Friday, February 27, 2009

Michael Deibert: Australia’s Parched Landscape

Michael Deibert: Australia’s Parched Landscape

February 26th, 2009

(This posting originally appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal, and can be read in its original form here)

When Australia was ravaged by wildfires that killed over 200 people earlier this month, the acts of arson that police suspect were behind at least some of the blazes were made even worse by the decade-long dry spell the country has been enduring.

Though this heavily eroded and sparsely populated continent has experienced two other major droughts over the last century, both the intensity and duration of the current lack of rainfall has scientists worried that the country’s environment may be permanently shifting to a drier regime.

The Murray-Darling Basin—a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia’s land mass—has been particularly hard hit, with official figures showing that, from 2006 until 2007, the amount of water flow into the basin was just 1,000 gigaliters. Normal inflows into the basin previously measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters. The region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum—a figure based on 117 years of records. Helping to irrigate such states such as Victoria, the site of the worst wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.

Across southern Australia, scientists have also witnessed an intensification of the subtropical ridge phenomenon, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked to global warming.

What has the Australian government’s response been to this growing disaster? Not much, it appears.

Though a 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030 “water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia,” and recommended a worldwide reduction in carbon emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, Australian environmentalists were outraged when the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that included a far more modest cut of 5 percent to 15 percent by 2020.

The Rudd government conditioned cuts beyond that level to government demands for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exemptions for energy-intensive industries in a broad carbon trading arrangement. Compensation for electricity producers and users was also an attached condition.

Subsequent research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment advisory firm, estimated that in the first year of the CPRS, $939 million of aid would go to the aluminum smelting industry, $297 million to petroleum refiners, $261 million to steel makers, $182 million to natural gas producers, and $157 million to cement makers. Companies such as Rio Tinto, Alcoa, and Woodside stand to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the system.

With a relatively small population of slightly more than 20 million for a land mass nearly as large as the United States, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse emission rates in the thirty-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), chiefly due to the country’s intensive use of coal.

Australia emits 28.1 tons of carbon per person into the atmosphere, five times greater than the per person total for China.

With the European Union having recently adopted a goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020, one must hope that Australia’s environmental lobby will succeed in pressuring the Rudd government to adopt a more aggressive approach to combating Australia’s contribution to climate change, and to help move to heal the continent’s already-ravaged environment.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He last wrote for the World Policy Journal from Guatemala.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Bone dry to blazing in Australia

Friday, February 20, 2009

Bone dry to blazing in Australia

By Michael Deibert

The Washington Times

(Read the original article here)

SYDNEY, Australia

The combination of Australia's worst-ever wildfires at a time when the nation is suffering its worst drought on record has fueled an intense debate on the effects of climate change in this vast and sparsely populated continent.

Officials say that at least some of the fires, which have killed more than 200 people, were the result of arson. But the fires were made worse by a decade-long dry spell, which has outstripped previous droughts going back at least a century.

Far from being a temporary lack of rainfall, it is a phenomenon that has observers worried that Australia might be witnessing a permanent altering of its environment, with the Murray-Darling Basin - a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia's land mass - being particularly hard hit.

"While rainfall might be about the same as during the previous two droughts, the inflows into the river system are much lower, and a fair bit of the cause of that is linked to global warming," said Wendy Craik, chief executive for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.

The commission has existed in some form or another for most of the past hundred years.

"There has been quite a shift in autumn rainfall," Ms. Craik said. "Before, it would wet the catchment, and when it rained in winter, we would get runoff into the system. Now, when you do get rain, it just sucks into a very dry catchment and you don't get the runoff."

As an inter-jurisdictional venture between four states, the region of Australia's capital, Canberra, and the federal government, figures collected by the commission in recent years have proved especially alarming.

Helping to water such states such as Victoria, the site of the wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the Murray-Darling Basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.

Once fertile scrubland has become cracked and arid desert.

Commission figures show that the region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum - a figure based on 117 years of records.

Whereas the normal inflows have measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year, from 2006 until 2007 the amount was just 1,000 gigaliters. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters.

Last year, the state of South Australia, the country's driest, was forced to purchase water from other states for the first time in its history to ensure that it would have enough water to meets its basic needs.

Late last year, the federal government announced it was assuming full control of the commission for the first time in the body's history.

Beyond the crop-growing regions of southern Australia, the effects of the drought have been felt as far north as the coastal city of Brisbane, hundreds of miles away, with residents forbidden from watering lawns, washing cars or using water for many other activities without a government permit.

"Extended periods of lack of rainfall have occurred in the past, but the difference we are seeing with this drought is that the impacts on hydrology seem to be much more severe than what we experienced before," said Ian Smith, coordinator of the South East Australia Climate Initiative with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency.

"The temperatures are warmer and that has exacerbated the effect on runoff into dams and rivers," Mr. Smith said. "The [low] inflows into the system are unprecedented, and that's the thing that we're worried about."

In southern Australia there has been an intensification of the phenomenon known as the subtropical ridge, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked by many scientists to global warming.

The debate about the drought also has a political dimension.

A 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, "water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia." The report recommended a worldwide reduction in carbon emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Australian environmentalists were subsequently outraged when the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that included a far more modest cut of 5 percent to 15 percent by 2020.

Cuts beyond that level were tied to government demands for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exemptions for energy-intensive industries in a broad carbon trading arrangement. Compensation for electricity producers and users was also an attached condition

By contrast, the European Union recently adopted a goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.

A December Australian government white paper struck a cautious tone on the issue of climate change, saying that the country's most emissions-intensive industries would be given "assistance in as practical and effective a fashion as possible," but that the government would "explicitly support" the continued growth of such industries.

Subsequent research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment advisory firm, estimated that in the first year of the CPRS, $939 million of aid would go to the aluminum smelting industry, $297 million to petroleum refiners, $261 million to steel makers, $182 million to natural gas producers and $157 million to cement makers.

Companies such as Rio Tinto, Alcoa and Woodside stand to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the system, the investment firm says.

With a relatively small population of slightly more than 20 million for a land mass nearly as large as the United States, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse emission rates in the 30-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), chiefly due to the country's intensive use of coal.

Australia emits 28.1 tons of carbon per person into the atmosphere, five times greater than the per person total for China.

Many Australians fear that their country may be heading toward a largely rainless future.

"There is massive stress, uncertainly and fear," said Mike Young, executive director of the Water Economics and Management program at the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute in South Australia. "There is a difference between a drought and what we're experiencing, which looks like a shift to a drier regime."

"We're in uncharted policy territory, and we're dealing with things with which we've had no previous experience," he said.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Xstrata Dreaming: The Struggle of Aboriginal Australians against a Swiss Mining Giant

Xstrata Dreaming: The Struggle of Aboriginal Australians against a Swiss Mining Giant

by Michael Deibert, Special to CorpWatch

February 16th, 2009

The McArthur River winds through Australia's remote Northern Territory creating lush floodplains that sustain vast herds of kangaroos, wallabies and cattle. Above them, finches, wild turkeys, and flocks of migratory birds fill an endless sky. The area around the river, which runs 300 kilometers before emptying into the Gulf of Carpentaria, also provides spiritual sustenance to the region's four main Aboriginal linguistic groups: the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.

Australia's indigenous culture is among the oldest continuously existing communities in the world, and one whose spiritual cosmology, known as the Dreamtime, ties its members closely to the land of their ancestors. At once a mythical time of creation and a present-day spiritual cycle, the Dreamtime includes such totemic animals as the Rainbow Snake, the Turtle and the Alligator. Rituals in tribute to these symbolic guides and protectors must be performed at certain times and in specific places around the expanse of this immense but sparsely populated continent.

Despite the region's glaring lack of basic services, education and employment opportunities, Aboriginal residents value the McArthur River area for its spiritual wealth. But a multinational mining company's pursuit of material riches threatens the core of this already beleaguered culture. In the 1950s, Mount Isa Mines (MIM), a mining concern based in neighboring Queensland state, discovered vast lead, silver and zinc deposits beneath and around the river, and conducted extensive exploratory drilling and feasibility studies.

The Yanyuwa had lived in the region for millennia and were able to legally claim the land in 1977 under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which allows indigenous people to establish ownership of land based on traditional occupation. Nonetheless, MIM, which by then had been operating in the area for three decades, began underground mining activities along the river in 1995.

In 2003, the government of the Northern Territory approved MIM's application to transition from underground to above-ground ("open-cut") mining, a process involving the diversion of the McArthur River. A short time later, MIM sold its operations to Switzerland-based Xstrata Plc, Europe's largest zinc producer. Described on the company's website as "a global diversified mining group" with a "meaningful position in seven major international commodity markets: copper, coking coal, thermal coal, ferrochrome, nickel, vanadium, and zinc," Xstrata has operations that span 18 countries.

Now, as full owners of McArthur River Mining Pty Ltd, Xstrata is authorized to extract 43 million tons of the resource over the next 20 years.

Read the full article here.