image: stoppress.com.au

Over the past few months, a little film Gasland has been doing a round of screenings on the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane and drawing good crowds.  It tells the story of American banjo player and filmmaker Josh Fox’s gradual discovery of the ominous extent of the underground gas industry in the US, how it had somehow, during the George W Bush/Dick Cheney era managed to make itself exempt from The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other protective legislation.

Click the image to watch the video on YouTube

It tells of groundwater so contaminated with gas that it could be ignited with a cigarette lighter and of the toxic nature of many of the chemicals used to fracture underground rock and allow gas to move to the surface.  It alarmingly portrayed the health impacts from both air and water pollution by the more than 500 chemicals in the fracking fluid (or fraccing), many of which enter groundwater or even become airborne when contaminated water (the industry calls it “produced water”, it sounds nicer) is misted to enhance evaporation.

The film had won a major documentary award at the Sundance Film Festival. Its pre-publicity described it as “incredibly inspiring”. I found it ominous and disturbing.  While all the audience were horrified at the American situation, there was a dangling question as to what was happening right here, in southeast Queensland.

It seemed the best way to find out was to do exactly what Josh Fox had done…. hit the road, a three-day information-gathering and film-making trip that my daughter Arkin and I hoped would shed some light on the local situation.

First stop was Kingaroy, the agricultural hub of the South Burnett.  We caught up with John and Therese Dalton who live 10 minutes drive out of Kingaroy and adjacent to the Cougar Energy Trial Underground Coal Gasification plant, UGC as we would come to know it.

The Cougar operation had just been shut down by the QLD’s Environmental Protection Agency. We needed to know the background.

John and Therese put us up in their beautiful strawbale cottage and while the full moon rose over the expansive Kingaroy skyline John outlined the local situation.  He explained that the Cougar operation involved burning coal underground and collecting the gas produced and that, being a “trial”, it had not even required an Environmental Impact Assessment.

While the potential was there to burn some 20 000 tonnes of coal in a deposit that reached right to the outskirts of Kingaroy, the plant, after months of setting up, only actually ran for five days before it was stopped by John described as a “catastrophic incident”.

There is mixed scientific opinion as to whether this was an explosion or an underground collapse, but the result was that benzene and toluene found their way into the groundwater as well as into the fatty tissue of cattle grazing nearby. The EPA has stepped in and ordered the mine to shut down although Cougar Energy has appealed this decision.

John’s neighbour Damien O’Sullivan explained his incredulity at finding that the Environmental Protection Agency had approved the trial without even having visited the site. He explained that the underground coal gasification process had even been banned in the US and described it as “a dirty filthy process which should not be used”.

Although the Cougar operation had been stopped, listening to both John and Damien didn’t exactly fill us with confidence about the role of the state’s Environmental Protection Agency. It was as if they’d been asked to look the other way!  I couldn’t help feeling that Cougar might have been a sort of sacrificial lamb and bigger operations might be causing problems elsewhere.

Further west, particularly around Tara and Chinchilla , a different process, CSG, coal seam gas, was moving from the exploratory stage  into production. I’d interviewed Friends of the Earth campaigner Drew Hutton after the Gasland screening in Maleny and he’d sent shivers down my spine when he told me that the situation in Australia, southeast Queensland in particular, was every bit as alarming as what had been portrayed in Josh Fox’s film.

Drew had set up an office just north of Tara, some 300km west of Brisbane, and was predicting that coal seam gas and underground coal gasification would become the biggest environmental campaign in Australia’s history,

Outside Tara we caught up with Michael Bretherick who’s part of the Western downs Alliance, strong local opposition to the under-regulated spread of the coal-seam gas industry. He told us that locals were engaged in a confrontation with the British Gas-owned QGC that intends to establish a gas field on the Tara rural residential estates, home to more than 2,000 people.

We drove past QGC’s huge headquarters, offices and Camp on the old Kenya station not far from Tara and realised the enormity of what was being rolled out.

The massive activity in coal seam gas harvesting is being felt at diverse locations across Australia. For that reason, Drew and Michael and others are organising a convergence of support in the Tara Showgrounds on the Labour Day long weekend at the start of May.

As we headed home I reflected on the last three days, the rich agricultural country we’d travelled through, and the new conflicts posed by its lying above underground coal and gas, and all that that entailed.

We’d focussed on gas but I couldn’t help thinking of the people of Felton, south of Toowoomba or Aldershot near Maryborough facing the prospect of new open cut coalmines.  The night after we arrived home, ABC’s Four Corners went to air with a full program The Gas rush devoted to coal seam gas, CSG, both around Tara and Chinchilla and in the Hunter Valley.

I’d been right to have an uneasy sense of foreboding after I’d first watched Gasland. In fact Josh Fox had been to Australia to film a piece for inclusion in the forthcoming Gasland 2. The American experience, chronicled so disturbingly in Gasland- and echoed in another film Split Estate, looked soon to be rolled out over many parts of Australia.

Four Corners had shown dropping well levels, bubbling gas… the longer-term health effects of fracking fluids would take longer to show up. But then Damien’s cattle had shown benzene and toluene in their fat after a relatively short exposure.  The consequences would be dire –for both present and future generations, an enduring millstone left as a legacy for short term financial and political gain.

And that’s exactly why an unlikely alliance of farmers and environmentalists are joining together to advocate Lock the Gate. If Drew Hutton is right it’ll be the largest environment campaign in Australia’s history.

Tara convergence details

When: Fri 29th of April – Tues 4th of May 2011

Where: Tara Showgrounds (300km west of Brisbane)
What: 4 days of workshops, forums, displays, entertainment and direct action
How: to register your interest or for more details.

Email tara2011@lockthegate.org.au or phone 07 4669 4864

 

About the Author

Ian is a regular contributor to ECO and has been active in Conondale Range and Mary River campaigns and is long-standing president of the Conondale Range Committee. He is also a Life Member of SCEC.

Arkin’s photography was an essential ingredient of the campaign to stop the now-defunct Traveston Crossing Dam and was recognised when she received a special Environment Award in 2009.

BZE, stands for Beyond Zero Emissions, and is an organisation that has been going since 2006 and is committed to providing a real, comprehensive, technically and financially feasible blueprint for Australia to slash its carbon emissions to zero by 2020.

They believe their 10-year target is attainable and it has meant coming up with a plan to transition Australia to 100 per cent renewable energy sources using existing proven technologies. It’s a plan that promises to ensure the nation’s future energy security.

Already, BZE, led by its driving force Matthew Wright, 31, has come up with the first stage. With the help of post graduate students from the University of Melbourne Energy Research Institute they have this year launched the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan.

It’s a comprehensive, detailed plan, documented in 170 pages of reasoned argument, heaps of facts and figures, graphs, charts and photographs. And it is very persuasive – already endorsed by enlightened politicians, leading conservationists and environmentalists.

“Not only do politicians support the Zero Carbon Australia initiative, but so do leading academics, energy experts, business people, and community leaders,” said Matthew,  the executive director and founder of BZE.

Solar Power towers -- set to create zero-emission, baseload-solar electricity in Australia.

“I found that I just couldn’t stand by as climate action progressed at such a glacial pace – I soon got addicted to the momentum we were building.”

It has taken four years to assemble the team, do the research, come up with some solutions to this massive planetary dilemma of carbon emissions and climate change, and then compile the first report. And now the momentum is with them to take the project to the next stage in 2011. So what is the Zero Carbon Australia plan?

The BZE researchers say they propose a 60/40 mix of large-scale solar thermal power plants with storage and wind farms to provide the bulk of Australia’s energy needs as part of a national energy grid.

“It will allow for geographically dispersed solar and wind power installations, with our existing hydroelectric capacity and small amount of biomass used for back-up generation,” said BZE’s 24-year-old technical director, Patrick Hearps, a chemical engineer and co-author of the ZCA plan.

Patrick will be attending the Woodford Folk Festival (December 27 – January 1 inclusive) as a speaker at the Greenhouse venue. There, he will present the plan and tell of the organisation’s incredible journey to develop and promote the plan, including a trip to Europe, touring solar thermal storage and wind power plants and attending an international solar conference.

Patrick says a combination of wide-spread large-scale concentrated solar thermal plants with molten salt storage (otherwise known as ‘baseload solar’) and wind farms can power Australia 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Concentrating solar thermal plants use mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver ZCA2020 proposes the use of ‘solar power towers’. The sunlight heats molten salt. The hot molten salt is safely stored in insulated tanks. At any time of day or night, the hot molten salt is used to generate steam for the turbine, creating zero-emission, baseload-solar electricity.

According to US Department of Energy projections, solar thermal will soon be cost-competitive with coal and gas power, as the solar thermal industry scales up to an installed capacity in the thousands of megawatts around the world. The ZCA2020 Plan has 12 solar regions across the country, consisting of 3500MW of power tower units. These would supply 60 per cent of Australia’s electricity in 2020.

The other 40 per cent of Australia’s electricity would come from wind ? 6400 gearless Enercon 7.5 MW turbines would be distributed across 23 sites around the country.

“We’ve completed the research that no Australian government or organisation has been prepared to investigate,” said Matthew, who was voted ‘Australia’s Young Environmentalist of the Year’ at the 2010 Banksia awards.

“We really seek to debunk the myth that renewables can’t cover baseload power needs and dispel concerns that it’s going to be too expensive.

“The projected investment is around 3 per cent of GDP over 10 years, or $370 billion. This is about as much as we spend on insurance over the same time.

“For an average household this would mean an increase to their electricity bill of $8 per week, which isn’t bad when you consider Australians spend over $30 billion on imported new cars each year. And after the initial decade of set-up costs, we should remember that the fuel is free from the sun to help pay for upgrades and maintenance.”

So, now it’s into the next phase.

“After the success of the Stationary Energy plan and new volunteers on board, we will develop transition plans for buildings, transport, steel, cement and other industrial sectors,” said Matthew.

The expected publication date for the ZCA2020 Buildings Plan is August 2011. Potential contributors to the buildings and transport plans can help provide content for the research database by getting in touch with BZE.

The projects already involve expert contributions in many areas relating to BZE’s specific calculations and forecasting, but they say more help is needed and that there are many different roles on offer.

“Though we first set up BZE back in 2006 it feels like we’ve only just begun,” said Matthew as he rolled up his sleeves for the next round.

But while he rolls up his sleeves he will also need to tighten his belt. For Matthew must continue to work part-time in radio to help him survive life in the penny-pinching world of an unfunded not-for-profit organisation.

However, it’s all worth it, he says. And the donors are starting to dig into their pockets and bank accounts to fund this massive project. The two front men, Patrick and Matthew, and their growing team of expert volunteers have shown that no other initiative has generated such excitement in Australia’s quest to address climate change or provided such a practical, scientifically-based solution to transition Australia to a zero carbon economy.

“The growing wave of support is at times overwhelming. Every week, our in-boxes are filled with messages of support and requests to join the Beyond Zero Emissions team and address climate change, so we wonder if the average Aussie knows just how strong this force of grassroots action is becoming,” said Matthew.

At Woodford they will be able to spread the word even further and, hopefully, attract some strong support. This time, it’s Patrick’s turn to deliver the message. He will be telling many Queenslanders that while their state might be leading the world on carbon emissions per capita at the present time, all of that could be reversed within a decade.

And that will be an easy job compared to his tough task of overseeing the growing team of pro bono engineers and scientists now involved with BZE. But neither of this dynamic duo ever really switch off message. Matt uses his previous experience and skills from working in the provision of financial information and news to corporates, energy and commodity markets, banks and other financial institutions, to lead the development of further ZCA plans across a range of priority areas.

Their diligence and brilliance has resulted in plaudits and encouragement across the spectrum. The various launches around the nation of the first part of the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 plan has drawn packed audiences over the past several months.

These launches have not only seen Australians turn out in their thousands, but have also featured endorsements from politicians as diverse as the past Premier of NSW Bob Carr, independent MP Senator Nick Xenophon, Australian Greens deputy leader Senator Christine Milne, and Federal Shadow Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull.

In Brisbane, the forum of speakers even included Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who recommended the plan. However, she did turn up late, leave early and gave a plug for the coal industry while she was at it.

But the attention given to BZE is not just from within Australia’s shores. There has been considerable international interest shown such as from luminaries at the International Energy Agency and the director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, USA.

At home, there has been a welter of encouragement including that from leading conservationist and former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, who described the plan as “an ambitious, technically feasible plan that should be looked at seriously”.

The Woodford Greenhouse crew and hundreds of festivalgoers are looking forward to Patrick’s sessions.

“We at the Greenhouse are enormously excited and feel honoured to host this young, resourceful visionary from Beyond Zero Emissions to our festival. His team’s cutting-edge research is inspiring and fills us with optimism and hope that a carbon-free future is truly possible,” said Greenhouse programmer and coordinator Jillian Rossiter.

“At last, Australia has an energy plan that demonstrates that renewables CAN provide baseload power; so no longer are there valid arguments for mining our farmland for fossil fuels or nuclear energy power plants.

“Let society lead our governments towards the Transition!”

Patrick Hearps will be at the Woodford Folk Festival Greenhouse venue on Wednesday, December 29 at 4.30pm, Thursday, December, 30 at 4pm for his BZE sessions, Friday, December 31 at 2pm with ‘Green Mythbusters and at 4pm with ‘Green Innovators’.

To learn more or donate visit Beyond Zero Emissions.

Greens Senator-elect Larrisa Waters

Queensland’s first Greens senator Larissa Waters, while all fired up after her recent election success, now has to be patient as she faces a long wait before she can take her Senate seat in Canberra.

While she can’t take office until the new Senate term starts next July, senator-elect Larissa will be keeping busy by going back to her old job part-time as an environmental lawyer in Brisbane.

She’s jubilant at the Greens great results after a campaign that won her party 14 per cent of the vote, increased the number of Green senators to nine and introduced the first Green member to the lower house.

It’s a result that essentially, from next July, tips the balance of legislative power to Bob Brown’s Green team. As part of that team, Larissa is now making preparations. It’s not as hectic as full-on campaigning, but the passion and optimism is still there.

“It’s still sinking in,” said Larissa who has won a Senate seat at her second attempt, having narrowly missed out in 2007. For now she will be dovetailing her work with the Environmental Defenders Office with some unpaid senator-elect tasks.

“Unfortunately, being the Greens, we don’t have as much in resources as the major parties. So I don’t have a wage or any staff until next July and my ability to do parliamentary work is pretty constrained until then,” she said.

“As an environmental lawyer I can still be helping the community. However, in terms of my senator-elect work I’ll be doing a little media work and the occasional public speech and trying to help with people’s inquiries.

“The enormity of the task ahead is sinking in; the responsibility of being the only Green elected in Queensland – the first and certainly not the last. We’ll be working hard for that.”

In the weeks and months ahead Larissa will be having many meetings with her fellow senators and senators-elect to establish portfolio agreements and establish how they will work together now that the team has doubled in size.?”It’s looking really positive – having to adjust my frame of reference and preparing myself for six years of hard slog,” she said.

“A lot of it is mental preparation. But my work as an environmental lawyer is similar to the work that I’ll be doing in the actual parliament itself. It will be a natural progression.

“The preparation will include finding some good staff and having my ear to the ground for Queenslanders and what their issues are. I obviously have a good idea of that already, but there’s a need to set up those mechanisms to ensure that I am still finding out about new issues.”

But Larissa already has a busy agenda and policy list. Her campaign literature says she will push for new jobs in renewable energy, affordable housing, action on climate change, protect food growing land from coal mining and gas fields, high quality public health and education, a fair go for indigenous communities and new Australians.

As an environmental lawyer says she has been close to people who have been disadvantage because some community and property rights and environmental protection has been lacking.

“I asked myself ‘how can you change that?’ The answer was ‘you need to be in parliament making those laws,” she said.

“I think the system’s rules need to change and I hope to have the opportunity to do that once I take office in July.”

Larissa says it’s a vital time for the Greens because it’s a vital time for the planet. She hopes she and her colleagues can take advantage of the political momentum to get action taken on climate change sooner than later.

“The science now says we have less than a decade to turn around our greenhouse emissions. If the Greens can be part of that through our role in the balance of power then it would be such a great honour to be part of that,” she said.

For the moment, she said, senators-elect don’t have a formal role to play.

“But we will be involved behind the scenes. We will be performing our roles within our home states. As senator-elect for Queensland, I’ve still got a lot of responsibilities here that I will continue to discharge.”

If you were an orang-utan you wouldn’t be happy at your prospects

Act now, act quickly and even act radically or else we will see the collapse of the planet’s natural systems that support our economies, lives and livelihoods.

That’ s the urgent warning from top level environmental scientists and some governments  who provided material for a sobering report recently produced by the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity.

While the report carries the dusty deadpan title ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3)’ and at first glance might excite academics, the reading behind the front cover is dynamite.

The convention’s headline message was: ‘New vision is required to stave off dramatic biodiversity loss’.

The report continued to say that these vital global natural systems were at risk of rapid degradation and collapse, unless there was also creative action to conserve and sustainably use the variety of life on Earth.

That was the principal conclusion of this major new assessment of the current state of biodiversity and the implications of its continued loss for human well-being.

There was also another red alert as the report confirmed that the world had failed to meet its target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

If you were a koala or an orang-utan, or a glossy black cockatoo – just to name a very few of countless life forms that struggle to survive on this planet — you wouldn’t be happy at your prospects. You wouldn’t be happy with many who belong to the human species. Would they all hear your calls for help?

From Australia’s perspective in this in this Year of Biodiversity, Professor Roger Kitching, from Griffith School of the Environment, considers the greatest threats to biodiversity.

“In Australia three pervasive inter-related threats promise to wipe out great chunks of the very special biodiversity with which this once-isolated continent is endowed: land clearing, invasive species and climate change,” he said.

“Mixed up with these three are drivers such as inappropriate fire regimes, pervasive agricultural chemicals and lack of connectivity across the landscape.”

The UN report was also based on a study on future scenarios for biodiversity. Some of them make grim reading.

The report has been subject to an extensive independent scientific review process and its publication seen as one of the principal milestones of the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity.

In September it will be put before top world leaders and heads of state at a special meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. But the crunch talks will come in October at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit in Japan, when their conclusions will be central to negotiations by world governments.

The executive secretary of the convention, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said:”The news is not good. We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history – extinction rates may be 1000 times higher than the historical background rate. It should serve as wake-up call for humanity – business as usual is no longer an option.”

The Outlook contains the sobering facts and figures while identifying key reasons as to why the challenge of conserving and, indeed, enhancing biodiversity remains unmet.

One key area is economics. Many economies continue to ignore the significant value of the diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms and their role in healthy and functioning ecosystems from forests and freshwaters to soils, oceans and the atmosphere.
And yet, significant reports and data stressing the economic imperatives and opportunities of restoring, preserving and enhancing biodiversity are being shunned in favour of the selfish and dangerous business-as-usual approach at the root of the catastrophes we now face.

A major international initiative called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has also presented a study to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity; to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. It draws together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical actions moving forward.

And the Outlook warns that the principal pressures leading to biodiversity loss are not just constant but are, in some cases, intensifying.

The critical analysis of the failure of countries to meet the 2010 biodiversity target will underpin the forthcoming conference of participating countries, including Australia, in Japan.

Most parties have confirmed that five main pressures continue to affect biodiversity within their borders: habitat loss, the unsustainable use and over-exploitation of resources, climate change, invasive alien species, and pollution.

The report sums up with yet another dire warning: “The consequences of this collective failure, if it is not quickly corrected, will be severe for us all. Biodiversity underpins the functioning of the ecosystems on which we depend for food and fresh water, health and recreation, and protection from natural disasters. Its loss also affects us culturally and spiritually.  This may be more difficult to quantify, but is nonetheless integral to our well-being.”

Professional biologists and an increasingly informed community are in little doubt that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past.

As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth was currently losing something in the order of 30,000 species per year – which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour.

Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this ‘Sixth Extinction’ caused by ourselves, Homo sapiens – is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has long been ringing warning bells.

In 2004 they calculated the rate of extinction had reached 100 to 1000 times than that suggested by the fossil records before humans. The IUCN also has grounded reason to  believe one in five mammals, one in three amphibians and one in seven birds are extinct or globally threatened, and other species groups still being assessed are showing similar patterns.

Simon Stuart, a senior IUCN scientist, has warned that: “For the first time since the dinosaurs, humans are driving plants and animals to extinction faster than new species can evolve.”

According to the IUCN, never has the world faced a more pressing crisis than the current loss of biodiversity which affects all of humanity. The gap between the pressure on our natural resources and governments’ response to the deterioration is widening.
As a sign of elevating this crisis in the context of other perceived global crises, the IUCN is calling for governments to come up with a ‘bail-out plan’, a 10-year strategy that will help countries halt and reverse this loss.

“Twenty-one per cent of all known mammals, 30 per cent of all known amphibians,12 per cent of all known birds, 35 per cent of conifers and cycads, 17 per cent of sharks and 27 per cent of reef-building corals assessed for the ‘IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’ are threatened with extinction,” says  IUCN deputy director general, Bill Jackson.

“If the world made equivalent losses in share prices there would be a rapid response and widespread panic, as we saw during the recent economic crisis,” he said.

“The loss of biodiversity, crucial to life on earth, has, in comparison, produced little response. By ignoring the urgent need for action we stand to pay a much higher price in the long term than the world can afford.”

Jane Smart, director of the IUCN Biodiversity Conservation Group, continues: “Countries are taking a very short-sighted view of the need to fuel their economies at the expense of nature, so much so that we’re now at crisis point when it comes to the loss of biodiversity.

“We can’t afford to forget that all economic activity is linked to nature. We need new targets and a concerted effort to ensure our natural assets are protected.

“This year we have a one-off opportunity to really bring home to the world the importance of the need to save nature for all life on earth. If we don’t come up with a new big plan now, the planet will not survive.”

Another telling statistic of Australia’s poor environmental stewardship is that close to half all mammal extinctions worldwide in the last 200 years have occurred here.

With headlines across the world and mounting reports giving the dire warnings of a global biodiversity crisis and its repercussions impossible to ignore, are they being heeded?  Alarmingly, not as urgently as warranted and not with the commensurate action such a crisis demands.

So what connection does the Sunshine Coast have to the ‘sixth extinction’ and this critical loss of biodiversity?  

The region is recognised as a biodiversity ‘hotspot’ boasting the second greatest biodiversity outside of the wet tropics in Queensland.

And yet, it is slated to be home for at least 500,000 people in the next decade compounded by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year bringing incredible pressure on the environmental and liveability values of the region.

How will this unique biodiversity be protected, with its coastal lowlands and forests, waterways and the internationally listed Pumicestone Passage already approaching tipping points?

This region is set to be a contributor to the shocking statistics of biodiversity loss, extinctions and declining well-being unless protection from the recognised threats of overpopulation and clearly unsustainable practices are arrested.
Ecological integrity and respect for this amazing planet, of which we know so little is paramount.

Southeast Queensland is one of Australia’s biological hotspots. It is an area where the sub-tropical and temperate regions known as the McPherson/MacLeay Overlap Zone are a region of diverse landscapes from mountain rainforest to open woodland and wallum wetlands to huge sand islands, mangroves forest, seagrass meadows and coral reefs.

Government reports show many koala populations will be extinct within a few years

It’s not surprising then that the region supports 151 terrestrial ecosystems and a great diversity of species. This richness is recognised worldwide, with southeast Queensland supporting the greatest number of birds in Australia and being botanically one of the richest regions.

However, you would think given this uniqueness and the economic, social and environmental benefits this brings, it would be proudly protected.  On the contrary, only 13.1 per cent of the region’s bushland is protected in National Parks or such like and only 17.5 per cent is in some form of public estate.

The State Government would argue about these figures stating that 80 per cent of southeast Queensland is protected from residential development. But, when you cut through the rhetoric, you soon realise it’s not protected from the impacts of urban growth. Dams, roads, powerlines, pipelines, agricultural and industry are rapidly destroying and fragmenting the little remaining bushland in southeast Queensland.

The fact is biodiversity in southeast Queensland is under pressure from habitat loss primarily due to increased urbanisation, driven by population growth, a fact stated in the State Government’s  State of the Region (SEQ) report.

Another fact is that by 2026 a further 70,000ha of bushland and open space will be lost to urbanisation and, by this time, there will be as much urban land as there is protected bushland estate.

Protecting biodiversity isn’t about protecting the cute and the furry. Protecting our precious biodiversity in southeast Queensland is central to providing people with many economic, social and physical benefits.

The importance of biodiversity to mankind is now more clearly understood and the science around ecosystem services highlights these benefits. Simply put, biodiversity is important for the provision of the air we breathe and drinkable freshwater.

More specifically, biodiversity is responsible for the health of our forests and crops through pollination. There are  hundreds of free services biodiversity delivers and yet State Government planning allows it to be readily destroyed. In essence it appears we are living as though there were no tomorrow.

State planning is currently based upon the fool’s dream of endless growth. The consequence of this is a tragic decline in the diversity of species. No species highlights this better than Queensland’s fauna emblem the iconic koala. The southeast Queensland koala has declined from common to vulnerable.

While being one of Australia’s largest urban koala populations the southeast Queensland ‘Koala Coast’ population has declined by 51 per cent in less than three years with a 64 per cent decline in the 10 years since the original 1996-1999 survey.

The cause of this decline is urban development driven by our unsustainable population growth. Sadly, the State Government is not prepared to stop this growth and government reports show many koala populations will be extinct within a few years.

The story is the same with southeast Queensland birds. Something like 20 or 30 species are in serious decline particularly those reliant upon lowland forests which are subject to the impacts of rampant urbanisation.

This population growth is also impacting upon our waterways. The science shows that urban areas produced more pollution and silt than the same area of farmland.

No surprises then that since 2004 the Healthy Waterways Report card has shown Moreton Bay has gone from a B+ to a D. The situation is grim with the science estimating by 2026 point source and diffuse pollution will increase by 50 per cent and 20 per cent respectively due to population growth.

Sadly if we pursue continued population growth, what made southeast Queensland unique and a healthy place to live will have been replaced by tar and cement. One has to ask is this what southeast Queensland residents really want.

If there is a take home message it is if we continue to grow we will destroy our biodiversity and can only expect southeast Queensland will become an increasingly greyer and grottier place to live.

Read more about Simon Baltais

From an economic perspective the population debate is all about scale — economies of scale and the opposite, diseconomies of scale are, the key concepts.

Illustration by Alex Mankiewicz

From the day ex-Treasurer, Peter Costello, made the extraordinary plea “to have one for the country”, we have politicians on both sides, business leaders and media commentators calling for population growth.

It is no longer the ‘populate or perish’ rhetoric. We have come to realise wars are not won with a mass of ground troops supported by a thickly-populated countryside.

We have also come to accept that most of our country is arid or semi-arid and filling the vast inland with people would cost us in enormous and unsustainable subsidies.

More recently we have the ‘have one for your old-age’ all to the bedroom. Sure, we are living longer. If we remain healthy that is a wondrous gain. Time on the planet is our scarcest resource.

In Australia we have pushed through the 80-year barrier while there are numerous countries in sub-Sahara Africa where the 40-year barrier is still a forlorn wish.

On the ageing issue, I shall make one observation. If we live longer we can work longer to support ourselves. I’m not talking about slave-like labour in a sweat-shop in the desperately poor countries. With a few exceptions modern-day work is easy and often a pleasure.

And be mindful of the fact that various professionals including farmers tend to continue working until they die.
I admit that as we grow older there can be increased medical costs. However, these tend to be compensated by decreased expenditure on the children, the mortgage, and the costly sports and recreation of the young and middle-aged.

So what is the debate about?  Business people have a case for supporting increased population, because the larger the market the lower the average cost of the good or service being sold and this means greater profits and ( assuming the market is competitive) lower prices for the consumer. Hard to ignore!

Cheap computers, television sets and mobile phones exist because there are enormous world markets for them.  Economies of scale.  Now consider the increase in costs of numerous goods and services. What happens when we notice higher costs is that diseconomies of scale have set in.

In other words, we are trying to provide goods and services to more and more people and we run into barriers.
We have most of the world’s arable land under cultivation. Most of the planet’s extremely limited supply of fresh water is already allocated or over-allocated.

We will recall the dramatic reduction in agricultural production in the drought affected parts of Australia. There are limits to growth.

In the recent drought, in the world’s best fine wool country, in the midlands in Tasmania, farmers attempted to save their sheep  by borrowing money to buy stock food. In the drought their scale of operation was too high. Major diseconomies set in.
We would do as the farmers, but it is a completely different matter to call for more people to simply add to the profits of the rich.

This we call greed. To dress this up as something else (good for the economy, good for the country) is to attempt to hide the truth. Beware of anyone wanting to sell you on the idea of population growth.

At the turn of the 18th century, the Reverend Thomas Malthus stated that the human population would outstrip our ability to feed ourselves.

He said there would be periods of starvation, bloody conflict over food supplies and population ‘culls’. The mechanisation of farm machinery, the use of steam, then in the 20th century oil and the opening-up of the plains in America made Malthus look foolish.

Keep in mind that after Malthus wrote his thesis, Carlyle coined the phrase ‘the dismal science’  to describe economics. It has stuck to the present even though most economists are technological utopian dreamers when it comes to limits to growth.
Come the 20th century and the human population grew dramatically but had it not been for the ‘green revolution’  developed by Norman Borlaug our population would have stalled at about half its present number.

Because it did not, Malthus continued to be wrong. The human population is rapidly approaching 9 billion, another 2 billion in the next 40 years. Many will rightly claim a place at the middle class table we enjoy.  Malthus is about to be proved right.  Where do we find another two or three planet Earths?

Economics drives population numbers not the other way round. This our politicians don’t understand. Furthermore, they don’t comprehend that once people reach a certain level of wellbeing they do not have more children.

The proof is to be found in Catholic Italy as well as Protestant Holland. Readers can explore the history of ideas, inventions, ethics and population growth as they relate to the sustainability of the environment and human society, in my recent book  From Buddha to Bono: Seeking Sustainability.

I conclude with a number. I have done a brief analysis of the economic cost of one aspect of the present level of population in the southeast of Queensland. I refer to the cost of congestion. Each and every one of us who is on our roads during peak hours causes a loss of valuable time for other motorists.

Some of us actually feel the lost time in our hip-pocket and can do something about recouping it.  Many of us (salary and wage earners) have to accept it as simply less time with family and friends.

Tradies, doctors, delivery drivers, taxi drivers and anyone else who can charge by the hour builds into the cost of a job the time lost on our over-crowded roads.

This may or may not show up on the hourly charge rate ( it can be incorporated into the bill in other ways and you do not see it) , but since crowding became very serious 10 to 15 years ago there has been an added cost.

Each time we call out a ‘sparky’ or plumber, each delivery we get, each visit to the dentist we make is costing us. My figures are in real dollars (inflation has been taken out) and they are averaged across a range of professions.

In a nutshell, you can add between 15 per cent and 20 per cent to your bill simply because there are too many people in vehicles clogging up our roads. That’s a big tax.

Tor Hundloe is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Management at the University of Queensland; Research Professor in the Environment School, Griffith University; and Foundation Professor in Environmental Science, Bond University. His most recent book is The Planet of the Thinking Animal: Surviving the 21st Century.

Lois Levy

Veteran environmental campaigner Lois Levy views the upcoming population forums as an opportunity to highlight the unwanted social impacts of population growth and expose the thinking behind it.

Ms Levy, secretary of Gold Coast environmental group Gecko, will be a speaker at  one of the forums where she will also argue that government promotion of population growth in southeast Queensland fails to give adequate consideration to the consequences of climate change.

“What I will be trying to convey in my address is that the population growth forecasts handed down by government to guide the new South East Queensland Regional Plan are based on nothing more than the desire of developers to continue to build homes, shopping centres and workspaces,” she said.

“Most of the southeast Queensland growth is occurring in coastal communities such as the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast despite the fact climate change is likely to cause water levels to rise which could require the relocation of hundreds of thousands of people.”

Ms Levy said the southeast Queensland community has never been asked whether it wants growth so, effectively, its voice has been muzzled.

“The forum provides an opportunity to increase public awareness of the many negative consequences of growth and the need for the community to lobby to achieve change to the regional plan,” she said.

“People are unhappy about coping with congested roads, poor infrastructure and reduced open space and, by working together, can bring this message home to the government.”

Ms Levy, a social worker for 40 years and for 13 years a TAFE teacher who now teaches community development part time, has played significant roles in many high-profile environmental campaigns, including the campaign to prevent development of a cruise terminal on the Southport Spit.

Her involvement with environmental issues began in 1979-80 when she worked with community group Friends of Currumbin Estuary to prevent national development company Lend Lease undertaking a major residential project on the north bank of Currumbin Creek.

“As a consequence of that first campaign, I became fascinated with the processes linked to conserving open space and the methodologies associated with involving the community,” she said.

“I have been active in the environmental movement ever since.”

Ms Levy said population growth, with the high-density living that accompanies much of it, is presented to the public as a rosy vision, but that there are many downsides such as anti-social behaviour in general, crime and mental illness.

“We have rising levels of mental illness among our young and we could easily conjecture that this is a consequence of the need for both parents to be working, the increased congestion in our cities and towns and the dearth of social and community infrastructure being provided in new suburban developments.

“Also, in relation to the issue of population growth, we need to consider the Australian psyche.

“Australians have been raised to think of homes as places with sizable backyards and of communities as places with lots of open space.

“Higher residential densities in the form of apartments and townhouses clustered around infrastructure such as town centres mean there will be little in the way of open space and no backyards.

“This is in complete conflict with the Australian vision.”

Ms Levy said the sorts of problems that flow from ill-considered and under-resourced growth are evident in the Gold Coast’s burgeoning northern suburbs, such as Coomera.

“The services in these areas are abysmal and youth is jammed into urban sprawl precincts with no facilities.

“Across the whole of the northern Gold Coast there is only one community hall, at Oxenford, and that exists solely because of the efforts of a community activist.

“There must be a limit to this sort of development and the community must find other ways of doing things.

“I believe it is time for governments and the community to start thinking about concepts such as the steady-state economy.”

Steady-state economy has its origin in ecological economics, although its roots are in classical economics such as the ‘stationary state’ concept put forward by John Stuart Mill.

The steady-state concept connotes constant populations, constant stocks of capital and a constant rate of throughput of energy and materials that, within a given technological framework, will yield constant flows of goods and services.

Advocates argue that neither economic growth nor economic recession is sustainable and that, therefore, the steady-state economy is the only sustainable option and the appropriate policy goal if sustainability is to be achieved.

Dr Jane O'sullivan

Growing crops in a more sustainable way is easier than growing the human population in a sustainable way.

In fact, the latter is nigh on impossible – and a sentiment embraced by Dr Jane O’Sullivan, an agricultural research scientist at the University of Queensland.

She is firmly convinced that arguments advanced by government that we must grow our numbers to meet the costs of an expanding aged population are fallacious.

As a speaker at the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast population forums organised by Queensland Conservation, the Sunshine Coast Environment Council and other green groups, Dr O’Sullivan will argue that the cost of growing a younger population is higher than the cost of maintaining a stable population and that government policy therefore makes little sense.

“The population debate implies a trade-off between economic benefits of growth and its social and environmental costs, but it seems to be that the touted benefits of growth are poorly based,” she said.

“In addressing the growth debate, we need to separate the impact of the size of the population and its demographic structure from the impacts of rate of growth.

“Rate of growth has immediate impact on facilities and resources and in Australia in the past decade it has doubled.

“There are two major areas of public expenditure associated with nation-building. These are skills-training and the development of infrastructure.

“In general terms, a stable population needs to replace about 2 per cent of community infrastructure each year. However, the current growth rate of Australia’s population requires the provision of a further 2 per cent.

“This not only doubles the capacity requirement but may more than double the cost, as it must be generated from a diminishing physical resource base. Increasingly, we have to substitute environmental services, such as for water supply, with more resource-intensive alternatives.

“Even small changes in growth rate result in large changes to infrastructure needs and if necessary additional resources are not provided, as has been the case in the past decade in Australia, access to services and service quality declines and society goes backwards.”

She points out that the same effect happens in the supply of skills.  To grow the supply of, for example, doctors or electricians by 2 per cent per year, we need to recruit around 50 per cent more than would be needed to maintain a constant workforce, either by graduations or immigration.

If we import them, they add to the need for every other skills area. Far from curing the skills shortage, our expanded immigration program is fuelling it.

While the costs of supporting more aged people are overstated, so is the ability of immigration to solve the problem. Dr O’Sullivan says that for Australia to maintain its current ratio of over-65s to working-aged people would require a much higher rate of immigration than we have now – a rate that could not be sustained and would greatly expand the future ageing problem, let alone the problem of food security.

“The current proportion of aged is an historical anomaly. It must rise, but will stabilise at quite a manageable level. We can plan for this, but we can’t plan for perpetual growth,” she said.

“Expanding our population is effectively living off the future and putting generations yet to come in a precarious position.”
Dr O’Sullivan says an oft-overlooked factor associated with population growth is that construction – the creation of new infrastructure – is the most energy-intensive form of economic activity.

“So, by accelerating growth, our energy intensity rises and our carbon emissions per person increase. Stabilising population therefore means a drop in per capita emissions without any impact on lifestyle,” she said.

Dr O’Sullivan says the focus on aged dependents ignores the even greater cost of young dependents, and completely fails to recognise the cost burden imposed on the community by the not-yet-arrived.  By this she means those who will be additional, requiring expanded capacity, not those who will replace the current population.

“They provide nothing, yet we have to spend massively to accommodate them.

“The worry that per capita Gross Domestic Product will be smaller with a larger aged population is outweighed by the fact that, under a growth scenario, capital and resources are being expended on people who are not yet with us.

“I am confident that, without growth, Australia will be more than able to service the needs of its aged citizens and that the community will be better off economically and environmentally.

“If we stop the ridiculous scare campaign about below-replacement birth rates, and let our fertility drop again to around 1.7 where it was before the baby bonus was introduced, we would also be able to receive many more refugees than we currently do.

“Every time anyone talks about limiting immigration, it is reported that they want to turn away refugees. I don’t think many people realise that refugees now constitute less than 5 per cent of our immigrants.”

Dr O’Sullivan is concerned that the population debate is being dominated by vested interests, which stand to benefit by growth in property and consumer demand and the oversupply of labour.

“The economic benefit is for them, not us.

“We must insist that politicians do not put the wants of the powerful above the needs of the wider community.”

As the population quickly increases, roads will be even more congested

Driving to work, going to the beach, going to the shops, taking the train – do you have the feeling you’re getting crowded out? Well, things will only get worse if Premier Anna Bligh has her way. So, welcome to Squeezeland, land of lost dreams!

But there may be some light because, at last, the planet’s most pressing problem – population growth – is being given an airing, even in mainstream media and on the floors of parliaments around the world.

And now the debate and discussion has come with passion to civic centres in southeast Queensland. In fact, there is a rash of forums dealing with this issue.

Some have already taken place while several others are planned for this month (March).

Both Queensland Conservation and the Sunshine Coast Environment Council, with help from other environmental groups, are holding separate public forums on the weekend of March 13-14 in Brisbane and on the Sunshine Coast respectively.

The need for these forums has been triggered to some extent by the State Government’s South East Queensland Regional Plan, which projects an increase in population of 1.6 million to 4.4 million by 2031, and by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s  call for a ‘Big Australia’ which would boost the nation’s population to 35 million by 2050.

It’s a wake-up call for concerned Australians, especially Queenslanders.

Many environmentalists, scientists, local civic leaders, social commentators, community leaders, business people and, indeed, many of the public have already voiced extreme worries about ‘unsustainable population growth’, and fear that plans to build 750,000 new dwellings in southeast Queensland will destroy extensive areas of farmland, open space and bushland as well as devastate hundreds of wildlife habitats.

There are also rational fears that our lifestyles will suffer with roads even more congested than they are now, mega motorway systems that concrete over yet more green space, beaches crowded out, and infill housing out of character with the present streetscapes and putting pressure on our communities.

Also, a degraded environment will be the norm and our health and education systems, which are already stretched, will continue to deteriorate.

Water and energy supply will become scarcer and more costly. But these two major forums are far more than talkfests.
Expert presenters from many fields, as well as exposing some population myths and vested interests, will show how community action can influence all levels of government to cooperate to address the problems of unsustainable population growth.

At the end of the month (March 30-31) the State Government hosts its own Brisbane forum ominously called ‘Growth Management  Summit’ which seems to indicate the Regional Plan’s projected population figures are not really up for debate. The talk will simply be about how to fit in all those extra taxpayers and business customers.

If the science continues to be spurned,  Anna Bligh’s forum will be no more than an orchestrated farce; yet another exercise in political spin and big business talk, determined to ignore the real and urgent call for common sense to protect our communities, lifestyle and environment.

It is increasingly apparent that the understanding of the carrying capacity of any system is being ignored and that we, as voters in a democratic process, need to exercise our power to influence the necessary and right outcomes.

If the State Government needs another reminder of the increasing community discontent, the recent Courier-Mail polls show almost 80 per cent of people are concerned at the way southeast Queensland is being destroyed by development.

Simon Baltais, from Sustainable Population Australia, believes decision-making on population needs to be based on science.

“The State Government is ignoring the findings of their own scientific reports, which reveal population is having a significant impact upon southeast Queensland residents and the environment,” he said.

“To say southeast Queensland and coastal Queensland has capacity to absorb more growth ignores the science.”

The State Government slogan of how it is ‘managing growth’ is just hollow and careless rhetoric according to Narelle McCarthy, manager of the Sunshine Coast Environment Council.

“Growth is not being managed and it is increasingly clear it is out of control,” she said.  Simon Baltais has a similar viewpoint.

“The government has been talking about managing growth for years to the extent that we have now exceeded critical mass and achieved a critical mess,” he said.

The latest South East Queensland Regional Plan attempts to lock in population figures for the next 20 years, aiming to have 4.4 million crammed into this corner of the state.

So, it is easy to understand why people are becoming more cynical of politicians.  The South East Queensland Regional Plan was brought forward and rushed through with limited consultation.  Now that it has become law Anna Bligh says we can now have a discussion on population.

Narelle McCarthy claims bad polling and not a genuine desire to address the problem is the motivator for the State Government’s ‘Growth Management Summit’.

“It is shaping up to be nothing more than  a talk fest,” she said.

So what can the government do to show it is listening and wanting to act on these concerns?

The population and dwelling figures allocated to each council under the South East Queensland Regional Plan need to be viewed for what they are,  population growth projections only.

They should not be mandatory and councils and their communities should have the right to determine the numbers for their own areas. This would involve not only ensuring the biophysical constraints were taken into account but also the character and amenity of an area.

The Sustainable Planning Act, which came into force late last year, supposedly governs the content and direction of planning in this state.

The stated objective of the legislation is to achieve ‘ecologically sustainable development’ something which it has clearly failed to do with the regional plan.

Supporting and parallel action must be taken by the Federal Government to urgently develop a rational or national (or both) population policy that recognises there are limits to growth. With 48 per cent of southeast Queensland population growth being fuelled by overseas migration, this needs to be a priority.

image: greghardwick.com.au

Anyone who has attended meetings will know — the greater the number of people, the less chance there is of obtaining an outcome.

Therefore the outcome of Copenhagen should come as no surprise. Governments from wealthy countries know that voters are easily swayed by economic arguments. Poorer countries want more for their people. While we all argue about money, man-made climate change will worsen.

As our planet’s human population increases we face a growing problem. The wealthier we all become, the more we want and the more we consume. More people consuming more of the earth’s finite ‘resources’ leads to only one outcome – less for everyone.

The science of climate change has taught us two things. Firstly, we need to be smarter, be prepared for change and focus upon cleaner, renewable energy sources. Our very short love affair with fossil fuels is over and is not worth one tear.

Secondly — many people do not like change, they use denial to avoid serious problems and know that many of us are swayed by fear. Radical politicians will seize on this and increasingly make promises they cannot deliver on.

The way forward is not something we are going to be given by our politicians. We are going to have to show our politicians what we are capable of. Great social changes have always been peaceful and well supported by the population. However, we will need to constantly remind our governments, and those seeking to be in government, that they serve us, and deceitful behaviour for the sake of claiming or clinging to power, will not be tolerated.

Now is not the time for blaming others for our woes or arguing whose way is best. It’s all too easy to point out the wrongs of someone from a distant nation or from a group who you do not associate with. Throwing stones over the fence is easy when you don’t see your victim, but stand face to face and it becomes so much harder.

In 2010 we need to stand face to face and unite everyone who wants a fairer, cleaner future. It is possible, if only we dare to try.

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Do yourself a favour this Christmas. Turn the air conditioner off, put the mobile phone away and get outside and talk to someone new. See you at the Woodford Folk Festival!

Wishing you all the best over the Christmas break and we look forward to bringing you more eco news in 2010. Eco online will take a short break, before returning in mid-January.

Keep safe and look after one another.