Regrow Qld 3 February 2021 Issue 5 Vol 2
Renewable energy, regenerative farming, and revitalising our communities. Unashamedly parochial. Unashamedly political. Let's Regrow Queensland.
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Editorial
Anna Hitchcock
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
My frends,
I have been spending a fair bit of time in the ocean recently, in spite of it being far from my natural habitat. There’s the sand for one thing, the random bits of seaweed that seem to end up in my hair, the fact that the sun has reached Death Star levels of radiation by 9am, and swimsuits that ride up your backside in an unattractive manner.
Nevertheless there are many benefits to sea swimming for humans, which is what I tell myself every time I am coughing seawater out of my sinuses or rinsing half the beach out of my swimmers. One sea denizen that we do not enjoy co-existing with is jellyfish. They seem to have any number of ways of making humans very unhappy.
Of course, it was the only bluebottle for 20km that managed to sting me a couple of summers ago. It well lived up to its name ‘floating terror’ as I saw it sailing towards me. Luckily, I only got a mild rap across the knuckles before I managed to get out of the way. Interestingly, the current treatment for a bluebottle sting is ice or very hot water, not urine or vinegar.
Jellyfish have been in existence for at least 500 million years,[1] and possibly 700 million years or more, making them the oldest multi-organ animal group. However, they are poorly studied, and there are many species. Some species are invasive, and some species explode in population numbers in reaction to pollution in the water or reduced fishing.
It’s also only one species of turtle - the leatherback - that mostly eats jellies, and is in danger from mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish. Green turtles, for instance, are mostly herbivores [2].
All of which shows the danger of making generalisations when it comes to biology. We know so little about our world, and we’re smashing it up just as fast as we can.
Meanwhile, your editor has sand to wash out of her hair before she gets back to work saving the world.
{Anna}
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071030211210.htm
[2] https://www.seeturtles.org/sea-turtle-diet
NEWS
(From Future Crunch 29th January - you can subscribe here to a free newsletter: https://futurecrunch.com/subscribe/)
China has passed a landmark environmental law protecting the Yangtze, one of the country's two 'mother rivers.' From the 1st of March, chemical projects near the river will be banned and relocated, sand mining will be restricted, and all fishing, including in tributaries, lakes and the estuary, will be forbidden (more than 400 million people live in the Yangtze basin).
https://news.trust.org/item/20201230015909-kvagi/
The world’s biggest diesel engine factory in France, is facing up the inevitable, and switching to electric motors. By 2025, more than half the plant's production will be dedicated entirely to electric vehicles, a shift that's testament to a car industry in flux. Demand for diesel cars has slumped since 2015, following pollution scandals and tough new EU regulations.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-europe-diesel-idUSKBN29U1HI
The interior least tern, the smallest member of the tern family, has been taken off the US endangered list after 30 years of tireless work by states, federal agencies, tribes and conservationists. In the early 20th century, its feathers became a popular feature of women's hats, and by 1985 numbers had dropped to less than 2,000. Today, the population is over 18,000, with 480 nesting sites in 18 states.
https://apnews.com/article/interior-least-tern-bird-d3bc413755d51b3a9fae8b0b669a5a96
Forward thinking -
Peter van Beek
‘Let’s hear it for cheap electricity, a shot in the arm for North Queensland and a nice clean-up of an eyesore’.
Queensland has more than its fair share of deserted mines of all types[1]. Most are small and old but many recent ones are big. These are huge blots on the landscape, literally an ugly waste of space. Australian company Genex Power Ltd[2] has started work on an old goldmine near Kidston in North Queensland, 275 km West of Townsville[3]. They will convert it into a store for electricity by turning it into a Pumped Hydro site.
Pumped Hydro uses surplus electricity during daytime (from the 50 MW solar farm in the background and other sources) to pump water from a lower reservoir (the pit in the foreground) into a higher reservoir (the pit in the middle). At night time they will let the water run back into the lower pit. The pump will then act as a generator and produce electricity. It can produce 250MW for 8 hours to sell on the main grid. This technology is widely used around the world.
A transmission line to connect to the main grid is being designed. An old construction camp for 500 workers will be renovated as will the airstrip. Local communication infrastructure will be upgraded. The next phase will be to add a 270MW solar farm and a 150MW wind farm to the site. That will make it bigger than the Tarong North power station.
North Queensland has many mineral deposits but has been held back by high cost of electricity and transport. Renewable energy is changing that rapidly. Electricity from renewables is now far cheaper than that from coal, even if counting only the basic cost of coal and wages. The ‘fuel’ cost of running electric trucks, utes and cars by using solar energy is next to nothing.
Jobs will inevitably be lost in coal mines but many more of the same type of jobs will be created in new industries. North Queensland is in for a period of growth. Economics rule.
[1]https://www.murweh.qld.gov.au/downloads/file/144/abandoned-mines-mappdf
[2] ‘GNX’ on the Australian Stock Market.
[3]https://reneweconomy.com.au/genex-commences-early-works-at-flagship-pumped-hydro-project-95383/
What we’re reading:
Boiling Cold is an excellent LNG focused newsletter from Western Australia. You can subscribe here (there are free and paid options): https://www.boilingcold.com.au/
“Boiling Cold is news for the rest of us: employees, suppliers, customers, communities and the curious; those who want the see worthwhile jobs for themselves and their children, the environment protected, taxes paid and governments working for their citizens.
Boiling Cold is written by Peter Milne, who covered energy for The West Australian and has since written for The Saturday Paper and numerous industry publications. Prior to journalism he had a 20-plus years oil and gas career in engineering, economic analysis and commercial negotiation roles.”
Upskilling:
We thought this article was really interesting - it talks about how often the most effective thing you can do to solve a problem costs the least, and how it’s important to direct resources to the most effective actions: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism/
For example you can see in the chart below that education is the most effective option to save lives in this instance (HIV and AIDS).
Here are some excerpts from the article -
“Researchers have found the following framework to be useful. Working on a cause is likely to be highly impactful to the extent that the cause is:
Great in scale (it affects many lives, by a great amount)
Highly neglected (few other people are working on addressing the problem), and
Highly solvable or tractable (additional resources will do a great deal to address it).” …
“For most of us, a significant amount of our productive waking life — over 80,000 hours on average — is spent working. This is an enormous resource that can be used to make the world better. If you can increase your impact by just 1%, that's equivalent to 800 hours of extra work.” …
“One of the easiest ways that a person can make a difference is by donating money to organizations that work on some of the most important causes. Monetary donations allow effective organizations to do more good things, and are much more flexible than time donations (like volunteering).
Most of us don’t realize just how rich we are in relative terms. People earning professional salaries in high-income countries are normally in the top 5% of global incomes. This relative wealth presents an enormous opportunity to do good if used effectively.” …
Speaking of donations, have you subscribed yet? Paying subscribers help us out enormously as the money isn’t tied to grant conditions. This lets us do things like advertise, or put up a billboard.
You can make a one-off donation to us by using the bank account details at: https://www.gladstoneconservationcouncil.com.au/make-a-donation/
Opinion:
Don’t Tell Mum I Worked for Newscorp, She Thought I Was a Dishwasher on the Death Star
”Um, Mr Darth, I have some concerns…”
In a previous career, not so long ago, I worked in the deep, dark depths of the Death Star canteen as a Dishwasher (Grade 2).
Well, that’s what I told everyone… it was better than admitting I worked as a reporter at Newscorp for the Dark Overlord, Darth Rupert Murdoch.
But, I’d wanted to be a reporter ever since I was a kid, and when the door of opportunity cracked opened, I choked down my loathing for Rupert, and everything he stood for, and teleported aboard (yes, yes, I realise that’s a Star Trek reference… humour me).
The paper was ‘The Gladstone Observer’, our city’s sole surviving newspaper with a history stretching back over a hundred and fifty years.
Like many regional newspapers, it was independently owned and printed, but eventually the corporates moved in and it became part of the APN stable until it was ensnared in the Newscorp empire’s tractor beam.
Previous employees told me that was the moment the papers’ culture changed for the worst.
Darth Murdoch, they discovered, was not in the business of spreading joy, light and harmony around the galaxy.
The pay was crap, the pressure intense, the hours long and public holiday pay and overtime were viewed by management as mythical beasts they refused to believe in.
I quickly learned to cope with the stomach churning anxiety of never being truly ‘off duty’, because we were always searching for the next story.
Still, I had a lot of fun, picked up plenty of handy skills (except shorthand, I never really nailed that), got an education into the workings of a newsroom and sales team, plus met some amazing people and shared their stories.
Even better, my co-workers were very smart, funny, insightful, extremely dedicated and always prepared to help me… no matter how many times they’d shown me the same things before; bless ‘em!
Sadly, I learned most of them were saddled with student loans for their Journalism degrees, which they could barely afford to repay on the pennies Rupert was slinging them.
Even so, we all toiled like sweating coolies in a boiler room to be the best damn dishwashers on our little section of the Death Star.
Now, I was not our papers best reporter, by a long shot, but I recall the day I saw ‘The Writing On The Wall’.
One of Rupe’s minions arrived to tell us Newscorp would be moving toward a subscription based formula for our writers. Basically, if you didn’t sell subscriptions, you’d be unceremoniously booted off the Death Star and abandoned on the nearest deserted planet.
Up until then, readers were allowed ten free stories per month on the papers’ digital platform.
I thought that was a good idea, as it allowed folk to select the yarns they wanted to read and gave writers a chance to showcase their wares. Much like a well-stocked shop window tantalises customers into the store.
It was a model which worked for people who enjoyed reading the stories I wrote; general and human interest, quirky yarns, historical features, art and music reviews and a couple of humorous weekly columns.
I loved writing that stuff and, as it turned out, so did some of my loyal readers, because I was the first scribbler in the newsroom to sell a couple of subscriptions under the new model, which shocked a lot of people; chiefly, me.
Pretty soon, the writers covering the court rounds, crime, politics, industry, disasters and other big news yarns were zooming into double figure subscription territory.
These hard news stories were always going to attract clicks. And clicks means bucks for Newscorp and job security for the writer.
My stories were ‘nice’, but they only offered a window into the lives of the people in our community. Stories that would be pinned on fridges, stored in photo albums or collected for nostalgic posterity.
John Williamson once warbled, ‘Good news never made a paper sell,’ and, in the back of my mind, a clock was ticking. My time was running out. I was a dinosaur in a dying industry.
Around this time, I noticed my wife, children and friends had stopped reading the printed daily paper, and were getting all their news off Facebook.
They weren’t alone. Pretty soon, our breaking stories were being copied and pasted and shared on Facebook by people who had found a way under, over or around the paywall.
In the face of this digital onslaught, Rupert declared if the Rebel Scum wanted to read his content then they’d have to pay for it; all of it.
Wildly cheered on by his sycophantic lackeys, he set up a paywall and locked the content behind it.
It didn’t matter if you were living on the other side of the galaxy and only wanted information on a person, relative or feature in Gladstone from a particular story, you had to buy a monthly subscription. Not smart.
How many good stories went unread as people clicked away from the paywall message I’ll never know. But what I did know was readership numbers began to plummet like a shot-up Millenium Falcon.
The Death Star news service requires funding, just like every other paper does, and I’m certain they would still be a Force if they’d done what other online newspapers did, such as The Guardian, which offer all their content for free, but pepper their stories with little messages i.e.: ‘Good writing costs money, please consider subscribing.’
(Note: I did. I still do. They’re so polite, I find them hard to refuse.)
Meanwhile, in early 2018, sensing the big implosion was coming, I bid a fond farewell to my fellow dishwashers, hopped into an escape pod, blasted off the Death Star and went for a long drive to think about my next career move.
Since then, in spite of being handed millions of taxpayer dollars to keep the doors open (and rather handily preventing Newscorp reporters from asking sticky questions about the LNP”s dodgy deals… prove me wrong somebody!) Rupert stopped printing nearly every regional and rural paper he owned around the country in June 2020.
Newsrooms were merged, then many offices were closed as journos worked from home due to the Corona Virus.
So where are we now?
Not a giant leap forward for news services.
It turns out that little, or no, news in small and regional communities isn’t actually good news.
In medieval times at least they had town criers to spread the news of the day.
Today, we have social media where The Four Horsemen of the Troll Apocalypse (Gossip, Innuendo, Bullying and Humiliation), terrorise and inflame the unwary, uneducated and easily incensed.
So, with their usual flair for incompetence (not to mention corruption), instead of funding small, independent papers in rural communities, the Federal Government demanded big tech companies sling Rupert more millions to keep his Death Star operational.
At which point Google decided to stop broadcasting Australian news.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Well done gang. Well, bloody, done.
Which is why I’m about to ask you to do something I’ve never asked of any of my readers:
Please consider subscribing to independent newsletters like this one.
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