How Much To Fund Green Infrastructure & Stop Deforestation?
The Australian Green Infrastructure Council has been trying to put its green stamp on all major projects with a rating scheme which is ready to roll. It needs Government to officially nudge it along. Meanwhile, although no binding agreement had been reached at Copenhagen, one bright spot was the commitment by countries, including Australia, to devote billions of dollars to slow down deforestation, a major source of greenhouse gases.
The AUSTRALIAN Green Infrastructure Council has been trying to put a very green stamp of all major infrastructure in Australia for some time. It has a green infrastructure rating scheme ready to roll.
It needs Government endorsement and a pittance of Federal Government funding – $1.25 million – which is nothing when compared to the amount Governments (federal, state and local) spend on infrastructure projects in any year.
David Hood, Chairman of AGIC, is ever hopeful that green infrastructure will get the official boost it needs and with the presence of Minister of Infrastructure Anthony Albanese in Brisbane this week, there’s an added whiff of optimism in the steamy autumnal air.
It was way back in October last year when editor of WME Environment Business Magazine Richard Collins had this to say:
“I cannot for the life of me understand the hold up on funding the Australian Green Infrastructure Council and its new eco-rating scheme for new infrastructure. It is patently a good idea and, as reported last issue, needs just $1.25 million to become a reality. So will some mid-level staffer in some government, any government really, just reach into the petty cash jar for some lose change.”
In December 2009 The Australian ran a story by Cameron Cooper about AGIC and its plans:
As part of its efforts to formalise sustainability standards for infrastructure, AGICis developing the world’s first sustainability rating scheme. It sets performance benchmarks and rewards infrastructure projects and organisations that achieve high outcomes against these standards.
AGIC chief executive Doug Harland says the rating scheme will consider multiple assessment categories ranging from climate vulnerability, energy use, emissions and materials consumed to factors such as community amenity, safety and economic viability.
Harland says under the sustainable infrastructure definition, people “are starting to question the very nature of the infrastructure that is being built”.
For example, he notes that NASA scientists argue that no more coal-fired power stations should be built.
“Obviously, some people would like to shut them down tomorrow and that’sjust not an option,” Harland says. “We all need our fridges running. There has to be a practical transition.”
With an eye to the future, Harland believes society must consider infrastructure as a “whole of life” concept.
From the AGIC website is an outline of the rating scheme:
The AGIC Rating Scheme is a governance mechanism for the AGIC Rating Tool that:
• Registers and supports award applicants
• Provides the functions for independently verifying submitted applications • Recommends awards to the AGIC Board for ratification
• Provides an arm’s length mechanism for system verification and award/rating appeals that adds credibility to, and builds community confidence in, the rating scheme; and
• Issues awards.
The AGIC Rating Scheme covers the methodology required to secure a rating for a range of infrastructure projects including:
• Roads, rail, bridges and tunnels
• Ports, wharves or boating
• Airport airside facilities
• Distribution grids (pipes, poles, wires)
• Water or resource management
• Water infrastructure
• Waterway or foreshore management
Preparatory civil works for other types.
Source: www.agic.net.au

UQ Release:
How much does it really cost to stop deforestation?
A UQ economics expert will help answer the complex question when he gives a public lecture at St Lucia later this month.
Dr Colin Hunt, a visiting fellow in the UQ School of Economics and a researcher on the economics of climate change, will present “The real costs of stopping deforestation” at 3pm on March 26.
Dr Hunt said although no binding agreement had been reached at the Copenhagen climate change conference in December, one bright spot was the agreement by countries including Australia to devote billions of dollars to slow down deforestation, a major source of greenhouse gases.
Last year Dr Hunt published a book on forests and climate change – Carbon sinks and climate change: forests in the fight against global warming. Prior to Copenhagen, he assisted the Papua New Guinean government on the costs and benefits of slowing down deforestation and helped devise its greenhouse policy.
“What is intriguing is the assumption by many researchers that it will be cheap to stop the clearing of tropical forests,” Dr Hunt said.
“This is because of a poor understanding of the multiple beneficiaries of logging, agricultural production and processing.”
Dr Hunt will present the methodology and the results of his research at the seminar to illustrate the economic and social costs of stopping deforestation in Papua New Guinea.
“Companies must be compensated for loss of profits, but so also must governments for loss of taxes. And then there are the working people who are expected to give up the income and employment opportunities of exploiting their forests. Such opportunities may be few in developing countries such as PNG.”
Dr Hunt will also discuss general problems of underestimating the cost of conservation initiatives, using the expansion of “no-take” zones in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park as an example.
“Inadequate compensation of stakeholders for their income lost can lead to a political backlash that threatens the whole conservation initiative,” he said.
“The real costs of stopping deforestation” takes place in room 103 in the Colin Clark Building (building 39) at 3pm on March 26. All are welcome.
Media: Dr Hunt (07 3349 3017, colinhunt@bigpond.com) or Cameron Pegg at UQ Communications (07 3365 2049, c.pegg@uq.edu.au)
Source: www.uq.edu.au

Fresh Air is Blowing & the Sun is Shining for Clean Energy Projects
THE Rudd government’s renewable energy backflip will unlock billions of dollars worth of investment in new windfarms, with wind energy companies Pacific Hydro and AGL ready to revive more than $6 billion worth of stalled projects in five states, while the Solar Flagships program has attracted a huge amount of interest, with 52 applications to build Australia’s first large-scale solar-thermal and solar-photovoltaic power plants.
Rick Wallace in The Australian (1 March 2010):
THE Rudd government’s wind energy backflip will unlock billions of dollars worth of investment in new windfarms, the wind power industry says.
Wind energy companies Pacific Hydro and AGL nominated more than $6 billion worth of stalled projects in five states that could be revived after the federal government’s decision to rejig its renewable energy scheme.
Proposed windfarms across the country had been put on hold amid an investment strike caused by the commonwealth’s controversial inclusion of solar panels in the scheme.
The price of the certificates issued under the scheme has since crashed from $60 per MWh to about $35 because the heavily subsidised solar panels and heaters have distorted the market.
A lobbying campaign from the wind industry, which hit its peak when AGL boss Michael Fraser labelled the scheme a “fraud”, finally caused the Rudd government to buckle last week.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong announced that domestic solar panels and water heaters would be stripped out of the large-scale renewable market, a move the wind industry says will drive up the price of renewable certificates and hence the viability of projects.
The certificates, along with the power, are onsold by producers to retailers, who are mandated to buy a certain proportion of renewable energy. Pacific Hydro’s Australian general manager, Lane Crockett, said the industry had been at the crossroads, but now had a future, as long as the changes passed through parliament. “The investment will flow, the jobs will be kept and created and we will end up with a better energy system as a result of broader energy security,” he said.
“We will be reassessing all of our (stalled) projects.”
Mr Crockett said Pacific Hydro had $1.7bn, or 560MW, of projects at an advanced stage and another $1.2bn, or 400MW, in the pipeline.
AGL — which has an estimated 1365MW, or $3bn, worth of projects under renewed consideration — also welcomed the changes. “We will obviously need to see the detail, but at face value it looks like a proposal that will see us make those investment decisions we have been holding back on,” chief executive Michael Fraser said.
AGL also has several billion dollars worth of wind projects in the pipeline, including the Macarthur windfarm in western Victoria, expected to be Australia’s largest if it goes ahead.
The $800 million project, with 365MW capacity, is one of four that AGL has in advanced stages with at least another three further away from development, but under renewed consideration.
The government’s about face came after the chief executive of Vestas — the largest producer of wind turbines in the world — joined the lobbying efforts, meeting Penny Wong in Canberra last week.
Vestas’s Ditlev Engel, speaking after the meeting, said Australia had enormous wind energy potential and said not utilising it was “like going to Saudi Arabia and not drilling for oil”.
“Some of the best wind resources in the world are in Australia,” Mr Engel said. “It’s got to be harvested, it’s commonsense. We understand you have a lot of coal, but look at what you have in terms of wind resources and it’s an energy resource that doesn’t consume water at all.”
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au
Giles Parkinson “Green Chip” in The Australian (1 March 2010):
Solar interest flares
THE Solar Flagships program has attracted a huge amount of interest, with 52 applications to build Australia’s first large-scale solar-thermal and solar-photovoltaic power plants.
The applications have been spread evenly across the two technology groups, with between six to eight to be short-listed by a seven-member panel in the next few months before the two winners are announced later this year.
The Transfield group has proposed to transform the 180MW Collinsville coal-fired power station in north Queensland to a solar thermal plant boosted by gas, using technology from the German-based Novatec Biosol, in which it has a controlling stake. US firm eSolar confirmed it had submitted a plan with BeSolar, Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, John Holland and Siemens.
The shortcoming of the Solar Flagships program is that only one from each technology grouping will be selected, so if projects such as Transfield’s miss out, their plans will simply be shelved. Many in the industry wish for a broad-based incentive such as a loan guarantee. In the US, the Obama administration has announced a $US1.5 billion ($1.67bn) guarantee for a 400MW plant — the world’s biggest — to be developed by BrightSource Energy, another Flagships applicant.
Some eyebrows were raised at the inclusion on the solar energy selection panel of a manager of a BP oil refinery and the head of an Alcan aluminium smelter, along with a former 23-year BHP veteran. But it may be that many experts with a more direct connection with the industry are involved in one or more of the competing proposals.
Not deep but meaningful
ONE of the more interesting developments in the geothermal industry has been the new focus of major renewable energy companies such as Origin Energy and AGL on shallower, more conventional developments. Origin announced last week it had teamed up Geodynamics, its partner in the deep “hot rock” geothermal developments in the Cooper Basin, to look at shallower geothermal resources. Origin is throwing $4.5 million at the cost of drilling two wells over the next two months, while AGL has also secured shallower resources in a handful of exploration permits in NSW and Victoria.
The deeper “hot rocks” resources remain a holy grail for the industry because of the potential rewards. But the experimental and risky nature of its development, as highlighted by Geodynamics problems at Habanero, has caused some resentment in the industry. Many begrudge the high-risk tag now attached to the industry, given that shallower, more conventional resources can be more easily harnessed for smaller-scale energy and industrial heat applications.
Another reason for Origin to pursue shallower resources is that the partnership will need more projects in the Cooper Basin to make any resource there commercially viable, considering the cost of transmission to the nearest grid line.
Riding the wave
ASPIRING ocean energy producer BioPower plans to install a commercial wave farm at a new site near Port Fairy in Victoria. It is to announce today that it will initially install a 250kW bioWave ocean wave energy system, followed by a 1MW unit. BioPower sees scope for a 100MW development.
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au

Lucky Last – Mike Steketee puts it in perspective
Global warming is a real problem, despite the ill-informed claims of the climate deniers, shouts the headline in The Australian. A rare opinion piece in this last broadsheet bastian of climate deniers.
“IF in doubt vote no” may be the five most powerful words in politics. Those arguing against action on climate change certainly are entitled to think so, writes Mike Sketetee.
They have shifted public opinion merely by raising a few instances where claims about the effects of global warming have been exaggerated or not sufficiently documented, and by catching a few scientists playing politics. Heaven forbid that anyone involved in a highly charged political debate should sex up their case through the selective use of material and exaggeration. Nevertheless, while that is stock in trade for politicians, it is not a good look for scientists. But some perspective is in order.
Mike Steketee in The Australian (27 February 2010):
Global warming is a real problem, despite the ill-informed claims of the climate deniers
“IF in doubt vote no” may be the five most powerful words in politics. Those arguing against action on climate change certainly are entitled to think so.
They have shifted public opinion merely by raising a few instances where claims about the effects of global warming have been exaggerated or not sufficiently documented, and by catching a few scientists playing politics. Heaven forbid that anyone involved in a highly charged political debate should sex up their case through the selective use of material and exaggeration. Nevertheless, while that is stock in trade for politicians, it is not a good look for scientists. But some perspective is in order.
Two sentences in volume two of the four-volume 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. This is not supported by the scientific evidence, including that in the rest of the IPCC report, which contains a 46-page chapter in volume one on glaciers, ice and snow. This covers scientific observations of melting and includes the comment that “reports on individual glaciers or limited glacier areas support the global picture of ongoing strong ice shrinkage in almost all regions”, although some glaciers had advanced or thickened, probably because of increased precipitation. Another chapter includes a projection of the future decline of glaciers but makes no predictions about their disappearance.
Apart from this, the errors in the IPCC report are hard to find. It says The Netherlands is highly susceptible to rising sea levels and river flooding because 55 per cent of its territory is below sea level. This figure was supplied by the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency, which has since conceded that it should have said that 55 per cent of The Netherlands was at risk of flooding, with 26 per cent of the country below sea level and 29 per cent susceptible to river flooding. This does not change the IPCC’s conclusion about The Netherlands’ vulnerability. Even the figure it used is not necessarily wrong: the Dutch transport ministry has a measure of 60 per cent of the country lying below the high water level during storms.
Sceptics have challenged the IPCC’s statement that up to 40 per cent of Amazon forests “could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. The reference cited is to a WWF report but this is based on a peer-reviewed study, the lead author of which has said that the IPCC statement is correct.
The IPCC has been accused of linking global warming to recent natural disasters. While it does refer to one study that found an increase in economic losses from natural disasters, it also mentions other studies that have not detected such a trend. All up, the IPCC’s 2007 report cites about 18,000 references and most of them are to peer-reviewed scientific papers. This is vastly more evidence than critics have been able to find to the contrary.
As for so-called Climategate — hacked emails from the University of East Anglia — this does show scientists behaving badly by withholding information and talking of manipulating data that did not suit their argument. But it does not invalidate the accumulating evidence for global warming.
Rather, it proves that the evidence is not all one way and that there is no absolute certainty in climate science, which is why the IPCC always talks in terms of probabilities.
None of these cases undermines the IPCC’s main findings. Are the glaciers melting? Not all of them and not uniformly, but overall, unambiguously yes. Are temperatures rising? You could be forgiven for thinking not, given the loudness of the claims that there has been no warming since 1998. How is it that sceptics can place so much importance on this short-term trend but ignore that 1998 was an unusually strong El Nino year, that the last decade in Australia was the warmest on record, that each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the preceding one in Australia and that, globally, 14 of the 15 warmest years on record occurred from 1995 to 2009?
Far from the scientific community hyping up the case for human-induced global warming, arguably it has been too cautious and too slow.
Joseph Fourier first suggested in 1824 that gases in the atmosphere trapped heat. Thirty-five years later John Tyndall conducted experiments that found water vapour and CO2 were the two most important gases to create such a greenhouse effect. In 1896 Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling the level of carbon dioxide would lead to temperature increases of 5C-6C. But he and others suggested this would not be a problem because the oceans would absorb most of the extra CO2 and additional CO2 would not trap more heat. This latter theory was not seriously challenged until the 1950s and it took until the 70s for a few scientists to start warning that global warming was a serious and urgent issue.
John Sawyer of the British Meteorological Office calculated in 1972 that increased greenhouse gases would cause warming of 0.6C by the end of the century. The actual increase was 0.5C. In areas such as the decline in sea ice and sea level rise, past IPCC projections have proven to be too low.
Although they are side issues, the doubts sown by critics, together with a few cooler winters, have led to a fall in public concern about global warming. A poll reported in the Guardian this week showed a drop from 44 per cent to 31 per cent in the past year in people in Britain who believe climate change is definitely a reality, although another 29 per cent agree that it could be. Almost 20 per cent say climate change is caused by human factors, while two-thirds say it is due to a mix of human and natural causes. The Australian’s Newspoll conducted a fortnight ago found a fall from 84 per cent to 73 per cent since 2008 in those who say climate change is occurring. Of these believers, 94 per cent say it is wholly or partly caused by human activity, two percentage points below the 2008 figure.
Of course, these figures demonstrate that we should not mistake those who make the most noise in the debate for the majority. They explain why Tony Abbott, while giving every impression to his conservative supporters that he is a sceptic, still subscribes to the government’s targets for emissions reductions, including the 5 per cent unconditional (we’re not waiting for the world) cut and feels compelled to offer his own, albeit partial, solutions. And although climate change may be a lower priority for voters, the polling suggests there is still mileage in Kevin Rudd campaigning on having superior credentials on the issue.
As it happens, public impressions about climate change are not that different from the views of those with professional knowledge on the issue. A poll of 3146 earth scientists at the start of last year found 82 per cent agreed that human activity was a significant contributing factor to changing mean global temperatures. Of the 77 climatologists actively engaged in research, 75 agreed. For any government to ignore these views would not just be courageous, it would be irresponsible. Tackling climate change remains, in the words of Ross Garnaut, a diabolical problem. An international emissions trading system may be the best solution in theory, but such an internationally binding agreement may be unobtainable and the scheme the Rudd government wants to legislate is so compromised as to render it ineffective. There are plenty of other options. Even if they are more expensive, as premiums for risk insurance they are well worth paying.
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au