Photo credit: GetUp

How many of you read or heard about Clive Hamilton’s article on climate contrarians in Australia? It was a 5-part piece that was published at the ABC’s Unleashed site a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d linked to it here but it looks like I missed it after all.

1: Bullying, lies and the rise of climate denial
2: Who is orchestrating the cyber-bullying?
3: Think tanks, oil money and black ops
4: Manufacturing a scientific scandal
5: Who’s defending science?

It’s a fascinating look at the people opposing climate change action in Australia. Hamilton, the author of Affluenza and now a Greens candidate for the next election, started researching them after hearing about all the death threats and hate mail that’s been directed at climate scientists and journalists over the last year or so.

Hamilton finds that there are essentially two groups of climate contrarians. The first is made up of politically-motivated individuals who aren’t all that interested in climate science, although they love to look for typos and mistakes in the work of climatologists. They’re the ones behind the hate mail and who spam every comment field on the internet, preventing honest discussion of the issues.

In my opinion, they’re acting out of fear. They like their lives just fine as they are, and oppose any change to it. I don’t think there’s any point arguing the science with them. I think it’s better to talk about what a bright green future could be like, showing the positive changes that would happen if we had smarter, cleaner energy systems and reduced the wastefulness of society. And there’s more to be gained from talking to undecided people than the dyed-in-the-wool anti’s.

The other group of climate contrarians are the fossil fuel lobby and their PR hacks. Most of those PR people used to work for tobacco companies, so they’ve got a lot of practice at delaying community action on toxic substances. They’re the ones with the cash and the influence to get laws passed, and the ones hacking into university emails to manufacture controversy.

And in my opinion, they’re using the first group to provide cover for their anti-democratic actions. They’re the ones pushing to log native forests, to open new coal mines and power plants, to fish the oceans until they’re empty. As long as they might make a single lousy buck, they’ll keep taking from our common heritage and polluting what’s left. They’re the ones we need to oppose most strongly.

Anyway, Hamilton has all the details you could possibly need - the articles are long, but they’re well worth a look to find out the names of the people involved in selling our future up the river. I don’t recommend reading the comments - they’re just ludicrous and merely serve as an example of what Hamilton’s talking about.

Nextbike in Germany. Photo credit: Jokannes, via Wikimedia Commons

G Magazine’s new issue is out, and they’ve got a feature on car-share businesses in Australia. If you’ve ever thought about ditching your car but weren’t sure if you could do without it all the time, it’s well worth a look.

But lately I’ve been seeing mentions of bike-sharing businesses around the world. I think they’re a great idea and would work really well in our capital cities and even some of our big regional centres.

Similar to the car-sharing idea, a business has a lot of bikes available for members who join up. They have several collection/drop-off points all around a city, lots of them near public transport hubs. That way you can leave the bike somewhere near the end of your journey without having to return it back where you started.

The first programs had problems with theft and vandalism, because they relied on a trust system. The most successful bike-shares require you to be a member, and have a swipe-card or mobile-phone system to record who’s got which bike.

One of the reasons people don’t like to give up their cars is that a car makes you independently mobile. Unlike public transport, you’re not relying on someone else to provide the transport on a set timetable and route. I think bicycles are a great alternative to cars for short trips by yourself, giving that independence of movement that we’re so used to but without the pollution and congestion problems.

Wikipedia lists 34 cities around the world with a system like this in place already. Mexico City, Hangzhou in China, Bristol and Blackpool in the UK, plus a dozen more in Europe. Paris, London and New York are in on the act too.

Apparently someone tried to set up a bike-share in Melbourne but it didn’t take off at first, and they’re trying again this year with new people running the show. There’s rumours of one starting up in Brisbane as well. Wikipedia also lists Perth and the Gold Coast as candidates, but doesn’t have any more detail than that.

If you know anything about these, please leave a comment, I’d love to know more! I’m always interested in product-sharing services, and bikes are a great candidate for that.

How to use up a vegetable box - having problems eating all the goodies in your CSA box? Limes and Lycopenes (written by Kathryn Elliot, a Sydney nutritionist) has a useful plan to get you through it all.

Green roofs to rooftop farms - I love green roofs, but I love productive vegie gardens even more. This Treehugger post has photos of people combining the ideas to get rooftop farms.

Ontario to get rid of coal power by 2014 - audio of an interview with Paul Gipe (author of Wind Energy Basics) about how small states and provinces in Canada and Australia are leading the way even when their federal governments are slow to act on clean energy.

A couple of petitions:

Say No to GMO in WA. In spite of trials showing no benefit to GMO crops, contamination of non-GMO crops, no plans to label GMO food products, and significant community opposition, WA’s agriculture minister is determined to allow genetically-modified canola to be commercially planted here. A few groups are co-ordinating to keep opposing it.

Protect Queensland’s food bowl from coal mining - 6degrees.org.au is trying to prevent Queensland’s farmland from being ripped up for coal production.

Photo credit: Friends of the Western Swamp Tortoise

On the weekend I went on a food-lovers’ tour of the Swan Valley as part of a fund-raising thing for the Friends of the Western Swamp Tortoise. It was a great day out - a small busload of us were taken to the best road-side stalls and food places in the valley to sample some great market garden produce and treats. We finished up with lunch at the Edgecombe Brothers winery, yummy food even though we were all wilting in the heat by the end of it.

The Western Swamp Tortoise is one of the most endangered tortoises in the world, and is listed as Critically Endangered with only 300 left in the world. Just 100 of these live in the wild, in a couple of pockets along the Swan River. They used to be plentiful, but when the Swan Valley was settled, people cleared their habitat for farming, and introduced predators like foxes and cats.

Which is a shame, because they’re a fascinating little animal. They’re carnivorous, eating little crustaceans and insects, but only when the water temperature is between 14 and 28 degrees! Obviously it gets much hotter than that in summer in Perth, as we found out for ourselves on the tour. To avoid the worst of it, the tortoises bury themselves underground until the weather gets nicer again. Seems like a good tactic, I can’t blame them after the heat-wave we’ve had here in the west!

People actually thought the Western Swamp Tortoise was extinct for over a century, but in the 1950s a little group of them was found. Nowadays, there are breeding programs and some have been reintroduced to protected areas. You can see some at the Perth Zoo, or get in touch with the Friends of the WST for more information about these interesting creatures.

Gorgon gas project ’saves’ endangered animals by moving them to a radioactive location - and a national park full of cats, dogs and foxes. Gee, thanks for your efforts to preserve the ecosystem while you take the profits.

News just in: carbon pricing works in the long term - so now will our politicians stop pretending that Australia is about to embark upon some wacky experiment? Because we’re actually playing catch-up with programs that have been in place in Europe for nearly a decade now.

The Bloom Box explained - it’s been all over the green news this week. Gizmodo.com explains what it is (energy-generating and -storing fuel cell) and how it works.

The Year of the Tiger - urban sprawl, pollution and poaching for black market trading are driving tigers to extinction. This slideshow has beautiful pictures of these magnificent animals, plus links to organisations trying to help them.

A scene from Something In The Water

Did anyone else watch Australian Story on Monday night? It was about an alliance between a GP, a group of oyster farmers and a Sydney scientist, investigating water quality issues in Tasmania’s George River.

The oyster farmers found that their business was suffering because of toxins in the water. A local GP believes there is a cancer cluster in the region her patients are from. And they got together with a scientist from Sydney to try to find out if there was any evidence for what they suspected.

The toxin problem in the water has been traced back to eucalypt plantations along the George River. Now the group of locals want further testing to confirm what’s going on.

You can see the episode online for a while at the Australian Story website: Something in the Water Part 1, and Part 2. I’m sure it will also be shown on ABC’s iView website as well, but the Australian Story site has extra information and interviews that weren’t able to be included in the show.

Because of the tv show, the issue has now been picked up by newspapers like The Mercury and The Australian.

Naturally, the Tasmanian government is denying that there’s any problem. This is the same government that let Gunns rewrite state national parks legislation to allow logging, so I can’t say I’m shocked that they’d instantly move to protect any part of the forestry industry.

As Dr Bleaney says,

Dr Bleaney says she wants further testing of the water supply to be able to make firm conclusions. “We’re not saying we actually have absolute proof of what’s going on,” she said. “We’re actually saying that this needs to be investigated and it needs to be looked at very carefully.”

Toxic drinking water is worth investigating. It remains to be seen if Tasmania’s government is impartial enough to actually conduct a scientific review of the situation, or take any action on it if a problem is found.

Last week, he gave a fascinating TED talk. You might have heard me mention TED talks before, they feature speakers who are leaders in their field talking about their ideas for making the future a better place.

[I'm not sure if this video will show up for email and RSS subscribers: if you can't see it, come on over to my website or check out the talk on TED.com]

Gates has an equation for how much CO2 is created by our world. He puts it like this:

CO2 = P x S x E x C

where P is population (currently at 7 billion and rising), S is services (from basics like electricity and running water to McMansions and SUVs), E is energy required to create S, and C is the amount of carbon in our E.

If you want to get CO2 down to zero, at least one of those multipliers has to come down to zero as well. I think we can all agree that zero population or zero services doesn’t sound like the kind of future we’re hoping for!

So how do we get to zero CO2 emissions?

Gates thinks we can get a reduction in energy of maybe two-thirds, by efficiency methods. But the amazing thing is that Gates is aiming for a 100% reduction in the carbon dioxide created by our energy.

No other public figure of his importance has set this as a goal - no one else in that league even thinks it’s possible. But Gates is a man with big ideas, and if he says zero-carbon is a realistic target, a lot of people will be convinced by him.

So he’s listed the ‘miracles’ we need to get zero-carbon energy. And he’s found the people working on making those miracles happen, and is offering them his support.

I don’t agree with the details of his position: I think efficiency needs more effort than he realises, and I’d prefer less nuclear. I’m not the only one quibbling with him. Alex Steffen at Worldchanging (Most Important Climate Speech of the Year)  and David Roberts at Grist (Why Bill Gates is Wrong) have some comments which I hope will keep the ball rolling.

But I firmly believe that the conversation Gates is bringing to the mainstream is a million times more important than the squabbling in the media over typos in air temperature reports. Gates is moving on to the next stage of the climate discussion: solutions.

I hope he can bring more people to this next stage. This talk lays things out simply and clearly, so that everyone can feel like they understand what’s at stake and what we need to be working on. I’ll be showing it to as many people as possible!

Single-stream recycling: what is it? how do you get it? - a short video over at Twilight Earth. We’ve got single stream in most of Perth, is it the same elsewhere in Australia? I bet it increases the amount of people who recycle if you don’t have to separate your rubbish.

Michael Pollan on Oprah about how we’ve made it rational to eat junk food - great little video via @lisaborden

Earth Hour 2010 - new video for this year’s global show of support for climate action, with footage of landmarks going dark in 2009. Last year’s was the largest mass-participation event ever, hoping this year’s will also be huge.

Yesterday I tackled my laundry. I can’t believe how much junk was in there! Plus cardboard boxes (recycled), 3 more laundry baskets than I need (I’m giving those away), and more cleaning products than you’d need to keep the Opera House shiny.

Which is silly, because for a couple of years now I’ve had a very pared-back cleaning system. Here’s the list of cleaning equipment I actually use each week:

• microfibre cloths, and a microfibre broom with extra mop attachment
• low-phosphate toilet cleaner, dishwashing liquid and washing powder
• bicarb soda
• vinegar

That’s it! That’s all I use, and it’s all kept in a couple of easily accessible boxes in the laundry and kitchen. I have no idea why I was hanging on to all that other stuff.

So I ditched all the extra bits and pieces of fabric softener, glass cleaner, and so on. I kept one bottle of washing liquid specifically for woollens, because I knit and it comes in handy once in a while, but everything else was disposed of and the bottles went into the recycling.

I could probably reduce the amount of chemicals in my cleaning even further, if I looked into making my own dishwashing liquid and so on. But the ones I’ve chosen are reliable and safe, I’ve kept them to a minimum, and I don’t want to have to find storage room for the ingredients needed to make them myself.

The microfibre cloths aren‘t 100% necessary either - you could easily replace them with clean cloths of any sort. But I find them easier to use and clean than random cloths, so as long as they last (they’ve got a 3 year guarantee) I’ll hang onto them.

After I cleared out the laundry, it was pretty dusty and sticky. I scrubbed the sink with bicarb and vinegar, wiped down the washer and dryer, and gave it a sweep and a mop. No fancy chemicals needed, and it looks pretty damn good. All I’ve got to do now is figure out how I ended up with 4 washing baskets in the first place!

There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection.

It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately.

When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.

Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior