Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category
Energy, Transport, Housing & Summer Reading for the PM: Grattan Podcasts
Posted in Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on December 22nd, 2011
Source: Grattan Institute
Australia’s energy future was considered in a seminar series that Grattan Institute ran jointly this year with the Melbourne Energy Institute. Webcasts are available for the final two seminars on the future of solar power and transport.
Grattan’s report Getting the housing we want was launched on November 21 by Cities Program Director Jane-Frances Kelly in conversation with former Victorian Premier, John Brumby. Transcripts and recordings of the launch are available, as is the report.
Every year Grattan Institute produces its Summer Reading List for the Prime Minister. The list contains books and articles that we found stimulating and a pleasure to read, and that we believe the PM, or indeed any Australian, should read over the break. Watch the launch or download the reading list.
www.grattan.edu.au
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Cost-Effective Distributed Energy Systems in Australia
Posted in Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on December 15th, 2011
Source: Climate Spectator
Photo by twicepix via flickr CC
From It’s time for a smarter grid by Giles Parkinson:
Imagine for a moment that you are the head of a large group of network operators, faced with a decision about what to do about rising peak electricity demand. And you are presented with a choice: invest $2.6 billion over five years on upgrading your network – the route you would normally take; or spend a comparable amount on solar power and energy storage, distributed throughout the network. This was the question posed by Professor John Bell, of the Queensland University of Technology, and Warwick Johnston, a leading solar analyst with Sunwiz, when they sought to find out if there was a better way than the traditional response of building more poles and wires to cope with rising peak demand.
Using Queensland network operator Energex as an example, and its forecast peak demand growth of 1.25GW over the five years to 2014/15, the study analysed the existing approach of spending $2.6 billion augmenting the grid, or investing a comparable amount in either 25GWh of storage, or 1.25GW of solar PV and 10GWh of storage. The study concluded that a combination of battery and solar PV produced a far better outcome, because of the ability to generate revenue from the energy produced, and the use of battery storage to resell energy. Over a five year period, the net present value (NPV) of the poles and wires solution was negative $2 billion, while the NPV of the solar/storage solution was negative $750 million. But because these could produce revenue over a 20-year period, the solar/storage had a positive NPV of $2 billion over a 20 year period.
Bell and Johnston say the main take-home messages from this are that the integration of distributed PV and battery storage into the existing energy system has the potential to be cost effective now, and it underpins the case for reform of the National Electricity Market, to ensure that distributed generation is fairly treated and that network providers are encouraged to opt for the solutions that have greater market benefit, rather than simply being least upfront cost.
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>>Read the full article by Giles Parkinson on Climate Spectator.
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>>Read about VEIL’s work on Distributed Systems.
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Do we have a Plan B? Exhibition: Fishmarkets in Japan
Posted in Events, Opinion by chardman25 on October 24th, 2011
| 27 October , 2011 | ||
| 6:30 pm |
“Scientific paper, after scientific paper that I read all seem to present the simple statement – that our oceans are dying and we are killing them. The oceans are the life force that keeps our planet alive – yet it has been predicted that we will have wiped out all the life in the oceans by 2049. This is within my lifetime – and this is just one of those things which keeps me awake at night. I wonder: Do we have a plan B? What shall we humans do, once we fish the last fish?” Georgia Laughton
In February 2011, Georgia went to Taiji Japan for a month to photograph the annual 6 month-long dolphin slaughters. Planning to return in September 2011, the day prior to her arrival back in Kii Katsurra, a typhoon struck this area – with a death tally of more than one hundred people. With the town in crisis, a plan B for her time in Japan was launched – and time was spent in Tokyo exploring and photographing the fish market there.
Do we have a plan B? is graphic and confronting images of Georgia’s exploration of fish markets in during her visits to Japan – and she poses the question: Do we have a plan B for when we kill the ocean?
Do we have a Plan B? is showing at one hundredth gallery between 26 October and 6 November.
Opening night October 27, 6:30pm
one hundredth gallery is located at 49 Porter Street Prahran (between greville and commercial) and is open Wednesday – Friday 11-7 and Saturday – Sunday 12-5.
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Seven Billion: It’s Getting Crowded in Here!
Posted in Events, Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on October 7th, 2011
| 12 October , 2011 | ||
| 6:15 pm | to | 7:30 pm |
Photo by bricoleurbanism via flickr CC
High density living is great for the environment, right? But what does it do to our heads and hearts? The Australian psyche was moulded by the myth of the ‘wide brown land’, so what might life packed like sardines look and feel like? With the world’s seven billionth person is about to be born, can we learn from the Asian megacity experience? And will we still be sharing a cup of sugar with our neighbours? As the population debate gets mental, we’re going in search of the soul in urban sprawl.
Hosted by Natasha Mitchell and featuring Kim Dovey, Helen Killmier, Bernard Salt and Sein-Way Tan.
Presented in partnership with ABC Radio National. Free event, bookings highly recommended.
The Wheeler Centre, 6:15PM – 7:30PM, Wednesday 12 October 2011
http://wheelercentre.com/calendar/event/seven-billion-it-s-getting-crowded-in-here/
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Encouraging Sustainability-Related Behaviours: Transport
Posted in Movements, Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on July 8th, 2011
Source: Awake
Image: Richard Drdul vial flickr CC
Getting People from A to B: This is the second in a series of articles summarising research into efforts to encourage specific areas of sustainability-related behaviours.
There is little doubt about the benefits of reducing the amount of travel that people undertake in cars. Decreased traffic congestion and pollution, more exercise, and less need for expensive infrastructure investment are just some of the positive societal outcomes of more people choosing alternatives to private car travel. For some people, driving is almost the only choice, such as where there are significant structural barriers. A lack of public transport infrastructure is an obvious example. However, for a large proportion of car trips, internal perceptions and motivations appear to be the main barrier. For instance many studies have shown that up to half of car trips are less than 2km in distance. It is these situations, where perception and motivation are the key barriers, which offer some of the best opportunities to increase non-car travel.
Those wishing to encourage more sustainable transport choices face a number of challenges. For a start, car use is a classic “social dilemma”. Social dilemmas occur where there is a clash between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interests. People generally gain a lot of personal benefit from driving their cars. The car gives them flexibility, speed, privacy and comfort, all of which are highly desirable attributes. By asking them to give up their car for the sake of such things as reducing pollution and infrastructure costs, we are asking them to act for the good of the whole community. The other option is to be able to demonstrate the personal benefits of the proposed alternative, to the extent that these outweigh the benefits of car use.
Which leads to the next significant barrier to car use – habits. It has been clearly demonstrated that transport choices are highly habitual. This means that they are behaviours which are undertaken repetitively, with limited decision processing each time. We decided a long time ago that this was the best way to get from A to B, and now we no longer have to think about it each time, instead just relying on a kind of unconscious autopilot to direct our behaviour. In fact, a study found that the stronger a persons travel habit is, the less time they spend examining information presented to them about different ways of travelling. As a result, even if the personal benefits of public transport rise considerably, people with a strong car habit are unlikely to seriously consider or even notice, as they are generally not consciously deciding on mode of transport. For example, an improvement in local public transport services may simply go unnoticed by those who are committed to driving. In a review of this subject, leading Danish researcher John Thogerson concluded that “due to the force of habit, decisions may be repeated even though important conditions have changed and made a non-chosen alternative more preferable”.
A third factor which works against the adoption of car alternatives is the gap between knowledge and behaviour. While providing information about the consequences of car use and possible alternatives can increase peoples awareness of the issues, this does not have a strong relationship with the likelihood that they will change their mode of travel. One particular study which attempted to change transport behaviour resulted in the following finding. “Some powerful methods of influence available in psychology were used: individually directed feedback, dealing both with environmental and financial consequences, self-registration, and commitment. Nevertheless, no change in actual transport behaviour was brought about. These measures proved insufficient to stimulate drivers to leave their cars. The car is too strongly linked to feelings of independence and convenience for that to happen”.
So we are up against some pretty significant barriers when it comes to convincing people to change the way in which they get around. Fortunately, there are some things which work.
Fair Share: Country & City in Australia
Posted in Opinion, Visions by Kate Archdeacon on June 15th, 2011
Image: MargaretNapier via flickr CC
For many decades Australia was the country that rode on the sheep’s back. No more – now we are a country of mining and services. In the new Wheeler Centre Quarterly Essay, one of Australia’s most original and respected political thinkers, Judith Brett, looks at what this has meant for the country and the city in our politics and culture. What will be the fate of rural and regional Australia in an era of economic rationalisation, water cutbacks, climate change, droughts and flooding rain? Does urban Australia care for or understand the country anymore?
The Wheeler Centre, 6:15PM – 7:15PM, Thursday 16 June 2011
Free event; recommended to make a booking.
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Climate Change Is Real: an open letter from the scientific community
Posted in Movements, Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on June 15th, 2011
Photo: California Academy of Sciences, the line attributed to Wallace Broecker, Scientist, by jinxmcc via flickr CC
…The Conversation launches a two-week series from the nation’s top minds on the science behind climate change and the efforts of “sceptics” to cloud the debate.
The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes. Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.
Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most recent report of the International Energy Agency, which their chief economist characterised as the “worst news on emissions.” Limiting global warming to 2°C is now beginning to look like a nearly insurmountable challenge.
Like all great challenges, climate change has brought out the best and the worst in people. A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businessmen are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity. At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes. Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of “balance” by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called “sceptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.
Australians have been exposed to a phony public debate which is not remotely reflected in the scientific literature and community of experts. Beginning today [Sunday June 13], The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the climate “sceptics.” For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how they can side-step the scientific literature and how they subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques.
We will show that “sceptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based. The individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence. The signatories below jointly authored this article, and some may also contribute to the forthcoming series of analyses.
Are you a scientist? Do you agree? If you’d like to add your name to the list, send an email to megan.clement@theconversation.edu.au The next installment in our series is from Karl Braganza at the Bureau of Meteorology. The greenhouse effect is real: here’s why.
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Go to the original article on The Conversation to read the list of signatories – it’s far too big to include here!
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Living Closer Together in Australian Cities
Posted in Movements, Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on June 14th, 2011
Source: The Age
Image: xenization via flickr CC
From “Love thy neighbour. Gen Y embraces closeness of urban living” by Tarsha Finney:
Research released last week entitled ”Why We Buy”, published by RAMS Home Loans and the market research firm, IPSOS, has shown that despite the increase in the value of residential property, young Australians still want to own their own home. But now, they are just as happy living in and buying apartments as they are houses. This is exciting news for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is the beginning of the de-coupling of our domestic fantasies from an economic pragmatism that sees wealth generation in the ownership of property. This is good for the city; it’s good for the production of housing, for the creation of density and for the making of public space.
With the loosening of the grip of this fantasy over our capacity to imagine a future, we can now as a community and as planning and design professionals start on the real work we need to do in our cities — to plan for two inevitables: population growth and climate change. Whacking a couple of solar panels on the roof doesn’t cut it (although I agree it makes some of us feel good). We need to fundamentally rethink our cities in terms of transport infrastructure and density. And to do that, we need to begin to rethink the issue of housing and what that means: how we organise our private space.
But, probably more importantly, this news of the beginnings of a shift from houses to apartments is indicative of what might seem like an astounding fact. Actually, most of the time, we really like each other and we like living together. We like being known by our neighbours, but also I would argue, we like the anonymity of the civilised urban crowd. Apartment living, despite the myth of isolation, is actually about less private space coupled with more collective urban living space. This is sociable space. Space where we get together in groups and hang out.
Gen X and Gen Y Australians know this. They know it from their experience as backpackers, not consumers of organised tour groups, who in their early 20s and 30s, have spent weeks if not months gloriously bumming around cities in Asia and Europe. There’s an exciting creative dynamism to this shared space and being together, where we get to look at each other and engage in civic life — even if it’s just for 20 minutes of lazy gossip while we get some sun on our backs and grab a coffee. But in a more profound sense, it’s this collective public space and environment in which we get together and look at each other; where we work out who ”we” are as a collective: as a neighbourhood, as communities of interest, as city dwellers and as citizens of a nation.
In small, but important moments, these informal meetings are known as the ”bump” factor. Interestingly bio-medical research institutions all over the country have examined these creative ”bump” scenarios. What these institutions have noticed is that some of the most important exchanges we make with each other happen in informal settings — over coffee, walking together up the stairs, over lunch, at the gym — they don’t happen at conferences or when we sit in our own private offices. These ideas have been harnessed by organisations such as the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland when building new research and work spaces.
Read the full article by Tarsha Finney in The Age.
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Shaping Tomorrow’s World: Website Launch
Posted in Opinion, Research, Seeking by Kate Archdeacon on May 17th, 2011
From climate change to peak oil and food insecurity, our societies are confronted with many serious challenges that, if left unresolved, will threaten the well-being of present and future generations, and the natural world. This website is dedicated to discussion of those challenges and potential solutions based on scientific evidence and scholarly analysis. Our goal is to provide a platform for re-examining some of the assumptions we make about our technological, social and economic systems.
The posts on this site are generally written by domain experts, specialists and scholars with an interest in these problems and we hope they will generate informed and constructive debate. We will archive seminal papers and posts for future reference.
We are now open for conversation. Our initial posts provide a preview of what’s to come. At the moment, most of the categories of topics remain to be filled, and we need to take up more policy issues. This will all happen over time—we have lots more content coming over the next few weeks and months. Just sign up to our RSS feed and you’ll stay informed.
www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org
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Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Public Lecture
Posted in Events, Opinion, Research by land-environment on April 27th, 2011
| 3 May , 2011 | ||
| 5:30 pm | to | 7:00 pm |
Climate change is not “a problem” waiting for “a solution”. It is an environmental, political and cultural phenomenon that is reshaping the way we think about ourselves, about our societies and about humanity’s place on Earth.
Based on some of the ideas contained in Prof. Mike Hulme’s recent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, this lecture dissects this idea of climate change – where it came from, what it means to different people in different places and why we disagree about it. It also develops a different way of approaching the idea of climate change and of working with it. Rather than seeing “stopping climate change” as the universal project around which the world must be mobilised at all costs, the idea of climate change gives us new resources – new insights, new vocabularies, new myths – which can be used creatively in our bewildering diversity of human projects. We must use the idea of climate change to open up new spaces for innovation, change and diversity, rather than try to align the world in search of one unattainable utopia. And we must accommodate disagreement by adopting a plural approach in our responses to climate change.
Biography:
Mike Hulme is professor of climate change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). He was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research from 2000 to 2007. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse. His two most recent books are Why We Disagree About Climate Change: understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity (2009) and, with Henry Neufeldt, the edited volume Making Climate Change Work For Us (2010) which is a synthesis of the research findings of the EU FP6 Integrated Project ‘ADAM: Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies’. He is editor-in-chief of the new review journal: Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs): Climate Change.
Tuesday 3rd May
Time: 5.30pm
Speaker: Professor Mike Hulme
Professor of Climate Change
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Location: Lower Theatre, Melbourne School of Land and Environment Building, University of Melbourne
To register, visit: http://www.land-environment.unimelb.edu.au/deanslectures/hulme/
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