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I smell a new euphemism wafting out of Canberra.

A report came out this morning in which it was argued that a 25% renewable energy target for 2020 would in fact financially harm consumers less than business as usual, and would create jobs, contrary to popular belief.

The Minister for the Environment (apparently) Malcolm Turnbull was predictably playing down the report’s conclusions and at one point addressed the difference in current price between green energy and coal. Except, when he was due to say ‘coal’, he paused, um‘d and ah‘d a couple of times, then came out with this gem.

He refered to it as “conventional grid electricity”.

Apparently a site of great cultural significance has been found in Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains. It’s a 100m x 50m sandstone slab covered in shallow engravings that are invisible for most of the day, emerging only in the angular light of dawn and dusk. From the substance of the engravings it is being compared to Mount Olympus, in that it supposedly depicts various deities and mythological creatures such as an ‘eagle man’ as well as “an evil and powerful club-footed being, infamous for eating children.”

The site is being described as ‘the most amazing rock engraving site in the whole of couth-eastern Austalia’. Probably second only to the thousands of known individual rock engravings on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia, which was a hot topic of debate at the end of last year, but for one reason or another, has fallen from the spotlight of late.

Woodside Petroleum want to build an on-shore natural liquefied natural gas plant on the peninsula – which, by the way, will process the spoils of Australia’s support for East-Timorese independence back in 2002 (read about it here) – but the rock art is unfortunately precisely where they want to build it.

At the time, we recorded about 9500 engravings on our North West Shelf leases, many of which remain undisturbed today. About 1800 were relocated. (from Woodside Petroleum’s website)

The same website claims that Woodside are working with local Aborigines to minimise any impact on the remainder, but from all news pieces on the matter, this is by no means uncontroversial.

No matter what we try and do, it’s the Minister is the one who’s got the answer. We could sit and cry day and night and they’ll just turn around and say, “There’s only black fellas. We’ll just go straight through them. We want this project to go ahead. We’ll go straight through it.” And that’s the way it’s happening. (Wilfred Hicks talking to the 7:30 report)

Hicks refers to the Minister for Environment (former Minister by now; Howard shuffles them around so often that it’s amazing they actually know what their portfolios are) Ian Campbell, who refuses to assign heritage listing to the Burrup, citing economic growth as the reason (and this is was the Minister for the Environment, not Industry).

Anyone who knows the extent of this rock art, and who says that none of it should be disturbed is taking an absolutist position that will hurt Australia’s economy and it will hurt the world’s environment. (transcript of a PM program, taken from the department’s website)

He mentions hurting the world’s environment here because of the relative benefits of natural gas as opposed to other forms of fossil fuels, but that is another debate altogether. To cut a long story short, I am skeptical that they would reduce any use of coal-power, just because of an influx of gas, and, by the time the gas is exported on diesel-powered ships, the difference in emissions is greatly reduced.

Having said that, it isn’t just the federal government taking an unreasonable economic-growth-trumps-all argument; understandably, the Western Australian government is keen to preserve the state’s 14% growth. And at the end of the day, why let a bunch of old rocks get in the way of inherently unsustainable economic growth?

Luckily, Wollemi National Park is nowhere near any politically hot natural gas reserves (as far as we know!) so it has a good chance of gaining the heritage listing that the Burrup desperately needs.

Last weekend, Sydney was urged to switch off the lights on Saturday night between 7:30 and 8:30 pm, for what was dubbed ‘Earth Hour’. I went with some friends to Milson’s point to have a small picnic and watch the city lights go off.

We were underwhelmed.

At 7:30 the lights on the arches and structural columns of the Harbour Bridge went out and at 8:00 the Opera House decided to switch off the purely aesthetic lights on the sails. That was about it.

I wasn’t expecting the entire CBD to suddenly descend into darkness – they clearly can’t switch off the street lights, et cetera – but even so, there seemed to be plenty of lights still on. In fact the only differences I noticed were the Bridge and Opera House. So hopefully you can understand my befuddlement upon seeing this image in the Sun-Herald the next day.

It looks like a huge difference, right?

Well apparently the ‘before’ photos were taken on the Thursday night, not just ‘before’ Earth Hour on the Saturday night as implied. The reason being that most people in the city switched off their lights before leaving the office on the Friday afternoon, as they should, but it meant that the Sun-Herald couldn’t get a good comparison image. I would contend that the comparison photos should be taken at a corresponding time, say, exactly a week earlier. There have also been photographers speculating that the differences between the various pairs of photos were mainly due to exposure; they were doctored¹. All this is outlined on the MediaWatch website, who broke the story last night.

While I fully support whatever the people who organised Earth Hour were trying to do, I think it was all a little bit bogus; a publicity-driven response to what is a very complex and difficult problem. Hopefully it wasn’t being seen as a ‘solution’ at all, just a demonstration, but obviously some thought it was meant to be an earnest attempt at saving an hour’s worth of electricity:

By switching off our lights … we kept the equivalent of 48,000 cars off our roads for one hour. That’s the equivalent of taking 5.5 cars off our road per year. If by making Earth Hour a yearly event we all feel like we are doing something for the environment, we are deluding ourselves.

Clearly, saving electricity was not the immediate and direct purpose of Earth Hour, but rather to draw attention to how much electricity is wasted so that the public in the future might be a little bit less flippant in a country where energy costs are certainly no disincentive to consumers.

We shouldn’t have to be coerced into consuming less energy. It should be the norm.

¹By the way, Fairfax, which owns the Sun-Herald, was one of the sponsors of Earth Hour.

First there was this:

TONY JONES: Prime Minister, what do you think living in Australia would be like by the end of this century for your own grandchildren and for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of others, if the temperatures, the average mean temperatures, around the world do rise by somewhere between four and possibly even more than six degrees celsius?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, it would be less comfortable for some than it is now,

And then this:

ELIZABETH JACKSON: What about rising sea levels?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: There’s a lot of very exaggerated claims and you have to bear in mind that most of our coastal population lives on the east coast of Australia and because of the geology or the typography of the east coast, you know, much of that is adequately elevated to deal with a one-metre sea rise.

Less comfortable? Adequately elevated? These kooks have been in power for over a decade!

I vote that we should accede to New Zealand.

The NSW government is staking a lot on the ‘Water for Life’ plan, the focus of which is a desalination plant at Kurnell. I’m not going to rant and rave on about the stupidity of desalination as opposed to more prudent measures like reduced consumption of water in the first place, especially by industry (One BHP Billiton mine uses 33 million litres every day), or using recycled water. Instead, I take issue with the advertising campaign being used to soften up the electorate to the blow of buiding such a piece of infrastructure. I can’t find it anywhere online as an mp3 or video, not even a transript, so you’ll have to trust my impeccable memory. It went something like this:

…And a desalination plant (ambiguous pause) Powered by renewable energy (ambiguous pause) It would have zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The ambiguity of the pauses was that the hearer, me, is left unsure as to where “powered by renewable energy” fits in the text. It could either be:

…a desalination plant, powered by renewable energy. It would have zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Or:

…a desalination plant. Powered by renewable energy, it would have zero greenhouse gas emissions.

See what I mean? I can’t tell if the advertisement is stating categorically that the desalination plant will be powered by renewable energy, thus having no greenhouse gas emissions, or if the ad is merely pointing out the obvious, that the desalination plant would have no greenhouse gas emissions if it were powered by renewable energy (which is not necessarily the case).

The only thing I’d be certain about would be that the prosody of this section of the advertisement was intended to be ambiguous between these two readings. The benefit of that is to have people believe that the desalination plant will be powered by renewables yet allow the government to come back later (after the election, for instance) and say “we never said it would be, we said if it were, then…”.

At least, that’s what I would have concluded, had I not seen the government’s website about the project, which contains a pdf factsheet, stating quite unambiguously that the desalination plant will in fact be powered by the surplus 3.7 million megawatt hours of green energy that the National GreenPower Accreditation Program cannot seem to sell to consumers.

Still, never let the facts get in the way of an otherwise warranted, anti-governmental rant!