Month: July 2012

Opinions published by The Land

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CO2Land org finds it puzzling to see so few of the readers participate in the polls! Would more readers participate and could it be better representative if the sample of opinion was changed to: Did you like the article/story? Would readers be more empowered to influence through their opinion? Is it just too boring?

Polls June to July 2012 with a Greens Poll from April thrown in:

Q: Do you believe the Coalition will repeal the Carbon Tax as promised?

Yes (60.3%)

No (39.7%)

Total Votes: 511
Poll Date: 09 July, 2012

 Q: Do you think we need a new national agricultural lobby?

Yes (44.5%)

No (55.5%)

Total Votes: 629
Poll Date: 02 July, 2012

Q: Are you ready for the Carbon Tax?

Yes (21.6%)

No (78.4%)

Total Votes: 874
Poll Date: 25 June, 2012

Q: Now more than one year on from the live export ban, do you think the government made the right decision?

Yes (15.4%)

No (82.3%)

Undecided (2.3%)

Total Votes: 751
Poll Date: 18 June, 2012

Q: Do you support the construction of wind farms in your area?

Yes (50.8%)

No (40.9%)

Undecided (8.2%)

Total Votes: 716
Poll Date: 11 June, 2012

Q: Are you more likely to vote for The Greens following the resignation of Bob Brown?

More likely (3.8%)

Less likely (4.9%)

About the same (10.6%)

I will never vote Green (80.7%)

Total Votes: 715
Poll Date: 23 April, 2012

innovative solution for waste handling

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Underground bioreactor – solution for waste handling?

The Cooperative Research Centre (CRCCARE) is noted as supporting a pilot scale project on biofuel generation. Currently they are working with piggery waste for the pilot.  The advantage for that industry is where waste did tend to be disposed of onto land and into water ways, and although some improvements had been put in place for larger farms to convert solid and liquid wastes to biofuel, this development of an underground reactor system virtually eliminates to problems of odour contamination of the air and allows smaller and larger farms to get an improved environmental benefit from the process.

CO2Land org found it particularly interesting that the project has been running 3 years, and CRCCARE has successfully run the trials under laboratory and field conditions.

We look forward to hearing of the technology being scaled up to large-scale conversion of solid wastes to energy in the not too distant future.

Reported in Remediation Australia Issue 9 2012.

markets can be reduced to form duopolies

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The Reserve Bank measures against some hard facts and this set the mind thinking: Is it the producer, the retailer or the customers fault markets can be reduced to form duopolies?

Looking at recent RBA farm to middleman to consumer reports, over the last nine years conclude: Retail goods prices rose by only about 1% a year. Retailers managed rising costs of approximately 3% a year and did not suffer in their net profit margins?

How did the retailers do it?

  • The volume of sales increased and they used less workers by investing in labour-saving equipment.
  • They increasingly substitute cheaper imported goods for locally made goods.
  • They concentrate on being a service industry and tend to stock more profitable lines.
  • They must service their shareholders before concern for producers livelihoods.

Now, it seems it is not the retailers’ fault, it is the power of market forces – customers want to pay less not more!

Now, looking a little closer at behaviours of the market to give customers more for less a clearer picture evolves:

  • Starting with the manufactured cost of the goods. It is about half of the retail prices we pay. Simple maths in the breakdown of costs suggests the profit to the retailers is between 7 to 10 percent. So rapid turnover reins as king of retail and only the major players have the means to reach the consumer with the volumes, and those needing higher returns to survive just fade away. Easy to understand when explained like that is it not?
  • Now consider the cost of production and prices of locally manufactured goods rose strongly over the period, and the producer has the problem of competing against cheaper imports. The producers have now become ‘price takers’, and have very little say in what they get for their efforts. The luxury of rapid turnover margins is not the option for producers that retailers enjoy.

So who is at fault that two retailers dominate our retail space, and producers get screwed?

The opinion of CO2Land org is the reference below is strongly suggestive, but in the interest of balance you should –
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/politics/farmers-good-big-retailers-bad–could-that-really-be-true-20120710-21tue.html#ixzz20Hg5YoDj

 

a story from BEIJING

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The Climate group of China, has released a story from BEIJING: The Chinese Government has released a regulation on domestic voluntary carbon trading and market development, which puts the nation on track towards achieving a compulsory carbon market.

In a quote directly from Changhua Wu, Greater China Director, The Climate Group, dated 9 July 2012, is: “This regulation marks a significant step forward in China in developing the domestic carbon market” . She added: “It sets clear guidelines and requirements of the technical and institutional elements when domestic voluntary carbon market is concerned. While still at a very early stage, today China is on the right track towards a nation-wide compulsory carbon market by establishing the infrastructure, technical guideline, as well as institutional structure needed to accelerate progress….This effort builds upon the practice and experience of China’s active participation in the Clean Development Mechanism at the global level.”

CO2Land org thinks we should have a long look at the significance of this development, we are not alone!

The community consultation process – next gen

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In our Woodlawn ducks blog, CO2Land org talked of planning regulations and coping means in handling Sydney’s waste. An equally compelling need is the community consultation process.  Increasingly professional ‘people managers’ are given the job of forming ‘representative’ groups that give ministerial comfort to ‘opinion’. In short this means those in the community that speak out are then branded ‘radical’ and not ‘representative’ of the community.  The evidence to date suggests consultation attempts tend to be dysfunctional and unsatisfactory and ‘participation representatives’ are restricted to complaints, insufficient information for adequate follow-up and tend to focus on managing ‘outrage’.

What lessons are learn’t from this ‘representative’ model?  Importantly, anyone who wishes to benefit from a better understanding of the process should look at all the tools available. Media plays a big part, including social media networking. The tools are necessary and form part of mature industry approaches, and give a more legitimate social license to operate your process, and can give valuable evidence pieces to show conformance to legally compliant governance structure.

 

Australian Government shifts on Additionality?

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The Australian Government is determined to avoid penalising landholders who have been managing their land well. The Savanna Burning Methodology allows landholders to choose a date to set the Baseline so they won’t be excluded. Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change Mark Dreyfus told ABC Radio’s PM program on 3 July: “land managers can get credit for all their good work in the future, without being penalised for any good work they’ve done in the past.” This means that landholders will be able to earn carbon credits in future for land management practices they adopted before the start date of a recognised project.  The precedent has been set that “good work” should be recognised: “As part of this methodology a baseline, which is set with reference to averaging annual emissions over the 10 years up to the project, and if they’ve already been doing recent pollution reduction burning, then that will be taken into account and the average will be set from the period immediately before the recent pollution reduction burning that they’ve been doing.” The Methodology allows landholders to go back up to 6 years to start the 10-year average emissions estimation to set the Baseline. The Methodology for Savanna Burning puts it this way:

“A project’s baseline will be the estimated average annual CH4 and N2O emissions from the project area in the 10 years immediately preceding project commencement. Where strategic fire management has been implemented within the project area for a period of at least one year but no more than six years immediately prior to project commencement, the baseline emissions can be estimated as the 10 years preceding this period of fire management.”
It remains to be seen if this provision can be used in a non-savanna methodology.

Fully referenced from: Carbon Coalition Against Global Warming blog:

Posted by Michael Kiely at 7:48 AM  Monday, July 09, 2012

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A cows’ stomach will adjust

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Evidence has been presented that adding supplements to cattle feed will only have a short-term effect. “Within six weeks they’d gone back to how they were at the beginning”.

CO2Land org picked up the story that says a cow’s stomach will adjust to changes in diet, and soon return to producing the same amount of methane as before. This raises many questions on other research findings that encourage diet changes to reduce methane emissions from livestock and raises the question: Is it a sustainable solution to switch feedstock for livestock?

Visiting Australia, the livestock sustainability consultant Dr Judy Capper delivered her findings to a national dairy conference at Camden in NSW. She says Australia’s tests on waste from wine grapes and oilseed in cattle feed showed they work only for a few weeks. “Long term, the rumen has a tendency to return to normal no matter what you do to it”.

Also reported was that US studies show a dairy cow in milk production emits, with high quality dairy feed, 1.35 kg of carbon per kilo of milk. In Africa carbon emission is ten times as high per kilo of milk, because the quality of forage feed is so much lower.

Food for thought!

See her research on http://www.wsu.academia.edu/JudeCapperabcwire.send-wallace.rural

Nanophosphate EXT technology – evolutionary improvement for electric cars

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Missing from full electric, and hybrid vehicle promotions is the Achilles heel for Li-ion. Extreme temperatures are the enemy of battery range and when the battery is also the fuel tank, a hot or cold day can stop electric vehicles in their tracks.

For best operating results and also longevity, EV batteries need to be maintained within a fairly narrow temperature band. To get around this, “thermal conditioning” is used to regulate battery temperature. Typically electric and hybrid cars require liquid coolant and battery heating to cope with the extremes. All this adds to the cost and complexity of the operational needs of the vehicles.

CO2Land org has taken note of the words of Steve Kealy, that Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research is well advanced in testing new technology called Nanophosphate EXT (EXtreme Temperature) and the company promoting the system, A123, is claiming that the lithium-ion variant can operate at both high and low temperatures without requiring conditioning. Nanophosphate EXT technology is expected to start volume production in 20Ah prismatic cells in the first half of 2013. The Nanophosphate EXT cells retain more than 90 percent of their energy capacity after 2,000 full charge-and-discharge cycles conducted at 45 degrees Celsius.

Testing in extreme cold suggests the new cells will deliver 20 percent more energy than conventional cells at -30 degrees C. This better power delivery implies they could be used to create smaller, lighter batteries for both electric and conventional cars.

So if that problem is solved, we still need to address the problem of tackling Generator Emissions Standards at the recharging points for electric vehicles. Maybe the carbon price will take care of that problem?

The most innovative Australians are Farmers

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The most innovative Australians are Farmers. The Daily Soils Digest on 15 June 2012 has written: Since 1970, arable farming land has reduced by 7.5%, but farmers have increased production by 220%.

The Nuffield Australian Farming Scholars say that the long-term capacity of Australian agriculture to compete and succeed internationally will be determined by the ability of Australian farmers to recognise changing consumer preferences, adopt new technologies and production practices and maintain the sustainability of their operations by protecting their production environment – they say in a “city-centric” world, Australia needs farmers with a world view who can convey clearly the needs of agriculture DAFF 210612.

For those that prefer biodiversity protection as their landholding option, they can enter into conservation agreements or covenants to protect biodiversity on their property. As state government run initiatives, the landholders can create private protected areas that bind future landholders to protect the property’s biodiversity, ensuring the long-term survival of plant and animal communities. Now the rub: While seems like a good deal, and while a private protected area comes at little to no cost to the government and offers protection to biodiversity that might not otherwise have been protected. Mining is not exempted from coming in and taking over with mining activities. Landholders can only weep no matter what state they live in, as all governments can still give miners permits to explore and extract in these private protected areas. Reported through The Conversation 29 May 2012.

For those that might expect market maturity to settle quickly on carbon, consider this: AFR on 12 June 2012 wrote, Wild gyrations in markets and economies are the ‘new normal’ – this requires business to be faster to innovate and be flexible and adaptive – US recruitment expert, John Sullivan, says that innovative people can produce far more revenue than more ordinary employees in this context – he says it takes nearly 8 people at IBM to produce the same revenue as one at Apple – in Silicon Valley, companies measure innovation before they measure productivity because they make huge margins through innovation.

Sourced through:  Garry Reynolds DAFF

Electric Motoring: The Technology Every Fleet Manager Should Know About

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A global debate occurred today 6 July 2012, after James Knight of The Fuelcard Company  in the UK posted a guide – Electric Motoring: The Technology Every Fleet Manager Should Know About. A guide for Fleet managers are looking to greener technologies to combat fuel costs and emissions.

CO2Land org played the devil’s advocate by quoting Origin Energy’s comparision posted on Drive.com.au . The quote being “A new generation of plug-in cars could do more to damage the environment than a Holden Commodore…..Origin Energy, Australia’s largest energy supplier, has compared the running costs and carbon dioxide emissions associated with a Nissan Leaf electric car against a similarly sized Mazda3 small car and Toyota’s environmental hero, the Prius.

Nissan come back with ‘‘It’s mostly Victoria that has the brown coal issue…Even in NSW (which uses black coal-fired power) the CO2 data are better…. ‘While it’s a most parochial angle, brown coal-fired Victoria is probably the least attractive to electric vehicles at the moment…’But this is changing with the carbon tax et al, and, as Nissan has said in the past, we can deliver the ultimate emission free technology but we can’t fix everything (like the source of energy) for which governments and energy producers are ultimately responsible….the Commodore’s emissions figures would look even worse if – similar to accounting for the emissions from electricity generation – the CO2 output of refining oil to make petrol was taken into account.

CO2Land took note of the comment and an interesting point prevails – what is the full life cycle cost of any of each of these types of cars? No real answer came forward, however on the grid emissions matter affecting electric cars environmental performance, the response from Ron Benenati in California USA was worth taking notice of: “The grid is everything. I suspect this bodes worse for Australia’s electric generation than for electric vehicles. It is one of the filthiest grids in the world. Coal fired electric plants are dinosaurs on their way out. THIS IS WHAT WE MUST GET BEYOND. It is the whole package. I have seen no other research as severe in its conclusions”.Then in defence of electric cars, Ron said: “But, three things I would add…The technology is new, and will only improve. Grids, in most, countries are getting better -rapidly. Renewable energy now provides 20 percent of electric worldwide according to the IEA. In my country, states like California have set a target of 60 per cent clean electric generation in the near future. So, dirty fuel generation is not really the failure of electric cars.

In hybrids vs conventional, MPG/MPK, certainly means a lot in terms of emissions. It also means a lot in terms of spills, contamination from processing before we even get to car emissions… 

If we are going to have a future, I suspect electric cars will be a part of it”.

Sheepishly, this writer has to say, seeing we live with such a dirty fuel generation system in this country, the preferred vehicle in this garage is POWERFUL – vroom vroom – for another couple of years anyway!