Jennifer Marohasy

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Golden Rice is Cost Effective: A Note from David Tribe

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Hi Jennifer,

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) afflicts many people around the world, especially in developing countries. Some of the adverse health outcomes of VAD include increased mortality, night blindness, corneal scars, blindness and measles among children, as well as night blindness among pregnant and lactating women. In a bid to reduce VAD-related diseases, rice plants were engineered to produce higher levels of beta-carotene in the endosperms or grains, and the result of this effort is Golden Rice 2. In an article in Nature Biotechnology, Alexander Stein and colleagues from the University of Hohenheim, Germany and Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science & Research, India, presented a new methodology for assessing the potential impact and cost-effectiveness of Golden Rice 2 in India.

Read the complete blog post at http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2006/11/assessing-benefits-of-golden-rice-2.html

Cheers, David Tribe

Democrats Set to Change US Climate Change Policy

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With the Democrats winning control of both the Senate and House of Representatives in the recent US elections, Senator Barbara Boxer will take over as chairman of the US Senate Environmental Public Works Committee and has pledged to introduce legislation to curb greenhouse gases. The legislation is likely to be modeled after a new California law that seeks to cut California’s emissions by 25 percent, dropping them to 1990 levels by 2020. Read the article at MSNBC by clicking here.

So the Democrats aren’t talking about signing Kyoto? Why not?

How Many Trees Did Bob Carr Really Save? A Note from Cinders

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Hi Jennifer,

The former Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, has made the following claim in a Daily Telegraph Editorial:

“ONE of my first acts as premier in 1995 was to introduce controls on the clearing of native vegetation. It was controversial and it involved me in endless arguments.

But stopping broadacre land clearing in NSW (Queensland followed) is the only thing that has enabled Prime Minister John Howard to boast that Australia can meet its Kyoto targets.”

I have compared this claim with information compiled by the Australian Greenhouse Office and it doesn’t appear to stack up.

landuse change emissions.JPG

The table indicates that landuse change emissions have reduced dramatically from 1990 to now by about 70 percent. Much of this occurred prior to 1995, the date Mr. Carr claims that he acted. In fact the table shows an extremely small decrease from 1995 to 2003 for New South Wales. There was no significant change in Queensland from 1995 to 2002.

Mr Carr’s statement that stopping broad acre land clearing in NSW in 1995 is the only thing that allows Australia to meets its Kyoto targets is not supported by the available evidence.

In the same article Mr Carr claims:

“In 1800 much of North America, South America, Australia and Asia was covered by forest. But the explosion in the human population meant massive clearing. Australia lost an estimated two-thirds of its vegetation.”

These statements can be compared with the Department of Environment and Heritage Australian Native Vegetation Assessment 2001 that states:

“At a continental scale, approximately 13% of the total land has been cleared.”

This assessment estimates that about 50% of the continent was covered by forest and woodland. Indeed this was mostly woodland, with forest accounting for just over 44 million hectares or about 6% of the continent. In 2001 the Audit estimated that over 31 million hectares remained, that is 71% of the original extent. This is less than a third of the forest cleared not two thirds as claimed by Bob Carr.

Regards Cinders.

Scientific Facts Irrelevant: A Note from Eric Ness

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Hi Jennifer,

I’m sure you have heard the old saying that rules are made to be broken. In most instances this is a relatively harmless idea if you are talking about a group of middle school children who fail to follow the instructions of their English teacher—at worst you might get a bunch of kids who can’t write well. However, what happens if the custodians of law in a country start to follow the same maxim? Unfortunately, you might get the Buyat case.

A justice system can fail in many ways. For instance, if a real criminal is not prosecuted or a criminal gets away with a disproportionately lenient sentence. But what happens when you are talking about a justice system that deliberately targeted an innocent man with the single minded determination to basically destroy his life, in this situation you are not talking about a justice system at all. However, this seems to be the situation exemplified by my Dad’s ongoing legal battles in Indonesia.

A friend of mine once said that you start having human rights issues when you stop following the rule of law. In the same tone it becomes pointless to continue talking about scientific facts because they have been made irrelevant in the absence of rule of law. As the Buyat case has proceeded it has truly revealed the personality of the justice system and we find ourselves facing some of these concerns.

Please read the rest of the blog entry at:

http://richardness.org/blog/ruleoflaworlawlessnessofrulers.php

Thanks,
Eric

Possums Killing River Red Gums: A Note from Michael O’Brien

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Dear Jennifer,

I was reading your blogs criticising the misrepresentation of the facts surrounding the Murray river floodplains and death of river red gums. I own a property on the Murray river floodplains, downstream of Echuca. My property has river red gum wetlands that have quite naturally not recieved any flooding since 1995.

For the last 15 years my red gum wetland and many other red gum wetlands in the region have suffered massive decline in tree health and in some instances all of the trees have been killed. It is changing the look of the landscape and is quite obviously a regional catastrophe.

But what is the cause? Ask any of the experts and they insist it is “drought”, but in my district the average rain for the past 15 years has only been slightly below the long term average and in reality the redgums have probably had as much flooding as they ever did in dry periods.

Death by Possum2blog.JPG

The actual cause of the tree death is something much more cute and cuddly, common brush-tailed possum’s. Brush-tailed possums are abundant in these hollow redgums. At times I have spotted up to 15 mature possums in one tree. Each summer the trees grow a few leaves and then for the remainder of the year the possums strip them clean. The trees can only take about three years of this kind of constant bombardment before they die. From the 200 large trees within my wetland at least 75% have died in the last 10 years, and the remainder are in poor health.

Prior to European settlement in the area, the local Aboriginals heavilly utilized brush-tailed possums for food, clothing etcetera. So much so that one of the early pastoralists in the area referred to them as the “possum-eaters”.

As an experiment I possum guarded a number of random trees last November.

The following photograph I took this morning of one of the possum- guarded trees. The trees in the photograph were all in similar health at the time of guarding last November.

Possum attack is a widespread problem in the Murray flood plains now that possums are unable to be utilized and managed, and probably explains a lot of the premature death of red gums that people are witnessing in this natural dry period.

Regards,
Michael O’Brien

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Note from Jeff Yugovic, added 13th December, 2015

“Although my work is widely accepted by the general public and many practical conservationists, I am being ignored by academia and am regarded as a heretic by some ratbag ‘conservationists’.

My discussion paper is online and is updated periodically:

http://www.spiffa.org/do-ecosystems-need-top-predators.html ”

This paper quotes the above blog post.

Who’s “Utterly Wrong” on The Murray?

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In the December 2004 issue of Quadrant magazine I had an article published entitled ‘Why Save the Murray’. It began:

“I WAS SURPRISED when I learned that the Australian [newspaper] was running a “Saving the Murray” campaign. I realised that journalists often fail in their quest for the truth, but I assumed that they at least subscribed to the ideal. Campaigning – organised action to achieve a particular end – is the antithesis of honest reporting.

Environmentalism is now big business and big politics. It would therefore seem important that journalists at our national daily newspaper scrutinise the actions and the media releases from politicians, environmental activists and the growing industry and research lobby, particularly on an issue as important as the Murray River. Yet they were running a campaign.”

In the piece I went on to document the campaign, and how much of what the newspaper writes on the River is propaganda rather than news or considered opinion.

I knew it was a bad career move, so to speak, taking on the nation’s daily newspaper. But gee their editorial today, entitled ‘Weighing up Water‘ is a bit mean:

“IN 2001, The Australian launched a campaign to save the ailing Murray River. In daily reports during a 2200km journey along the nation’s mightiest waterway from Albury to its mouth at the Coorong, this newspaper’s Amanda Hodge catalogued its precarious plight as a result of salination, over-irrigation, and pollution…
The Australian’s Murray campaign was challenged by the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, which released a report showing the river’s condition had not deteriorated in 15 years. They were utterly wrong. Five years after Hodge’s journey and faced with the looming reality that the present drought may see the Murray run dry, John Howard and the premiers of the four southeastern states have finally agreed on a plan to overhaul the nation’s water management by fast-tracking both a system of interstate trading of water entitlements and water conservation projects.”

No. My report ‘ Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment’ was factually correct. Furthermore, it didn’t show “no deterioration”. It actually documented improvement!

In the report I also explained that while it is generally believed that irrigation diversions leave too little water in the river. In reality, as a consequence of the building of dams and weirs, the water level in the river is unnaturally high for much of the length of the river, most of the time.

Now in 2006 with record low inflows into the Murray, there is much hand wringing because the river might run dry. If this happens, the consequences will be devastating for many industries. But it won’t necessarily be devastating for the ecology of the river. Australian rivers naturally run dry during drought. What is most unnatural is to continue to push large quantities of water downstream during drought.

We’ll see if the Australian publishes the letter to the editor which I’ve just drafted and sent off now.

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Update 10th November, 2006

My letter was published today in The Australian and is available online:

Facts, not exaggeration

YOUR editorial (“Weighing up water”, 9/11) claims that a report by the Institute of Public Affairs was “utterly wrong” to conclude that the condition of the Murray River had not deteriorated in 15 years. Actually, all the evidence does support the IPA’s findings.

Our 2003 report showed that salt levels had halved at key sites, Murray cod and sliver perch numbers were on the increase and that while there were many stressed red gums in South Australia, forests in NSW and Victoria were generally healthy and supported large populations of water birds.

The report also explained that it’s generally believed that irrigation diversions leave too little water in the river. In reality, as a consequence of the building of dams and weirs, the water level in the river was unnaturally high for much of the length of the river, most of the time.

Now, in 2006, with record low inflows into the Murray, there is much hand-wringing because the river might run dry. If this happens, the consequences will be devastating for many industries. But it won’t necessarily be devastating for the ecology of the river. Australian rivers naturally run dry during drought. What is most unnatural is to continue to push large quantities of water downstream during drought.

Sensible water policy needs to be based on facts, not exaggeration.

Dr Jennifer Marohasy
Senior fellow, Institute of Public Affairs
Melbourne