Australia ratifying Kyoto: that wasn’t so difficult, was it?

It’s been a while since I wrote a post. I’ve been so busy recently I’ve hardly had a spare moment (which is something I couldn’t have imagined six months ago!).

While it’s two days late now, I have to say about Australia ratifying the Kyoto protocol: there, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?

An easy way to reduce water usage

I had an idea yesterday - what if state and federal govts had unflushing male urinals (if that’s possible from a health perspective) in all the properties they controlled - what would be the reduction in water usage?

In my workplace, the male urinals don’t flush - the flushing water has been replaced with small cubes apparently containing microbes which do all the work. It actually smells better than when it was a flushing urinal.

I should find out more about this.

TREC - Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation

Via a comment at LP, I just became aware of the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), the work of which may have quite a bit of relevance to Australia given the amount of desert on the Australian mainland. The best way to describe TREC is to merely copy the contents of that webpage:

The rusting Australian landmass

I love looking at the scenery while flying - it’s so interesting to look at the topography and patterns of human settlement, imagining how towns developed and noticing how the environment shapes human settlement and land use so clearly. The scientist in me is fascinated. During most international flights the plane is often too high to make out too many details, but watching the scenery is one of the joys of domestic flying.

(Flying on a clear night last year heading north-west over Indonesia, I was astonished to be able to make out lights from cities and roads. Upon access to a map, I realised that I had had an almost cartographic view of part of eastern Java! Incredible.)

I flew back to Sydney from Adelaide today, and the ground was a partially dried watercolour painting during the first part of the flight over South Australia. During the latter part of the flight, outbreaks of rust riddled the land, as if it were sick. Overlaid was the geometric shading of land use. Startling.

Using Google Earth as a platform

On the plane home from Adelaide this afternoon, I was inspired by a mention in The Economist’s “The World in 2007″ that the Jane Goodall Institute uses Google Earth (GE) on its blog to educate people, to think that GE could be an excellent platform for all kinds of geographically relevant data. I went to an oceanography seminar six months ago in which GE was being developed/used as a platform for information about ocean currents and my brother recently e-mailed me a GE file showing several points of his adventures in India.

Price signals in water policy - Turnbull’s comments

I was very happy to hear Malcolm Turnbull talk about using price signals in urban water policy on Sydney ABC radio this morning. He discussed a scheme in which individual users (whether just residential users I’m not sure) would be allocated a certain amount of usage and the relevant water utility would charge them more if they used more than their allocation, and would give the user some amount of money if they used less than their allocation.

For these price signals to have some impact, the charges/payments would probably have to be much more substantial than water charges are now as anecdotally, water charges are pretty small at the moment.

This scheme sounds better than the present one, and may well lead to water being used more efficiently than at present, but at a guess I don’t know if it’s sufficient. Perhaps a cap and trade scheme would be better?

In response to a question from a listener, he also was in favour of units being individually metered for water which was nice, as I wrote about this, in addition to renters being directly charged for their water use rather than through their rent, on my blog a couple of months ago!

Probably not coincidentally, this report, available on Turnbull’s web-site, is all about urban water policy.

No doubt everything that can help increase the supply of water, and manage its demand, should be considered. Talk about a challenge!

Sustainability Science

Last night Mr T and I went to hear Prof. Ian Lowe give the first Rick Farley Lecture at the Sydney Conservatorium. It was quite interesting, and good to hear the phrase “sustainability science” again, which I havn’t heard for a while.

Essentially, sustainability science seems to be about understanding the life support systems of the planet and then, hopefully, it’s up to societies to live in accordance with these life support systems. A few years ago I found this CSIRO paper  on sustainability focussing on Australia.

In the Q & A session I asked Ian about the oft-levelled charge at renewable energy sources: that electricity supply is not guaranteed. His reply drew on Australia being such a huge continent and that it was known to be possible.

Darfur dead higher than thought, Islands appear in the receding Arctic

From Scientific American I just noticed two particularly interesting stories: a very sad one: Darfur Dead Much Higher than Commonly Reported  and this one: Polar bears drown, islands appear in Arctic thaw.