The Queensland Government has put out for comment a Queensland resources industry development plan, Draft for consultation, November 2021with a consultation deadline of 11 February 2022.
My concern is that the future plans for coal and gas do not sit well the latest science and with what the world must collectively do to prevent the current climate crisis from becoming a tragedy. Within that I have a specific concern about the plans relating to the fracking of gas in the Channel Country. Relevant to these concerns I’ll make four statements with some supporting notes. (Last updated, 27 February 2022)
As a summary, here are the four statements:
- The climate crisis is way more urgent than appreciated
- Methane is worse for the climate than scientists realised, so gas is not a benign transition fuel
- With respect to fossil fuels, before finalising the plan, Queensland should pause and consider, and formally consult with scientists who understand climate from an Earth Systems perspective
- Fracking the Channel Country is absurd
The climate crisis is way more urgent than appreciated
The Queensland plan seems to be based on the notion that as long as we get to net zero by 2050 we can please ourselves, and please anyone who will buy our fossil fuels, without penalty or adverse outcomes.
This graph from Glenn Peters, a climate scientist who worked on the latest IPCCAR6 report, is based on IPCC numbers:
An 83% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C requires net zero emissions for the whole planet by 2040. However 1.5°C is a certainty, which will probably be reached in about 10 years time.
These are not good odds. New research shows global warming of 1.5C will be catastrophic for almost all coral reefs worldwide, even sites scientists once thought of as refuges – none of which are known in Australia. In a decade’s time, there will be no Great Barrier Reef. (Tourism may survive if ‘botanical gardens’ reefs are created with heat tolerant species being bred in labs.)
A recent study showed that by 2050 there would be 254 “climate-sensitive suburbs” at increased risk of a drop in value, rising to 1438 suburbs by 2100. Some of these are vulnerable to fire and flood, for many the threat is sea level rise which is becoming troublesome right now on every continent as well as islands, such as in Torres Strait and the Pacific Islands.
Will Steffen, a world class climate scientist who looks at climate from an ‘Earth systems’ perspective, and is a councillor at the Climate Council, gave a talk in April 2020 Climate Change 2020: Why we are facing an emergency where he said
- “If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization. No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us.”
Tipping points are points where a significant earth system moves to a new state, on its own momentum, and cannot be stopped by human intervention. He identified 15:
Science writer David Spratt recently reviewed the scientific literature on tipping points, with this conclusion:
- At just 1.2°C of global average warming, tipping points have been passed for several large Earth systems. These include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland Ice Sheet, The Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, the eastern Amazonian rainforest, and the world’s coral systems. The world will warm to 1.5°C by around 2030, with additional warming well beyond 1.5°C in the system after that. Yet even at the current level of warming, these systems will continue to move to qualitatively different states. In most cases, strong positive feedbacks are driving abrupt change. At higher levels of warming, the rate of change will quicken. The meme that “we have eight years to avoid 1.5°C and tipping points” should be deleted from the climate advocacy vocabulary. It is simply wrong.
He says decarbonisation is not enough. We will need to engage in drawdown, and also look at earth-cooling schemes such as cloud brightening.
Will Steffen points out that CO2 is increasing 100 times faster now than it did coming out of the ice age. Temperature is worse at 170 times.
About 20:25 on the video he looks into what is happening longer term based on this graph:
In geological terms what we are doing is equivalent to what happened 66 million years ago with the asteroid strike that gave us the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which knocked over the dinosaurs.
Sir David King in Forget 2050, experts say it’s 2030 or bust for net zero emissions told Melbourne’s National Climate Emergency summit in February 2021:
- Humanity has less than a five year window to take decisive action on climate change, the UK’s former chief scientist told the opening session of the National Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne.
“We have to move rapidly,” said Professor Sir David King, founder and chair of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University and a former advisor to both the Blair and Brown governments.
“What we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity. We are in a very very desperate situation.”
Methane is worse for the climate than scientists realised, so gas is not a benign transition fuel
According to Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA GISS, the IPCC AR6 report found that methane was responsible for around 40% of human-caused warming, roughly double what had been thought. Methane’s high potency in the short term (after 12 years it converts to CO2) may make that balance worse in the context of the climate battle in the next 10-30 years.
Also, while atmospheric CO2 has increased by 50%, methane has tripled and is on a steeper incremental path.
Apart from methane as industrial feedstock, Climate Council warns:
- Gas has no role to play in building a prosperous, resilient economy for the future. It is volatile, dangerous and unnecessary.
Gas is price volatile, driving energy prices for Australians. Investing further in gas risks locking in huge investment losses, stranded assets and environmental harm.
Queensland draft resources industry development plan sees gas as a positive in mitigating global heating, as on page 11:
- Our gas industry’s role in supporting grid reliability and security is enabling the deployment of renewable energy generation in Australia and internationally.
This clearly needs to change.
With respect to fossil fuels, before finalising the plan, Queensland should pause and consider, and formally consult with scientists who understand climate from an Earth Systems perspective
We need a space to consult good science, to pause and consider before approving new mines which must become stranded assets if the planet is to have a liveable future. New exploration licenses must be seen in the same frame.
All of the IPCC scenarios see 1.5°C breached for a time. At that point, if not before, tipping points may take us to ‘Hothouse Earth’ where we lose control. On current trends 1.5°C is expected in the early to mid-2030s.
Will Steffen thinks 1.5°C will be breached, and we have some chance of limiting heating to 2°C.
The Climate Council where Steffen is a councillor in reading of the IPCC report repeated their recommendation made earlier of 75% reductions by 2030 and net zero by 2035.
See also their Aim High, Go Fast: Why Emissions Need to Plummet this Decade.
Since the Labor lost the Federal treasury benches in 2013 the Climate Change Authority has been nobbled, starved of funds, and ignored, so Australia has no official source of advice on climate matters. The move in Queensland to set up an independent EPA has merit, but meanwhile I would suggest the Queensland Cabinet consult the Climate Council to brief themselves on the climate emergency. I appreciate that there is momentum in the system and attempted to sketch the dimensions in a long-read post Methane worse than we thought, will wreck the planet. The situation is complex.
However, it’s time for a reset, not a plan based on yesterday’s dreams.
Fracking the Channel Country is absurd
Action 21 (page 42) Continue Kati-Thanda-Lake Eyre Basin Consultation states that the Government has committed to establishing a stakeholder advisory group to consult on how an appropriate balance of environmental and economic considerations can be achieved in the basin, including what activities can occur. Yet the ABC reports that Santos was given extended gas exploration rights over Queensland’s Channel Country in March 2020.
Then late last year we were told:
- In October, 11 applications for petroleum leases across more than 250,000 hectares of land in the Channel Country bioregion of the Lake Eyre Basin were granted to gas company Origin Energy.
This is a photo of the Channel Country:
This is what it looks like when it floods:
I understand the gas in the area is shale gas, or ‘tight’ gas, which must be fracked (or hydraulically fractured) with water and chemicals. There is conflicting information about how much water is required, varying from 1-2 ML (million litres) to up to 30ML. Lock the Gate assembles various quotes by authoritative bodies in Unconventional Gas: Shale and Tight Gas & Fracking Risks and Risks of Unconventional Gas Extraction in the Lake Eyre Basin.
Taking a lower end of average 1-2 ML, we need to realise that 1000 litres of water weighs a tonne, so 1 megalitre (1ML) weighs 1000 tonnes. Fracking water contains some 2% of chemicals, many of them toxic. Water is typically delivered in trucks, so a single average frack of 1.5 ML would require 300 x 5 tonne trucks, or 150 x 10 tonnes. Each well will need to be fracked up to 30-40 times during its life.
This is an image of tight gas extraction in Wyoming:
No doubt with directional or horizontal drilling there will be fewer wells, but we still would need a landscape with a web of wells, with all-weather roads capable of bearing considerable loads. By definition, the roads would need to be above the flood level, meaning that there would no longer be a flood plain with water able to spread freely. So the flood plain would be destroyed.
Shale gas requires larger pads than coal seam gas in order to accommodate fracking. North American studies indicate that each well-pad destroys about 10 acres (4 hectares) of vegetation.
Gas extraction involves drawing out the water (around 30% of what is inserted) yielding wastewater that can contain a range of naturally occurring contaminants from the deep shale layers, heavy metals, naturally occurring radioactive materials, volatile and semi volatile organic compounds and a high concentrations of salts which need to be dealt with. In the Wyoming photo at the bottom towards the right there is a larger hub pad, which may look something like this one in Kimberley, WA:
Clearly the industrialisation of the landscape through fracking for tight gas is incompatible with the current balance of nature, wildlife and the largest organic beef region on the planet.
The choice is to keep the flood plain, or destroy it, there is no middle way.
Update (13 March 2022):
In February 2022 The Environmental Defenders Office Ltd (EDO) has released a report Implementing an effective independent Environmental Protection Agency in Queensland. It seems an EPA was established in Queensland in 1998, but “without sufficient independence mechanisms, resources or strong governance” . It was abolished in 2009 by the Campbell Newman LNP government, whereby the Department of Environment and Science (DES) became:
- responsible for environmental impact assessment and decision making for specified environmentally relevant activities (ERAs), but not all environmentally impactful activities.
It’s not clear to me what happened between 2009 and 2016 when the Planning Act 2016 (Qld) became law. Certainly now the Co-ordinator General and the State Assessment and Referral Agency (SARA) can ignore DES rulings:
- Currently, the Coordinator-General has the power to mandate environmental conditions that no other decision-maker, including the Court, can be inconsistent with. Further, agencies such as SARA and Economic Development Queensland both have the power to disregard the expert advice of DES in the assessment of proposed development activities.
In the case of the Olive Downs Coal Mine:
- DES reportedly advised the Coordinator-General that the draft environmental impact statement provided insufficient detail to properly assess the impacts to the environment of leaving final voids in the floodplain, and that the proposal was considered to pose a significant and inappropriate impact to the Isaac River floodplain and associated ecology. Yet, the Coordinator-General reportedly did not request the further information DES stated was necessary to properly assess the environmental risks of the project, and instead mandated conditions which provided for the final voids to be left in the floodplain.
Apparently no reason was given, and the information as to what happened was only made public via a Right to Information application by ABC News.
The report cites a September 2021 EDO article Falling through the cracks: Issues with integrity in environmental assessment of gas activities in Queensland where they say that unlike other states there has been little transparent public debate and scrutiny over the industry’s regulation and impacts:
- In contrast to the significant public interest in gas activities, in Queensland there is very limited transparency or accountability to the public around the assessment process for gas related environmental authorities, the key environmental permit regulating the impacts of petroleum and gas exploration and production activities.
Gas activities have the largest footprint of any industry projects applied for in Australia, yet in Queensland gas proponents are generally not required to state where specifically on the landscape they will be undertaking their activity in their assessment materials, nor is this generally provided for in conditions. This lack of specificity greatly reduces the ability of communities to understand what the impact will be on their communities, livelihoods, cultural activities, land and water, and reduces the ability to hold proponents to account on their approved activities, let alone reducing the ability for meaningful environmental and social impact assessment to be undertaken.
This is clearly problematic. At present the Queensland Government is undertaking an Independent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) consultation, so we expect better days to come.
Bit rushed in the end.
I published this at 11:44 PM and emailed the link at 11:55 PM.
Probably no-one will bother reading it. I thought a machine may have acknowledged receipt, but nothing so far.
that Jonah Field aerial image is a bit of a shocker. If you see it from ground level you don’t get the full sense of the disruption.
I had looked at coal seam gas before, bilb, but not shale gas.
Miners spruik that it is safer to aquifers, because 2-5km deep (what happens to all the dirt and rock removed in drilling?)
However, it is hugely disruptive at a surface level, more so on a flood plain where the very concept is that water spreads freely.
Really it’s shocking.
Presumably the dirt and rock removed goes into road building.
ANU Professor Mark Howden says we need “immediate, rapid and large scale action” on climate change.
The devastating Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 could be the new normal in 2030 to 2050.
“In south west Australia and south east Australia we’ve already lost around 20 per cent of our rainfall compared with that of 100 years ago,” he said.
“In those mid-latitudes – where Australia sits – there have already been very strong drying trends. We’re likely to see a strong intensification of that.”
“As we go to the higher levels of climate change, we will not be able to keep up with our current type of agriculture – so agriculture as we currently conceive it.”
Brian: I would find your figures easier to understand if you talked about tonnes CO2 equivalent to reach 1,5 deg C (or whatever) and the number of years to emit this amount of CO2 equivalent at this rate. You might also talk about momentum. Ex: How long the Amazon might be a net emitter once clearing stops.
Bit skeptical about the tonnage of rock removed by drilling being a big issue but haven’t done the sums.
John, on tonnage of rock removed by drilling, not sure it’s big, and I can’t pick up where I mentioned it.
From one of the links, the average depth in the Cooper Basin is said to be 2,000 metres, and they will do “horizontal drilling” up to 3,000 metres. I assume they will have multiple wells from each pad to limit surface disturbance.
So there would be a fair bit of rock and stuff on each site, I would think, but nowhere near enough to elevate the access roads to above the flood plain.
I’ll have a think about the other points you raised.
ACF have produced a paper Queensland actions to cut dangerous methane emissions.
They have considerable detail under each recommended action heading:
1. Understanding the scale of the problem
2. Setting targets to reduce methane emissions
3. Implementing tougher industry standards and measures for coal, oil and gas projects at every stage of planning, operation and end-of-life
4. Transitioning rapidly away from coal, gas and oil to renewable energy, sustainable transport and energy efficiency
They are calling for better understanding of the issue, better planning and accountability, plus a concerted effort to minimise and terminate emissions.
From RenewEconomy on the ACF report – “Emissions blowout:” Australian coal and gas projects underplay emissions in planning process:
The analysis published by the Australian Conservation Foundation has found that several of Australia’s largest coal and gas developments reported to the Clean Energy Regulator that they were releasing significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than companies had stated when seeking approvals.
“We found that two in three fossil fuel projects were wrong about their estimates by more than 25 per cent. In some scenarios, this includes projects that actually emitted less than anticipated,” ACF said.
“But most concerning, we found that one in three fossil fuel projects are emitting more than estimated during the approval phase.”
Brian: Companies that underestimated should be forced to cut back enough to meet their estimates.
Indeed, John.
Just to let y’all know.
We had 102mm of rain from Tuesday to Thursday.
Then on Friday we had 271mm.
On Saturday we had 261mm.
Today so far, to 6pm we’ve had 276mm.
That’s at our place. We are safe and mostly dry, but we’ve had a few distractions.
When your place floods Brian that will leave not much of Brisbane above water.
John, we are about 80m I think. Main worry is a tsunami from an asteroid strike!
John, hope you are OK!
Ballina flood: residents of NSW coastal town face tense night as flood peak expected to coincide with high tide
Lismore comprehensively overwhelmed. I heard 7,000 homes were in jeopardy in Ballina. This one is going all the way down, expected to have some impact on Tasmania!
Brian: Lismore is vulnerable to serious flooding because the topography and location of houses and business center cause significant water level rises that cause a lot of damage and kill people.
By contrast Ballina is flat and spread out so that flood heights ae much lower than those for Lismore. (Lismore is upstream of Ballina which is at the mouth of the Richmond river.)
There have been evacuations from some of the lower levels of Ballina but this is about being careful rather than extreme risk.
The North Ck (where we live) levels have been less than about above one metre above tide chart predictions. This was enough to convert Cherry /St into Cherry Ck at high tide this morning but the creek was still low enough to drive along.
We haven’t had to move so far.
Brian: Battery-electric “Infinity Train” will charge itself using gravity
Twiggy Forrest is looking at running the ore trains for some of his mines on the power generated by regenerative speed control. The loaded trains run downhill from the mines. Dunno what size Twiggy’s trains are but Newman trains used to carry 75,000 of ore.
You have to hand it to Twiggy, he’s having a red hot go.
Glad to hear you are safe. Seems the water in Lismore was 2 metres higher than previously, so some that thought if the water was up to their floor level before they would be safe.
Apparently that is what happened to country music performer, broadcaster, promoter, and event organiser Marge Graham, one of four.
Coal-fired power in Australia could be over within 10 years concedes lobbyist Ian Macfarlane
and:
John, the podcast Australia, if you’re listening is well researched and I think well worth a listen.
This paper on population and climate change is worth a look:
Population and climate change by Ian Lowe, Jane O’Sullivan and Peter Cook
If you exclude LULUCF our emissions are increasing, or close to flat on a per capita basis.
If you spend $1 on family planning it returns $120.
Australia’s true emissions are far more than what is officially counted, because of embedded emissions in all the stuff we import.
Then there is “Why global supply chains will be re-written by the ‘second Cold War'”
Free market globalization is behind a number of world problems. Think of the dangerous grip China is getting on other parts of the world and the link between economic and political growth.
Think too of the growing support of the US extreme right coming from workers who lost their jobs because of the Democrats support of free trade.
Russia may be forcing us to have a hard think about how the world and local economies should work.
John, I’m not sure that ‘cold war’ is a useful analogy.
When we had the real cold war, the Soviet Union, not Russia, had some credibility as a great power. The Korean war ended in at best a draw in 1953, then with Sputnik in 1957 Russia seemed to have the edge.
Gideon Rachman says Russia is once again behind an iron curtain and the economic gains of the past 20 years could be wiped out in weeks.
Thing is, Russia after Glasnost has never been accepted into the World Trade Organisation because it does not have what Western economists would call an open competitive economy. It does have a helluva lot of resources. Putin seems to like being disruptive, but so is the USA, which has gotten itself into scraps recently under the umbrella of NATO, where other countries join, but an American general will always be in charge.
China thinks it has a better system of government than the decadent West. China is bucking the West’s version of globalisation. Right now Russia will always be the junior partner in any relationship with China.
I’m not sure how all this will be resolved, but I agree, we do need to think again about how the world and local economies should work.
I’ve been working on something the fell out of the sky onto my lap. Not finished yet.
Last night I went to the Abel Smith Lecture Theatre at QU to hear The Comprehensive Plan to Phase Out Coal and Gas as proposed by The Greens.
I’ll say for starters that there was a lot of energy in the room, and secondly Max Chandler-Mather who chaired the meeting and spoke last about strategy is a gifted orator. It had the feeling of a religious revival meeting, although there was reason at work also.
Much to think about!
I have said for a long time that the role of the Greens is to redefine what is seen as reasonable by arguing for something more extreme than what is considered practical at the moment. Be interested to know where the Qld Greens were at your talk and whether anything was said that was beyond what you think is needed in the next 10 yrs.
Views change. My Renew Economy article “RENEWABLE, LOW IMPACT FUELS – GAME CHANGER” would have seemed a bit radical when the article was published in 2013 but now green hydrogen seems to be about to happen.
It doesn’t seem to ne that long ago when the LNP was arguing about subsidizing renewable energy. Now the LNP is talking about subsidizing fossil power!
Were the Qld Greens putting forward anything that won’t be mainstream in a few years time?
John, there was nothing new on Wednesday night that I hadn’t heard dozens of times before.
The Greens have 43 policies on your site, including one on Climate change and energy, which I quite like as an opening statement. There is quite a lot of good reading in what I’ve sampled from the other 42.
However, if you go to Greens Home you can’t find that policy page. If you go to ‘Our Plan’ and click on ‘Policies’ you get to Greens Election Policy Platform, where you will find 15 election policies.
(To get to the broader 43 ‘policies’ you have to delete ‘platform’ from that last URL and type in ‘policies’. Confused?)
So now for the election we have Tackling The Climate Crisis: The Greens plan to phase out coal, oil and gas and create jobs.
Adam Bandt in painting the big picture actually did say this, which turns out to be a quote from the playbook:
The climate crisis is caused by mining and burning coal & gas.
It’s simple, if you don’t have a plan to phase out coal & gas, you don’t have a plan for the climate crisis.
Oil went missing, but even to include oil would be simplistic.
So what we got was a mixture of utopian dreaming and pragmatic near-term politics.
So we can have free health, dentistry, education, childcare and more plus $45 billion worth of renewable energy built by Snowy 3.0 and supplied to consumers at cost (thereby wiping out private investment) courtesy of a publicly owned super-grid worth $25 billion and make green steel in Gladstone, wind towers in Rockhampton, solar panels in Townsville, all funded by soaking the rich.
I’ll reveal what the real purpose of the meeting was when I do a full post.
Brian: My take is that if there is going to be a future for my grandchildren the world has to go on a war footing to fight climate change.
War footing is about doing whatever needs to to be done to to win the war.
Adam Bandt is about going on a war footing in terms of climate change and social justice. That is a key reason why I will vote Greens.
Labor is too busy being careful for my taste.
John, I agree with the first two sentences, but I’m sorry Adam Bandt does not talk like that when I’m listening.
I came to the conclusion that while he talks about following the science he does not understand it.
For example, he talked about the Great Barrier Reef being a goner at 2°C, implying that it was a guardrail, and OK this side of 2°C. Latest research is that it’s gone at 1.5°C.
He talked about sea level rise becoming a threat for the Pacific Islands at 1.5°C, again as a guardrail.
He’s not alone, of course, many scientists talk that way as well.
I’m not saying all is well in the Labor camp, because clearly it’s not.
Brian: We can argue about what amount of global warming can be tolerated and you may be right to say neither Labor or the Greens are aiming low enough.
What I do know is that it is important that Labor wins the next election even if their targets ae not challenging enough to save the planet.
It is equally important is that the Greens increase their presence t other point where they hold the balance of power in the senate and have a bigger presence in the lower house. We need the Greens to push for more challenging climate and social justice goals.
Being in NSW gives a different perspective on the Greens and the level of their practicality. Last LGA gave the Greens 57 councilors including 2 for the Ballina Shire. Worth noting too that the NSW Greens lead senate candidate (David Shoebridge) has been a Greens lord mayor as well as a member of the NSW parliament. (And what I have seen of him is good logical stuff.)
John, I have not complained about Greens in the Senate. And no doubt they will mature as a party with time, as they have in places with more representative electoral systems, such as the ACT and Germany.
What I thoroughly dislike is their penchant for knocking off sitting Labor members, even ministers.
Some decades ago the Nationals and Liberals did that too, but finally came to an agreement that they would only run against each other when a sitting member was retiring, or the seat was held by Labor, independent etc.
For example I’m happy that we compete in Ryan, held by the Liberals, but I’m not happy about Greens trying to knock off Terri Butler.
That makes them political enemies. It also makes their policies harder for Labor to adopt.
The Greens need to take a longer view to build a coalition with Labor, rather than assume they can leverage the balance of power to coerce Labor.
They can’t use the balance of power in Labor’s favour unless Labor wins more seats than the LNP. Taking any off them that Labor already holds works against that outcome.
I can tell you that on Wednesday night I heard more negative things said about Labor from the podium than about the LNP. Some of it was from 5 parliaments ago, some was selective and misleading, and some was wrong.
Apart from that some was true, current and deserved calling out.
BTW my next comment will be about something in that latter category.
John, I do find your report on the Greens in NSW encouraging.
Also I would welcome Penny Allman-Payne as a second Greens senator from Qld, especially if she knocks off Pauline Hanson. Currently from Gladstone she has had more than usual experience around the traps.
Here’s my longish comment which I have put at the end of the post. Probably should make it a separate post, but it fits there.
In February 2022 The Environmental Defenders Office Ltd (EDO) has released a report Implementing an effective independent Environmental Protection Agency in Queensland. It seems an EPA was established in Queensland in 1998, but “without sufficient independence mechanisms, resources or strong governance” . It was abolished in 2009 by the Campbell Newman LNP government, whereby the Department of Environment and Science (DES) became:
responsible for environmental impact assessment and decision making for specified environmentally relevant activities (ERAs), but not all environmentally impactful activities.
It’s not clear to me what happened between 2009 and 2016 when the Planning Act 2016 (Qld) became law. Certainly now the Co-ordinator General and the State Assessment and Referral Agency (SARA) can ignore DES rulings:
Currently, the Coordinator-General has the power to mandate environmental conditions that no other decision-maker, including the Court, can be inconsistent with. Further, agencies such as SARA and Economic Development Queensland both have the power to disregard the expert advice of DES in the assessment of proposed development activities.
In the case of the Olive Downs Coal Mine:
DES reportedly advised the Coordinator-General that the draft environmental impact statement provided insufficient detail to properly assess the impacts to the environment of leaving final voids in the floodplain, and that the proposal was considered to pose a significant and inappropriate impact to the Isaac River floodplain and associated ecology. Yet, the Coordinator-General reportedly did not request the further information DES stated was necessary to properly assess the environmental risks of the project, and instead mandated conditions which provided for the final voids to be left in the floodplain.
Apparently no reason was given, and the information as to what happened was only made public via a Right to Information application by ABC News.
The report cites a September 2021 EDO article Falling through the cracks: Issues with integrity in environmental assessment of gas activities in Queensland where they say that unlike other states there has been little transparent public debate and scrutiny over the industry’s regulation and impacts:
In contrast to the significant public interest in gas activities, in Queensland there is very limited transparency or accountability to the public around the assessment process for gas related environmental authorities, the key environmental permit regulating the impacts of petroleum and gas exploration and production activities.
Gas activities have the largest footprint of any industry projects applied for in Australia, yet in Queensland gas proponents are generally not required to state where specifically on the landscape they will be undertaking their activity in their assessment materials, nor is this generally provided for in conditions. This lack of specificity greatly reduces the ability of communities to understand what the impact will be on their communities, livelihoods, cultural activities, land and water, and reduces the ability to hold proponents to account on their approved activities, let alone reducing the ability for meaningful environmental and social impact assessment to be undertaken.
This is clearly problematic. At present the Queensland Government is undertaking an Independent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) consultation, so we expect better days to come.
In the meantime: Why coal is an each-way bet for a government that both backs and undermines it ahead of federal election
Interesting read on the problems the LNP faces as a result of past actions and a changing future.
Some decades ago the Nationals and Liberals did that too, but finally came to an agreement that they would only run against each other when a sitting member was retiring, or the seat was held by Labor, independent etc.
Problem is that what used to be inner city working class were logical Labor seats are now inner city educated middle class that are now logical Greens seats.
Maybe there are some seats where Labor might consider not running but at the moment what seem to be asking for is for the Greens o be locked into a very minor role.
Keep in mind that states like WA don’t have coalitions. The Country party there is proudly independent.
John, no-one in Labor would accept the notion that educated middle class is logically Green. Pretty much everyone I’ve met who is a member of Labor is educated middle class.
The Liberals have never accepted that provincial = national and the Nationals became nationals in Qld because they did not want to be constrained to the ‘country’.
As it stands there are federally more provincial Liberals in NSW and Qld than Nationals.
I’d like to have a system, where above 5% you get proportional representation as per Germany and NZ.
Thing is that if you run against sitting Labor people you thereby become political enemies.
Second thing is that most of the nice reasonably rich (not filthy rich) people I have worked for in these suburbs have strong concerns for the environment, but if you mention “greens” or “Greens” they get quite agitated, even angry. To a lot of people it’s a negative appellation, much like “unions” to a lot of people.
By and large I like and support the Greens values, and appreciate their commentary on social issues etc.
The data I have seen suggests that LNP voters are more likely to switch to Green than to Labor.
However I think we both must accept that both the Greens and Labor will run in as many seats as possible if for no other reason than it helps their Senate vote.
I am hoping that the Greens will win Ryan. Having a Greens state member in part of Ryan helps people understand that the Greens are not entirely crazy.
John, I understand about the senate vote. I’m hoping that after we get a federal ICAC, get public funding of election campaigns (or reasonable limits, and ban mining companies), stop the revolving doors of people moving in and out of jobs and politics, have truth in political statement laws etc, etc, we get to electoral reform.
BTW all of the above was what Larissa Waters spoke about, in what was the best speech of the night.
In Ryan I would most humbly submit that Peter Cossar, our candidate, will be a more suitable candidate than Elizabeth Watson-Brown, although she is not bad and better than Julian Simmonds for the LNP, who still lives in his local government world.
Not sure he has ever had a proper job.
Ryan was the only seat in Qld where Labor improved its vote in 2019. Peter reckons the door-knocking is chalk and cheese better now, so we have a good chance of knocking it off if the Greens don’t steal it!
Victoria is getting out of gas:
Victorian Roadmap may see gas use fall to less than half within eight years
Some 80% of Victorian households are connected to gas. They use far more than any other state.
In the recent forum, the Victorian Government showed how Victorian households will save thousands of dollars per year when they eventually switch off gas (see graphic) and on to electric cooking and renewable-heat-harvesting heat pumps (e.g. reverse-cycle air conditioners) for space and water heating.
When we lived in Melbourne in 1980 I remember my boss going on about the advantages of reverse cycle air conditioning vs the gas heating norm.
From InQueensland – Gas blast: Major shakeup of LNG market in the works as domestic supply dwindles.
The ACCC is getting shirty with the gas companies, because (a) the haven’t developed new gas fields fast enough to supply forecast shortages in the East Coast market, and (b) because Gas miners would rather sell the stuff offshore, or so it seems.
The basic problem is that the Federal Government policy sees gas as good for climate change abatement, and is completely blind to the notion that the future of the planet is going to depend on what we do in the next 8 years or so.
So the ACCC is just doing its job.
Brian: One of the advantages of the capacity contracts I talk about from time to time is that it can pay for standby capacity without having using this capacity. “Standby” can mean anything from being able to get to full capacity in a very short time to weeks getting a power station that is down for maintenance back up and running.
What our beloved government doesn’t understand is that capacity contracts can allow standby capacity to be maintained while only buying this power under unusual circumstances.
Then there are dams “Dams can shore up some regional votes, but are they good for water security? No, some say”
Pollies like dams and canals because they are visible action even if evaporation losses are high and they stop some flooding that is beneficial to the environment.
Be wary of pollies spruiking dams just before an election.
Barnaby is at least being honest when he says “He is not interested’ in calls for transparency about new Dungowan Dam”
Recharging aquifers can make more sense even though the voters can’t see it happening. (Newman in WA had a recharge system.)
John, further link from your link:
Dungowan Dam backed by council, irrigators as ‘essential’ despite critical national water reform report
And from there:
Productivity Commission finds Australia’s water policy not up to challenge of climate change, population growth
From there you could keep going, link after link.
Australia’s overarching water policy is outdated and will struggle to meet population and climate challenges without a major overhaul, according to the Productivity Commission.
Once again we are in a mess with no leadership.
How can that be possible, Brian. How long have they been working on water policy. Good grief, obviously the people doing the work have been incompetent and should pay back the money they have been received.
America at the end of WW2 offered to build the canal needed to divert Northern inland flood water South into the Darling River with the mass of engineering machinery they had in the Pacific for the war effort, but apparently Australia declined the offer. All of the machinery then went to Japan as scrap metal.
How many governments since then reclaimed that mistake as their own, over and over again, and probably over squabbles about who was going to pay for it.
Bilb: I am always a wee bit skeptical about amazing plans to send water down the Darling River evaporation canal to the mouth of the Murray via some large evaporation ponds in SA that used to be tidal.
In the meantime: “Perverse:” Australian fossil fuel subsidies will top $22,000 a minute this year”
On Hell’s Gate I wouldn’t have an opinion without talking to my elder bro, who is a grazier around Rockhampton.
My younger bro, who is a retired ag scientist, took a look at the project, and said he could not see the Bradfield Scheme (1938 I think, the engineer who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge) ever working. The lift and the distance to the Murray Darling headwaters is just too much.
Haven’t time tonight to round up links, but I think the Townsville Enterprise proposal, currently being examined and worked into a business case, is 2,100 gigalitres (4 Sydharbs), which is about the same or a bit less than Wivenhoe flood and storage compartments combined. Wivenhoe is 80 metres.
Bob Katter is talking about a dam with a 395m wall. He wants the to grow stuff on the dry black soil plains around Richmond/Hughendon. I don’t know the area, but I think it drains to the gulf of Carpentaria. It’s a helluva long way south (I suspect about 800km) to the headwaters of the Murry-Darling, which I don’t think go beyond the Carnarvon Ranges north of Roma/Injune.
Katter is upset enough, waving a letter from the Deputy PM and threatening to change his guarantee of supply. He also says the dam is in the wrong place.
Safe to say Katter’s scheme will not get traction, which means his dream is destroyed forever, if it happens.
The scheme would allow 60,000 hectares of irrigation, provide some hydro power, and assure Townsville of it’s water supply. Townsville is in a rain shadow, and water is a problem. I think they have about 2 years supply, then need to pump from the Burdekin Falls Dam, past Ayr.
I think Townsville region population is upwards of 180,000, with visions of growing to 300,000, but I’m not sure if they know about sea level rise.
I have not checked what Infrastructure Australia think of Hells Gate, but whatever they think would not be relevant to anything Morrison’s crowd do.
A highly visible dam scheme that diverts water from somebody else’s electorate into your electorate. Why wouldn’t a polly love it?
Skepticism aside, water storage and irrigation systems may make sense for a world where feeding the human plague will get harder and harder unless population growth and global warming is reversed.
John, my elder brother was down yesterday to get a new knee today. We had a family lunch meet, so I had a chance to talk to both brothers together.
Both say Bradfield scheme to bring water to Murray Darling is totally impossible. Bringing it south after you get it over the range means having to bring it across the headwaters of either of both the headwaters of the Lake Ayre basin and the Fitzroy River basin which flows each. Both a very large.
Too much energy is required to lift water into Katter’s patch, so it is just not feasible.
I’m told the current proposition for Hells Gate is for a 290m wall, so quite high. Katter wants 395m.
Apparently the current extraction rate of the Burdekin system is very low at present. Both are sceptical, though, as am I, of feasibility studies. The existing one was done by Townsville Enterprises, who are proponents. The state government review and preparation of business case is problematic. The public service these days does not have the expertise. When you hire consultants they tend to give you the answer you want, so they get the next gig.
Other than that, four points.
First, there is quite a lot of ‘undeveloped’ land in the north, and if they set up irrigation farming they will find something that is profitable eventually.
Second, greenie concerns about farm runoff wrecking the GBR are largely misplaced. In that sense Peter Ridd is probably right. The reef is large, is out there from the coast, and the water exchange from coast to reef is minimal. Ridd, I think, is mostly wrong when he criticizes the reef biologists, although the GBR is the size of Italy and is hard to monitor in detail.
Third, the channel of the Burdekin on the coastal side of the range is silting up (it only flows strongly about 3 months a year. For the rest of the year it is a string of waterhole and maybe a creek-sized stream. Now it is threatening to change channels, which would carve through farm lands.
Fourth, putting in a dam affects the natural flow in that branch of the river.
Just in, the Feds have abolished the National Water Grid Authority set up to advise on dams. The say it has done its job. It was set up I think at the initiative of Zali Steggall. In honesty, they probably did not consult it on the latest dams, as they came out of payment for Morrison to the Nats in return for agreement to take a net zero by 2050 fairy story to Glasgow COP26.
The new lord mayor (Independent yet ex National of Ballina got in on a campaign for a new dam despite al the studies to date saying the new dam didn’t make sense.) Next step is an independent study by CSIRO. Can’t see the state Gov supplying the cash for the dam. Water efficiency now with desalination and/or use of deep aquifers for large droughts make more sense to me than a dam.
Brian: Albanese looked good. Particularly when he got onto helping people and growing Australia.
John, yes he looked and said good.
Leigh Sales was a disgrace. She should have known that Albo was the minister (2008, I think) who instituted Infrastructure Australia. She clearly had not read any of Labor’s policies.
Also in calling for detail, she should have known that you can’t say much in half an hour.
I thought using aged care as an exemplar was good strategy. Basically, all Frydenberg offered was to manage their pills better. Probably won’t change oldies’ votes, but a lot of people have oldies. It has been a particular weakness of the Morrison govt.
A lot of people will be wondering how they are going to navigate the home care system. Or what to do with their parents when they live nowhere near where their parents live or where there is suitable aged care.
We badly need a leader that cares about social justice.
Labor has talked the part in general about caring for others, no-one gets left behind etc. but I don’t know how deep it goes. Certainly more promising than the present lot, who don’t seem to care if people are homeless. And that was before the floods.
From my ABC listening it was a major mistake to say there would be a registered nurse 24/7 within a year.
Probably not doable, and it was all that anyone wanted to talk about.
So we had ‘experts’ commenting who had not heard the other four points he made about aged care.
We had people saying he was doing nothing about anything else, even some who heard the speech.
Last night we had a climate expert saying nothing was to be done about climate change, who obviously had not bothered to visit the Labor site and read Powering Australia.
So it goes!
Brian: Quiggan is getting more and more agitated about climate changeinaction.
Thanks, John.
I haven’t been bodily abducted, rather working flat strap on a task I couldn’t avoid. I’d like to get a bit of blogging in, but the prospects are not good until about the end of May.
Did someone mention an election?
Back to Quiggin, he’s not a climate scientist, of course, and I think this one at The Conversation is better value:
IPCC says the tools to stop catastrophic climate change are in our hands. Here’s how to use them
Tonight LEAN organised a zoom session with Saul Griffith, who has come back to Australia to save us, and to help us lead the world in climate action.
He’s written a book The Big Switch. You and I have to read it, John. He’s and engineer, has done stuff, still has a session to advise Biden’s people once a week. I think he’s ahead of the IPCC folks. Reckons 70% reduction by 2030 is doable in Oz, and net zero by 2040.
Biggest problem, he says, is agriculture, and he says it’s our habit of eating animals. He’s got the rest sorted, or on the way, including ships and aeroplanes.
There is an interview The Big Switch: Saul Griffith says the answer is electric , but it’s really just an introduction.
Brian: “and he says it’s our habit of eating animals.”
I guess I am a bit of a sceptic here because I think part of what is going on is vegetarians using climate change to push their moral issues re killing big animals vs killing lots of small animals to protect the crops . They also seem to be skimming over the fact that there is a methane cycle where methane is converted to CO2 which is then converted back to grass that the ruminants eat.
Ruminants such as cattle generate more methane than other grazing animals. Cattle aren’t the only ruminants. Wikipedia says: “Ruminants (suborder Ruminantia) are hoofed herbivorous grazing or browsing mammals that are able to acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion, principally through microbial actions. The process, which takes place in the front part of the digestive system and therefore is called foregut fermentation, typically requires the fermented ingesta (known as cud) to be regurgitated and chewed again. The process of rechewing the cud to further break down plant matter and stimulate digestion is called rumination.[2][3] The word “ruminant” comes from the Latin ruminare, which means “to chew over again”.
The roughly 200 species of ruminants include both domestic and wild species.[4] Ruminating mammals include cattle, all domesticated and wild bovines, goats, sheep, giraffes, deer, gazelles, and antelopes.[5] It has also been suggested that notoungulates also relied on rumination, as opposed to other atlantogenates that rely on the more typical hindgut fermentation, though this is not entirely certain.”
Are we going to declare a jihad against antelopes and giraffes?
John, I think Griffith does not want to be distracted by the 10% we can’t do, rather get on with the 90% that we can, while working out what to do about the hardest bits.
He does not know any single country that is doing what needs to be done. Australia is blessed with a large area of land with copious sun and wind. He says, for example, that if we ship iron ore to Japan, along with the energy to smelt it, we could do it here for a third of the price.
His future is one of energy abundance, so no need for hair shirts if we do things the right way.
Anyway, I think he should be put on the Climate Change Authority, with a blend of other professionals.
His problem politically is that he is pretty blunt, and likely to start a scare campaign, if Labor started saying what he’s saying. He’s a natural fit with the Greens, but they won’t be running the show. Although, with the Greens, 20 candidates supported by Climate 200, plus Zali Steggall and Helen Haines, things could look a bit different.
Here is an interesting thing my sister sent me,
“Next time you visit France you could be forced to take the train
or bus on short journeys as the country outlaws short range
domestic flights.
Coming into effect this month, the rule applies to all air routes where a
train or bus alternative of less than 2.5 hours exists.
Flights from Paris Orly to Bordeaux, Nantes and Lyon will all be
shelved, although short-range domestic flights through Paris Charles
de Gaulle which continue to an overseas destination won’t be affected
if they form part of the same international service.
It’s expected up to 12% of the country’s domestic routes will be culled
under the ban, devised in 2021 as part of the French government’s €4
billion rescue package for Air France after it reported staggering losses
due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The plan initially proposed banning trips of four hours by air, however
this was reduced after objections from Air France-KLM and
representatives of affected regions.
However, environmental groups are now pushing for the flight ban to
go further, with Greenpeace saying it should extend to six hours where
a train alternative is available.
The Austrian government is considering a similar step as part of a
recent bailout of Austrian Airlines, suggesting that domestic flights be
axed where a train ride of up to three hours is available, such as
between Vienna and Salzburg.
It’s estimated that 80% of short-range flights in Austria could be
replaced by trips on the country’s sprawling OBB state rail network.”
The right thing, re Climate Action, for all the wrong reasons
Election Sat 21 May. Hoping more climate champions get elected. We think the amazing Mandy Nolan has a good chance of winning for the Greens in Richmond. Canberra will wonder what hit them if she gets in.
Bilb: There are a lot of short air hops in aus but the ones i am familiar with are part of longer trips. (Ex: Blackwater to Emerald. Never heard of someone using the plane for the hop only.
BilB, the French governments seem to make a habit of imposing rules, irrespective of what the people might think. Which makes the people inclined to kick out any president after their first term.
Macron’s arrogance and neglect of the election in favour of playing the international scene with Ukraine Putin et al may deliver the prize to Marine Le Penn.
John, not sure we can compare our outback public transport with densely populated Europe.
John, I’m working at an election post. Mandy Nolan may make a stir, but unfortunately she will be cutting a vital limb off the body of Labor in defeating Justine Elliott.
Given Elliott’s experience and position within Labor, Nolan’s win would be a net negative for regional Australia, and possibly her own electorate. If Labor gain the treasury benches, which her win would make less likely.
Labor, I expect, would freeze her out.
It’s a big shame where Greens/Labor relations have come to, but I keep telling you that blood on the carpet does not make for a congenial meeting place.
Brian: Justine Elliot is almost invisible here. Unlike the Greens all the Labor councilors lost their position at the recent Ballina shire council elections. (The Greens won two positions despite having no reps in the previous council.) The Ballina state member is a Green in her second term and one of the NSW upper house members is also a local Green. It is not Labor country.
John, you live there, so things have changed. I must accept that.
It seemed like paradise whenever I’ve been there.
When I grew up on a farm I was told that in the previous generation there were so many workers on farms, it was Labor country.
It still means the Labor and the Greens are competing rather than cooperative parties.
Not sure what ‘labor country’ is anymore.
John, there was an interesting article on the future of food in the AFR on the weekend.
A company in USA, I think, has manufactured a powder containing all the nutrients we need. At first there as no attention to taste.
Now they are adding texture and taste, but not looks and smell. Buy it in a bag, and its cheap.
He started from nothing but now had a $100 million company and is putting a big effort into R&D.
I’ve saved it and will try to do a post some time.
Brian: Interesting one: Hydrogen 11 times worse than CO2 for climate, says new report
“Hydrogen will be one of humanity’s key weapons in the war against carbon dioxide emissions, but it must be treated with care. New reports show how fugitive hydrogen emissions can indirectly produce warming effects 11 times worse than those of CO2.”
Surprising, John, but they still say hydrogen is worthwhile.
I think it’s going to happen. Andy Park spoke to Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest tonight on ABC RN Drive.
Forrest has just come back from Europe having signed deals with Germany, the UK and Airbus, where they plan to fly planes on hydrogen.
Saul Griffith reckons that the energy we have to add when we electrify everything will be 250% more than the grid supplies now. He sees the grid as basically flatlining. In Oz we can get all we need from Solar and wind, with firming.
He says that Europe and Asia mostly won’t, because some parts are too cold, and much is too populated to free up the land required.
He thinks they’ll need nukes. He’s not a fan of hydrogen, but sees it as 5% of energy needs by 2050. Maybe he’s on the low side, but if we can keep hydrogen fugitive emissions down towards 1% it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Good presentation from Adam Bandt to the press club today (13/4/22). A man on top of his brief.
Also a man with a strong social justice background.
John, your link surprised me that Bandt was on the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. I thought that was Christine Milne.
Turns out that I was right, but Bandt was one of three pollies “invited to assist”.
But then Adam did not say he was a member, just a “key participant”.
I heard it all on the radio, except for the last few minutes of questions.
There has been a Twitter storm, because Labor folks this election filling out the ABC’s Vote Compass are being told that the party for them is the Greens.
The ABC’s story is that they got political scientists to go through the party policies, then got the parties to check out what they had done. It seems that the way they have designed the grid, Labor is now dead centre, with Greens on the left, but Labor voters who have nothing better to do than fill out the Vote Compass have views that align with the Greens.
This does not surprise me. I agreed with most of what Adam said. Also the rich should pay more tax and I would not stop with billionaires. Not sure about his company super-profits tax.
Personally I don’t think Labor is going fast enough on climate, but appreciate that Labor is not working in a vacuum. I think Albanese is sincere in saying he wants to end the climate wars. Medicare was the same at first. Labor would put it in, the other mob would take it out.
As I’ve said, I think that Labor’s policy would take us to a social/political tipping point on climate, and that would happen quite fast.
I think the aggressive shouty way Adam is prosecuting the Greens position will actually slow things down.
I didn’t appreciate towards the end him saying that Labor only stood for tax cuts for millionaires and new coal and gas, but beyond that was visionless.
However, I do think that with more Greens and indies we will get important change on the three pillars that the Voices of.. or Climate 200 people are standing for.
I’ve been interested in politics since Chifley was PM and have never seen a Labor front bench as decent and as competent as this one. So I don’t like to see them dissed in that fashion. Otherwise his voice is welcome!
Bob Brown and Christine Milne tended to be obsessed with the “how.” rather than the “what”. The Greens obsession with putting a price on carbon made things hard for Gillard. What really counts is meeting targets. The ACT Labor/Green alliance has done very well using the contracts to supply approach that I favour.
John, logically I don’t think a carbon price is necessary, but we effectively have one in the Safeguard Mechanism and the carbon credit scheme, albeit largely a scam.
I think Labor would take a hard look at the latter, but do not intend to do away with it.
Albanese is genuine, I think, in trying to make climate policy bipartisan, because he doesn’t want to have it all unpicked again if government changes. This happened with Medibank/Medicare under Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke/Keating.
On this, given that I’ve always said net zero by 2030, Adam Bandt and the Greens are closest to my own position.
Because we didn’t do it 10 years ago (Hansen said it would be planetary trouble if we exceeded 400ppm) the sooner the better.
“We have Medicare because Labor persisted instead of coming to a weak consensus with the Libs.”
My take was that Medicare was finally accepted because most voters benefitted from Medicare.
By contrast, a carbon tax would add to the cost of a whole range of goods and services.
One attraction of contracts to supply capacity is that governments are reluctant to cancel contracts entered into by previous governments.