As the Christmas holidays approach, the giant factories are kicking into high gear to provide Australians with monstrous piles of cheaply produced goods.

This year will be different. This year Australians will give the gift of genuine concern for other Australians.

So here are suggestions for great gifts that support the local economy:
Everyone — yes EVERYONE gets their hair cut. How about gift certificates from your local hair salon or barber?

Gym membership? It’s appropriate for all ages who are thinking about some health improvement.

Who wouldn’t appreciate getting their car detailed? Small owned detail shops & car washes would love to sell you a gift certificate or a book of gift certificates.

For the Gardeners on your list – how about some lovely healthy pot plants or plants for the garden or even a gift certificate from the local lawnmowing person.

Are you one of those extravagant givers? Perhaps that grateful gift receiver would like his driveway sealed, or lawn mowed for the summer, or games at the local golf course.

There are a bazillion owner-run restaurants — all offering gift certificates. If your intended isn’t the fancy eatery sort, what about a half dozen breakfasts at the local cafe. Remember, folks isn’t about big National chains — this is about supporting your local community with their financial lives on the line to keep their doors open.

How many people couldn’t use an oil change for their car, truck or motorcycle, done at a local garage?

What about a gift certificate from a local home handyperson for some chores to be done around the home?

Thinking about a heartfelt gift for mum? Mum would LOVE the services of a local cleaning lady for a day.

Someone’s computer could use a tune-up, so find some young computer wizard who is struggling to get his repair business up & running.

OK, you were looking for something more personal. Local crafts people spin their own wool & knit them into scarves. They make jewellery, & pottery & beautiful wooden boxes.

Plan your holiday outings at local, owner operated restaurants and leave your server a nice tip. How about going out to see a play or ballet at your hometown theatre?

Musicians need love too, so find a venue showcasing local bands.

If you have money to burn, leave the postman, garbo or babysitter a nice BIG tip.

You see, Christmas is no longer about draining Australian pockets for cheap junk with a short life before ending up on the tip. Christmas is now about caring about Australia, encouraging our small businesses to keep plugging away to follow their dreams. When we care about other Australians, we care about our communities, & the benefits come back to us in ways we couldn’t imagine.

THIS is the new Australian Christmas tradition. This is a revolution of caring about each other and growing sustainability.

Check out this article extract from today’s Sydney Morning Herald, which puts the benefit into perspective: no need to build a new power station for many years as a result of the levelling of peak loads by use of solar electricity generation under the Solar Bonus Scheme:

Solar does NSW a power of good

Brian Robins

August 31, 2011

THE boom in solar panel installations coupled with higher electricity prices and energy efficiency measures has pushed back the likely need for new baseload electricity generation capacity in NSW until near the end of the decade.

The need for more baseload power, which operates 24 hours a day, has been steadily pushed back for several years now.

When trying to sell the power industry, the then premier Morris Iemma said a power supply shortfall would occur by 2013-14.

In the annual Statement of Opportunities issued by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) today, that need has been pushed back to 2018-19, a further two-year delay since last year’s forecast.

A factor in the extended delay has been the 500 to 600 megawatts of solar panel capacity that is being installed following the state government’s generous feed-in tariff subsidy, which has now been curtailed.

Also, higher electricity prices, energy efficiency programs and the slowdown in demand due to the global financial crisis and, more recently, the decline in manufacturing, have hit electricity demand forecasts for NSW.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/solar-does-nsw-a-power-of-good-20110830-1jk5l.html#ixzz1WZU9oTGs

Bernard, your bagging of the term sustainability is shallow and unnecessary. Sustainability is either a warm fuzzy term, or a straw man for bagging, for those who don’t understand what it means. I’d expect someone in your position would be able to read a planning document to see if there is a real sustainability prospect in it, or if its just greenwash. So if you believe that the words are used without the real prospect of sustainability, critique the planning documents on that basis and don’t give the impression that you believe that sustainability is just a word without any real meaning, ignoring it as a whole system of principles, strategies, actions, tools and measurements. I expect better from you.

Bernard Salt: The Australian Thursday 3/3/2011 Extracts

I HAVE a theory about the strategic planning process in Australia’s five largest cities.

There is a sameness to the plans that is hardly coincidental. No metropolitan plan is truly unique; they all embody much the same principles. Or could it be that each of the states have independently come to the same conclusion about how their capital cities should be managed in the future?

Even the time frame of strategic plans is similar. Planning documents for Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide look out 25 years to 2036 while southeast Queensland and Perth work on a 20-year blueprint. Why don’t strategic plans look 40 or even 50 years into the future?

—

It was the Melbourne at 2030 plan, released in October 2002, that set the 21st century strategic planning agenda in Australia. All other current strategic plans followed the Victorians. I think it is Melbourne that is the intellectual stronghold of strategic planning in Australia. The planning agenda, vision horizon and key ratios that apply in that city end up being only moderately modified in later plans for other states.

And I suspect that Melbourne continues its lead in the national planning agenda with documents such as Delivering Melbourne’s Newest Sustainable Communities. (Notice the word “sustainable” inserted into the title. It wards off the evil spirits of negative public sentiment. If it’s sustainable it’s warm and cuddly.) Not only do the Victorians set the planning agenda, they also determine the politically correct language to use.

If you are a developer seeking development approval in any part of metropolitan Australia, make sure you read and understand planning documentation coming out of Victoria. And make sure you use the language of the Victorians: insert the word sustainable into the title of your project. It has an oddly calming effect on the planning community.

Worried about big slugs? Try a carbon tax

By Michael Stutchbury

TONY Abbott rejects Julia Gillard’s plans to put a price on carbon emissions as a great big new tax on everything. But his populism risks saddling Australia with a crazy quilt of hidden carbon prices that will cost much more to cut emissions, whatever you think of the science.

A general carbon price – most likely a carbon tax – is needed if only to counter the crazy-quilt risk from the balance of power Greens and country independents. Even climate-change sceptic Bob Katter found common cause with the Greens’ Adam Bandt on “clean energy” bush subsidies. And this just follows the precedent of Labor’s green protectionism, including its “green car” subsidies to the motor vehicle industry.

Such crazy schemes all impose a price on cutting a tonne of carbon emissions by lifting the price of energy, soaking up tax revenue or imposing blunt and costly regulations. But these prices are typically hidden from consumers or deflected by the supposed multiple gains of “direct action” on emissions. By contrast, a general carbon price allows businesses and consumers – rather than politicians, bureaucrats and special interests – to reduce emissions at least cost.

Rudd Labor’s meek surrender to the Abbott assault underlines how an explicit carbon price is more difficult to sell politically, even if couched in an emissions trading scheme rather than a straight carbon tax. Yet the resulting investment uncertainty is pushing up electricity prices, perhaps just as much as if a generalised carbon price were in place.

Greg Combet is a sensible choice as Climate Change Minister to pull together a consensus in favour of a simpler carbon tax, rather than Penny Wong’s more complex ETS.

The Greens favour a carbon tax. So now does Ross Garnaut, who has shifted from the ETS after last December’s Copenhagen fiasco derailed any global deal to help Australia buy cheaper internationally traded emissions permits. Garnaut also figures that a carbon tax, implemented by issuing unlimited emissions permits at a fixed but gradually rising price, would avoid the risk of big carbon price swings under a politically contentious ETS. And it would puncture the rationale for crazy schemes.

• The mandating of 20 per cent renewable energy by 2020 ensures that one-fifth of Australia’s energy use will cost more than it needs to, through the proliferation of subsidised wind farms requiring very expensive transmission lines to far-flung destinations. Without a carbon price, the renewables mandate squeezes out gas-fired energy generation as a more efficient option for reducing our dependence on coal. The Greens want to lift the renewables mandate to 30 per cent.

• Labor’s $2.5 billion home insulation stimulus scheme shows just how much disaster can be courted by confused objectives. As a stimulus program, it ended up killing workers and burning down homes. The mixed-up objectives helped hide its very high price tag for reducing each tonne of carbon emissions.

• The same confusion applies to Labor’s “cash for clunkers” campaign promise of a $2000 rebate for motorists who scrap their pre-1995 cars in favour of new fuel-efficient vehicles. In the US, Barack Obama’s $US3bn ($3.2bn) cash for clunkers scheme pulled forward car purchases that mostly would have happened any way. One US study estimates it created less than 3700 auto jobs at a cost of $US91 to $US301 for each tonne of saved carbon emissions. Gillard didn’t seem to comprehend the irrationality of her claim that Labor’s $395 million scheme would save one million tonnes of carbon emissions. That’s a whopping $400 a tonne, paid for by taxpayers and no doubt internally justified as reinforcing Labor’s green car subsidies.

• Rather than manufacturing protection, Gillard’s promise to Tony Windsor to extend import protection to the ethanol industry for another five years is about rural protectionism. This all started when John Howard caved in to Dick Honan’s Manildra group to provide a one-year ethanol production subsidy in 2002 amid the threat of low-cost Brazilian imports. Now Gillard has extended the subsidy from 2015 to 2020 to get Windsor’s support at a cost of another $140m from the Renewable Energy Future Fund. But a 2008 report co-authored by Centre for International Economics director Derek Quirke found that producing ethanol fuel from wheat required $680 to $790 of subsidy for each tonne of carbon emissions saved. You could get 20 times the emissions reductions by buying carbon offsets on the Chicago Climate Exchange. And the ethanol subsidy threatens to push up feedstock costs for Australia’s beef producers.

As well as the ethanol subsidy, Gillard promised to put Windsor on her new climate change committee, which will get an update from Garnaut of his September 2008 climate-change report. It will also seek to measure the “carbon price equivalent” of post-Copenhagen emissions reduction measures in China and other developed economies.

The story here is that a Kyoto-style “target and timetable” deal for reducing emissions was never going to fly because such binding common commitments would impose very different national costs. China only offered to cut its emissions “intensity” – or emissions per unit of gross domestic product – by up to 45 per cent on business-as-usual levels by 2020.

Yet Australian National University economist Warwick McKibbin calculates that China’s offer implies comparable economic costs – in terms of the hit to its economic growth – as the absolute emissions reductions promised by the US, Europe, Japan and Australia. The implied carbon price for both China and Australia is about $US20 a tonne. This potentially reduces the “carbon leakage” costs on emissions-intensive industries because Australia would not be going alone where it matters.

And, compared with Labor’s ETS plan, the costs of a carbon tax could be eased if it were used to cut other inefficient taxes.

Lower-income earners could be compensated for higher electricity prices by reducing work disincentives as proposed by the Henry review’s income tax and benefits reforms. The Coalition has backed these reforms in principle. A revenue-neutral carbon tax wouldn’t have to be a great big new tax on everything.

And my comment to the Oz online:

Good on you Stutch. Finally a reasoned analysis of the carbon reduction situation without the stupid politics designed to play to the swinging voter and the misinformed. And from the Australian, no less! Imagine what might have been if the Oz took this as their editorial position during the Garnaut period, then the ETS debate and more recently in the election campaign. Imagine if the Oz didn’t give each and every contrarian their “equal time” and a platform for misinformation, as if there were two equal and opposing sides of the debate. We might have ended up with a workable approach to emission reduction coming on stream as the economy picks up (maybe even world’s best practice?). Now who knows when we’ll get any clarity on this issue from either side of politics. Talk about a lost opportunity and the loss of valuable time.

Attached is a slide show from Fiona Waterhouse’s presentation to the inaugural gathering of the Coffs Harbour Sustainable Building and Technology Group back on March 11th. (That’s me in green shirt in centre rows listening intently). Good presentation on networking for innovation and issues in getting venture capital support for innovations. Good discussions with other industry people before and after the presentation. Look forward to more meetings like this.

Find more photos like this on Sustainable Building and Technology

Greensynergy Consulting will have a stall at the Festival, so if you want to discuss anything about sustainability, drop in to see me on the day.

The image below is at the information stall at last years event talking window films with Raj Ussher, a local Bello identity. I only came across this image from last year on this year’s web site <www.energyfestival.org>.

Matthew (right) + Raj Ussher (left) at last year's Bellingen Renewable Energy Fair

In all of this debacle that the installation of foil insulation to flat ceilings is inherently dodgy. Both as a result of the electrical dangers and also due to reduced insulation values. The insulation values of the top surface of the foil must be discounted due to dust build-up: in the old days we used to treat such surfaces as having zero reflectivity, thus zero insulation. Unfortunately, many of the houses with such insulation are  not only potentially dangerous, but are not delivering the insulation values claimed by the suppliers. The suppliers always count the full reflective value of their product, and do not account for the dust effect. This could reduce values by around R1 for summer conditions. Depending on what other insulation has been installed under roof cladding, foil insulation is clearly inadequate in any climate zone (see figures below). In all the media beat up about the insulation debacle, I have not seen any references to this point in any media discussion . Other criticisms are:

• Traditionally, foil has never been installed in flat ceilings. I put the change down to aggressive marketing by the plastic bubble insulation manufacturers who spread the fiction that one layer of foil is a direct and equivalent substitution for bulk insulation. They claim this by the most optimistic calculations for insulation, which are often inapproriate for many specific locations.
• Most of the images in the media of foil insulation installations are so poorly done that it reinforces the notion that foil is completely inappropriate in this situation. There are too many obstacles for a continuous foil membrane: cuts around truss chords; access for cabling and downlights. Further, the foil completely obscures the timber framing, so that any trades entering the roof space will find it harder to get a foothold. This means more tradies  and DIYers plunging through ceilings!
• The insulation values obtained by a single layer of foil is also generally inadequate for all climates, even if the dust effect is not included.
• The only foil product suitable for flat ceilings is the concertina-type that fits between ceiling joists or trusses, as it keeps the timber exposed, does not need to be fixed in place and thus avoids clips that may penetrate electrical cabling; and can be more readily cut around downlights and penetrations.
• Note that foil in a flat ceiling  only produces insulation value for the bottom foil surface and associated air gaps: assuming a 90mm air gap if installed across tops of bottom truss chords, roughly R1.5 down (summer conditions) and R0.5 up (winter conditions). For plastic bubble foil, add another R0.14-R0.2 for the air bubbles.
• For the concertina foil air gap 40mm nom, roughly R1.0 down (summer conditions) and R0.4 up (winter conditions).
• For double layer foil batts with two reflective surfaces within cells, R1.2 down (summer conditions) and R0.45 up (winter conditions).
• As a rule, do not take the claims of any foil insulation supplier on face value!

Post script: The other items not commented on in the media concerns the use of blown-in insulation, such as cellulose fibres. I have observed installers blowing this material into raked ceilings: this is also inappropriate because the material will settle “down the slope” over time, leaving the upper sections uninsulated. It is clear that such installers do not understand the material they are working with.

My comments on David Burchell’s article in today’s Australian regarding  Peter Garrett’s  and the Labor Governement’s failure to properly design their sustainability schemes:

As a  consultant working to improve the sustainability of our built environment, the thing that most appalls me is that this insulation scheme and the others (HSAS, Green Loans etc) are fundamentally unsustainable! I have no sympathy for all those new start-ups who based their entire business model on a dodgy government program. If the available work wasn’t enough to be in the insulation business before the scheme, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been once it had closed down. The fact that the solar scheme closed down early was a bit of a hint that all other schemes would not last, at least in their original forms. Talk about opportunists coming to the honey-pot, but having no contingency plan for the inevitable end of the program! I fear that this government has made it much more difficult to progress on the path to real sustainability.

David Burchell’s article follows:

Attempting to understand why so many people were willing to draw Europe into the abyss for the sake of imagined utopias they didn’t seriously believe in, Weber was moved to compare the visionaries of his day to the early followers of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount or Moses’ tablets, believers in an absolute ethic that brooks no compromise and focuses only on ultimate ends. To the followers of this creed, “if an action of good intent leads to bad results”, the responsibility must lie with the world, or with the stupidity of others.

At our best we may manage to combine both ethics, so that the grand cause and the steps along its way are equally visible to us. Most often, though, the final goal is shrouded in life’s moral mist.

Watching Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s other-worldly television performances last week amid the dying fall of the government’s home insulation program, I found Weber leaping to my mind. Here, after all, is the minister who best lays claim to our contemporary Sermon on the Mount: the preservation of the planet, seen as the overarching political good. Here is a man who incarnates the notion that a good conscience can overcome all political ills; the conviction that “from good only comes good, but from evil only evil follows”, in Weber’s words.

And yet here, at the same moment, is a man who seems constitutionally incapable of accepting any personal responsibility for one of the great public policy follies of the past decade and who seems, to all appearances, strangely emotionally detached from its human consequences. If there was ever an example of how an unquestioned good heart and political irresponsibility of the most abject kind can travel hand in hand – like two heedless child-lovers out of a Medieval chivalry romance – surely this is it.

It is humbug to suggest – as Garrett continues to suggest – that his scheme has been laid low by the machination of shonky operators or the negligence of half-trained operatives. Patently, there would have been no fly-by-night insulation firms and no army of semi-trained labourers in the first place but for a decision to throw billions of dollars of public money, holus-bolus, towards the creation of a new and for all practical purposes unregulated industry without any apparent concern for the consequences.

Nor is it credible to blame the existing safety standards of state governments when their creators could hardly have imagined the industry would grow 30-fold within a few months.

Curiously, in his interviews Garrett neglected to mention that the proposed replacement scheme will be subject to a rigorous independent assessment. But then, signalling a belated return to good governance might amount to a confession of error. And for our granite-faced modern Moses, that would never do.

By the normal measures of prudent governance it ought to have been obvious that the business of combining our largest ever stimulus package with a vast wish-list of public infrastructure programs and improvised environmental remedies was laden with peril.

As a stimulus package it is probably too large and too lengthy, because of the competing policy demands generated by it and because of the impossibility of cutting off the fiscal tap once so many undertakings have been given. At the same time, as a public infrastructure program it is too improvised, too spontaneous and too nakedly political. To save the planet, fill up schoolyards with new buildings, prime the pump and lock in the electoral support of Ute-Man all at once is a virtuous circle of vertiginous complexity. In the end, it is an invitation to irresponsibility.

Of all the grand literary creations of Old Labor – the romantic, quixotic Labor of the 1970s, with its endless litany of self-justifying mythologies – none is more elegiac or more eye-opening than Graham Freudenberg’s classic biography of Gough Whitlam, A Certain Grandeur. Penned in the mordant, sententious tones of Roman imperial historians, it relates the fall of Whitlam as a kind of grand tragedy, replete with heroic but flawed characters and the inscrutable hand of fate.

Also, if we consider each tonne of topsoil lost as equivalent to a tonne of thermal mass ie a “quarried” product, is timber that much better than brick, concrete etc?

I have never seen any research on this issue, as I think the timber industry is loathe to publish topsoil loss data. Massive topsoil loss, especially in rainforests means that yields will fall over harvest cycles. This is a potential long-term sustainability problem.

Does anyone know of any research on this topic?