austerity for others. And the conclusion gives the opportunity for many ordinary citizens in the world to sigh with relief…

By Ken Haapala at www.sepp.org

After Gina Rhinehart Buys Fairfax

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‘The hilarious implication – and secret terror of every Melbourne hipster – is that Rinehart will turn Fairfax into some kind of 24-hour Mining Channel, with endless re-runs of Red Dog and Wake in Fright, interspersed with ads for blue singlets. You won’t be able to so much as pick up a copy of the Age without finding your hands stained red with dust, as you search in vain for a single article that isn’t about the Hancock family, while averting your eyes from the topless pictures of Andrew Bolt on page 3. 

I don’t know about you, but given the uniformly mindless dross scraped up, warmed over, rehashed and then served as ideological bubble-and-squeak on the ABC (even drizzled with its jus of self-righteousness and dark-green sea foam), I long for alternatives. In fact, I long for the much-anticipated sale of the ABC under the most enthusiastic sort of Liberal government, and dismantled by an equally enthusiastic Mark Latham. During the Renaissance, it was the independently filthy rich – the oligarchs, bankers and popes – who sponsored the finest artists of the age. Let a new Renaissance bloom at the touch of button 2 on the remote: I hope Rinehart buys the entire Fairfax group, and then casts hungry eyes on the ABC itself…

Read more here: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2012/06/one-woman-army

From ‘One-woman Army’ by Philippa Martyr
Published at Quadrant Online on June 20, 2012

Alan Jones, About the Murray’s Mouth

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Hi Alan

Re: How to Keep the Sea Mouth of the Murray River Open

I was sent a podcast from your broadcast on 2GB Sydney radio this morning talking about the Lower Lakes and the barrages (Alan Jones on 2GB on June 20, 2012). Great to hear you put the Water Minister Tony Burke straight on a few issues including explaining to him that taking water from farmers/irrigators won’t stop drought! It was also nice to be quoted by you.

You might like to also consider quoting the famous British explorer Charles Sturt who wrote in about 1840:

“Australian rivers fall rapidly from the mountains in which they originate into a level and extremely depressed country; having weak and inconsiderable sources, and being almost wholly unaided by tributaries of any kind; they naturally fail before they reach the coast, and exhaust themselves in marshes or lakes; or reach it so weakened as to be unable to preserve clear or navigable mouths, or to remove the sand banks that the tide throws up before them.”

In fact, the Murray River often ran strong in spring and summer, but by autumn had slowed and then a southwesterly wind would pick up and the sea would pour in. So, the Lower Lakes, that the Minister now wants to keep permanently fresh, were often brackish and during prolonged drought, full of seawater.

[Read more…] about Alan Jones, About the Murray’s Mouth

Away with Rio+20 and Ineptocracy

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INEPTOCRACY is a system of government where the least capable of leading are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers. That’s according to the web-based Urban Dictionary of slang and seems to be an increasingly apt description of how Australia is governed.

The latest fiasco is the proposed closely down of an already diminished Australian fishing industry through the creation of the world’s largest marine park.

But what on earth is the purpose of having the world’s large marine park if we continue to condone the slaughter of a species of marine mammal already on the verge of extinction? There are only about 14,000 dugongs left in Great Barrier Reef waters and about 1,000 are slaughtered each year.

Dugongs are closely related to elephants, don’t calf until they are nearly twenty years old and suckle their young for up to two years. They are slaughtered by aborigines and Torres Strait islanders as part of an indigenous hunting right, never mind that the slaughter is unsustainable and inhumane.

If the Australian government really cared about the Great Barrier Reef and its dugongs, it would immediately ban the slaughter of dugongs by aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Then there is the Murray River fiasco. The buy back of vast quantities of water by the Australian government from our most efficient food producers to send to an artificial freshwater reservoir that has crippled the Murray River’s estuary and all ostensibly to save the environment.

Before the sea dykes that dammed the estuary, each autumn when the southwesterly winds picked up, the Southern Ocean would push into Lake Alexandrina. So the lake was sometimes fresh and some brackish and during prolonged drought it was full of seawater. A mainstay of local fishery was mulloway, a large fish with a golden sheen, but there are no mulloway anymore.

Before the sea dykes were built across the five channels that converge on the Murray’s sea mouth, mulloway would hangout in the underwater canyons beyond the Murray’s mouth. As though reluctant to come in, then on a big tide and a full moon large schools would race through the inlet between the sand dunes. The year the sea dykes were sealed, the mulloway came in and then were trapped, on each ebbing tide, churning in the channels below the sea dykes. There is an old photograph of the Goolwa wharf groaning under 160 tonnes of dead mulloway.

If the Australian government really cared about fish it would restore the 75,000 hectares of terminal coastal lagoon at the bottom of the Murray Darling by removing the sea dykes.

But it doesn’t really care about dugongs or mulloway.

In our ineptocracy, real and pressing environmental issues are ignored while governments legislate against productive and sustainable industries.

Over the next few days the mainstream media are going to tell us stories about the Rio+20 conference, a place in South America where Australia’s richest environmental groups and government bureaucrats are gathering with other such groups and governments from around the world. They are gathering ostensibly to solve the environmental problems of the world by promoting a new economic order through a new political document for our future.

A majority of those attending will likely represent the least capable of leading meaningful change and the least capable of contributing in a practical way to a productive society, and their very attendance will be a consequence of the taxing of a diminishing number of productive and sustainable industries.

And not one of the many delegates from Australia has ever shown the slightest interest in any of our real environmental issues including the restoration of the Murray River’s estuary or saving our dugongs.

 

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I took the picture of Green Island shown above from the window of one of those small Dash 8 aeroplanes on my way to Cairns last week. From Cairns I ventured north to the Daintree and went looking for cassowaries with Neil Hewett.

… only my second YouTube movie. Thanks to all who donated to Mr Koala’s fundraising appeal, we purchased the video camera with some of the monies raised.

My very first YouTube movie is here…