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?

The following extract from Bernard Keane of Crikey.com is the best summary of the dilemma the Liberal Party is now in. If it wasn’t so pathetic and with such dire consequences for all of us, one would almost die laughing at the prospects of seeing how they twist and turn in the wind to try to come up with a solution to climate change when the climate denialists, flat-earthers and anti-science types are running the party. Do they think the Australian electorate is that dumb that we would buy such a stupid and clearly hypocritical position?

There is a delicious irony in that the party of the free market has quashed a market-based approach. I’ll be waiting for them to pull a different rabbit out of the hat! If Rudds CPRS was way short of the mark after years of debate and negotiation (as if the Liberals haven’t had their opportunities), then the Liberals plan will be of the Clayton’s variety.

Meanwhile check out what BK has to say:

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 02 2009
Bernard Keane:

So the Liberals have sorted out the leadership, at least for now. Tony Abbott may have only beaten Malcolm Turnbull by a single vote, but that’s as good as a landslide. Plenty of other leaders have won only narrow victories. Billy McMahon, Billy Snedden, Bill Hayden, Mark Latham, Brendan Nelson and Turnbull himself….

Hmmm. Perhaps the less said about that the better.

And for now the moderate-conservative divide has been papered over, with the conservatives in the ascendancy, moderates being told to toe the line or have their preselections threatened (“they owe their careers to the party”, their new leader warned yesterday, unsubtly) and troglodytes such as Bronwyn Bishop and Sophie Mirabella in line for promotion. That’s two of the three issues that caused this whole disaster.  On the third, things aren’t looking so good.

Putting aside its dog of a CPRS and its determination to use climate change as a political weapon, the government has been dead right to point out  that the coalition has repeatedly delayed settling a position on the CPRS.  As each stage of the debate has unfolded?—?the Garnaut Review, the Green Paper, the White Paper, the first cave-in to polluters early this year, the introduction of the actual legislation and its inevitable senate committees ?—?the coalition has put off determining a position, saying it would wait until the next stage, or commission its own review (it’s had two of its own reviews or wait for the legislation to appear), or wait for Copenhagen, or wait for the Americans.

Finally, for exactly one week, they had a position on implementing the policy John Howard took to the last election.  Then, yesterday, they demolished their own position and began calling the very policy they had negotiated with the government and accepted last week a “giant tax” that they would fight tooth and claw.

This confusion is mirrored in Abbott’s own position on climate change. As Turnbull accurately noted, there isn’t a position on climate change and the CPRS Abbott hasn’t held, despite his reputation as a bloke who says what he believes.

Apparently he wasn’t saying what he believes when he called climate change “crap” or claimed that the science “wasn’t settled”. Yesterday he was back to claiming climate change was real and at least partly caused by humans.  He also, crucially, committed the coalition to the same emissions reduction target range as the government 5-25%.

Anyway, that’s politics, and no one would be able to do anything without a little hypocrisy. So now Abbott has the same problem that Turnbull and Nelson faced: what will be the coalition’s policy to address climate change? Specifically, how will it reduce Australia’s emissions by at least 5% by 2020, unilaterally? Because that’s what Abbott signed himself up to on his first day in the job.

Turnbull solved the problem. He got the government to agree to an ETS even less effective and even more rewarding to polluters than Labor’s. Now Abbott has to do the same. He has very few options, and none of them good, and that’s before he even takes it to a party room divided between reactionary denialists, emissions trading sceptics and the 29 who backed the Turnbull-amended CPRS.

A carbon tax is not an option, and Abbott appeared to rule it out this morning. You can’t campaign against a “giant tax” and propose one of your own. The party of the Right can’t campaign for a vast tax while the party of the Left wants a market-based mechanism. You can’t have another version of the CPRS. Again, it clashes with the coalition campaign against the CPRS if it is proposing a variant of the same thing. And their own, Keatingesque mantra if you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it” would apply equally to the coalition variant.

After that, you’re down to non-economic tools: throwing money at technology, which the government is already doing, except Abbott might be tempted by nuclear power, the most expensive technology of the lot, and the most frightening one to voters. Or regulating industries to compel carbon emission reductions. Again, the party of the Right promising big government spending, or regulation, when that of the Left wants a market-based mechanism.

Or there’s voluntary action, which is now being promoted as some sort of silver bullet, both for households and for agriculture.

If voluntary action was going to do the trick on climate change, we wouldn’t be having climate change. All the tree-planting and switching off lights and biosequestration in the world won’t get us within cooee of 5% reductions by 2020.

And you know what’s worse about the coalition’s position? They’ve signed up to a unilateral 5%, but look like they’re walking away from the mechanism that would have allowed Australia to actually increase its emissions while still notionally meeting that 5% target, by buying foreign permits. Abbott seems to have signed up to a far more draconian target, a real 5% reduction, unleavened by trading credits from PNG and Indonesian forests.

Quite the greenie aren’t we, Mr Abbott.

That’s why more sensible Australian businesses are mortified that the chance of passage of the CPRS has slipped away.

Whatever Frankenstein’s Monster of a policy Abbott and his team craft over the summer break?—?it needs to be done by the end of January, because the government might call a double dissolution election in March?—?as Christopher Pyne noted last night, that will need to go through the same trial by fire that Turnbull’s went through. Most or all of the Nationals, the denialists, the ETS sceptics and the moderates will need to be happy with it. The coalition has spent two years running and hiding from having to take climate change seriously, littering public debate with a string of increasingly implausible excuses while they sought a way to deal with their own internal divisions. Turnbull made them stop running and face up to the challenge. Now that they’ve overturned all his work and shown him the door, they’ve resumed running.

But they can’t run forever. Eventually Abbott will desperately wish more Senators than Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce had crossed the floor and got the government’s CPRS over the line.

Great News! Greensynergy Consulting is now eligible to provide energy audit services under the above NSW Government Programs. Through an arrangement with David Howard of Partners Energy at Alstonville, we can service clients  throughout NSW, but will focus on the Mid-North Coast and New England regions.

For information on the programs:

Download the Energy Efficiency for Small Business Brochure and Energy Efficiency for Small Business Registration Form or go to www.environment.nsw.gov.au/sustainbus/smallbusenergy.htm

For the Sustainability Advantage program download the Energy Saver and Resource Efficiency Brochures or go to www.environment.nsw.gov.au/sustainbus/sustainabilityadvantage.htm

If you need any advice, please email or call.

Matthew Parnell

From Today’s Australian 2nd November, 2009

IF you don’t reduce your carbon footprint, then puppies will drown and bunny rabbits will die. And a terrifying, jagged-toothed monster with crazy hooked hands will descend from the clouds to eat you up.

Believe it or not, that is the message being delivered by the British government to children, in a L6 million ($10.7m) advertising campaign designed to scare the next generation witless about the alleged horrors of global warming.

Taking environmentalist propaganda to a new low, the TV ad shows a father reading a nightmarish bedtime story to his perturbed-looking young daughter.

He tells her of a land where the “weather is very, very strange”. There are “awful heatwaves” and “terrible storms and floods”. A cartoon bunny is shown crying as it starves on the dried, cracked earth, while elsewhere a puppy drowns in floodwaters.

Above it all, a sooty, blackened monster – CO2 made hideous flesh – surveys the horrors with a grotesque grin on its face.

And just in case the little girl, and the millions of children that the TV ad is aimed at, thinks this is merely a twisted fairytale, her father makes clear that it is reality.

It is the “horrible consequence”, he says, of human beings using too much CO2, much of which comes from “everyday things like keeping houses warm and driving cars”.

In short? Children who live in warm houses and who get lifts to school or football practice should feel guilty, because their evil antics are causing dogs to die and cute rabbits to go hungry.

Not surprisingly, the ad has caused a storm. Nearly 400 people have complained to Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority. Some are disturbed by the ad’s scientific illiteracy (how one gets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s relatively sober reports about changing weather patterns to a cartoon dog drowning in a flooded city is anybody’s guess). Others have slammed the government for knowingly and deliberately – and with taxypayers’ money – scaring kids.

Yet the ad is only an extreme version of what has become mainstream environmentalist policy in recent years: terrifying children.

The environmentalist ethos, whether it is spouted by official bodies or radical, dreadlock-sporting campaigners, presents itself as caring and considerate, yet it is shot through with the politics of fear.

In place of grown-up, adult debate about the future, environmentalists continually use scaremongering – conjuring up horrid, squalid future scenarios based more on their fantastic imaginations than scientific fact – to try to force people to lower their horizons and change their behaviour.

And this green politics of fear is starting to have a detrimental effect on children.

As popular culture bombards kids with messages about a fiery, bunny-hostile future, and as many schools in Britain and elsewhere rebrand themselves as “eco schools”, devoted to reducing children’s carbon footprints as much as expanding their minds, so children are becoming paralysed by fear.

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change.

“It’s making me and my friends go mad,” said a 12-year-old girl.

The children were most likely to be kept awake thinking about “the possible submergence of entire countries” and the “welfare of animals”, indicating that hysterical, fact-lite, The Day After Tomorrow-style scare stories about worldwide flooding or the wiping out of polar bears have hit children where it hurts.

Worryingly, the survey also found that one in seven children blamed their own parents for the coming climate doom. This suggests that environmentalists’ emphasis on the destructiveness of people’s everyday behaviour – their driving habits, their food choices, their holidays – has successfully convinced kids that all adults, even mummy and daddy, are dirty and dangerous.

Indeed, environmentalist activists now cynically exploit children’s fears to try to get them to snitch on their parents. A book called How To Turn Your Parents Green, by James Russell, encourages children to “nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking our world”, that is, grown-ups, or “Groans”.

It tells kids to become “Guardians of a Glorious Green Future” and to get their parents to sign up to a “Glorious Green Charter”. Traditionally, it has only been the most authoritarian regimes on Earth – think Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union – that encouraged children to spy on and squeal on their parents. Now environmentalists do it, too, though with a Little Green Book rather than a little red one.

When I was a child in the 1980s, the spectre of nuclear war was used to keep children in a permanent state of panic; today climate change plays that role. We should be wary indeed of any campaign that makes children feel scared and guilty and even drives them mad, and which turns them against their own parents.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked Online.

As someone who has actively worked in promoting behaviour change and sustainability for over 30 years, I find the kind of advertising described in this article as nothing short of appalling. It is counterproductive and immature. Not to mention that it goes against all the principles of the social aspects of sustainability. We will achieve nothing by fear – such fear mongering is largely responsible for the far right-wing backlash trying to undermine the climate-change response by any means possible.

We have some major issues to deal with, so lets get on with it – and lets not scare the children and horses in the process!

Matthew

While fully supportive of the idea to get as many older houses fitted with ceiling insulation, I believe the the Federal Government’s Home Insulation Scheme is seriously dodgy; and now the Feds are downgrading the amount of the subsidy from a maximum of $1600 to $1200. While the argument is based on a winding back of the stimulus funding as our economy picks up, it is a convenient excuse to cover up for a very poor program design and limiting the damage, especially as caused by installers claiming the full rebate by overstating the area of insulation installed.

As I see it the problems are:

• Flooding the industry with unqualified installers (one of whom was killed by electrocution by putting a reflective foil staple through a cable).
• Importing of insulation that does not meet Australian Standards
• Poor installation practices such as:
  • Leaving bags of insulation in ceilings uninstalled
  • Insulating around access hatches so it looks like insulation has been installed
  • Scattering batts generally in the roof
  • No neat fitting between ceiling members or cutting to fit odd spots
  • No overlapping at tops of walls
  • Not insulating to the full width of the ceiling (its hard to see that last row of batts around the edges from an access hatch
  • Covering halogen light fittings, causing house fires
• Collusive tendering between individual contractors to get around the two quotes requirement
• Installing less than $1600 worth of insulation but overstating the area and charging $1600 (losses to the government are substantial from this rort alone)
• Good insulation companies in the industry affected by competition from dodgy installers
• False claims about job creation (depending on whether you regard jobs for visiting backpackers as job creation)

What a mess! It wouldn’t surprise me if this program is canned within six months altogether. At least the $1600 option for solar hot water systems still remains. And there is a lesson in this: the solar rebate option must be paid for by the householder and a rebate sought; the insulation rebate is handled at point of sale, thus allowing for all the above corruption to emerge.

This is a classic case of a desirable sustainability initiative being completely buggered up by bad policy, bad program design and bad politics. And don’t get me started on the Home Sustainability Assessment/Green Loans Process!

Some images from my bushwalk yesterday in Bongil Bongil National Park: Bundageree Creek track from Tucker’s Rocks to Bundagen headland via littoral rainforest on sand (very rare) then back to Tucker’s Rocks via beach. Fantastic display of staghorns and elkhorns.

Just a question: why are 4 wheel drives still allowed on a National Park beach?

Rainforest on the Bundageree Creek Walk

Variety of life growing on a tree trunk

Looking south on the beach at Bongil Bongil NP