Coal seam gas less dirty than coal, says company with $580 million stake in coal seam gas

THE Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association has just released the executive summary of a new “independent” report which looks at the climate change impact of coal seam gas compared to coal when both are burned for electricity.

I’m still digesting the findings and trying to get a full copy rather than just the executive summary, which APPEA has made available.

But in short, the report’s summary claims to examine the cradle-to-grave emissions of a type of gas known as CSG (coal seam gas) but known elsewhere as coal bed methane.

Specifically, the report looks at emissions from CSG once it has been compressed into liquid form (LNG) and exported to China. A comparison is then made between burning this gas for electricity using various different types of generators and asks how this compares to coal.

The report claims coal seam gas is a cleaner option or, to put this another way, less dirty than coal when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Depending on which type of power station is used, the report says coal emits somewhere between 87 per cent and 5 per cent more greenhouse gases per unit of electricity than CSG-LNG gas from Australia.

Forgetting for a moment that gas does still emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases, the CSG industry will no doubt make a big play on the findings of this “independent” report.

What should be noted, however, is that the report which attempts to paint CSG as a good guy was carried out by a giant resource industry service company, WorleyParsons.

Late last year, WorleyParsons won a $580 million contract to deliver “engineering, procurement and infrastructure” to a $15 billion CSG-LNG project in Queensland.

So the “independent” report was written by a company with a $580 million stake in the same industry they’re examining.

Campbell’s trees blown away by coal

QUEENSLAND’S new opposition leader Campbell Newman thinks that a carbon price is a “very bad idea” and told reporters yesterday that he had a better way to deal with climate change.

Something altogether more practical.

I have a positive, proactive way of dealing with this. I’m into tree planting. I planted 1.38 million trees in Brisbane.

Now that’s a lot of trees, and I’m a big fan of trees. We do need more of them.

But how much carbon dioxide does that suck from the atmosphere? I asked one of the country’s leading providers of tree planting offsets for a “ballpark” figure on this.

I was told that it depends on which variety of tree you plant, but that 1.38 million trees would offset about 370,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and this would take the trees 20 years to achieve. Is that a lot? An average 18,500 tonnes a year?

If you take a formula offered recently by Guy Pearse, author and research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, Queensland’s coal industry exports about 100 tonnes of CO2 every seven seconds.

Or in other words, the annual emissions saved from Campbell Newman’s 1.38 million trees gets cancelled out by the State’s own coal exports every 21 minutes. [awkward silence]

Nice bit of gas-powered Churnalism

THERE’S a new service over in the UK set up by the Media Standards Trust which allows the public to check for cases of “Churnalism”.

Churnalism, says the trust, is “a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added”.

Using the free Churnalism website, you can paste text from a press release into a box. The service then goes off and finds any news articles that resemble the text of the press release – articles suspected of being “churn”.

The site lets you see the press release placed side-by-side against the original and gives a percentage of how much of the release was cut-and-pasted and how many characters overlap.

In the last few days, they’ve added a service where you can do this exercise in reverse and search news outlets against press releases from some companies and government agencies.

For example, the site suspects that in the last three years 495 articles in The Guardian online may be churn. The Daily Mail online scores more than 700.

Now obviously, there are lots of occasions when there’s nothing at all wrong with a press release being churned. The trust points out that

Some press releases are clearly in the public interest (medical breakthroughs, government announcements, school closures and so on). But even in these cases, it is better that people should know what press release the article is based on than for the source of the article to remain hidden.

Unfortunately,the site is only available in the UK but you can rest assured there’s plenty of churnalism that goes on in Australia too. Some of it is harmless, but some of it is clearly not.

Which brings me to a recent article which appeared online in the Gladstone Observer and an almost identical story which appeared online in the Toowoomba Chronicle – both news sites owned by APN News & Media.

The story reported how the Queensland Gas Company had stopped work on clearing land for a coal seam gas  pipeline because “environmental plans for soil and species management have not been approved”, the report said. A serious issue no doubt and well worth the time of an APN journalist in reporting it. After all, QGC has reported it is spending $15 billion on the project which the delay was part of.

There were quotes from “QGC senior vice president Jim Knudsen” who explained the company didn’t believe their work so far had caused any  “adverse impact on protected plants and animals”.

I asked QGC if they had issued a press release into the incident. They said they had and they sent me a copy. It’s now here online. Well, you’ve guessed the rest.

The story on the Towoomba site was almost identical to the press release, with only 5 words of the original 251-word press release changed. They didn’t even bother to write their own headline. “QGC stops work on pipeline”.

The Gladstone Observer story was identical, except for the addition of a 13 word intro popped on the top of the text. The rest of the story was a complete and unchanged cut-and-paste from the QGC release.

Why am I worried about this? Because a news outlet should not be just a distribution service for a major corporation, especially one which is drilling 6000 wells and laying more than 700 kilometres of pipeline in the areas being served by the news outlet.

I know regional newspapers have resources issues but surely its online readers should have been made aware that the story printed on its website was just a cut-and-pasted press release?

Good on QGC for admitting the breach, but you can only hope that the print versions of the Gladstone Observer and the Toowoomba Chronicle do better.

You can make the comparison between the two stories for yourself if you keep reading. I recently wrote a feature on some of the concerns related to the Coal Seam Gas industry on ABC Environment.

Continue reading “Nice bit of gas-powered Churnalism”

Cycling Super Duper Highways

I’M no commuter cyclist, but then I don’t commute.

On the rare occasion I do need to get into my city of choice (Brisbane) I’ll generally take the train or the bus. Taking the bike would mean about 12 kilometers along with a disconnected network of paths through parks and along roads or a more direct 10-kilometre route along the main road choked with cars, buses, and lorries. I wouldn’t deny though that riding bike is fun, thrilling and at the same time can help burn calories. It could be all the more exciting riding on gravel e bikes as you do not need to stress much for paddling.

However, I prefer my legs and head unsmashed, although I do know that people take this route daily and arrive unbroken. Many people prefer dirt bikes to go on uneven roads as such bikes tend to have a lot of auto controls that prevent them from crashing or falling. Well, a lot of people might not be able to buy such bikes as they can be costly. Alternatively, they can head over to reseller portals like ZeCycles (https://www.zecycles.com) where they can buy well-maintained dirt bikes at a cheaper price.

For every 100 journeys made in southeast Queensland each day, just a smidgen over one of them will be taken on a bike. Yet the Queensland Government wants to push this figure up to nine by the year 2031.

Now assuming that oil prices don’t rise to the point where people are forced to reach for the handlebars out of necessity (which might happen), how will the Government and local councils get all of those bums out of air-conditioned over-sized steel boxes on traffic-clogged roads and onto rubber-clad cycling seats?

Research by traffic planner Rachel Smith, who I spoke to recently for a story in BMAG, suggests one of the main reasons that more people don’t switch to bikes is because they don’t feel safe sharing the road with cars, scooters or motorbikes and their itinerant unpredictable riders and drivers.

Funnily enough, painting a white line down a road and stencilling a picture of a bike on the asphalt doesn’t appear to give citizens much re-assurance that it will prevent them from being squished by something bigger and heavier than they are. Yet this appears to be the preferred method (the painting, not the squishing).

Smith went off around the world on a research scholarship to visit more than 20 cities that have dedicated cycle routes. Not paths that take you on the most circuitous route possible to uninhabited corners of cities, but cycle ways that lead people straight to where all the action is or, alternatively, where they work. Smith told me

At the moment we build skinny unprotected on-road cycle lanes, often less than half a metre wide and then stand back and wonder why ‘normal’ people don’t cycle.

Smith returned from places like Bogota, Copenhagen and Malmo with a big idea. Cycling Super Highways – routes several metres wide , separate from traffic and all… well… super.

But Smith is no lone nutty voice from some cycling utopia. Brisbane’s CBD Bicycle User Group want one linking northern suburbs to the city. Bicycle Queensland are lobbying for a handful of them too.

And before everyone get’s their bike chains in a knot at the preposterousnous of actually giving up valuable city real estate to something other than a motor vehicle, it’s worth understanding a couple of things.

The first is that there are cities around the world which have been bold enough and visionary enough to build things like this. The other is that, even now in Copenhagen, 18 local authorities are collaborating to build a network of commuter routes for bikes.

As Dr Matthew Burke at Griffith University’s Urban Research Programme said to me, when it comes to getting people on bikes we need to take a philosophy from Kevin Costner (well.. who else?) in that film Field of Dreams.

It’s a case of, if you build them… cycle routes… then they’ll come.

Read a bit more about Rachel Smith’s big idea for bikes here. See her report here.

Cardinal Pell’s mine of climate misinformation

THE director of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology Dr Greg Ayers must surely possess the patience of a saint or, if you don’t believe in saints, then the patience of my wife who has been waiting for me to fix the hole in the bathroom ceiling for well over three years.

Dr Ayers has finally gained some closure on an issue concerning Cardinal George Pell, the head of the Catholic church in Australia who while believing in saints, doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change.

Dr Ayer’s unloaded his frustrations on a senate estimates committee this week, saying he believed Cardinal Pell had been “misled” by a book called Heaven + Earth, written by Australian climate sceptic and mining director Professor Ian Plimer.

Back in October last year, the Senate’s Environment and Communications Legislation Committee agreed to table a letter from Cardinal Pell which quoted heavily from Heaven + Earth to claim there were “good reasons for doubting that carbon dioxide causes warmer temperatures”.

After an early battle with Senator Ian McDonald, who didn’t want to give Dr Ayers time to respond, the bureau’s director finally managed to get his frustrations off his chest and onto the Hansard record. Dr Ayers’ explained how Cardinal Pell’s views on climate change were not only unsupported by the science but in some cases directly contradicted some of its core understandings. For example, he pointed out that Cardinal Pell had miraculously given nitrogen a new physical property.

At one stage [Cardinal Pell] lists greenhouse gases. Included in the list is the gas nitrogen. That is not a greenhouse gas; it is 78 per cent of the atmosphere. You cannot have people out there telling the public that nitrogen is a greenhouse gas, because it is not.

You can read Dr Ayers’ very full response to Cardinal Pell on Hansard here. The fact that Dr Ayers’ response is now there and that I can now point to it, illustrates why he argued so forcefully to be allowed to have his views put on record in the first place.

But as well as being a correction to the cardinal, Dr Ayers’ also critiqued the book which Cardinal Pell had drawn from (Professor Plimer, look away now).

The cardinal I do not anticipate would be an expert in these fields of science, so he has quoted very heavily from this book and the book is, frankly, misleading to all Australians in terms of what it represents.

Why would I say this book is not science? It is not me who says it so much, although I have read it myself; it has been widely reviewed by people in the scientific arena and it has been very heavily criticised for not presenting science but presenting a polemic from one individual. It has not been scientifically peer reviewed.

Dr Ayers’ goes on to describe in detail the great many scientific errors in Professor Plimer’s book. As I’ve personally pointed out many times – including during a face-to-face debate in Brisbane in 2009 – Professor Plimer has never written a peer-reviewed paper on climate change in his life.

Ian Plimer

But what neither Cardinal Pell nor Dr Ayers nor the media coverage has pointed out, is Professor Plimer’s role as a director and chairman with several mining companies, an occupation which he has recently expanded. These same energy-intensive operations are those which would be hardest hit under any plans to price carbon.

Professor Plimer has long-standing roles as a non-executive director with Australia-based mining companies Ivanhoe Australia and CBH Resources, which mainly dig up silver, gold, lead.copper, zinc and other minerals. Professor Plimer is shown in company reports to have earned about $270,000 from Ivanhoe in the last two years. He earned more than $300,000 from CBH Resources over the same period. He is also a director of UK-listed Kefi Minerals, where he recently disposed of 2,400,000 shares worth about $350,000. He has recently taken on the role as chairman of an unlisted tin mining company, called TNT Limited.

Professor Plimer is also a director of Ormil Energy, which is currently engaged in a $3.2 million commitment to investigate coal seam gas and coal mine gas in the Sydney basin, pending government approvals.

But back to Dr Ayers and the senate estimates hearing, where Nationals Senator Ron Boswell pleaded unsuccessfully that Professor Plimer should also be allowed to appear to answer the criticism.

Senator Boswell should already have been well aware of the scathing criticisms of Heaven + Earth, because he launched that very same book in May 2009, a good two weeks after a swathe of scientists had attacked its integrity.

Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald, who is also sceptical of human-caused climate change, was pressing for Professor Plimer’s views to be placed on the record and encouraged Ayers to “go and listen to Professor Carter some day” referring to Professor Bob Carter, another of Australia’s confirmed sceptics of human caused climate change.

Senator Macdonald also suggested he would be tabling an article which recorded how the US house of representatives had recently voted to pull all funding to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Given that the oil and gas industries have been found to have donated more than US$21 million to the current US Congress, should we be surprised that it has now decided to pull the US$2.3 million funding for the IPCC?

The calls for an appearance by Professor Plimer didn’t impress Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, who claimed that all Professor Plimer needed to do to get himself heard was to “publish another work of science fiction”.

While the retort was obviously meant as a joke, there’s no fun in knowing that Australian Senators and the head of the Catholic church seem happy to take their views on climate from that piece of “science fiction”.

Plenty more sustainable fish in the sea?

CAN I buy some fish please?

BUYING fish is an extremely easy thing to do. All you have to do is ask.

You can get it in a can, it comes battered or breaded in fish shops, filleted, whole or frozen on market stalls and every-which-way in supermarkets.

Granted, there are questions that most consumers will ask themselves. Is it cheap, is it fresh and will it taste good, among the most popular.

But all in all, there is no hunting or gathering involved for the consumer. Buying fish is not rocket science because the commercial fishing industry and retailers have made it so.

But insert one word into your question and you have a whole new kettle of fish.

Can I buy some sustainable fish please?

Now that’s a question that is a gateway to a complex global issue because it prompts lots of other questions. Here are a few of them.

What kind of fish are you buying? This may be obvious, but in fact – in the case of tuna for example – even this can’t be answered with confidence.

Is the species of fish you’re buying plentiful or are stocks dwindling or even endangered? Is the fishery which it came from being sustainably managed or overfished? How was the fish caught?

Again your fish retailer, waiter, or manufacturer is unlikely to be able to answer any or all of these questions clearly yet the impacts of commercial fishing and fishing methods are huge.

Sometimes, for example, only the people on the fishing vessel will know how many turtles, sharks, sea lions, seabirds, dolphins, or any other non-target species – including other fish – were impacted when the fish was pulled from the ocean. The knock-on effects go unnoticed. In other circumstances, if you take the example of organizations that offer grouper Fishing Charter services to tourists and outdoor enthusiasts, they tend to mention the type of fish available during each season. Based on the needs of the tourists, customizations, and rates are set up. This ensures that the more endangered fish species don’t get targeted during the fishing escapade.

As the threat of endangerment is very real, the population density of several species is being monitored so as to regulate and maintain their numbers. However, if you keep a track of appropriate times for such activities, you could go fishing without causing harm to the ecosystem by overfishing. Certain places could be considered hotspots for fishing trips due to the abundance of fish to catch seasonally. These would include countries in the Latin Americas. In places such as Costa Rica, you should not have any problems trying out sport fishing if you’re taking the right help; Los Suenos Costa Rica fishing charters is a good place to start. In addition to fishing adventures, various places within the country where you can enjoy their local cuisine. And if you have got the time, then maybe you could even experience the local sustainable fishing methods.

Similarly, people who are going fishing for fun or as a weekend gateway on their own can plan things in advance. They can try Fishing Calendar by Catchingtimes.com or similar websites to learn about the best time for fishing, types of fish available in nearby lakes, what is easy to catch, etc. In order to catch more fish, it seems equally important to invest in the most appropriate equipment after getting the necessary information about the fish. The most reliable solution to this would be to purchase such equipment from a trusted and reputed online fishing store. Having the right information and appropriate equipment would make it easier for people to catch more fish.

However, if you take the situation of buying fish, even if you choose to buy farmed fish, there are questions to be asked. Is the fish farm out in the open ocean or connected to waterways? What impact is that farming operation has on the water and species living around it?

The reason I’m asking all of these questions is that I’ve tried to address these, and a few more, in a special report in G Magazine. The report appeared in print last November but is now available free online. It’s long but hopefully enlightening.

For a free guide to these issues, you can go to the Australian Marine Conservation Society’s online Sustainable Seafood Guide where you can buy a print version too.

Roots of resilience in community gardens

DEFINE resilience.

Actually no, don’t bother. It would take too long.

But as parts of Queensland hit the road to recovery, it is worth thinking about what makes a community resilient to extreme events like floods and cyclones.

That’s especially important given climate scientists predict we’ll either be getting more events such as these or the ones we do get, will be more severe.

There’s been much talk of how these events in themselves are bringing people closer together and this might be the case in the short term.

The story as portrayed on the television news or in newspapers has been how people who don’t usually talk to each other (let alone help each other out) have been mucking in together.

But relying on disasters to build cohesive communities would be an odd policy indeed. Once the working-bees are over and the media pack has moved on, will memories of sifting through sodden muddied possessions, repairing roofs or attending funerals be enough to keep people together?

A few days after the floods had subsided, I went into the suburb of West End to see a community garden which, as you can see from the picture, had looked very different a week earlier.

I heard about how volunteers from the suburb and from other parts of the city had streamed in to help repair vegetable beds, reconstruct worm farms and generally clean up the mess. New seeds and seedlings are already going in.

In a story for bmag, social researchers tell me that community gardens aren’t just there to provide food.

They act as social and community hubs that build friendships which are there before cyclones and floods, come together to recover from cyclones and floods and are still there afterwards.

If you did want to go off and define resilience, maybe community gardens would provide a good case study.

Is The Australian addicted to Monckton’s denial?

HIS choice of the Gershwin song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” was unfortunate, if not a little ironic.

In an opinion article published in The Australian, professional climate change denier Christopher Monckton tried his hardest to convince readers that “thoughtful” politicians were beginning to ask “privately, quietly” if a supposed climate crisis was not “necessarily so”.

They were beginning to ask the “Gershwin question” mused Monckton, referring to the song in the 1935 musical Porgy and Bess – a song delivered, ironically, by the musical’s drug dealing character Sportin’ Life.

An addiction to a drug can be a terrible and debilitating experience and just as it is in the case of The Australian‘s apparent addiction to climate denial, it can be degrading, embarrassing and professionally damaging.

Christopher Monckton is one of the world’s most charismatic climate deniers, yet he has no qualifications at all in climate science. Among his beliefs are that the UN is attempting to create a world government and  young climate campaigners are like Hitler youth. Others have also examined Monckton’s creative CV.

This lack of genuine expertise and tendency towards conspiracy theories don’t in themselves deny Monckton the right to an opinion, but the thrust of his views have been roundly rejected by practically every climate scientist currently researching and publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

Over and over, scientists working in the field and opening their own research to the rigours of peer review (which Monckton has never done) have gone to great lengths to debunk Monckton’s “analysis” of climate change (small selection of examples here, many here and here). They have explained his persistent misrepresentations and errors in calculations, but still Monckton repeats them and still – after alarm bells have been ringing for half a decade – The Australian provides him a forum. Continue reading “Is The Australian addicted to Monckton’s denial?”