Last week Enviro Action had a stand at the Carbon Trading Expo in Melbourne. it was combined with a major safety expo and was a huge event. The number of people coming through was almost overwhelming. Thankfully I had two wonderful guys helping me.

Enviro Action is about reducing carbon and other environmental impacts which is the major step we need to take. We were very busy & I also spoke at the conference.

It was most interesting seeing what is on offer. The entire carbon trading area is still in a premature muddle with a mixture of tree planters and others. The auditing requirements are not yet set, the tree planters, while mainly very well meaning need to be clear on both how much carbon they really sequester and from when, the effect a bushfire will have on their operation and very importantly the ecological impact of their planting and what the ecology was of the land they are planting on. There are some horror stories about unsuitable trees being planted on what was an natural ecology that did not “look like forest” but actually worked better than the artificial community put there with wrong species.

I am NOT against tree planting and as a member of a volunteer group in the past, have planted thousands. I have responsibly collected local seed, dried it (taking over almost the entire northern side of a previous house I owned) and direct seeds and well as tending tube stock.

I have been a member of Trees for Life for around 15 years and am now a sponsor because I like the fact that they collect local seed, work with local landowners and are very ecologically responsible. But i fail to see how you can do accurate carbon accounting on this even though it is very good for the environment and the planedt.

A “Conditional Approval” system would seem to be a sensible step to allow for the development of new and emerging technologies to enable the kinds of changes we need over the next 10-20 years if we are to in any way manage the “runaway train” of global warming and its flow on implications.   I firmly believe that while Government needs strict regulations preventing environmental harm and enforcing greenhouse gas reductions, they also need to get out of the way and permit innovation.

I have previously mentioned coastal aquaculture located in high wind areas that would like to power their pumps with wind turbines but this is not permitted because they are too big to be domestic and too small to be commercial.  Bullshit is about the only comment that I think fits!

I sat in on the summary and outcomes session on coal seam gas water at the EcoForum.  This was a fascinating insight on how Government needs to be able to be more flexible in some of their regulations and a bit of across States consistency would help!

There is a large amount of water in the coal seams and it is regarded as a waste under rigid EPA restrictions and, although it is much needed, it is only allowed to be put into evaporation ponds.  They would even be in breach of their licence if they use the “waste” for jobs like dust suppression around their own mine site.

The discussion brought out very interesting State differences and strongly overlapped with a discussion of water resource management.  Australia is a Federation made up of what were originally separate colonies and the legacy at times seems to present difficulties in establishing sensible management of national issues like water (not to mention hospitals and education!). 

The water issue is huge in Australia.  A lot of people want the water and if the gas is to be extracted, the water must be also.  Power stations need to be cooled.  Some use treated sewage effluent, some cool with sea water and some use dry fans.  As it is logical to locate power stations near the coal and gas they are fired by, cooperation with this water would seem logical.

There was interesting discussion around the different rules between States and contrasting with overseas experience also.  Queensland does not have the concept of environmental water flows that is the norm in most states.  In the ACT the miners would have to pay to be allowed to evaporate their water – it would be regarded as a valuable resource to be cleaned and used, not a waste.  In South Africa if a miner extracts water or uses it, they have to replace it.

Kwinana in Western Australia was mentioned as an example of organisation between neighbouring businesses so that the companies trade their waste with each other on the principle that one man’s waste is another’s treasure.

If we can’t even agree about sensibly managing our water how in the **** are we going to get the 50-80% reductions we need in greenhouse emissions, the 50% reduction in available water, cope with an increasing population (50% increase was mentioned) and increasingly unstable weather patterns.

Get real Government and get a razor gang onto red and green tape!

This morning I flew to Brisbane then caught the train to the Gold Coast where I am attending this year’s EcoForum conference and exhibition. This meant a 4am start to catch a 6am flight so I spent some time after lunch in the hotel pool. The conference is being held in the Conrad Jupiter Casino so it was a rather bizarre contract walking from a serious environmental conference, through a casino with a Mexican band and dancers on stilts who were about 10ft tall!

The pool was wonderful! It was set in trees with fantastic landscaping. The local small wildlife was living there happily so I sat and enjoyed a wonderful soak in a spa along side exotic pools with fountains galore and a delightful small lizard (an eastern dragon) who was happily ignoring me and catching small insects. He was around 15cm long and as thick as my thumb and the most delightful company. There was also an Ibis and a wild turkey walking around the edge of the pool complex and scratching in the bushes. Totally delightful and totally relaxing!

I have a deep love of lizards which are fascinating creatures and we have such a wide range of them in Australia, from miniature skinks to the huge monitors in the North. My personal favourites are the dragons with the big collars that run at you with a huge show of bravado with their collars up making them look so wonderfully fierce. I also have fascination with turtles and have had a pet turtle called Toots for the past 25 years. She started as a tiny thing the size of my thumbnail! Yes I do have a permit for her. I do not, however, like all reptiles. I regard snakes, both venomous and not, and also crocodiles with the deepest suspicion. What an interesting contrast. I must admit though that last time I was in Darwin; there were some utterly beautiful snakes around looking for flood refuges in the places we were working. They were lovely – but highly venomous and the guys were relocating them, without harm, away from the work area. Admired from the safety of a bucket, I could appreciate them.

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Very briefly my daughter had her second child on Sunday. A little boy called Dante. He is a very welcome brother for Luka after multiple miscarriages.

It is a real joy to see these little people grow – hopefully into sensitive and caring adults who are environmentally aware and able to think outside the square and cope with the world we leave them.

Luka’s favourite DVD is The Lorax by Dr Seuss. This is a fabulous story about conservation and ecology and I can’t recommend it highly enough. My children grew up with The Lorax book which is also really good so it was a wonderful find to be able to buy the DVD for the kids.

Technorati Tags: The Lorax, Dr Seuss, environmentally aware, conservation, ecology, The Lorax by Dr Seuss

Three days a week I walk to the local Gym and workout with a trainer for 30 minutes. I normally enjoy the walk down a back lane away from the traffic but this Wednesday it was very different!

The first obstacles were separate waste management trucks collecting recycling, general house hold and green waste from a series of bins in the lane. Very noisy and hard to avoid as they sped past me to the next bin, then stopped and mechanically lifted the bins, put them down, then sped on past me again to the next bin to repeat. It was horrendous in a narrow lane. Necessary I guess – but bad timing. They seemed to be leapfrogging me all the way to the main road which I need to cross to reach the gym.

Next came a council truck, mulcher and chain saw gang who were pruning overhanging branches – wow – they may have had ear muffs on to reduce the noise but the residents and pedestrians did not.

Then there were the frustrated commuters who were trying to reach their parking spots that access the lane and the more help up they were, the more furiously they planted their foot when there were a few spare metres between other obstacles.

All in all, the normally pleasant walk to gym was rather horrendous and unbelievably noisy. Not a pleasant way to wake up and get going in the morning. I am not sure that our inner city environments are really very human friendly places. I rather like the concept where people in many parts of Europe take their rubbish to the appropriate bins themselves. That way they all get some exercise as well as reducing the stop starts and the distances the waste removal trucks have to travel.

Technorati Tags: waste management, recycling, commuting, walking, gym, adventurous, environment, waste removal, noise

I live in a north facing apartment block and since I erected a canopy over the windows to keep out the summer sun, I seldom have any real desire to use an air-conditioner. The apartments are all very well insulated so that we don’t hear sound from one to another. Really quite environmentally friendly.

We have a series of recycling bins in the basement – I feel that if they were better labelled for cans, bottles, plastics etc it would be better. Paper is pre-sorted and most of us are good about using these. The household waste has to be bagged and put down a shute with organic waste going into an in-sink-erator that grinds it up which prevent odours in the waste bins but does add to the biological load in the sewer. I use a worm farm on my terrace in winter but the heat on the tiled surface cooks them in summer.
My concern is for bagging the rubbish. Like most council waste, our waste all must be bagged and I have not found a satisfactory biodegradable bin liner bag that I can use that avoids plastic bag use. With the Federal Environment Minister wanting to make plastic shopping bags illegal by the end of the year, it would be great if all the bin liners sold were biodegradable too. In Australia almost 50% of shoppers bring their own cloth bags for shopping but here are still millions of the plastic bags entering the environment and killing wildlife, especially when they reach the sea and are mistaken for edible jelly fish by wildlife who then choke to death.

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Let’s put Global warming into perspective. Sure the earth has warmed and cooled in the past due to variations in intensity of heat from the sun.

Now we have added atmospheric pollution! We have changed the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere. There is now an insulating layer of polluted atmosphere that lets the sun’s rays in but lets less than normal of the reflected rays out.

Pouring excess CO2, Methane, NOX and other gases into the air is pollution and this is putting our children and grand children’s future at risk. We ignore it at THEIR peril.

OK so it means we need to make some changes now. Many of these will actually save us money once we get our head around them and decide that change is ok. If we don’t we risk major economic effects (see Stern Report), political instability and increasing unpredictable weather patterns.

In the diagram, the arrows on the left indicate the situation before we started to seriously pollute our atmosphere and the right hand side shows the greenhouse effect.

I know I seem to keep banging on about this subject but I deeply care about the future for my grandchildren and all their friends. I guess that this is a major motivation for my business. I have two major passions - my deep love of the natural world and my understanding of the way systems help businesses to run more profitably and provide business owners with a less stressful lifestyle.

Technorati Tags: global warming, symptom of atmospheric pollution, atmospheric pollution, pollution, greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide, methane, greenhouse gases, Stern report

The Cannon family have been reflecting on life and change in the last two weeks. One new baby born, another due in 2 weeks and 2 wonderful old ladies dying at 100 and 101.

When Margaret and Joyce were born in 1906 and 1907, life involved a lot more horses, no electricity, computers, phone or radios. Both were wonderful feisty ladies who brought up their children and lived very full lives. Margaret played competitive bridge nearly all her life and as she lived in the UK, used to like shopping in Paris until a very old age. Joyce got a passport at well over 80 years when her sight began to go and she traveled widely so she could still see the world while she could. Bravo to both of them.

What huge changes these two lived through!

What changes will the new babies see in their lifetimes? Hopefully human ingenuity will go on finding new ways to do things, but with less fossil energy used and more respect for the embodied energy in the “things” we all dispose of in such huge amounts.

The scary thing is that we seem to be bringing our children up with a huge emphasis on consumerism and the toys they have tend to confine their imagination rather than expand it. I heard the other day about research showing the a lot of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) in children is due to boredom and is best treated with different teaching styles. Why does that NOT surprise me?

I don’t pretend to have answers to the future other than that we must stop polluting out atmosphere and our seas. What I do know is that we need to do this urgently and we need to nurture our children’s lateral thinking and imagination.

In Australia they are raising the school leaving age but we do need to remember in all this training that we are training them for jobs that don’t exist yet, to do tasks that we don’t understand, using technology that does not yet exist. I am not sure that our education system is really geared for this. My experience as a student, former teacher, parent and observer is that we do not have either the facilities or the mindset to challenge the brightest minds and many of us feel safer with conformity. We are beginning to cater more for the disadvantaged but there is a lack of understanding of how to nurture those brightest minds who will be solving the problems that we leave them.

Technorati Tags: Cannon family, fossil energy, add, attention deficit disorder, polluting our atmosphere

However the USA has problems because they have to do more than the developing nations. Wow. Perhaps some of their leaders need to go live in China, India or an African country for a while and get a reality check.

Almost 200 nations agreed that we need to get on with reducing emissions and that we only have 10 years to make major reductions to reduce the impacts. We can no longer avoid global warming, we can only reduce the impact.

On the day my youngest grandson (Edwin) was born, I can can only applaud the patience and negotiating skills of the almost 200 nations who agreed do something.

If the USA wants to be considered as a world leader it does need to get its act together because at present it is out on a limb on its own. As Papua New Guinea said - either join in or get out of our way.

We, individuals, business and government alike, must start pulling together for the sake of the new generation. Edwin and all the other children need this! Desperately even though they are much too small to realise. How can we look them in the eye and say we love them if we continue to destroy their future.

A report by the Climate Change Institute quoted on this morning’s news says that if we all make the behavioural changes needed, it will not make major changes to our lifestyles.

It is a fact that well planned environmental management systems actually save money as well as helping the environment. Go look at www.enviroaction.com.au and www.enviro-action.com for more information about how to green your business and increase profits

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change Bali conference, our responsibility to the kids

I try to catch public transport – buses using LPG as fuel, to save carbon when I go into the city centre. This seems a sensible approach. However the public transport authorities have a responsibility for the safety of their passengers.

Recently I was coming home in a bus that had to stop very abruptly to prevent a serious traffic incident. I was thrown forward several metres and hit my head on a pole at the front, my collar bone on a seat and finally landed on my back on the floor. By the time I had been taken to hospital in an ambulance and used lots of xrays etc, any carbon savings I made by busing not driving had long gone and I had concussion, sore neck, purple face (best shiner you ever saw) and a broken finger – thankfully that was all I broke.

If the community are to reduce fuel use in our cities by using public transport, the authorities need to provide a regular service that is safe to use. If seat belts in cars are compulsory, how come they are missing in buses? How come wheel chair bays on buses do not have anchor points to secure wheel chairs in case of sudden braking. I am not crying sorry for myself – I am really grateful to my local gym for helping me to have a strong body but this is something that must be addressed urgently.

Technorati Tags: safety, public transport, save carbon