21 September 2017, The Conversation, Sustainable cities? Australia’s building and planning rules stand in the way of getting there. Australia’s building and land-use policy settings fall well short of what’s needed to make meaningful progress toward creating sustainable cities. You will find environmental sustainability goals and objectives in government strategy documents. But our newly released review of building and land-use planning policies around Australia has found New South Wales is the only state without serious gaps in legislation and enforcement. Research shows a large percentage of new dwellings in Australia fail to meet even minimum building requirements when checked after construction. There is little legislation and enforcement, with the notable exception of NSW’s Building and Sustainability Index (BASIX). This means neither building codes nor state planning systems are achieving sustainability goals required for a low-carbon future for cities and buildings. Sustainable cities are among the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At present, Australia ranks 20th on progress toward these goals. So how important is the built environment to Australia’s ability to achieve these goals? In fact, it’s a significant contributor to anthropogenic climate change. The built environment accounts for around 40% of worldwide energy useand one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. In Australia, the residential sector is responsible for 12% of final energy use and 13% of emissions. Read More here
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20 September 2017, Renew Economy, Back to 2009: Abbott declares war on everything. Well, that turned out well didn’t it. Despite prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s desperate attempts to appease the conservative faction of his Coalition government by compromising everything he ever stood for on climate and clean energy, it’s clearly not enough. In doing so, Abbott has done what Turnbull dared not in the past two years: jettison Abbott-era policies. While Turnbull was too afraid to make those policies more ambitious, Abbott has now come out and effectively dumped the very policies he put in place: its Paris climate commitment, and the much-reduced renewable energy target.His predecessor Tony Abbott effectively dialled back the climate and energy debate to 2009 by announcing that he would cross the floor and vote against anything that looked remotely like a climate change policy, or represented even the smallest subsidy for renewable energy. Abbott has reinforced his assertion that climate science is “crap”. In an interview on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News with climate denier and renewables hater Alan Jones and his former chief of staff Peta Credlin, Abbott rates climate changes as “a third order” issue. Read More here
20 September 2017, The Conversation, Vietnam’s typhoon disaster highlights the plight of its poorest people. Six people lost their lives when Typhoon Doksuri smashed into central Vietnam on September 16, the most powerful storm in a decade to hit the country. Although widespread evacuations prevented a higher death toll, the impact on the region’s most vulnerable people will be extensive and lasting. Government sources report that more than 193,000 properties have been damaged, including 11,000 that were flooded. The storm also caused widespread damage to farmland, roads, and water and electricity infrastructure. Quang Binh and Ha Tinh provinces bore the brunt of the damage. Central Vietnam is often in the path of tropical storms and depressions that form in the East Sea, which can intensify to form tropical cyclones known as typhoons (the Pacific equivalent of an Atlantic hurricane). Typhoon Doksuri developed and tracked exactly as forecast, meaning that evacuations were relatively effective in saving lives. What’s more, the storm moved quickly over the affected area, delivering only 200-300 mm of rainfall and sparing the region the severe flooding now being experienced in Thailand. Doksuri is just one of a spate of severe tropical cyclones that have formed in recent weeks, in both the Pacific and Atlantic regions. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and, most recently, Maria have attracted global media coverage, much of it focused on rarely considered angles such as urban planning, poverty, poor development, politics, the media coverage of disasters – as well as the perennial question of climate change. Disasters are finally being talked about as part of a discourse of systemic oppression – and this is a great step forward. Read More here
15 September 2017, Renew Economy, Blackouts and baseload: Debunking myths of AEMO reports and Liddell. The day after the release of the two key reports from the Australian Energy Market Operator last week – its annual Electricity Statement of Opportunities and the specially commissioned report on dispatchable generation requested by the federal government – RenewEconomy could barely believe what it read and heard in the media. Consumers were being frightened into thinking that the lights were going out, the economy would collapse, and they’d all be better off going out to buy a generator and a supply of candles and batteries. The only possible solution to the crisis, we were told, was to stop renewable energy and keep the Liddell coal generator on line. What was missed – in the fog of politics, ideologies and deliberate misinformation – were the fundamental messages of the two reports: that the energy system is transitioning quickly, and it is more or less unstoppable, because of the march of technologies and global trends. This is not a bad thing, AEMO boss Audrey Zibelman underlined. But it does require some policy certainty and some co-ordination to ensure that Australia’s dirty, expensive and increasingly unreliable grid can be transformed into a smarter, cleaner, more reliable and cheaper source of power. Read More here