In 1992 Severn Cullis-Suzuki (David Suzuki’s daughter) who was 12 years old gave a talk to the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio on behalf of . She gave a really good talk, see the below Youtube video. The best quote is “If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!”. Unfortunately they haven’t stopped breaking things yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsDliXzyAY.
Here is some background information on Several Cullis-Suzuki.
Hewlet-Packard is sponsoring the recycling of old computers in Victoria, Australia in a program named Byteback – note that they accept all brands of computer and charge nothing to accept the e-waste. This is a really good thing, I’ll start saving up my old computer parts to deliver to them!
Is there a directory of computer recycling plants that accept old hardware for no charge? If you know of one in your area then please blog about it and send a track-back to my post.
A common meme is that the media is biased towards the political left. This meme was deliberately created to encourage well-meaning journalists to be more generous in their reporting of Neo-Cons in a misguided attempt at being fair and also as a mechanism for refuting criticism of any media reports that criticise Neo-Cons.
The ABC has been criticised for being biased towards the left as part of this attack on fair media and have recently demonstrated that they are in fact biased towards the Neo-Con ideas by airing a pseudo-documentary about climate change The Great Global Warming Swindle.
The fake documentary has been refuted by many scientists, here is one by George Monbiot published in The Age.
I wonder whether this blog post will get Google adverts related to Nostradamus and UFOs – I’m sure that the google search engine has worked out that cranks are interested in that fake-doco.
The ABC reports that an oil shortage is predicted soon. The International Energy Agency predicts that oil supply problems will start within the next five years. Oil production has been dropping over the last two years (we have passed the “peak oil” point) and demand is steadily increasing. Regardless of wars oil prices will increase significantly in the near future.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the average age of Australian cars was 10.7 years at the end of 1998. So the vast majority of the current fuel-hungry cars on Australian roads will still be in use in five years time – if the owners can afford them.
The government needs to start providing tax incentives for fuel efficient cars and to end tax incentives for inefficient cars. Currently 4WD vehicles have reduced taxes and the tax deduction for a business car is based on the engine size (get a less efficient car and get a bigger tax deduction).
The government claims to be protecting the economy (at the expense of the environment). But with the way things currently work the economy will be destroyed in less than five years.
Even though the government cares little for the environment (in spite of the effect that climate change is having on farmers) they need to do something if they want to fulfill their claims of protecting the economy!
Thanks to Chris Samuel for informing me of this.
Google has just announced the Recharge project. They are converting some of their own fleet of Prius and other hybrid cars to be “plug-in hybrids”, this means that the car can be plugged in to mains power to charge it’s batteries and petrol will only be used as a fuel of last resort. If a car is mostly used for short trips then the petrol use is dramatically reduced – but the car still has the 1000Km range that a full tank of petrol provides!
Google is also going to invest $10,000,000 in companies that develop technologies related to hybrid vehicles. If you have some ideas for new technological developments related to power saving then you might want to check out what Google is doing.
Mark Greenaway writes about writes about robots being designed to remove weeds from farms. This seems like a bad idea given that we currently have an energy crisis due to CO2 emissions from power plants causing environment change (including reduced water supplies), and coal and nuclear power plants requiring water to produce electricity (pity about the reduced water supply). Introducing robots that require either electricity of petrol for operation and also maintenance (which probably requires plastic parts on occasion) seems to be more of a problem than a solution.
Fortunately there is already work in progress on training sheep to eat weeds. Given that we already raise sheep for wool and food it makes more sense for them to eat unwanted vegetation (weeds in a vineyard is the example given) than to grow grass specially for them.
Also Mark says that the recent increase in oil price is not good news. What would be ideal is a slow steady increase in petrol prices that allows individuals and companies to change to more efficient vehicles (smaller and slower vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and more use of public transport) and also allows governments to make changes (such as building new public transport infrastructure). Having the oil remain cheap until it starts to run out doesn’t do anyone any good (apart from the short-term interests of oil companies).
In a comment on my previous blog post a question was asked as to who benefits when customers are able to use cheap electricity.
The answer is that the electricity company benefits the most! When electricity sources such as wind and solar power which can vary in capacity are used the electricity would be cheaper when there is adequate or excess supply. The electricity would be cheaper then to encourage customers to use power hungry devices at those times rather than when the electricity supply is reduced. The larger the capacity of back-up power plants such as gas-fired plants the larger the overall cost of the system (having extra peak-load capacity that is unused most of the time is a waste of money).
However the company that I once worked for on a project related to this was not an electricity company. I can’t name the company due to the confidentiality agreement but if the project ever goes into production I’ll blog about it.
Recently some of the major investment banks have been focussing on how climate change affects business. I think that with these developments there will be a lot of new investment in environment related technologies. Probably if a few people started work on an embedded Linux box for scheduling power use they could have a good chance of getting some investment. The ideal feature list would include control and monitoring over the Internet, the ability to schedule operations based on power price (received from the grid via a technology similar to X10) and local conditions (how charged the batteries are in your photo-voltaic system). It would control devices via standard X10 modules (which can control the power to the device) as well as directly interfacing with machines that need to be turned on all the time.
I would be happy to offer more suggestions via private email to anyone who is interested in implementing this.
A question that people often ask about wind power (and was asked in the comments section of my previous post) is what can be done when the wind speed decreases in an area. There are several methods that can be used to address this problem.
The easiest option is to simply have wind farms spread out over a large area and interconnects that can spread the load. This greatly reduces the problems but is not a total solution.
The next step is to have a series of power plants that can quickly ramp up supply to meet the demand. One good option for this is gas-fired power plants, while they aren’t ideal for the environment they are cheap to build and can react quickly to changing demand. If a gas fired plant is only used when wind speeds are low it should on average be running at a small fraction of it’s peak capacity and use little fuel. Another good option is hydro-electric power which can be turned on quickly, which doesn’t produce any CO2 emissions and is already used widely (about 10% of Australia’s electricity is provided by hydro-electric power).
The ideal solution is to have every user of grid power know when the electricity is cheap (when there is a surplus of wind power) and when it’s expensive (when gas or hydro power is being used). Then non-critical services can be run when electricity is cheap. For example you could put clothes in your washing machine and program it to start the wash when electricity becomes cheap, some time during the day there will be a cheap time and the washing will get done. Once consumers know when electricity is cheap (via X10 or similar technology) they can use that information to determine when to use electricity generated from photo-voltaic cells on their roof and when to use grid power. The same technology can be used for heating and cooling of your home or office, turning off the A/C for an hour or so is only going to be a problem in the middle of summer or winter, for most of the year any heating or cooling could be done with cheap electricity. These technologies are all being developed at the moment (I once briefly worked on a system that could be used as a pre-cursor to managing home electricity use for times of cheap electricity).
Ben Fowler writes about the issues related to nuclear power in Australia. He spends 8 paragraphs discussing the issues on the “Right” side of politics – of which 6 concern the an Australian nuclear weapons capability and then spends 3 out of 5 paragraphs related to the “Left” side explaining that he thinks that everyone who opposes nuclear power is a Luddite.
Ben didn’t bother providing any links or statistics to back up his claims, so I’ll assist him in analysing these issues by providing some facts that we can discuss.
In March Spain had wind power provide 27% of all electricity (making wind power the main source of power for the country). I blogged about this at the time. While Spain has an ongoing program of building new wind power stations the majority of wind turbines in Spain are quite old (the Model T of wind power) and not nearly as efficient as modern turbines that would be installed for Australian power plants.
The Danish government has announced plans to use wind power for 75% of their electricity. Denmark has a much smaller land area than Australia, which means that generating so much electricity from wind power is more technically challenging for them than it would be for us. A larger land area means that when one area has low wind speeds other areas can be used to provide power.
For home electricity generation wind turbines have not yet been proven to be practical. The linear speed of the blade is determined by the wind speed and the rotational speed is therefore a factor of the wind speed divided by the radius of the blades. This means that smaller turbines have higher rotational speeds which causes more noise (bad for getting council approval), also to avoid turbulence a wind turbine will ideally be some distance above the ground (8 meters is good) which again gives problems when getting approval. The O’Connor Hush Turbine is supposed to solve the noise component of this problem. It will be interesting to see whether home based wind power becomes practical in future – if so I would like to get an O’Connor turbine on my house!
Home solar power has been proven to work well, in the form of both solar-electric and solar hot water (I know several people who have been happily using them for years). You don’t get cold showers when the sun isn’t shining, you instead use gas or electricity to heat the water (it’s a standard feature in a solar hot water system). Also your home electricity doesn’t go off when the sun stops shining, you have batteries that are charged during sunny times to run things overnight, and when they get flat you pay for power from the grid.
It is quite realistic to stick solar power systems on every roof in the country. The added cost to the process of building or purchasing a house is negligible and the benefits include having electricity when mains power is unavailable (NB water is used in generating electricity from coal or nuclear power plants so a bad drought will eventually become a time of limited mains power). Even the smallest home solar electric system will produce enough electricity to power a fridge and freezer 24*7 so it’s a very useful backup for essential power. The government is subsidising the installation of solar electric systems, so it seems that they expect everyone to get one eventually.
Dr. Ziggy Switkowski (the main advocate of nuclear power in Australia) says “the introduction of a carbon tax could make nuclear power the cheapest option by the 2020s”. In consecutive paragraphs Ben derides “carbon trading” and claims that nuclear power is “practical”. Unfortunately the main advocate of nuclear power in Australia does not believe that it is practical without a carbon tax. Ziggy also states that it would take at least 15 years to complete a nuclear power plant, unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of waiting for 15 years before starting to try and reduce the damage that we are doing to the environment. The Stern report makes the economic consequences of inaction quite clear.
I am not a Luddite. I oppose nuclear power because of the risks related to accidental release of radioactive material and the routine release of radioactive material as part of the uranium mining process, and the dangers related to long-term storage of nuclear waste (let’s not assume that Star Trek science can make it all non-radioactive). Nuclear power is not cost effective for Australia and will take so long to develop that it won’t save us from the serious economic damage predicted by the best scientific models as presented in the Stern report.
For large scale power generation wind power works now, can be easily implemented and has no hidden costs or risks. There will never be a Chernobyl type accident with wind power, it is inherently a safe technology. For small scale power generation (something you can add to your home) solar power works well, is not expensive (when considering the price of a house and especially when the government subsidy is counted) and has the potential to seriously reduce the amount of carbon dioxide produced.
In response to my comment and post about the cost of driving to work there was a comment on the blog post I responded to suggesting that a small car is better value for money than a hybrid car.
The claim was made regarding a Nissan Pulsar, but to investigate this I decided to compare the Prius with the Corolla Hatchback, as far as I can tell the Corolla Hatchback is the nearest non-hybrid car to the Prius that Toyota sells (being similar in size, weight, and performance). Comparing cars of different make adds extra variables into the equation. Unfortunately the Toyota web site fails to provide specifications for the Prius and only provides a PDF file with minimal information on the Corolla, but it is enough for some minimal calculations.
A car company run by intelligent people would publish the specs on all their vehicles and provide a search form to compare selected models. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has a good search method that allows easy comparison and ranking of items in their database (here is an example). It would be good if Toyota would permit us to compare models in their car range in a similar manner.
According to the Toyota web site the Prius uses 4.4L/100Km when driving in the city and the manual transmission version of the Corolla Hatchback uses 7.4L/100Km (7.7 for the auto). For the average 16,000Km that an average Prius owner drives that would save 480L of petrol which would save about $700 at current petrol prices.
The Corolla Ascent Hatchback (the cheapest of all Corollas) is $21,000 while the cheapest Prius is $37,400. If you compare the Prius with the cheapest Corolla then it’s a $16,400 price difference. If you save $700 per annum then it won’t cover the interest on a $16,400 loan or match the interest rates earned by a bank term-deposit if the $16,400 was invested. So it seems apparent that at current petrol prices (NB petrol prices are expected to increase) and with average Prius driving patterns a Prius will not be more economical than a cheap Corolla.
Currently the Commonwealth Bank of Australia offers 6.05% interest on term deposits of between $10,000 and $25,000. This means that $700 per annum would be the interest on a term deposit of $11,500. If we compare the Corolla Ultima Sedan at $32,000 with the Prius at $37,400 the difference in price is less than $11,500 – but the cars have incomparable sets of luxury and safety features. The Prius i-tech appears to have a super-set of the luxury and safety features of the Corolla Ultima Sedan but at $46,900 is again going to cost more for the average Prius driver.
The Prius is a very quiet car to drive, there is almost no engine noise (when driving at speeds where the Petrol engine is operating there is usually more noise from other vehicles) and no gear changes (handy if passengers are consuming hot or sticky drinks). It has a good set of safety and luxury features and is also a prestige car (no-one will say “oh wow, you’ve got a Corolla”). If you assign a dollar value to these features then a Prius may be the most economical car that meets your requirements!
Finally, let’s keep in mind the fact that petrol prices are steadily increasing. If you save $700 by driving a Prius this year then you may save $1000 next year. There is also the option of converting a Prius to a plug-in hybrid which will be a useful option if petrol prices hit $10/L! Also the amount of money saved will depend on the use of the car. If you are running a courier or taxi business then a Prius will probably be a lot more economical than a Corolla due to the greater distances travelled and the travel in the slow city traffic that the Prius was designed for.
PS All prices are in Australian dollars and concern products on offer in Australia, I would like to see comments from other people who perform the same calculations for their countries.
Update: If this interests you then you may want to read other posts I filed under the Environment and Cars categories.