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Drive less if you care about air pollution | Letters
Please don’t give people an excuse for not making every effort to change behaviours that contribute to air pollution (Omega-3 supplements could guard against air pollution, 4 March). Millions of car drivers can cut air pollution right now by reducing their car use. Driving a car is antisocial in the extreme: it negatively impacts on thousands of lives and there are few places (if any) to escape the toxic waste that car drivers (their cars couldn’t do it without them) spew out from the moment they turn the key in the ignition to the moment they turn it off. One of the most troubling aspects of the human intellect is our ability to rationalise and reason away the most irrational and unreasonable and destructive behaviours. Car drivers are brilliant at it.
Jo Whateley
Sheffield
• It appears that may be true for mice and may yet prove to be so for humans. However, bearing in mind that around a quarter of all car journeys are for less than one mile and that car engines are significantly more polluting when the engine is cold, wouldn’t it be more immediately effective and expedient if far more people simply left their cars behind and walked?
Bill White
Leeds
William Shatner's guide to Mars
Sea turtle recovering after 915 coins removed from stomach – video report
Omsin, a green sea turtle, is recovering in Bangkok after surgery to remove over 900 coins from her stomach on Monday. She was brought to Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn university for medical attention by Thai naval personnel who noticed the struggling turtle in Sriracha. A CT scan found that Omsin (“piggy-bank” in English) was carrying a 5kg metal mass inside her, later found during surgery to be coins. It is likely Omsin was swallowing coins thrown into her pond in her hometown. She is expected to make a full recovery
More than 900 coins removed from turtle’s stomach in Thailand
Continue reading...Prize for cracking brain's 'feel good' system
Coal collapse drives down UK carbon emissions
More than 900 coins removed from turtle's stomach in Thailand
Twenty-five-year-old green sea turtle nicknamed Bank swallowed money thrown into her pool by tourists seeking good luck
Tossing coins into a fountain to bring good luck is a popular superstition, but the practice brought misery to a sea turtle in Thailand from which vets have removed 915 coins.
Vets in Bangkok operated on Monday on the 25-year-old female green sea turtle nicknamed Bank, whose indigestible diet was the result of tourists seeking good fortune by tossing coins into her pool over many years in the eastern town of Sri Racha.
Continue reading...UK carbon emissions drop to lowest level since 19th century, study finds
Ditching dirty coal benefiting environment as gas and renewables increase their share in electricity generation
The UK’s carbon dioxide emissions have fallen to their lowest level since the 19th century as coal use continues to plummet, analysis suggests.
Emissions of the major greenhouse gas fell almost 6% year-on-year in 2016, after the use of coal for electricity more than halved to record lows, according to the Carbon Brief website, which reports on climate science and energy policy.
Continue reading...Pollution responsible for a quarter of deaths of young children, says WHO
Toxic air, unsafe water and and lack of sanitation causing the deaths of 1.7 million children under five every year
Pollution is responsible for one in four deaths among all children under five, according to new World Health Organisation reports, with toxic air, unsafe water and and lack of sanitation the leading causes.
The reports found polluted environments cause the deaths of 1.7 million children every year, but that many of the deaths could be prevented by interventions already known to work, such as providing cleaner cooking fuels to prevent indoor air pollution.
Continue reading...Schools with solar panels face £1.8m bill due to business rates rise
Tax hike on solar-installed properties to affect 821 state schools in England and Wales, research suggests
New research suggests schools in England and Wales which have solar panels installed will be landed with a £1.8m bill because of business rate changes that have been branded ludicrous and nonsensical.
More than 1,000 schools installed solar power in recent years to address climate change, educate pupils and provide a crucial new revenue stream to help squeezed budgets.
Continue reading...Americans are confused on climate, but support cutting carbon pollution | Dana Nuccitelli
There’s broad support for climate policies in every state and county, but Americans view global warming as a distant problem
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication published the findings of its 2016 survey on American public opinion about climate change. The results are interesting – in some ways confusing – and yet they reveal surprisingly broad support for action to address climate change. The Yale team created a tool with which the results can be broken down by state, congressional district, or county to drill down into the geographic differences in Americans’ climate beliefs.
Continue reading...A right to repair: why Nebraska farmers are taking on John Deere and Apple
Farmers like fixing their own equipment, but rules imposed by big corporations are making it impossible. Now this small showdown could have a big impact
There are corn and soy fields as far as the eye can see around Kyle Schwarting’s home in Ceresco, Nebraska. The 36-year-old farmer lives on a small plot of land peppered with large agricultural machines including tractors, planters and a combine harvester.
Parked up in front of his house is a bright read 27-ton Case tractor which has tracks instead of wheels. It’s worth about $250,000, and there’s a problem with it: an in-cab alarm sounds at ten-minute intervals to alert him to a faulty hydraulic connector he never needs to use.
Continue reading...IBM's online quantum machine gets faster
Can elephants and humans live together?
Berserk beasts, trashed crops, vengeful villagers: tales of ‘conflict’ come thick and fast as humans and elephants are forced into closer contact. But does it have to be war? Across Asia and Africa, there are hints of how we might live in peace
While I was working on this article, two people were killed by wild elephants near my home in south India. Mary Leena, a middle-aged woman, was rushing to church for an early morning service. At an intersection, she came face to face with a huge male elephant as it turned the corner. Both panicked; the elephant swung his trunk out, and she was thrown into a wall. She was rushed to the hospital, but died on the way.
Three weeks later, a lorry driver on a national highway heard someone calling for help. He found an old lady in the tea bushes, badly injured. She was walking along the road, encountered wild elephants, and was thrown into the bushes. She too died shortly after.
A champion of 'unofficial countryside'
Haverah Park, North Yorkshire It is an unglamorous fringeland of rush pasture and white moor, yet nature finds a use for it
Neglect has left the wooden barrack-like building looking gaunt and frankly sinister. A sky of torn clouds, a sea of rough, rust-coloured pasture, a few knotty hawthorns and some lonely telegraph poles complete the Yorkshire Gothic ambience; it could be a backdrop to a horror film.
Yet this is Doug Simpson’s preferred patch for a wander. Best known for overseeing the successful reintroduction of red kites to Yorkshire, he looks at this windswept, indefinite area of “unofficial countryside” in Haverah Park, near Harrogate, through the eyes of an ornithologist.
Continue reading...The case for renationalising Australia's electricity grid
Australia's electricity grid is no longer fit for purpose. Tatters ❀/Flickr, CC BY-SAThe public debate over the problems of electricity supply displays a curious disconnect. On the one hand, there is virtually universal agreement that the system is in crisis. After 25 years, the promised outcomes of reform – cheaper and more reliable electricity, competitive markets and rational investment decisions – are further away than ever.
On the other hand, proposals to change the situation range from marginal tweaks to politically motivated mischief-making. The preliminary report of the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market, released last year, canvasses such options as the introduction of capacity markets for reserve power, which have done little to resolve problems overseas.
Meanwhile, the Turnbull government has used recent failures to score points against renewable energy (hated, for obscure historical-cultural reasons, by its right-wing base) and to promote the absurd idea of new coal-fired power stations.
A sorry stateThis debate might make sense if the system had worked well in the past. In reality, however, the National Electricity Market (NEM) never produced lower prices or more reliable power for households.
In the early years of the NEM, reductions in maintenance spending concealed this failure. When new investment became necessary in the early 2000s, the result was a dramatic upsurge in prices. This was primarily because the NEM regulatory system allowed rates of return on capital far higher than those needed to finance the system under public ownership.
Until the 1990s state governments owned and controlled Australia’s electricity grids from power stations to poles and wires. The expansion of interconnections between state networks created the possibility of a truly national network. The Commonwealth and the states could have jointly owned such a network, following the highly successful model of Snowy Hydro.
The creation of the NEM broke this system into pieces. Ownership of generation was separated from transmission, distribution and retail, while maintaining effectively separate state systems. The only national component was at the regulatory level, where two separate national regulators (the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Australian Energy Regulator) overlap with the continuing regulatory operations of state governments.
Most state governments have sold their electricity enterprises wholly or partly. Victoria and South Australia fully privatised their systems by the early 2000s. NSW partially privatised its network business after 2015. Queensland privatised the retail sector but maintained public ownership of the network and some electricity generation.
Contrary to the hopes of the market designers, breaking up these integrated systems has delivered no benefits, while incurring huge costs. Power prices have continued to rise.
These costs have been on display, in dramatic form, in recent system failures in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania. Everyone has blamed everyone else, and no real change has emerged.
The tragedy is that all this could have been avoided if we had seized the opportunity in the 1990s to build a unified national grid, with a single authority running transmission networks and the interconnectors between them. This would still allow competition in generation, but would abandon the idea of market incentives in the provision of network services.
Electricity networks are considered to be natural monopolies. Unlike other industries, where it makes sense for lots of businesses to compete and drive costs lower, the cost and importance of supplying electricity means it make sense for one business to control the market.
Given this status, this authority should not be a privatised firm or even a corporatised government enterprise. Instead, it should be a statutory authority with a primary mission of delivering energy security at low cost.
This failure was not confined to electricity. Our telecommunications network was also privatised in the 1990s, with the promise that competition would deliver better services. In reality, investment and innovation stagnated. It got to the point where the government was forced to re-enter the market with the National Broadband Network (NBN).
As the NBN example suggests, unscrambling the egg of failed reform will be a complex and messy business. It will have to be done gradually, perhaps beginning with South Australia and Tasmania, the states worst affected by recent disasters. But there is no satisfactory alternative.
Public appetite, lack of political willAn obvious question is whether renationalising the electricity network is politically feasible. While the political class on both sides views privatised infrastructure as an unchallengeable necessity, the general public has a very different view. With only a handful of exceptions, voters have rejected privatisation whenever they have had a chance to do so.
The question of reversing past privatisations is more difficult, and there is less evidence. However, none of the privatisations of the reform era, even those that took place decades ago, commands majority support in Australia.
The question has been addressed by pollsters in Britain, which provided the model for Australia’s energy reforms. The results show overwhelming public support for renationalisation, even though the electricity industry has been in private ownership for decades. Even a majority of Conservative voters support public ownership.
The issue will have its next electoral test in Western Australia, where the Barnett government is proposing to sell its majority interest in its electricity distribution enterprise Western Power. While nothing is ever certain in politics, current polls suggest the government is headed for defeat.
John Quiggin has worked on the issues of privatisation and electricity reform for many years, and has acted as a consultant to unions, state governments and community groups. He received no funding for the work on which this article was based.
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