- By Michael Mobbs - We citizens can cut 20 per cent of our individual climate pollution this month.  (Four times what the government wants to do by 2020 with their Kyoto Dreaming.) It’s easy for each of us to cut our climate pollution. We need only our own permission and some know how. We don’t need a go-ahead from governments. Nor do we need to spend extra money – just spend it differently. And I estimate that for every 100 citizens who take the actions outlined here there’ll be one new job created by our re-directed money. The main losers here will be our country’s biggest profit makers, the Coles and Woolies chain stores and the banks (who will cream less money from credit cards). Would you like to give these suggestions a go for a month? If so, here’s how.  (There’s a list below for you to bookmark or print out.) Food is our first priority. The bulk of our climate and resource pollution comes from how we grow, buy, eat and waste food. (1) Try to eat red meat and chicken... 
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- By Michael Mobbs - We citizens can cut 20 per cent of our individual climate pollution this month.  (Four times what the government wants to do by 2020 with their Kyoto Dreaming.) It’s easy for each of us to cut our climate pollution. We need only our own permission and some know how. We don’t need a go-ahead from governments. Nor do we need to spend extra money – just spend it differently. And I estimate that for every 100 citizens who take the actions outlined here there’ll be one new job created by our re-directed money. The main losers here will be our country’s biggest profit makers, the Coles and Woolies chain stores and the banks (who will cream less money from credit cards). Would you like to give these suggestions a go for a month? If so, here’s how.  (There’s a list below for you to bookmark or print out.) Food is our first priority. The bulk of our climate and resource pollution comes from how we grow, buy, eat and waste food. (1) Try to eat red meat and chicken... 
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- Germaine Greer has been at it again, prodding conventional thinking. This time she says old houses in the Scotland need to be knocked down and rebuilt sustainably because the building fabric is too poor to be retrofitted. And she makes a case for high rise. Following is her article published in Scotland’s Sunday Herald. Do you have a response? Please send it to editorial@thefifthestate.com.au -  Now that Britain has become a property-owning democracy like Australia, the major part of its wealth is locked up in bricks and mortar, which is mad. Regardless of silly house prices, decaying housing stock is a steadily depreciating asset that will depreciate even faster when new and essential regulations about energy efficiency come into force. At present, three-quarters of the Scottish housing stock falls below the Scottish Quality Housing Standard. Half of it does not satisy the seven out of 10 energy standard. The solution is not to tart it up, but to knock it down. With the best... 
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Resilient Cities.  Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer Island Press. 2008. Review by Greg Paine Cities are in constant change. But are they heading in the right direction? This book suggests they (we) are not. At the same time it remains positive – pointing, through reference to numerous examples of what cities around the world are doing, to a more viable urban form that we can – and must – create right now. The choice of resilience as a connecting principle or objective is a good one. It is seductive in its imagery, clear in its aim, and familiar. The authors equate the idea of resilience in our personal lives with resilience within cities. As they say, it is about lasting, about making it through crises, about inner strength and strong physical constitution (and built form). The notion is also of its time. Elisabeth Wynhausen for instance covers resilience in one of the series of books by University of Melbourne... 
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by Lynne Blundell Australia’s chances of cutting greenhouse gas emissions cost-effectively are being seriously undermined by Energy  Ministers and bureaucrats who are maintaining a system that encourages inefficiency and high usage, according to energy efficiency expert Alan Pears. Winner of the Centenary Medal for contribution to climate change and environment policy in 2003 and currently Adjunct Professor at RMIT, Pears has been a major contributor to energy policy reform and energy efficiency schemes in Australia, including helping to formulate the GreenStar ratings system for buildings and reforming the Building Code of Australia. He told The Fifth Estate in an interview this week that he has serious concerns about the ability or will of Energy Ministers and energy regulators to make the necessary changes that will allow Australia to cut emissions in the most cost effective way and to create a viable renewable energy industry. “The Energy Minister and regulators seem amazingly... 
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5 August 2009 - The Australian has come under fire for its anti climate change pro climate deniers stance (see stories on Peter Newman in TFE) But now the Murdoch newspaper is pitching for a new image with an ad from  Greenpeace that features a protester walking out of a climate change ad to spray paint a slogan on top of news stories in The Australian and The Courier Mail. How very Greenpeace. At last. Again.  How very un-Australian. See  mumbrella for the whole story  
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5 August 2009 – Total Environment Centre, Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF Australia, CHOICE and the Alternative Technology Association have thrown their weight behind a new campaign to stop the carbon pollution reduction scheme ignoring the greenhouse gas savings  of GreenPower and alternative energy users. Director of the TEC Jeff Angel today said the current design of the CPRS would undermine a set of green industries worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “Under Rudd government policies household action is helping the big polluters to pollute more at a lower cost, instead of helping reduce the threat of climate change, Mr Angel said. The purchase of GreenPower, carbon offsets, and the installation of small-scale renewable energy (such as rooftop solar and solar hot-water systems), save households six million tonnes a year  in greenhouse gas emissions and support economic activity of around $150 million each year, Mr Angel said. “This is disgraceful when Australians... 
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5 August 2009 – Total Environment Centre, Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF Australia, CHOICE and the Alternative Technology Association have thrown their weight behind a new campaign to stop the carbon pollution reduction scheme ignoring the greenhouse gas savings  of GreenPower and alternative energy users. Director of the TEC Jeff Angel today said the current design of the CPRS would undermine a set of green industries worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “Under Rudd government policies household action is helping the big polluters to pollute more at a lower cost, instead of helping reduce the threat of climate change, Mr Angel said. The purchase of GreenPower, carbon offsets, and the installation of small-scale renewable energy (such as rooftop solar and solar hot-water systems), save households six million tonnes a year  in greenhouse gas emissions and support economic activity of around $150 million each year, Mr Angel said. “This is disgraceful when Australians... 
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By Michael Mobbs This once, the Burr finds itself unable to prick the hides of governments, consultants, red tape worshippers and even those besotted with Kyoto Dreaming. Instead, we turn to a different type of digging. Gardening. Burr has been gardening. Aside from feeling good, and bloody sore all over, gardening has put things in perspective, with the result that we don’t have any interest in digging at those who do most damage to our lovely Earth – governments and their policy tragics. As the good John Lennon advised, “Why don’t we do it in the road”. And so we have, and are. In the last 18 months Burr and neighbours have planted about 1000 fruit trees, herbs, veggies, and bird-attracting plants in four city blocks in inner Sydney, about 10 minutes walk from Central Railway. About $4000 has come from our own pockets and about $3000 from Sydney Council. The value of our street maintenance labours is over $5000 a year. Along the way we have: begun... 
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By Rob Murray-Leach, chief executive officer, Energy Efficiency Council. The Energy Efficiency Council believes the Council of Australian Governments’ (COAG) National Strategy on Energy Efficiency is an important step forward, and calls for more action on industrial and commercial energy efficiency. [see TFE  post on this] The National Strategy shows that Australian governments are waking up to the massive potential of energy efficiency. To meet the Commonwealth’s target to put Australia at the forefront of OECD energy efficiency improvement we’ll need to build on the Strategy with serious programs to retrofit commercial buildings and drive industrial energy efficiency. There is no doubt that the largest and cheapest opportunities for energy efficiency are in commercial buildings and industry. There are huge savings available in manufacturing and mining, with Australia’s top 215 energy users spending over $25 billion on energy per year, around 65 per cent of all business energy... 
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By Ché Wall… 24 May - Two very important events occurred 150 years ago. The first oil well in the US was drilled at Titusville in Pennsylvania and, on the other side of the Atlantic, John Tyndall demonstrated the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. The rest, as they say, is history. This very topical observation was made by Al Gore during his keynote at the Word Business Summit on Climate Change of the Copenhagen Climate Council, which kicked off today. The event, attended by 700 delegates from around the world, is cited as being the last chance for business to inform the negotiation and international treaty at the December UNFCCC COP 15 meeting. To be hosted at the same venue, the COP 15 meeting will give us a new global agreement for climate change that will take over from the Kyoto protocol. For those whose businesses are provided with opportunity or risk from climate change this is clearly a big deal. I am in attendance because my business has become increasing engaged in... 
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by Nicola Woodward - 21 April 2009 – Accelerated Depreciation is a core platform of the property industry as a way to green buildings – but there are major flaws in this approach and better ways to achieve the desired outcomes…. “Green depreciation” is a term that has recently been coined for providing accelerated tax depreciation for property related capital expenditure that provides a green payback. Tax depreciation is a tax deferral mechanism that already provides capital allowance deductions for refurbishment works as well as write offs for any plant or building items that are demolished or disposed of as part of the project. The rationale for the introduction of green depreciation has been this: there is an environmental need for existing buildings to be brought into the “green” fold but there is a cost premium in refurbishing an existing building to green standards over traditional design. There is an existing framework for providing tax deferrals for capital... 
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By Maria Atkinson… Dear Prime Minister, I am writing to alert you to serious flaws in Federal Government data on emissions from buildings and to request urgent action to establish accurate data, to ensure Australia’s carbon pollution reduction responses are soundly based. My specific concern is that inaccurate data from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural & Resource Economics (ABARE) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which in turn is based on inaccurate methodology adopted by the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO), has been used as the basis of calculations which suggest buildings are responsible for 23 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the United Nations and many other international authorities put buildings’ contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions in the order of 40 per cent or higher. The data in question appears to date back to an erroneous assumption adopted in the 2002 report by George Wilkenfeld to the AGO: Australia’s... 
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By Tina Perinotto… In a sign that the sustainable building industry is coming of age,  developer and energy consultancy Szencorp has revealed a “warts and all” report on its refurbished 6 star Green Star building in South Melbourne. According to Peter Szental, managing director of Szencorp, (a TFE sponsor) the Building Use Study benchmarked the premises in the top 4 per cent for overall building performance in Australia. But although the report found tenants were not happy with the air-conditioning system, they were forgiving because of the building’s “green” credentials. Mr Szental said said that while the building at 40 Albert Road, South Melbourne,  achieved excellent results in a number of areas including design, image, and perceived productivity and health, the study uncovered that 86 per cent of staff were unhappy with the temperature within the building. The results also showed that tenants’ reported perceived productivity was in the top 9 per cent of Australian... 
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By Tina Perinotto… It’s amazing how quickly a targeted discussion about an important issue can gain momentum. At the Green Cities conference in Brisbane in early March this year, inevitable musings over the question of where to next for the green building movement have sparked what looks like a new wave of enthusiasm from a huge range of individual industry practitioners to take forward the green building agenda. At the centre of the talks is Thinc Projects’consultant, Elena Bondareva, who first contributed an article to our inaugural edition of The Fifth Estate’s newsletter, Movement Looking for Direction. Bondareva tells us that “over coffee and in informal gatherings more than 100 industry professionals have met in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Brisbane are exploring where the next quantum shift towards sustainability might come from, and how they can help catalyse it.” The meetings are designed purely for individuals to ”constructively... 
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By Tina Perinotto… It’s amazing how quickly a targeted discussion about an important issue can gain momentum. At the Green Cities conference in Brisbane in early March this year, inevitable musings over the question of where to next for the green building movement have sparked what looks like a new wave of enthusiasm from a huge range of individual industry practitioners to take forward the green building agenda. At the centre of the talks is Thinc Projects’consultant, Elena Bondareva, who first contributed an article to our inaugural edition of The Fifth Estate’s newsletter, Movement Looking for Direction. Bondareva tells us that “over coffee and in informal gatherings more than 100 industry professionals have met in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Brisbane are exploring where the next quantum shift towards sustainability might come from, and how they can help catalyse it.” The meetings are designed purely for individuals to ”constructively... 
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by Lynne Blundell 6 May – There are some claims that you just shouldn’t bank on. Especially when it involves the coal industry, which in the US is every bit as dominant and influential as in Australia. In the US Barack Obama has been criticised for falling for the “coal can be clean line” which others, including Robert F Kennedy Jr and former US vice president Al Gore, say is a “dirty big lie”. President Obama has proposed $3.4 billion in stimulus legislation to fund continued research on clean coal projects. “Clean coal is like healthy cigarettes, it does not exist,” says former vice president Al Gore in US media reports. Obama used in coal ads The US coal industry has cashed in on Obama’s comments, using one of his campaign speeches in its multi-million dollar advertising campaign: “You can’t tell me we can’t figure out a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States and make it work,” says Obama in the... 
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by Peter Szental The Council of Australian Governments’ (COAG) draft National Strategy on Energy Efficiency makes important steps, but leaves the building sector out in the cold and Australia’s greatest energy efficiency opportunities untapped. Investing in energy efficiency is more than a double-dividend. Energy efficiency creates green jobs, improves Australia’s economic competitiveness, cuts greenhouse pollution and saves money. Australia is currently one of the worst performers in energy efficiency in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That puts our economy at tremendous risk. The largest and cheapest opportunities for energy efficiency are in existing commercial buildings and industry, but COAG seems to be ignoring these opportunities. Existing commercial buildings account for 98 per cent of office space each year, and are a gold mine of potential energy savings. The strategy will fail to unlock these savings. A report by the Australian Sustainable... 
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By Gavin Gilchrist Think about this. Just over 50 years ago when President Eisenhower and the US Congress realised they had a serious technological and political challenge – matching the Soviet Union in the space race – did they respond by imposing a new tax on non-space travel in the hope that “market forces” would somehow respond by delivering more space travel? No way. They created a new national agency, one that was well-funded, prestigious, and attractive to the best and the brightest US scientists, managers and engineers. And they gave it a clear goal: beat the USSR in space. So they created NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Australia in 2009 doesn’t need a NASA. But it desperately needs a NESA. A National Energy Savings Agency. Here’s why. The cheapest, fastest way to cut Australia’s greenhouse emissions is by saving energy through the accelerated adoption of energy-effective processes and practices. Like better lighting control in offices,... 
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By Michael Mobbs Rating systems rate the wrong things. If you asked me, “What’s the best thing I can do to cut climate change for my kids?” I would answer, grow your own food and buy from local farmers.  I would not say, build a sustainable house or office. The climate impacts of the Australian food system are more than three times those of the housing and construction sector. Food takes over 50 per cent of Australia’s water, and housing just 11 per cent. At least 23 per cent of Australia’s climate pollution comes from its food system. It’s more effective to have a sustainability target for food than it is for the water and energy used in houses and offices. Even if every new or renovated building scores 100 out of 100 points or the maximum number of stars the amount of energy and water saved and the impact on climate change pollution is so minor as to be insignificant compared to that used to make the food eaten in those buildings. What good is it if we cut 10 per cent... 
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By Peter Droege The confusion around building a “carbon economy” around emissions trading has served to disguise for too long that countries, regions and cities need crash programs to replace their entire energy supply systems, and exchange coal and oil for renewable power. The longer this is postponed, the more difficult the ultimate effort will be, yet it is necessary for our survival and to help other countries make this inevitable change. It will also address the inexorable arrival of oil, gas and uranium peaks. Roughly three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions that are produced by human activities result from burning fossil fuels for power generation and transport, almost one-quarter from industrial agricultural practices, and (this includes) another significant portion from cement production. At present, there is a 40 per cent excess of carbon pollution in the atmosphere already, warming the world to melt polar caps and permafrost, and acidifying oceans. Yet instead of focusing... 
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By Simon Carter We are businesses and people who live by incremental change. But we now enter a time of transformation in which we are being forced to examine the full systems that inhibit us existing sustainably, rather than just addressing the symptoms of our unsustainability. It is clearly a time of reinvention. Our global financial system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Obama has declared his commitment to have the US no longer importing oil from the Middle East or Venezuela within 10 years and America’s previously mighty automotive industry is going back to the drawing board. It’s clear 2009 is proving to be the turning point from which many of the rules of the old industrial economy will go out the window and the rules of the post industrial era are created. So, what might this profound shift in the world mean for the Australian property industry and our green building movement? Even pre Global Financial Crisis, our green building movement had found itself at an interesting... 
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By Elena Bondareva Shortly after Green Cities 09 (a major Asia Pacific green building conference run jointly by the Green Building Council of Australia and the Property Council of Australia), I was having a drink with a couple of colleagues and they mentioned that they felt  that the green building movement is not strategic. Interestingly enough, this conversation mirrored scores of other similar conversations I have had recently, (although, for some reason, no one is raising this issue publicly). This has started me thinking: would the movement have its inarguable success if these people were right? How do we reconcile a ‘no’ with the evidence mounting from these conversations, and the calibre and range of people concerned? Perhaps the expectation for ‘strategic’ has changed. Perhaps today, it needs to come with a vision which is focused on our future. In the beginning of the green building movement in Australia, arguably signified by the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the strategy was... 
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By Michael Mobbs Why have one policy about something simple when you can have 140 or more and make it really complicated? How many policies does it take to control the parking of car share cars in NSW? One for each council, or over 140 policies. Just to park a car. I calculate that the time; cost and paper this policy mania produces is: 140 different policies across NSW on the one subject Over 50,000 pages of printing just to make one draft policy for the councils Over 840 months or six years of policy making time to make the 141 policies Over 50,000 printed pages to make the final form of the policies Over $280,000 of council officers salaries to make the draft policies An additional $500 per developer per development application to address the policy in one project per council per year or over 70,000 a year just to deal with it in 140 development proposals across the state. These are conservative figures and probably underestimate the costs and time by 50 per cent. In... 
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by Peter Szental Earth Hour has succeeded in grabbing our attention about the urgent need to address Climate Change. But does it send the right message? Is switching off and sitting in darkness the right way to save the planet or instead should the focus be on using energy more efficiently; reducing waste rather than sacrificing amenity and our lifestyles? No one should have to forgo their comfort or live in the dark for an hour once a year to highlight our urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By using its profile to promote the smarter use of energy year round, Earth Hour could have a much greater, long-lasting impact by highlight that energy efficiency is a simple, cost-effective and proven way to reduce our carbon emissions. Installing more energy efficient equipment might be less visible and lack the ‘wow’ factor, but it is incredibly effective. For example, in my office in South Melbourne lights and air-conditioning automatically turn off when no one’s... 
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