Fresh green links

I’ve got a bit of a theme this week! All over the news are hints that the campaign to get a better Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) from the government is starting…

Gavin on Today Tonight – Gavin from The Greening of Gavin blog was on Today Tonight in Victoria, explaining how his expensive solar panels will be used to allow an electricity company to remain below their emissions cap without making any reductions themselves. He’s got the video of it on YouTube and posted on his website for you to see. Good work, Gavin!

An idea whose time never came – Richard Denniss, one of the experts shown in Gavin’s video, writes a longer explanation of what’s wrong with the CPRS and what the alternatives are (huge changes to the scheme, or starting fresh with a new one).

Wong & Turnbull inspired by Heath Robinson – John Hepburn at Crikey’s Rooted blog explains how politicians are relying on unneccessarily complicated mechanisms for their policies on reducing emissions. He compares them to Heath Robinson’s illustrations of silly contraptions that are way more complex than they need to be for the task.

So what can you do to help get changes to this very silly and irresponsible policy? Take a look at this:

Permit Me to Make a Difference – GetUp is running a campaign for changes to the CPRS to allow reductions made by households to be counted fairly in the scheme. They’re running a full-page ad in The Australian to inform people of the problem, and there’s a petition you can sign, letters you can send, and factsheets about the issue. Definitely check it out and make your voice heard on the topic.

Cursing cap

The Environmental Defence Action Fund in the USA recently had a competition for the best video that explains what a carbon cap scheme is. There were two winners, Thinking Cap and Cursing Cap. Personally, I liked the Cursing Cap one best, so I’ve chosen to show it to you now:

If you liked that one, check out the other prize-winners at the EDF’s YouTube channel.

I’m not sure why Americans conflate oil emissions with electricity emissions so completely though – wind and solar are great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not going to replace huge amounts of oil anytime soon.

Cooking the rainforests

Palm oil is the world’s second most popular edible oil after soybean oil, and is used by food and cosmetics companies around the world. It’s a cash crop for several South-East Asian countries, grown in rainforest areas. It’s also a product that leaves a huge trail of environmental destruction, and we need to seriously look at alternatives.

What is palm oil?

Palm oil comes from, you guessed it, the fruit of the palm tree. Palm trees are from West Africa, but will grow anywhere tropical, and makes a great perennial crop in areas that don’t grow other crops very well.

It’s got a great shelf life, blends well with other oils, is solid at room temperature but melts with very little extra heat. This makes it very convenient to use in all sorts of mass-produced food.

For example, it’s used in many of your favourite snack foods: Tim Tams, Pringles, and Kit-kats. It’s also used to make some margarines, and in plenty of non-food items like soaps and paints. You can find out more about it at Wikipedia.

So what’s the problem? It seems like a great product!

Copyright Hatchling Productions, courtesy of PalmOilAction.org.au

The problem is that to grow it, many countries are clearing huge amounts of irreplaceable rainforest. In Malaysia and Indonesia, these rainforests are home to endangered orang-utans, as well as sun-bears and clouded leopard. These animals cannot live in the plantations that replace their homes.

The rainforests are cleared by burning, which is cheaper than bulldozing. This is the cause of the fires across south-east Asia that you hear about in the news each year.

The remaining topsoil is very thin and easily washed away when the trees are removed. The new palm trees then suck out the remaining nutrients and leave the area depleted. And because plantations are a monoculture, they also require huge amounts of pesticide and herbicide to keep them alive. These chemicals create a run-off during the rainy season which then pollutes the waterways. As you can see, deforestation has a knock-on effect that destroys local eco-systems while increasing global warming.

Ok, that sounds bad. But aren’t there people relying on the money from palm oil?

Sort of – the companies who own the plantations employ local people, and supply them with seedlings, fertilisers, equipment and so on. But the workers aren’t paid well, and customary land boundaries are ignored by foreign-owned businesses. There’s no land left for farming, but the workers don’t make enough money to buy food from supermarkets, so they’re left in worse poverty than when they started. The economic implications are complex, but while the governments and businesses supporting palm oil are doing well out of it, local villagers are having their way of life wrecked.

What can I do about this?

The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is a group of companies who produce and use palm oil, and they’re promising to change their practices to only include oil from well-managed plantations. However, they seem to be taking their sweet time about it, and there’s some evidence that by the time their 2015 target rolls around, there won’t be any rainforest left to protect! See Fred Pearce’s article The Slippery Business of Palm Oil to find out more about this.

The Palm Oil Action Group has the following suggestions:

• write to supermarkets asking them to stock products that use alternatives to palm oil, or to politicians to let them know you’re concerned (sample letters);
• find out how to avoid buying palm oil products;
• learning more about the issue through their website and send the info on to your friends.

The Australian Orangutan Project also suggests asking for better labelling of palm oil on food and cosmetics, and opposing the use of palm oil to make biofuels (which is slowly becoming more common).

If you’re very keen, I’d strongly recommend reading the Greenpeace report Cooking the Climate (pdf) to get the full picture.

Fresh green links

So what’s new this week?

Peter at Reluctant Greenie tells us what to do with that DVD collection when you’ve decided you want the space for something else, or have gone completely digital as he did. He did it as part of Planet Ark’s Green Resolutions campaign, which might be handy for those of you who need a bit of support for keeping your own resolutions.

Surprise! Economists have reached a consensus on how much it will cost us to fix climate change. Not that you’d know it from reading the newspaper, since they’d rather report on people arguing about something. Less than one half of one percent of GDP per nation should do it, which really doesn’t seem like much of a hardship to me. (via Grist)

Meanwhile, Australian economists are speaking out against Rudd’s flawed ETS. The open letter and signatories can be seen at Crikey’s Rooted blog.

At long last, mobile phone companies have agreed to make a universal charger that will fit any model. No more groups of wall-warts clumped at your power points! Plus a reduction in electronic waste, which is great.

That’s it for today – have a great weekend!

Bright ideas: solar-powered air-conditioning

We’ve already talked about how over-using air-conditioning isn’t great for Australia. On hot summer afternoons we all want to use electricity at once, and it can be too much for our coal-fired power stations to handle, which can leave us with rolling blackouts in the city.

There’s also the added problem of the refrigerants used in standard air-con – they’re a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but there’s no method for disposing of it safely when the air-conditioner is thrown away.

But Dr Mike Dennis at the Australian National University has been working on making a solar-powered air-conditioner. It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple and clever you wonder why we haven’t been doing it all along!

Dr Dennis’ design replaces the electrical compressor in a conventional air-conditioner with a solar powered thermal compressor. Solar power is provided in the form of heat, not electricity, from conventional solar water heater panels. The same system could provide heat in winter and hot water all year round.

So he’s started a 2 year program to develop them, and expects that they’ll be cheap to manufacture. This will mean more jobs and export opportunities for Australia, which is always handy. You can read more about his plans in Cool Runnings at the ANU News website.

Personally, I’d love one of these. It’d be a great fit for the Perth climate and it’d be great to get our electricity bill down by using more solar-powered appliances. How about you? Would you give a solar-powered air-conditioner a go?