Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

The Long and Costly War on Carbon: Viv Forbes

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‘The Australian government claims that next month’s tax on carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for today’s soaring costs of living.

This tax, however, is just their latest assault in the decades-long war on carbon that is already inflating the cost of everything.

For at least a decade, power companies have been obliged to source 10-15% of their power at inflated prices from costly and unreliable sources like wind and solar. And for every wind or solar plant built, a duplicate backup gas facility is needed, increasing the demand and price for backup gas, hitting other gas consumers. Moreover, the threat of more carbon taxes has deterred the construction of efficient new coal-burning power plants. Rising electricity costs feed into the cost of everything from public transport to building materials.

The climatists are also responsible for numerous policies pushing up the price of food. These include the ethanol/biofuel madness, the restrictions on the fishing industry, the Kyoto scrub clearing bans, the spread of carbon-credit forests over farming and grazing land, the never ending war on irrigators, and the virtual ban on building new water-supply dams.

Then we have all the hidden costs of the climate industry. Thousands of our smartest graduates are lured into well-paid dead-end desk jobs in the overheads industry devoted to climate red tape, while real entrepreneurs are unable to find workers to develop our continent of under-utilised resources. There is an overpaid bureaucracy devoted to climate “research”, alternate energy, international junkets, Kyoto give-aways, and administration, auditing, enforcement, accounting, law and propaganda for their empire of climate taxes and subsidies.

Finally we have income tax implications from all the money being flung around to bribe people to accept their carbon tax? Every Australian will get these bills somewhere, sometime. And who pays for the hundreds of millions poured down subsidy rat-holes like carbon capture, solar panels, pink bats and the IPCC?

Australia’s crippling carbon tax is but the latest symptom of the costly Climate Madness infecting the well-fed elite of the western world.

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Text from Viv Forbes, photograph from Jennifer Marohasy taken near Lithgow, NSW

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

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…

How the Prime Minister Can Save the Great Barrier Reef

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EVERYONE claims to be concerned about the health of the Great Barrier Reef. Last week a joint UNESCO World Heritage Centre and International Union for the Conservation of Nature report was released claiming the reef could be “in danger”.

Earlier this week the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, wrote to Queensland Premier, Campbell Newman, expressing concern about approval for a coal mine at Alpha and the potential impact of runoff on dugongs. [1]

Ha. It’s many hundreds of kilometres from Alpha to the coast. In between is the Burdekin dam and a long way further downstream more than 20,000 hectares of sugarcane and then the wetlands of Bowling Green Bay.

It’s absurd to suggest that the mine is going to have any impact on dugongs.

Maybe the concern wasn’t so much about the mine but about the associated development, in particular the railway and plans to expand the port at Abbot Point? Maybe.

But the Great Barrier Reef covers a vast area and dugongs aren’t going to congregate about a port development.

Dugongs congregate where there are seagrass meadows and there is no evidence that seagrass meadows are generally in decline around the Australian coastline.

Dugongs numbers, however, are in decline.

And it has everything to do with something the Prime Minister can stop.

There are perhaps only 14,000 dugongs left in Great Barrier Reef waters, and some estimates suggest that about 1,000 are slaughtered each year.

If the Prime Minister really cared about the Great Barrier Reef and its dugongs she would immediately ban the slaughter of dugongs by aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Great Barrier Reef waters.

 

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Artificial Salinity Target for Artificial Lower Lake

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IN the newly released Murray Darling Basin Plan there is a proposed target salinity for Lake Alexandrina. The plan suggests this target salinity value to be measured at Milang:

“The inclusion of a salinity target for Lake Alexandrina will provide for the management of salinity in both Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert. The Milang location is proposed as there is a historical record for this site, and it is not influenced by the day-to-day operations of the barrages which could result in short-term salinity fluctuations at sites closer to the mouth.

The proposed Basin Plan has been amended to introduce a new target value for salinity for managing water flows in the Lower Lakes (measured at Milang) of 600mg/L for 95% of the time.”

Milang is located on the western edge of Lake Alexandrina, as you can see on the map.

The salinity target value of 600mg/L can be compared to the salinity of seawater that is about 35,000 mg/L.

In other words, the target value is about 1.7% of the salinity of the ocean.

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