AUSTRALIA could switch completely to renewable energy within a decade by building a dozen vast, new solar power stations and about 6500 wind turbines, according to a major new study.

The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan – a collaboration between Melbourne University’s Energy Research Institute, the environment group Beyond Zero Emissions and engineers Sinclair Knight Merz, puts the cost at $37 billion in private funding and public investment every year for the next decade.

Plus the once the technology is improved, it has just been reported that the sea off southern Australia has the best wave energy in the globe and can potentially provide all the energy Australia needs.

Let’s hope that the coal lobby does not hijack the renewable energy funding and we can move in these directions.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The CSIRO has found that a third of Australia’s coastal fish are on the move and some cool-water fish are struggling; with 19 Tasmanian fish species in serious decline or becoming extinct because of sea temperatures warming.

Dr Last from CSIRO said southeast Australia was a “climate change hotspot” with water temperatures in some areas rising by almost two degrees and warm-water

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The Chinese government is closing 2,087 steel and cement mills and other factories with poor energy efficiency as it struggles to cut waste and improve the country’s damaged environment.

These facilities currently produce steel, coke, aluminium, paper and other materials and must close by late September.
Meanwhile, Australian companies in the sustainable design and building sectors can make a lot of headway in China when benefiting from the right connections, relationships and events, according to Nigel Haywood in China Connection from Beijing.

There is a five-year plan to improve energy efficiency for a 20 percent reduction in China’s energy consumption per unit of economic output, or energy intensity, by the end of this year. which has suffered a setback this year as China’s economic rebound and a construction boom boosted a demand for steel, cement and other energy-intensive products.

While China overtook the United States last year as the world’s biggest energy consumer, because of its much larger population it still is well below the consumption per person, according to the International Energy Agency.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Public health problems will increase unless global governments take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Andrew Pesce has called on the federal government to set up a national climate change and health strategy.  He warns “Failure on the part of governments internationally to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to result in significant public health problems. These health impacts will place increasing demand on the health system over time.”

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study found the past decade was the warmest on record and that the earth had been warming during the past half century.  This is moving tropical diseases further south in Australia to more populated regions.

Mosquito borne diseases like Dengue Fever which were rare and only existed on Cape Yorke are now common in Cairns.

Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, the report said in its analysis of 10 indicators that are “clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable.”

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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In Germany this was called the “environment premium” and intended to help the environment by removing gas-guzzlers from the streets.  It was also meant to support struggling German car manufacturers. On both counts, it failed miserably.

A car’s environmental impact does not only depend on how much petrol it consumes. It is also the production of the car itself, which accounts for a big chunk of the energy consumption over its life cycle.

Scrapping a car before the end of its useful life therefore necessitates an additional consumption of resources and energy. The marginal reduction in petrol consumption rarely justifies this.

The real beneficiaries of the “cash for clunkers” scheme were the manufacturers of small and inexpensive cars from countries such as Italy, Japan or Korea.  Plus the government program also effectively destroyed the second-hand car market.

For people on small budgets such as students, it was virtually impossible to buy any cars at a price they could manage.  And car repair businesses reported serious difficulties. With many older cars being taken off the roads, there were fewer cars left in need of servicing. But garages were not the only industry to complain.

Furniture stores and whitegoods dealers pointed out that with consumer spending being redirected towards the purchase of new vehicles, less money was spent on other goods.

The German “environment premium” example was one of the most bizarre and wasteful programs ever to be implemented by any government.

Instead of scrapping hundreds of thousands of perfectly functional cars for imaginary benefits, it would be better to scrap this proposal.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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A study of South Australia’s renewable energy potential says the state could export green power to eastern Australia and it proposes doubling wind power generation on Eyre Peninsula through private investment.

SA Premier Mike Rann says four energy companies have expressed interest in the idea and SA could meet 30 per cent of the nation’s renewable energy target.

The south coast of South Australia and also southern Victoria do have consistent strong winds for much of the year. At the same time we need to be aware of a report that Scotland’s wind farms are not delivering as much power as predicted due to calmer weather,.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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The Brumby government has expanded an energy-saving scheme to target up to 500,000 small and medium businesses which promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.4 million tonnes a year – roughly equivalent to 1 per cent of national emissions.

It requires energy retailers to make savings by encouraging the uptake of efficient technology, including new-generation appliances and lighting, heating and water systems.

Federal cabinet was believed to have considered adopting a national scheme similar to the Victorian model.

Premier John Brumby called for the Victorian approach to be adopted, saying it could cut power bills by up to 25 per cent and he hopes this scheme will be copied across Australia, because this is the way to go in the household and small-business sector,” he said.

He confirmed that future announcements would include a statement about the Hazelwood brown-coal power station which the state government is seeking federal help to shut down a quarter of Hazelwood’s generators by 2014.

Mr Brumby said ”Hazelwood is obviously the biggest polluter in Victoria … If you were going to reduce emissions and make an abrupt and significant difference to the level of emissions in Victoria you would obviously need to focus on Hazelwood,” he said.

The Victorian boosted energy efficiency target, up from 2.7 million tonnes a year.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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Climate-change management may just boil down to animal droppings, and digestion. The droppings from Southern Ocean sperm whales remove the same amount of carbon emissions as is pumped out by 40,000 cars each year.

Amazing- atmosphere-enhancing whale poo. Australian biologists have been probing this connection, calculating that the whale-size droppings of 12,000 sperms leave 50 tonnes of iron in the sea yearly and that is a “terrific food for phytoplankton, the marine plants that suck up CO2. Note that plankton are not threatened by climate change but their species distribution will and is already changing and that may not always be good changes.

And Did Woolly Mammoths increase global warning?

There was a report in the Daily Express that scientists from the University of New Mexico reckon that the flatulence of woolly mammoths 13,000 years ago “helped to keep the planet warm”. Those big hairy lumps pumped out about ”9.5 million tonnes” of methane each year, wrote the New Mexicans in the journal Nature Geoscience. The boffins dug up some ice cores and deduced that when the belching mammoths disappeared, much to the relief of their nasally sensitive neighbours, there was a huge fall in atmospheric methane, which may have caused the last Ice Age.

Early caveman didn’t have to put up with climatic confusion. When it got cool he just warmed himself behind a woolly mammal, then killed it for dinner and cooked it over a nice wood fire.

We turn on the air- conditioner, consume electricity and emit greenhouse gases

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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New Zealand have done it!

They started with the Waste Minimisation Act (WMA) in 2008 that included a waste disposal levy, product stewardship, defined responsibilities for territorial authorities and a Waste Minimisation Fund. Product stewardship is important in the recycling story and it has been in place in much of Europe for years where manufacturers need to take back and manage merchandise they sold.

This ties in with some of my previous articles about what is happening with e-waste, batteries and fluoro light globes.

Then have included the waste sector in the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS). The government’s approach is ‘all gases, all inclusive’, with a target of a 10% to 20% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2020. This is very different from what has been suggested here in Australia.

The NZ waste sector is responsible for somewhere around 2.7% of total emissions and is the only sector to have reduced emissions, with a 31% decrease from 1990 to 2008, despite increasing volumes of waste. Other sectors had increased considerably: electricity up 122% and transport up 63%.

Interesting from Australia’s nearest neighbours. Wonder whether our Poly’s will really leave it all in the too hard basket until 2103?

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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A $600 million levy on coal producers came into force yesterday in India as the first step to charge companies for fossil fuel pollution.  This is the first step to introduce a carbon tax’.

The European Union, South Korea and Japan are considering taxing carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fuels such as coal and oil to slow climate change.

As part of the tax, coal, which is used to generate more than half of India’s electricity, will be taxed at 50 rupees a tonne to help fund clean-energy projects.

”It’s putting a price on pollution for the first time,” said Ashutosh Pandey, the chief executive officer of Emergent Ventures India,which has worked on carbon projects with the Indian government and the World Bank.

The clean-energy levy will also apply to imported coal, the Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said.
India has set a voluntary target to cut its carbon intensity, or the amount of carbon dioxide released per unit of gross domestic product, by as much as 25 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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