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The Environment Thread

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This is interesting IMO. I was trying to search for how the new Govt was going to reach the new carbon reduction target.

Anthony Albanese commits Labor to emissions reduction target of 43% by 2030

In opposition leader’s most significant policy announcement to date, Albanese also pledges to boost renewables share of grid to 82%
www.theguardian.com
From the article:
Anthony Albanese will set an emissions reduction target of 43% by 2030 and boost the share of renewables in the national electricity market to 82% if Labor wins the coming federal election.

The ALP leader has unveiled Labor’s most electorally risky policy commitment since the 2019 election defeat, declaring a more ambitious target would spur $76bn in investment and reduce average annual household power bills by $275 in 2025 and $378 in 2030.


Guardian Australia revealed on Friday the shadow cabinet had signed off on a 43% target, which is lower than the 45% medium term target Labor promised at the 2019 election, but higher than the Morrison government’s Abbott-era commitment of a 26-28% cut on 2005 levels.


The primary mechanism Labor will use to reduce emissions faster than current projections will be the Coalition’s existing safeguard mechanism. Improvements to that scheme are expected to deliver emissions reductions of 213Mt by 2030.

In electricity, Labor will significantly upgrade transmission infrastructure to hasten the transition to renewables, invest in solar banks and install 400 community batteries. These measures are projected to see renewables make up 82% of power generation in Australia’s national electricity market by 2030, instead of 68% under current projections.
 
Not half as bad as this one, if this gets hold it is ecological armageddon.

Australia honey bees put in lockdown due to deadly varroa parasite

A deadly parasite is detected in the country's bee population which could cause millions of dollars of damage.
www.bbc.com
 
I remember posting about this year's ago and how the Australian government was spending something like $125,000 for bio security on this problem to keep it out of Australia. At the time it wasn't here. Seriously underfunded.
What an utter joke.Makes you wonder about the level of idiocy running this country.
 
Absolutely, if the bees are decimated, pollination is decimated, crops are decimated.
We just have to hope the media wind up the troops, they're too ffing dumb to understand otherwise.?
 
Learn something new every day.

This piece from George Monbiot starts with an intriguing new analysis of why the Earth flourishing ecosystems almost went extinct because of CO2 created global warming 252 million years ago.

Fossil fuel burning once caused a mass extinction – now we’re risking another | George Monbiot

The Devon coastline reveals that Earth was in a near-lifeless state for up to five million years after the last event, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
 
Check this out.

A desalination plant that uses almost no energy to produce fresh water from sea water and doesn't spew out super dense brine.
It is simple, operating and ground breaking.

 
Recognising when you have made a mistake. Wood fires are great . But not for ones health or the environment.
As usual some excellent detail and research by George Monbiot.

Wood burners are incredibly bad for the environment – and flood our homes with toxins, too. I wish I’d known that in 2008

‘Every time you open the stove door to refuel, your home is flooded with tiny particulates, accompanied by other toxins.’ Photograph: Rolf Bruderer/Getty Images/Blend Images
Tue 27 Dec 2022 23.00 AEDTLast modified on Tue 27 Dec 2022 23.09 AEDT


It’s shame that has stopped me writing about it before. The shame of failing to think for myself and see the bigger picture, which is more or less my job description. Instead, I followed the crowd.

In 2008 I was refitting my house. It was a century old and poorly built. Insulating it and installing efficient appliances was expensive but straightforward, and the decisions I made were generally good ones. But the toughest issue was heating. The technology that had seemed to show most promise a few years before – domestic fuel cells – hadn’t materialised. Domestic heat pumps (which are now more accessible) were extremely expensive and scarcely deployed in the UK. That left only two options: gas or wood. I wanted to unhook myself from fossil fuels. So I went with wood.

At some expense, I fitted three wood burners and the steel flues required to remove the smoke. I would buy the wood locally, from a contractor I knew.

My burning shame: I fitted my house with three wood-burning stoves | George Monbiot

Wood burners are awful for the environment and flood our homes with toxins, too. I wish I’d known that in 2008, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
 
basilio said:
Recognising when you have made a mistake. Wood fires are great . But not for ones health or the environment.
Click to expand...
Ah yes, wood fires.

Amazing how political the things can become as anyone familiar with energy issues in Tasmania 1980's and 90's will painfully recall. How you heated your home became a political statement not simply a practical or financial decision.

Years later, 2007, I bought a house with one. Then realised I had absolutely no idea how to use it - yes I know how to light a fire but couldn't get one to burn inside a steel box. Then I discovered it matters hugely which way around the logs are placed - end of the logs needs to face the back and front of the firebox, not sideways. So simple in hindsight.....

Glad to not have one now though. Always felt somewhat out of place owning one, in a manner akin to an atheist turning up to a church service.

"Smoking is old fashioned, obsolete and no longer required". Indeed.



That's what domestic wood fires and an inversion layer do. Location is Launceston Tas and this was a routine daily occurrence during winter 1980's into the 00's.

Didn't happen prior to the 1980's as domestic slow combustion wood heaters weren't that common and has now been greatly reduced by the shift to electric heating.

That particular photo, or replicas of it, have been widely used and was taken from here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah-Henderson-22/publication/234089475/figure/fig2/AS:393515793174546@1470832884599/Launceston-Tasmania-showing-reduced-visibility-associated-with-smoke-from-domestic-wood.png Not sure if it's copyright but no infringement is intended - any copyright belongs to the original photographer.
 
My father in law recently died from lung damage, lives in the country and doesn't smoke. Obvious to me, wood fire caused.
 
Moonbattery!!!

Okay yeah, let's ban wood fires

And diesel vehicles
And tyres (microplastics bruh)
And gas stoves (like has been mooted in 'Murica)
And bush fires (or at least stop firefighters so they can save themselves)
Let's stop cane farmers burning their stubble.
And those gas flames outside of crown casino, fatal, let's ban them.

... And from a personal point of view, let's ban horses all together so I don't have to breathe in sublimated keratin protein plus that maybe a dozen other serious risks that are part of my job.

Not saying we shouldn't try to minimise particulates in the atmosphere but, ferchrissake!
 
This is not good news on the plastics recycling front. The very best plastics recyclers produces untold amounts of micro plastic particles.
Catastrophic consequences. Clearly needs a complete rethink of how plastic is recycled

Recycling can release huge quantities of microplastics, study finds​

Scientists find high levels of microplastics in wastewater from unnamed UK plant – and in air surrounding facility

Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by

About this content
Karen McVeigh

@karenmcveigh1
Tue 23 May 2023 13.25 EDTLast modified on Tue 23 May 2023 13.49 ED


Recycling has been promoted by the plastics industry as a key solution to the growing problem of plastic waste. But a study has found recycling itself could be releasing huge quantities of microplastics.

An international team of scientists sampled wastewater from a state-of-the-art recycling plant at an undisclosed location in the UK. They found that the microplastics released in the water amounted to 13% of the plastic processed.

The facility could be releasing up to 75bn plastic particles in each cubic metre of wastewater, they estimated.
“I was incredibly shocked,” said Erina Brown, the lead researcher of the study, conducted at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. “It’s scary because recycling has been designed in order to reduce the problem and to protect the environment. This is a huge problem we’re creating.”

The researchers tested the water before and after the plant installed a water filtration system and found the filter reduced the concentration of microplastics from 13% of the plastic processed to 6%.

The estimate of 75bn particles a cubic metre is for a plant with a filter installed. A majority of the particles were smaller than 10 microns, about the diameter of a human red blood cell, with more than 80% smaller than five microns, Brown said.

Recycling can release huge quantities of microplastics, study finds

Scientists find high levels of microplastics in wastewater from unnamed UK plant – and in air surrounding facility
www.theguardian.com
 
basilio said:
Clearly needs a complete rethink of how plastic is recycled
Click to expand...
As a concept I like the complex approach.

Don't take shortcuts - just turn it back to oil. Then refine it for use (eg to make new plastic).

That's the complex, energy-intensive approach but plausibly the most workable one since it gets around most of the other issues associated with "shortcut" approaches.
 
wayneL said:
Okay yeah, let's ban wood fires
Click to expand...
The thing about wood fires is the detail.

Long story short a pellet fire is several orders of magnitude cleaner than a slow combustion heater despite both burning wood.

If people want fires in their homes then pellets are much cleaner way to go about it.
 
We went on the Canadian train ride through the Rockies and where it follows the rivers they have a number of artificial nests on poles in the river.

It works well over there and I have always wondered why we don't do it here.

Perhaps a useful project instead of just being a pack of whingers might gain some support for our green extremists
 
A heads up on the recycling of electronic waste. Sad, scary xhit.

‘I spot brand new TVs, here to be shredded’: the truth about our electronic waste​

In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about the billions of other defunct (or not) devices?
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Sat 3 Jun 2023 08.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...the-truth-about-our-electronic-waste#comments
In the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes?

I haven’t come to Fresno to see the trees; I’ve come about the device on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US.

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.”

‘I spot brand new TVs, here to be shredded’: the truth about our electronic waste

In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about the billions of other defunct (or not) devices?
www.theguardian.com
 
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