Giving, Sailing and Coasting  are the Key Award Winning Messages

Australian of the Year Simon McKeon will devote 2011 to inspiring individuals and especially corporations to dig deeper for those doing it tough. He has played key roles with World Vision Australia, the Global Poverty Project and Red Dust Role Models and is currently chairman of the CSIRO. He is pictured with around the world sailor 2011 Young Australian of the Year Jessica Watson. Previous award winner Tim Flannery – in his capacity as Chairman of the Coastal and Climate Change Council – calls for urgent Government leadership on coastal adaptation to drive collaboration and consistent approaches across all levels of government.

Born-again banker out to make charity the bottom line

BY BREANNA TUCKER

26 Jan, 2011 01:00 AM

Australian of the Year Simon McKeon will devote 2011 to inspiring individuals and especially corporations to dig deeper for those doing it tough.

Speaking at Parliament House after last night’s awards ceremony, Mr McKeon urged all Australians to donate more of their time to charitable causes and hoped the corporate sector would go one step further than simply writing out a cheque.

Mr McKeon is the executive chairman of Macquarie Bank’s Melbourne office but now performs the role part-time. In 1994, he was in the middle of a lucrative investment banking career when he decided to devote more time to community work.

”I come from the big end of town and for many years have tried to preach, if you like, what happens when a big corporation actually does give money,” he said.

”It’s there to make a profit, I’m not going to deny that. But I think there are many ways in which corporates these days can share their expertise, their people, their facilities and, of course, a bit of money as well … of course they can give more.”

Mr McKeon has played key roles with World Vision Australia, the Global Poverty Project and Red Dust Role Models and is currently chairman of the CSIRO.

He also recently retired as founding chairman of MS Research Australia after having himself been diagnosed with the disease.

He says a brief period of blindness and paralysis from the hip down showed him the importance of contributing to the organisations that make a difference.

”It was a wonderful thing for me because I encountered what life might have been like if I had been struck with it permanently,” he said.

Last year’s ceremony drew heavy media attention after 2010 award recipient, Professor Patrick McGorry, used his new title to accuse the Federal Government’s immigration detention centres of being ”factories for producing mental illness” before later retracting the comment.

Mr McKeon steered clear of controversy last night and acknowledged that the Treasurer had ”a damn hard job of allocating scarce resources”.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard last night congratulated Mr McKeon on his award and praised his achievements as an inspiration to the Australian community.

”Simon’s example is about fund-raising but it’s also about putting in your personal time and direct support, your skills, your mentoring, into organisations that need your help,” she said.

Also revealed at last night’s ceremony was 2011 Young Australian of the Year Jessica Watson.

The 17-year-old last year achieved her dream of sailing solo, unassisted, non-stop around the world but last night she maintained she was ”no one special”. ”Heroes aren’t these people put up on pedestals … so dream big and more importantly, let’s make it happen.

Source: www.canberratimes.com.au/

14/01/2011

The Chair of the Coasts and Climate Change Council, Professor Tim Flannery, provided the Coasts and Climate Change Council’s end of term report to the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, the Hon Greg Combet AM MP.

In its report, the Council suggests an urgent need for Australian Government leadership on coastal adaptation to drive collaboration and consistent approaches across all levels of government. It proposes a 10-year national coastal adaptation agenda be defined and suggests four priority areas:

• accessible and consistent information for coastal communities;
• high quality and regionally targeted data for decision-makers;

• clarification of legal liability for local governments; and  
• greater policy and regulatory consistency for local governments and professions.

Many coastal assets – critical infrastructure, beaches and public open spaces, public facilities, homes and commercial interests – are at risk from rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change. The value and distribution of assets at risk reveals the national scale of coastal adaptation.

Effective coastal adaptation will require innovation, reform and structural adjustment. Australia’s policies, institutions and investors are not well positioned to manage the scale of risk that climate change will bring to Australia’s coast. There is an urgent need now for improved cooperation and collaboration between all levels of government, with leadership from the Australian Government, to drive risk assessment, improved land use planning and design standards and to enhance decision-making capacity in coastal regions.

Continuing to engage stakeholders across both private and public sectors will be critical to the development of partnerships which can deliver demonstrable progress in reducing the climate change risks to our economy, social values and ecosystems.

Early action can help reduce the severity of long term adverse impacts in many areas. This is because the use of strategic risk-based land use planning and well designed legal and regulation reform can ensure that exposure to risk does not unnecessarily increase with further development, and reduce financial and adjustment costs to future generations.

The Coasts and Climate Change Council can assist in communicating risk and impacts to private and public sectors and communities, and continue to provide independent advice to the Minister on effective approaches to coastal adaptation.

Read the Coasts and Climate Change Council report.

Source: www.climatechange.gov.au

More than One Degree of Separation  Between Words & Action

It’s great that a big company like News Ltd should be setting an example by going out of its way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This all started when the company’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who a bit over three years ago, in a remarkable pep talk to his global staff, pledged “our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010″. Jonathan Holmes for the ABC’s The Drum reflects on this positive action, but wonders why the newspapers in the Murdoch stable don’t do more for the cause. “As one of the world’s great media companies, News Corporation has the power to do far more to counter the risk of catastrophic climate change than merely to reduce its own emissions.”

By Jonathan Holmes for The Drum, ABC

27 January 2011

You may have seen the full page ads in the papers on Tuesday morning:

How do you change the equivalent of 57,302 light bulbs? Start with one.

That’s how News Ltd, the Australian province of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire, proudly announced that it is now ‘a carbon neutral business’. And if you follow the invitation in the ads to visit News Ltd’s website www.1degree.com.au, you can read about all the wondrous things that the company is doing to reduce its carbon footprint, from applying infrared paint “to reduce heat absorption through the press hall roof” at its Chullora press plant in Sydney, to running ‘an incredibly popular bike discount scheme’ at the Adelaide Advertiser, “with 30 staff rushing to take up the offer”.

It would be easy, and in my opinion, quite wrong, to scoff. It’s great that a big company like News Ltd should be setting an example by going out of its way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that it will also be reducing its power bills shouldn’t be any reason for cynicism. Energy efficiency can be capital-intensive: the pay-off in reduced power bills can take years to achieve, and in any case often amounts to just a tiny percentage of a large business’s overall costs. That’s why many still don’t make much of an effort.

That News Ltd does so can be sheeted home to its parent company’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who a bit over three years ago, in a remarkable pep talk to his global staff, pledged “our intention to be carbon neutral, across all our businesses, by 2010″.

Why? Well, argued Murdoch, because it makes good business sense, and because News Corp’s staff, and more importantly, its global audienes, are interested in this climate change stuff; but principally because “in Melbourne, 2006 was the 10th consecutive year with below average rainfall. And 2005 was the hottest year on record throughout Australia… Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction”.

Last Thursday, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation sent out an important announcement from its Geneva headquarters. Together with 2005 and 1998, it said, the year 2010 ranked as the warmest on record. “The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,’ said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998″.

The findings are based on three separate datasets, two maintained in the United States and one in the UK. And they’re significant, not just because climate change sceptics have been maintaining for years that since 1998 the earth has been cooling, not warming; but because, in the words of Professor Matthew England of the UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre, “in the absence of global warming, you would have thought 2010 should be one of the coolest on record because there’s been a very strong La Nina for about eight months of the year”.

1998 was an extraordinarily hot year globally, largely because of a very strong El Nino phenomenon. El Nino conditions prevailed in 2009 too, but in around May of 2010 there was a rapid switch to its opposite, La Nina, as abnormally cold water upwelled to the surface in the eastern Pacific. That, along with record warm ocean temperatures north of Australia, is what has caused the extraordinary amount of rainfall in eastern Australia in the past few months; and it’s also why, in central and eastern Australia, 2010 was an unusually cool year.

The fact that despite this, the global temperature was as high as in 1998, argues Professor England, “taken together with other observations, such as accelerating ice melt, increased humidity, more extreme events and rising sea levels, (indicates that) climate change is progressing at what should be seen as an alarming rate”.

Those quotations aren’t taken directly from anything Matthew England has said to me. They’re from an email he was sent by The Australian’s Debbie Guest, after she’d spent half an hour on the phone with him last Friday. She was checking that he was happy for them to be included in a piece she’d written on the WMO’s announcement for Saturday’s Weekend Australian.

The Oz had carried an AFP wire story about the WMO announcement on the Friday, discreetly placed on an inside page. Debbie Guest’s piece for the Saturday dealt with the apparent paradox that a cool year in Australia was the hottest on record globally. But her story didn’t make it into most editions of the Weekend Oz the next morning. A severely truncated version did appear in early editions, and online, but the quotes from Professor England were conspicuously absent.

When he asked her why, Ms Guest told him that her story had had to be shortened for space reasons – though why that should have affected the online story, she didn’t explain.

Professor England says he’s satisfied Debbie Guest was genuinely trying to do a good job. The shortening was done by someone above her in the hierarchy.

So what did appear in The Weekend Australian that day? Well, nothing in the newspaper (as far as I can see) about the WMO’s announcement- although this alarming story from AFP was posted on The Australian’s website that day.

But The Weekend Oz did find room on its opinion pages for this piece by the ineffable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. If you can’t understand its tortured mathematics, don’t worry. You’re not intended to. You areintended to think, “Well, I don’t really follow it all, but this bloke seems to be impressively learned, and he says it’s not worth doing anything about climate change”.

That, of course, is precisely the opposite message to the one Rupert Murdoch was trying to send his own troops back in 2007. The evidence for climate change, since then, has only got stronger. The reasons for taking precautionary action have only become more compelling. Of course News Ltd can’t, on its own, affect the global climate by reducing its carbon footprint, and nor can Australia. But if every company, and every nation, acted – or refrained from acting – on the basis of that logic, the chances of eventually stabilising global temperatures at less than catastrophic levels would be reduced to zero.

Well, you may argue, but doesn’t Christopher Monckton have a right to be heard? Don’t news stories get shortened every day? What does all this prove?

Nothing, in itself. You have to be an alert and habitual reader to notice that week after week, year after year,The Australian and The Weekend Australian massage their news coverage and grossly unbalance their opinion pages so as to send the message that the existence of human-induced climate change is highly debatable, and that any action by Australia to reduce its emissions would be economically ruinous and politically foolish.

At least, as The Australian’s former rural reporter, Asa Wahlquist, told a conference of journalism educators last year, “The one bit of good news from this is that it shows that News Limited editors are independent (from Rupert Murdoch)”. She also said that reporting climate change for The Australian was ‘torture’.

The Australian’s circulation may be modest, but it is undoubtedly influential in business and political circles. Fox News in the US, whose presenters are almost unanimous in their virulent climate change ‘scepticism’, is hugely influential. Both, in their different ways, are failing to report fairly and accurately what is arguably the most important global issue of our times.

As one of the world’s great media companies, News Corporation has the power to do far more to counter the risk of catastrophic climate change than merely to reduce its own emissions. As Rupert Murdoch put it back in 2007:

“News Corporation, today, reaches people at home and at work… when they’re thinking… when they’re laughing… and when they are making choices that have enormous impact.

“The unique potential – and duty – of a media company are (sic) to help its audiences connect to the issues that define our time.

“We are only at the beginning of this mission, and we have a long way to go.”

Yes Mr Murdoch. You did then, and you still do

Source: www.abc.net.au

Last Word: Bamboo the Ultimate Sustainable Material

Regular readers of abc carbon express and “The ABC of Carbon” know there is a certain partiality shown towards bamboo and its atributes from the writer. (For further evidence see pages 26 and 29 in the book.)  We have also acclaimed the Green School in Bali made entirely of bamboo. There are even thoughts being seriously given to a major arts/environmental project with bamboo at its heart and soul. Pictured is black bamboo being used to great design effect at One Raffles Quay, Singapore. So thanks to Martin Blake for passing on this wonderful story on the merits of bamboo by Paul Miles in the UK Financial Times. Here goes:

“If I told you there’s a building material that is up to 50 times stronger than oak but lighter than steel or concrete, that is flexible, aesthetically pleasing and highly rated for its green credentials, you might say it sounds too good to be true.

“If I went on to explain that the material can be used not only to build bridges and cathedrals but also to create floors, walls, clothing, paper, vinegar, cosmetics, animal feed and as a vegetable for human consumption, you would probably dismiss it as some Utopian pipe dream.

“But the product exists. It’s bamboo.”

The organic alternative
By Paul Miles

FINANCIAL TIMES, EUROPE, 7 JANUARY 2007

If I told you there’s a building material that is up to 50 times stronger than oak but lighter than steel or concrete, that is flexible, aesthetically pleasing and highly rated for its green credentials, you might say it sounds too good to be true.

If I went on to explain that the material can be used not only to build bridges and cathedrals but also to create floors, walls, clothing, paper, vinegar, cosmetics, animal feed and as a vegetable for human consumption, you would probably dismiss it as some Utopian pipe dream.

But the product exists. It’s bamboo.

Today, there is a worldwide movement of architects, interior designers, aid workers and environmentalists championing this hollow-stemmed member of the grass family. Giant bamboos, which grow at rates of more than a metre a day, reaching heights of 30 metres or more and diameters of up to 25cm, are being cultivated and harvested for modern architect-designed structures. And interest in the projects is growing as fast as the grasses.

In Colombia, which is at the forefront of modern bamboo architecture, talents such as Oscar Hidalgo L�pez, Marcelo Villegas and Sim�n V�lez build expensive homes and public buildings from bamboo. In the US, California architect Darrel DeBoer, who specialises in building with sustainable materials, has created university buildings from bamboo and written a manual about its use. Hawaii-based Bamboo Technologies has attained government building code certification for one species of structural bamboo and built more than 50 bamboo homes in the islands and California, the most expensive one costing $250,000. The company hopes to build homes in other temperate areas of the US and Europe this year and its latest annual bamboo house design competition has attracted more than 300 entrants from 63 countries.

One happy customer is Shep Gordon, who bought a Bamboo Technologies kit last year for use as his home office in Maui. “It’s fantastic. I’ve never felt so good being inside something. It really is magical,” he says. “It’s like being in a bamboo forest. It’s really calming.”

The 1,000 sq ft office “with lots of bells and whistles” took less than three weeks to erect. Speed of assembly is a “fantastic attraction, especially [in Hawaii] where there’s a shortage in the labour market”. It cost $170 per sq ft compared with $500 per sq ft for a traditional building and “I like this much more”, Gordon says. He’s now about to have a two-storey bamboo guesthouse built.

Stephan Reeve, who lives in a bamboo house in Kipahulu, Hawaii, and built another for her mother, says: “I love the look and feel of the bamboo culms [stalks]. We recently had a substantial earthquake which damaged local bridges and closed our highway for over a month. I was very safe in my strong and flexible bamboo home. I find it tremendously satisfying that my house is contributing to new, more sustainable construction processes. [And] it is a nice house for kids as it has all natural safe materials.” 
DeBoer praises bamboo for its “strength, longevity and beauty”, characteristics that have also made it a new favourite among interior designers. In a pressed and laminated form, bamboo can be used as flooring and wall panelling and for kitchen cabinets and furniture and it comes in a range of natural colourings. US-based Smith & Fong, established in 1989, says it has seen a “phenomenal growth” in sales of its Plyboo, which is manufactured in China. “With an increasing interest in green building, people are looking for products that are sustainable. It’s also durable and very versatile,” says Sven Eberlein, director of marketing. “I recently saw a bicycle made from bamboo.”

London-based Urbane Living is one of about six UK suppliers of bamboo flooring and sells “a huge amount”, according to director Adam Robertson. “It’s fantastic value for money, being comparable in strength to oak but at a fraction of the cost,” he says. Indeed, bamboo flooring starts at �16.49 a sq metre compared with about �40 for certified sustainable timber.

Bali-based Linda Garland, dubbed “the queen of bamboo”, makes beds, sofas and other furniture from some of the 200 species of bamboo (of the 1,500 or so worldwide) on her Panchoran Estate, near Ubud. Her pieces have been installed in the homes of clients such as David Bowie and Richard Branson and she’s currently building an enormous holiday home with black bamboo walls and roofs around a lake in eastern Bali for Hollywood film director Rob Cohen.

Garland, who also runs the non-profit Environmental Bamboo Foundation, which promotes the use of the material worldwide, says she’s “enchanted by [its] aesthetics” and hopes that luxurious homes such as the one for Cohen will help address its “association with poverty”, which is still a “problem with its status”.

That said, she remains committed to encouraging the use of bamboo for rebuilding low-income housing after natural disasters, since bamboo houses fare better than many other structures in hurricanes and earthquakes (up to magnitude five on the Richter scale, according to a 2004 test by Britain’s Timber Research and Development Association). After fashion designer Donna Karan stayed at Panchoran last year, she donated funds for five bamboo houses to be built for survivors of the Javanese earthquake.

Garland also emphasises the environmentally friendly aspects of bamboo. Its yield (weight per acre per year) is up to 25 times that of timber. One hectare of bamboo can yield 22 to 44 tonnes a year and it is ready to harvest within three to five years. Because it is botanically a grass, more shoots simply appear from where it is cut, so it doesn’t need to be replanted. Bamboo prevents soil erosion, sequesters at least four times more carbon than a forest of young trees and releases 35 per cent more oxygen.

Although humans have sheltered under bamboo structures for millennia, its modern renaissance dates to 2000 when Sim�n V�lez built a 1,830 sq metre pavilion from 4,000 giant stalks of Guadua angustifolia at the Hanover Expo. The organisation that commissioned him was Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (Zeri), a “global network” that seeks to create a society without unwanted waste. The Guadua species used for the pavilion proved strong enough to meet strict European building codes. Loads weighing 10 tonnes placed at the edge of the 7.5m cantilevered roof caused a movement of just 5cm, most of which reversed when the load was removed.

DeBoer cites V�lez’s mortar-filled bolt joinery, which he pioneered some 20 years before, as “making all the difference” to bamboo architecture. In traditional housing, such as that used in the south Pacific, bamboo culms (stalks) are joined together by lashing with vines or other natural fibres, producing a joint that weakens over time as climate and age affects the fibres. V�lez’s method fills part of the hollow stalk, between nodes, with mortar and uses bolts to join pieces together. Several stalks can be joined together to form cathedral-like vertical columns and horizontal spans of more than 50 metres are now possible. V�lez’s most recent project was a 130-room bamboo eco-lodge in China but in Colombia he has built more muscular structures: bridges across gorges, enormous factory roofs, sports stadia and market places. “Bamboo is steel from nature,” he says. “Whatever an engineer can build from steel, I can build from bamboo. Steel and bamboo have the same strength.”

It is with roofs that bamboo comes into its own. The structures of architects such as Villegas and V�lez are at their most inspiring when you look up. Architect Shoei Yoh has designed public buildings in Japan with roofs inspired by bamboo basketware. A woven bamboo frame, supported with temporary posts, is covered with a thin layer of cement. It becomes a beautiful roof with a flowing, fabric feel, as if a lily flower has landed gently on the ground. Richard Rogers’s award-winning Barajas airport in Madrid has 210,000 sq metres of laminated bamboo planking adorning its waving roof. “It gives the building a lovely ‘soft’ feel and is great at absorbing sound,” an airport spokesman says. In Leipzig, the zoo’s new multi-storey car park is clad in bamboo, changing what could be just another concrete monstrosity into a thing of Zen beauty.

As timber forests continue to be over-exploited, there’s no doubt that bamboo will become an increasingly important crop. “It’s such a multi-purpose plant,” says Francesca Ambrosini, European representative for the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (Inbar), a non-profit organisation funded by the United Nations and the European Union. The group promotes products such as paper, fabric (including super-soft, fast-wicking, anti-bacterial fibre) and cosmetics all made from bamboo using new technologies developed in the past few years. Construction – an area where, Barajas notwithstanding, Europe still lags – will be the next push. Moving on from demonstration buildings V�lez built for Germany’s Vitra Design Museum, Inbar is working on modular housing made from bamboo panels suitable for European climates that are expected to cost in the region of just $70 per sq metre to construct. It hopes to have built examples by the end of this year. “Use of bamboo directly contributes to the community or people of the developing or poor countries where it grows,” says Shyam Paudel of Inbar.

There are some downsides to bamboo. Certain species can get out of control, spreading rapidly across vast areas. Infestation by the “powder post beetle” is a threat (although most bamboo is pre-treated to prevent insect damage). The process of laminating to produce flooring and panels adds environmental cost, especially if the bamboo is bleached. 

More worryingly from a sustainability perspective, there are currently no commercial plantations producing structural bamboo in Europe or the mainland US (although there are some in Hawaii). Most comes from China, India, Vietnam and Latin America. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, in 2005, China had 5.4m hectares of bamboo plantation, some 2.7 per cent of its forestry area, and all the houses sold by Bamboo Technologies arrive in kit-form from Vietnam. Shipping bamboo and bamboo products round the world makes it much less eco-friendly. “Transport is an issue, as it is with many materials,” says Sally Hall of the Association for Environment Conscious Building, which has about 1,400 members in the UK and is developing a “gold standard” for a “nearly zero” emissions house.

Still, enthusiasts think the benefits of bamboo easily outweigh its flaws. And they spread their message with religious zeal. Take architect Gale Goldberg, author of Bamboo Style. Her plea to readers? “Bring bamboo into your life”.

Source: www.pandabamboo.co.za