The April-May edition of ECOS magazine discusses improving the energy efficiency of Australia’s existing commercial buildings and it compares this with the commitment by Los Angeles to retrofit for energy efficiency all city-owned buildings larger than 7,500 square feet or built before 1978.  This is simply not happening here.  There are a few 5 star new buildings but retrofitting just isn’t happening even though improving the energy efficiency of ourexisting commercial buildings is one of the fastest, most effective ways to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy efficiency upgrades can also reduce running costs for tenants, and enable the building’s owners to attract valuable clients, such as large corporations and government agencies, which are increasingly opting for energy-rated offices.

The everyday electrical services of both residential and commercial buildings – such as lighting, air-conditioning, lifts and hot water – account for close to one-quarter of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

When you consider the embodied energy in a building it makes much more sense to upgrade existing buildings in preference to constructing ‘green’ buildings from scratch and we retain the existing look and feel of our cities.

Technorati Tags: energy efficiency, commercial buildings, green buildings, energy ratings, embodied energy, greenhouse gas emissions

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We can now watch the  deteriorating state of the Murray Darling Basin online with a new website Penny Wong unveiled this week to track the state of water storage’s across the basin.  Monitor the Murray Darling Basin Online http://www.mdba.gov.au/water/waterinstorage

Senator Wong said having factual information online was important to cut through inaccurate information running through public debates.

She said that  the government has two main jobs:

• - to do two things: to try to improve the health of the rivers by purchasing and investing in water savings and
• - to try and make our irrigation industries more efficient.

The troubled Lower Lakes contained just 687 Gl of its 2015Gl capacity, based on 117 years of data.  That is less than one third.

Technorati Tags: Irrigation, Murray Darling Basin, water savings, Lower lakes

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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We all know that both crop production and livestock release greenhouse gases into the air such as methane from cattle and wetlands, especially rice paddies, nitrous oxide from fertilizer use and carbon from deforestation and soil degradation.

We also know we absolutely need farmers to produce our food.  They are the basis of life.

We also need to consider changes in land use such as deforestation and soil degradation which emit large amounts of greenhouse gases.

There are concerns about use of valuable agricultural land for tree planting schemes to cater for people who would rather pay to continue emitting elsewhere.  And there are pressures to produce biofuels from food crops.

Annual greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are expected to increase in coming decades due to increased demand for food and shifts in diet.

However millions of farmers around the globe could also be helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by keeping higher levels of carbon in the soil – a process known as “carbon sequestration”. This can help reduce carbon dioxide levels in the air, enhance the soil’s resilience and boost crop yields.

Options farmers can use to help include reduced tillage, increased organic soil matter, increasing soil cover, improving grassland management, restoring degraded lands, planting trees, altering forage and sustainable use of animal genetic diversity, using fertilizer more efficiently, improving water and rice management.There really needs to be serious investments in agriculture to train farmers in climate change mitigation practices and to improve overall access to credit and information so that agriculture becomes more resilient to climate change and at the same time improves agricultural productivity and sustainability,

At the moment there are insufficient incentives, training and funding.  In Australia the government has exempted agriculture and put it in a “too difficult” basket.  Given the importance of this industry this seems insane.

Soil carbon sequestration, through which nearly 90 percent of agriculture’s climate change mitigation potential could be realized, is outside the scope of the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol. Climate change mitigation, food security, and sustainable development all suffer from this exclusion.

Technorati Tags: Agriculture, Carbon dioxide, Carbon sequestration, Climate change, Greenhouse gases, Kyoto, Methane, Soil carbon

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The Victorian Opposition’s environment spokesman called for the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to develop agreed definitions for ‘green jobs’ because jobs focused on environmental sustainability are the future of Australia and should be measured.

He says green plumbing is just one occupation that should be monitored.  “They need special certification and they also need to be measured so that we can show the number of green plumbers, the number of green plumbers who’ve got the right set of skills and knowledge, to carry things forward,”

He says the ABS needs to find out how many people have jobs with special green qualifications.  He said we need to know the numbers, the impact that it has on employment and how it can grow employment.

Technorati Tags: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Employment, Green jobs, Green plumbing, Green certification

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I have a channel of videos called envirojean on YouTube.  While they are NOT good cinematography, they have improved but the point is that they are all video articles about climate change and environmental management.  Some have had over 16,000 views but occasionally I get comments from some of the deniers.  I had one to day

He said that Climate Change is caused by solar activity it’s got nothing to do with CO2

I replied that Climate change is caused by both. There is natural change that has happened for millennia but now we have added a layer of chemical pollution due to carbon dioxide and other gases. This layer is real, has been measured, is caused by man and does insulate and speed natural climate change up.

Why would anyone deny this fact unless their research is being funded by the oil and coal industry or they have not kept up with atmospheric physics.

Global Climate Coalition is a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, who have spent the last ten years leading an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.  This was even though their own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

There may also be some confused people but most are the funded group which is very sad.  I hope they can sleep well at night.

Technorati Tags: carbon dioxide, Climate change, envirojean, Global Climate Coalition, greenhouse gases, global warming

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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While some people are saying that the way out of the global crisis is to just focus on returns, many experts believe that sustainable behaviour will be one of the — if not the most — critical drivers of business over the next decade as companies realise that their survival hinges on how well they respond to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

I was reading an article in The Australian by Tyndall’s Roger Collison who said that the fund manager considers the issue to be so important that it tries to influence the management and boards of companies in which it invests to respond appropriately.

Leading companies have already begun incorporating sustainability measures in their operations, and broker reports increasingly include analyses of those approaches, such as discussing the carbon effect of business practices.

Collison says Tyndall has seeking answers to concerns about the environmental impact of Rio Tinto’s operations which they believe could have repercussions for the future strength of the business.

Several insurance groups have undergone massive overhauls of their approach to sustainability, which included reviewing its workforce, financial viability and the strength of its customer base and they believe if the company does not go down that

I was reading that sustainability challenges are partly to blame for the global downturn with “short-termism” in the marketplace, lack of accountability, poor corporate governance, the lack of culture and leadership in a number of organisations etc all being  are sustainability issues.  And also you add climate change and water as very real and visible challenges

The message was clear that the current global transition from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon economy has thrown up “an extremely interesting opportunity” and the message on sustainability is stronger than it has ever been.

Sustainable development will be one of the, if not the critical, drivers of business over the next 10 years.”
[tags] Carbon, carbon effect of business practices.critical drivers of business, financial viability, sustainability [tags]

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Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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Corn is currently the major crop used for ethanol production in the United States but the amount of energy used to grow corn and commodity price disruptions resulting from competition for corn between ethanol manufacturers and the food and feed industries.

The suggestion is that animal waste from pig farms can be used to grow duckweed on wastewater ponds and this can five to six times more starch per acre than corn.

Researchers at North Carolina State University are currently working on this as a fuel source.

“We can kill two birds – biofuel production and wastewater treatment – with one stone – duckweed,” Cheng says. Starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same facilities currently used for corn, Cheng adds.

The duckweed system consists of shallow ponds that can be built on land unsuitable for conventional crops, and is so efficient it generates water clean enough for re-use. The technology can utilize any nutrient-rich wastewater, from livestock production to municipal wastewater.

Technorati Tags: Biofuels, Corn, Duckweed, Ethanol, Piggeries

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Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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CHINESE climate experts have urged rich nations to rein in their “wasteful and luxurious” lifestyles and say Australia’s carbon reduction targets are insufficient to reverse damaging climate change.

The Chinese experts told an Australia-China climate conference in Canberra yesterday that any global solution should be based on per capita emissions.   This would be damaging for Australia, which has high per capita emissions.

China has the highest total emissions of any country, but its per capita emissions are only about one-fifth of Australia’s.
Professor Pan Jiahua from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the planet could not afford countries such as Australia and the US having such “wasteful and luxurious” lifestyles.   He called for a global carbon budget that allowed countries to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis and to pay for emissions above that.
Professor Pan said Australia’s target of 5 to 15 per cent reductions on 2000 levels by 2020 was “certainly insufficient”.  “This would set a very bad example for the developing countries,” he said.

Technorati Tags: Australia, Carbon, China, Climate Emissions

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

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CSIRO climate scientist Michael Raupach has told the Senate some home truths.  He said that Australia must aim for a 90 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 ”to keep the risk below the danger point”, and stop its per capita carbon use growing by the current unsustainable rate of 2per cent a year.

He also pointed out that Australia is clearing native vegetation at 60million tonnes of carbon a year which amounts to a $2.4 billion annual loss of stored carbon.
Four CSIRO scientists have made submissions to the Senate committee on climate policy even though they were told by CSIRO they could not speak on behalf of the organisation if they took part in the inquiry.

Former CSIRO climate science chief Dr Graeme Pearman, who was formally reprimanded by CSIRO executive management in 2004 for speaking out on the need for Australia to set greenhouse targets.   He said it was ”unrealistic” for CSIRO to claim scientists should not comment on government policy.

”It doesn’t recognise the fact that the interface between science and policy development is very fuzzy, and both sides have to step a little bit over into each other’s regime to get the exchange of information going in a sensible way.”

Technorati Tags: Australia, Carbon, Climate scientist, Greenhouse targets

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Either this week or next, the US EPA will issue its long-awaited finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health. And that clears the way to start regulating carbon under the Clean Air Act, although the rules are unclear.  It seems probable tht they will grapple with vehicle emissions first and the Obama administration may try to reconcile California’s tailpipe-emission laws with the new federal standards to create a single, strict national fuel-economy rule.

After that, the EPA could turn its eye toward carbon regulations for stationary sources like power plants, though there’s no fixed timeline for this, and no one knows what shape those rules will take.

Needless to say groups like the Chamber of Commerce haven’t wasted any time warning that the EPA is plotting to reduce the economy into rubble.

It is unlikely that the EPA will require coal plants to install carbon-capture-and-storage technology, since that’s still pricey. Alternatively, the EPA could force coal plants to employ some combination of waste-heat capture, efficiency improvements, and co-firing with biomass. It’s all still murky.

For now the finding will put pressure on Congress to pass its own greenhouse-gas rules instead.  As much as some members of Congress might prefer to kill cap-and-trade and ignore the climate issue entirely, that’s not an option at this point.

Technorati Tags: Carbon, Carbon-capture-and=storage, Carbon Regulations, Cap and trade, Clean air act, Climate, Coal, Greenhouse gas, US EPA

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Save Money with Simple and Effective Management Systems

Jean Cannon is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want to save money by implementing simple and effective management systems. Sign up to discover how YOU can save money with sensible energy management and ISO 14001.

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