Now that the Australian election has been called for next month, here are a few cartoon reminders of the state of environmental politics in this country (hint: they’re abysmal). I’ve surpassed my normal 6 cartoons/post here in this second set for 2022 because, well, our lives depend on the outcome of 21 May. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
The first set of six biodiversity cartoons for 2019 to usher in the New Year. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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The fifth set of six biodiversity cartoons for 2018. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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The third set of six biodiversity cartoons for 2018. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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As you recall, I asked both for your nominations and your votes for the inaugural Environmental Arsehat of the Year. Nominees could be a person or an entity who stood out in 2016 for his/her/their egregious attacks on environmental integrity. There were many fine nominations, and so now I’m elated to announce the results of the voting. Drumroll …
In 4th place with 13.7% of the votes, Matt Ridley. He is Conservative hereditary peer in the British House of Lords, and a flack for the coal industry who has championed global-warming denialism.
In 3rd place with 14.9% of the votes, Gautam Adani. The multibillionaire is a major coal baron in India and elswhere who has made a lot of splash recently in Australia for trying to build the biggest coal mine in the world that will likely finish off the Great Barrier Reef once and for all. Nice one, Gautam.
In 2nd place with 17.7% of the votes, The Liberal-National Party of Queensland. The (former) State Government ushered Queensland into 2016 by making the state one of the world’s deforestation hotspots, yet again!
And now, for the winner with a whopping 30.3% of the popular vote; please put your virtual hands together for the 2016 Environmental Arsehat of the Year … Read the rest of this entry »
In March 2016 I requested nominations for the Environmental Arsehat of the Year, and you happily complied by providing many excellent suggestions.
I now request that you vote on these nominations using the polling widget that follows a brief description of each nominee and why they’ve been suggested by the CB.com community. Once the votes are tallied, I’ll post the ‘winner’ (loser) in a new post in early 2017. Happy voting!
The nominations (in no particular order)
Another six biodiversity cartoons for your midday chuckle & groan. There’s even one in there that takes the mickey out of some of my own research (see if you can figure out which one). See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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Another six biodiversity cartoons for you this week. You might have asked yourself ‘Why six?’ — the number 6 is, of course, the smallest perfect number (i.e., the sum of its aliquot divisors is equal to the number itself: 1 + 2 + 3 = 6), and as a result, my favourite (geek). See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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Mmmmm! I love coal!
An article originally posted on ALERT by April Reside (with permission to reproduce).
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The Conservative Tony Abbott government in Australia is proposing alarming changes to Australia’s Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999 — a remarkable move that would prevent environment groups from challenging many damaging development projects.
This has all come to a head over the Carmichael Coal Mine — a plan to build a massive mine in central Queensland in order to export 60 million of tonnes of coal to India each year.
Coal, of course, is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, and India’s plan to burn it by the shipload for electricity is bad news for the planet.
The Abbott government is in a tizzy after after a community organization, the Mackay Conservation Group, challenged the approval of the Carmichael Mine in Australia’s Federal Court.
The community group says Environment Minister Greg Hunt didn’t properly consider the impact the mine would have on two threatened species, the yakka skink and ornamental snake.
The mine site also sustains the largest population of the southern subspecies of the black-throated Finch, which is endangered.
The implications of the mega-mine go well beyond a few imperilled species. If the mine goes ahead, it will be one of the biggest in the world — and the emissions from burning its mountains of coal would cancel out all gains made from Australia’s current emissions-reduction strategy.
On top of the frightening precedent it would set, the Abbott government appears to be double-dealing. Read the rest of this entry »
This is an article by Barry Brook and me, published today in The Conversation. I’m republishing it here.
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Should nuclear energy be part of Australia’s (and many other countries’) future energy mix? We think so, particularly as part of a solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change.
But there are other reasons for supporting nuclear technology. In a paper recently published in Conservation Biology, we show that an energy mix including nuclear power has lowest impact on wildlife and ecosystems — which is what we need given the dire state of the world’s biodiversity.
In response, we have gathered signatures of 70 leading conservation scientists from 14 countries in an open letter asking that the environmental community:
weigh up the pros and cons of different energy sources using objective evidence and pragmatic trade-offs, rather than simply relying on idealistic perceptions of what is ‘green’.
Modern society is a ceaseless consumer of energy, and growing demand won’t stop any time soon, even under the most optimistic energy-efficiency scenario.
Although it goes without saying that we must continue to improve energy efficiency in the developed world, the momentum of population growth and rising living standards, particularly in the developing world, means we will continue to need more energy for decades to come. No amount of wishful thinking for reduced demand will change that.
But which are the best forms of energy to supply the world, and not add to the biodiversity crisis?
In short, the argument goes like this.
To avoid the worst ravages of climate change, we have to decarbonise fully (eliminate net carbon emissions from) the global electricity sector. Wildlife and ecosystems are threatened by this climate disruption, largely caused by fossil-fuel derived emissions.
But they are also imperilled by land transformation (i.e., habitat loss) caused in part by other energy sources, such as flooded areas (usually forests) for hydro-electricity and all the associated road development this entails, agricultural areas needed for biofuels, and large spaces needed for wind and solar farms.
Professor Barry W. Brook, Chair of Environmental Sustainability, University of Tasmania, Australia. barry.brook@utas.edu.au
Professor Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, The Environment Institute, The University of Adelaide, Australia. corey.bradshaw@adelaide.edu.au
An Open Letter to Environmentalists:
As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation published in Conservation Biology (Brook & Bradshaw 2014).
Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources—including nuclear power—must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change. They provide strong evidence for the need to accept a substantial role for advanced nuclear power systems with complete fuel recycling—as part of a range of sustainable energy technologies that also includes appropriate use of renewables, energy storage and energy efficiency. This multi-pronged strategy for sustainable energy could also be more cost-effective and spare more land for biodiversity, as well as reduce non-carbon pollution (aerosols, heavy metals).
Given the historical antagonism towards nuclear energy amongst the environmental community, we accept that this stands as a controversial position. However, much as leading climate scientists have recently advocated the development of safe, next-generation nuclear energy systems to combat global climate change (Caldeira et al. 2013), we entreat the conservation and environmental community to weigh up the pros and cons of different energy sources using objective evidence and pragmatic trade-offs, rather than simply relying on idealistic perceptions of what is ‘green’.
Although renewable energy sources like wind and solar will likely make increasing contributions to future energy production, these technology options face real-world problems of scalability, cost, material and land use, meaning that it is too risky to rely on them as the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Nuclear power—being by far the most compact and energy-dense of sources—could also make a major, and perhaps leading, contribution. As scientists, we declare that an evidence-based approach to future energy production is an essential component of securing biodiversity’s future and cannot be ignored. It is time that conservationists make their voices heard in this policy arena.
Signatories (in alphabetical order)
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Note: Affiliations of signatories are for identification purposes, and do not imply that their organizations have necessarily endorsed this letter.
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References
Brook, B. W., and C. J. A. Bradshaw. 2014. Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology doi:10.1111/cobi.12433.
Caldeira, K., K., Emmanuel, J. Hansen, and T. Wigley. 2013. An Open Letter to those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear power. CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html. (Accessed 14 March 2014).
A couple of years ago, James Hansen visited Adelaide and I was fortunate enough to attend dinner with him and his lovely wife Anniek. A truly inspiring scientist in all respects. His academic track record is unbeatable, and he puts his money where his mouth is in terms of climate change activism.
In a similar vein, but something I’m not used to publishing on Conservation Bytes, my colleague Alejandro Frid requested I publish his essay here. I’m a firm advocate for standing up for evidence-based policy, and Alejandro (inspired by James Hansen), shows us how it’s done.
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I am addressing this letter to colleagues with research careers because I am compelled to share what I learned recently by crossing a new threshold. For years I have been talking and writing about the climate change crisis. As intellectually rewarding and therapeutic as it has been, these letters to government, meetings with Members of [the Canadian] Parliament, and articles for conservation-minded audiences have accomplished nothing of substance.
Others feel similarly. Prominent academics, fed up with governments that ignore science and heed the priorities of corporations, have turned to civil disobedience. James Hansen, a senior climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, led by example last year when he got himself arrested in front of the USA’s Whitehouse to protest the proposed Keystone Pipeline that would carry oil from the Alberta Tar Sands to the USA. That was his third arrest in three years; the previous two involved civil disobedience against the mining of coal, a huge contributor to greenhouse gases.
In the wake of Hansen’s arrests, on 05 May 2012, Mark Jaccard—a prominent economist, IPCC member, and professor at the Energy and Materials Research Group of Simon Fraser University—got himself arrested in White Rock, British Columbia, for blocking a coal train carrying US coal for export to China via British Columbia ports. There were 12 others with Jaccard, among them a man in his 80s, several men in their 60s and 70s, and a few youngsters like myself and my good friend Lynne Quarmby. Lynne happens to be chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Simon Fraser University.
Shortly before the arrest, as we sat on the tracks, I told Jaccard that I had been teetering on the decision to come, but his announcement to participate sealed my decision. Jaccard replied that, given what he knew about the climate crisis and the consequences of inaction, it was impossible for him to not be here. He was echoing sentiments shared by all 13 of us on the tracks. Later, as we were released from jail, Jaccard wondered out loud whether the arrest would affect his ability to travel for work. Then he said something to the effect that, “You can forever come up with excuses, or you can get real and just do it.”
The other day, Bill Laurance asked Barry Brook and me to comment on an opinion editorial he was doing up, so I feel fully justified in reproducing it here (and he asked me to ;-). It has just been published online in Australian Geographic.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but here it is: China is now the biggest global emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), the chief greenhouse gas – and Australia has helped it attain that dubious honour.
China now spews out about 6.5 billion tons of CO2 annually, whereas the USA emits 5.8 billion tons a year (based on data for 2008 compiled by the U.S. Department of Energy). Collectively, these two countries account for over 40 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Number three on the list is Russia, with 1.7 billion tons per year, followed closely by India.
Of course, China’s huge leap in emissions is largely down to its dramatic industrial and economic growth, in concert with the fact that it is the world’s most populous nation, with over 1.3 billion people. To help fuel its growth, China is now building nearly one new coal-fired power-generating plant per week. Read the rest of this entry »
Nearly a decade ago (my how time flies*), I wrote a post about the guaranteed failure of government policies purporting no-extinction targets within their environmental plans. I was referring to the State of South Australia’s (then) official policy of no future extinctions. In summary, zero- (or no-) extinction targets at best demonstrate a deep naïvety […]
I’ve been on the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts now for a little over two and a half years. It has been a time-consuming, yet insightful experience. Without attempting to breach all the confidentiality agreements I signed when I joined up, I would like to explain a few of the internal machinations that […]
This is not a rhetorical question. I really do want to solicit responses to the aspects I will raise in this post, because I have to admit that I’m a little unclear on the subject. Preamble — While I do not intend to deflate the value of any particular academic society, I’m sure some might […]
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