Rift I’ve seen this movie.

Rules of the Road The first rule of cycling in the city: they don't see you. Melbourne is a cycling-intensive city, more so than Sydney, but both cities haven't got the infrastructure or the culture to keep their cyclists safe. What that means is that it's up to the cyclists, so today's rally is important. I commend Sydney's mayor, Clover Moore, for her efforts to establish bicycle lanes, and condemn both Labor and Liberal state governments for their efforts to rid themselves of both her and cycleways. Cities are not for cars, they're for people. That has to be balanced. And bicycles are better for the environment than cars. It isn't just about how many cars can be funneled into the CBD, but that seems to be the motivation of most of our politicians, and, unfortunately, the short-sighted, narrow-minded perspective of many citizens. This, too, is part of how someone can be killed riding a bike, and it needs to change.

Landmark Preservation Still no sign of Miranda.

Believers Yesterday was the People's Climate Mobilisation, and around the world, people gathered to let their politicians know the time for action is now, not later. BBC coverage includes the gathering in Glebe, where we formed a "human sign": Beyond Coal & Gas". Now that China has reduced its imports of our brown coal, we can hope they will make further progress towards emissions reductions, but also that our Prime Denialist, Tony Abbott, will take renewable energy production seriously, regardless of whether Treasurer Joe Hockey finds wind turbines objectionable intrusions on his aesthetic sense while driving between Sydney and Canberra, or not. (What did we do to deserve these lunatics as our government?)

A Short Walk in the Woods
Although the track from Perry's Lookout to the Blue Gum forest is less than three kilometers, it's pretty much three kilometers straight down and then, for the bushwalk on Saturday, straight back up after lunch.  I haven't done stairmaster like this since ever.  But the Blue Gum Forest? What a sight.

Not so much me, of course.  Glad of the hiking poles, though.

Insert Godzilla Here Anyone else think Japanese Island Aogashima looks like Monster Island? Good casting is good casting. (via Boing Boing, of course)

Alpiney
I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it in NSW over Christmas, but possible snow in Victoria – in summer still seems extreme.
As for the Americans missing on Kosciuszko, well, I suppose they must have taken a more adventurous pathway than the steel track we followed two weeks ago, but I won’t be surprised, after the various groups and individuals we saw departing the track for one reason or another (including contributing to the giardia problem, to discover that the well-trodden paths around there were abandoned for overconfident trekking. Luckily, there are no bears (but, sadly, no tigers, either).

Gas
Australia's got a carbon tax, until 2015 - according to the plan - when we get a emissions trading scheme. I'm not opposed to either, but have my doubts about the overall efficacy of the plan on actually reducing emissions, although still willing to support positive efforts and evaluate whatever outcome is achieved, howsoever little that will be in my lifetime, especially with the Chinese, the Indians, and the U.S. unwilling or unable to act. For that matter, aren't India and China still among the developing nations, i.e., lumped in with Africa et al., and therefore those that will be on the outer with developed nations acting, not acting, and requiring their participation.

I guess it's one of the advantages of the Australian government's setup, that we can put through this kind of legislation, without having to have a "mandate", and without having to deal with a just-say-no opposition capable of siphoning off members of the party in power. Party-line voting can be trouble, too, but here's Australia taking action when the big players can't get it together to have it on the agenda even.

Sure, we have the usual suspects proclaiming doom, but, quietly, in other areas, you've got businesses and people looking for a way to make it work, and to make a profit, too. Will it cost jobs? Maybe, but it'll probably create some, too. Will it kill off entire industries? Please.

BP & Bush: Never Forget Their Sweet Talk
Brilliant.

It Can't Happen Here
From the Department of Good Thinking, 31 new offshore drilling projects for Australia. I guess it'll be o.k. so long as we don't use BP.

We have more solar energy beaming down you'd think we could make a go of that, but I guess we'll keep digging coal and pumping oil until every last molecule is expended. Thank goodness the ETS was abandoned until 2013.

Running Hot & Cold
Kyoto was a farce, mostly because the U.S. bailing out was a great excuse for others to do the same or to do nothing. So my expectations from Copenhagen were not high, even though we have a President who recognizes the science and is willing to make an effort. Because the closer we get to actually implementing a way for every nation to participate it will indeed be the smaller, less industrialised countries that get left behind unless Europe and the U.S. are going to need to share the burden fairly and their innovations in carbon-reduction quite freely, which is unlikely to happen easily if at all. Otherwise, Third World industrialisation comes to a standstill to the point where they can’t compete and shut down entirely, leading to the worst kinds of anarchy, dispossession, and an increase in economic refugees, right alongside the waves of environmental refugees set to increase as global warming progresses, a juggernaut of inertia that carbon reduction will only slow over decades. So the haves keep what they’ve got and increase it at the expense of the have-nots, who continue to lose and lose. And then it’s still just an excuse to do nothing until we absolutely have to so it all takes that much longer and has an even more extensive effect on the less fortunate. It’s all very Aesop’s Fables.

Red Centre Restrictions
It’s on my list to go to Alice and visit Uluru, and I know about the climbing ban, which is disappointing. Maybe I’ve seen too much Peter Weir, but the spiritual charge of places like this seems to me to almost require as much interaction as possible. So, climb or not climb? Frankly, things I’ve seen or heard in documentaries about Aboriginal Dreamtime proprietorship and caretaking sometimes verges into the ludicrous, but I can’t have it both ways – either I respect their claims or I don’t, and I’m not comfortable with making a nuisance of myself. I don’t go to churches and disrupt the services or soil the draperies, so if somebody tells me this big ol’ rock is a leftover from the days of the Rainbow Serpent, I guess I’ll stay off. And I’ve got no problem with shutting down access.

Plenty for Everybody
The Japanese “research” whaling program is a farce: it’s all about food, and probably a substantial amount of it is pet food. Well, pet’s have to eat, too, I suppose. Still, the arguments put forward by Minoru Morimoto, Japan’s commissioner to the IWC, are largely just an attempt to recast the argument, making out Australia as irrational and out-of-step with a substantial international community, who all, quite reasonably, kill and eat marine mammals, including whales. Do Australians eat much dolphin? No more than Canadians are stuffing themselves silly with seal burgers. But what’s really getting up Morimoto’s nose is Australia’s insistence on claiming a 200-mile area of prime whale breeding grounds off Antarctica, and the High Court’s decision that any whaling by Japan in that zone would be a crime, albeit a crime without any recourse to justice, as well as the successful chase by Greenpeace of the Japanese fleet (and now the outcry over the hostages).

If Japan was honest about their intentions, then we might really be able to make progress towards an end to commercial whaling. Instead, they play Simpsons-esque tobacco giant games to ensure a steady demand and to drum up support for their fleet and activities, while claiming it’s all about the science. “We now know more about . . . whale biology than at any time in history”, Morimoto says, and I’m sure that’s true, as far as it goes, but what did we learn this year different from last year or in the last ten years that’s actually helpful to anyone, let alone helpful to whales themselves? That they’re delicious deep-fried? I think someone already worked that out, besides which, there are many other things also delicious prepared that way.

We’ve got a positive result in the High Court, and maybe we can translate that into something bigger. Meanwhile, Japan’s behavior gets more intransigent.

Weather Wars
John Howard is a known climate change sceptic, but is promising AU$75 million for the development of renewable energy technology. Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd, who says he’ll sign on to Kyoto if Labor takes government in November, is promising AU$489 million for solar panels in schools, at AU$20,000 per school. I’d kind of like to see the numbers switched. Even if we take the number of schools as 24,450 (489 million divided by 20,000), AU$75 million would provide just over AU$3,000 per school. If this was added to the existing rebate scheme, it would make up about half the cost of a fairly large installation. O.k., not really enough, but I’ll bet selling a few candy bars would make up the rest. Around where I work, it seems like they’re always on sale.

Cane Toad Redux
Imported species of plants and animals have a habit of getting out of control. So when you’ve got lantana spreading like kudzu, what do you do? Issue a 457 visa for a South American fly? (As if there weren’t enough flies in Australia.) How does that song go?

Everywhere, But Not to Drink
Walking past the Camperdown oval the other day in the pouring rain, I was not amused to see the sprinklers on, watering the grounds. In fact, over the course of the next few rainy days, I noticed the grounds continued to receive their regular watering, which, as the weekend approached, I couldn’t imagine the local footy team appreciating, as they’d be playing in quite a quagmire by Saturday. In any event, it comes, therefore, as no surprise, that business and government are eating up the water savings made by Sydney residents, with little recycling going on, and on-going infrastructure-related losses. It’s not good enough. Local councils and the State government have to step up their game. Earth Hour is a nice stunt, but there’s more to the situation than kilowatt hours, and it’s not just a matter of desalination plants.

Unplugged
The Sydney Morning Herald is promoting an environmental awareness campaign, called “Earth Hour,” wherein, on March 31, at 7:30 p.m., Sydney will turn out its lights. O.k., well, so far 25,000 of us will turn off our lights, including me, although that’s the day I’m moving into my new accommodations.

It’s an interesting idea, and I’m hoping they’ll get a satellite photo. It would be really good if it could spread across the industrialized world. Imagine Earth Hour NYC. Or across the Eastern seaboard of the US, an area that appears in space photos as a dense band of white, light bleeding up into space. I wonder what the space aliens would think if the entire planet went from light to dark and back again in a rotating band?

Wetlands, Drylands
Foreshore development on Sydney harbour has been controlled for many years, although that hasn’t really stopped a lot of buildings going up, mostly of the hugely expensive kind, but including some public projects. The city’s commitment to extending greenways on the foreshore has seen some positive change along Blackwattle Bay and Glebe, and we might once have hoped for even more. Except the State government doesn’t want things that way: they prefer development.

It’s not so long ago that the harbour was so thoroughly polluted that we aren’t yet still feeling the effects. Commercial fishing was recently halted, due to PCB’s, for example. The idea that huge developments may go up, adding to the problem of sewerage, let alone that new and existing home owners and commercial operators could extend access and boat use, ought to concern the entire city, but probably doesn’t, much, at least not yet. As so often, it will become more of a concern only after the problem has occurred.

We need better environmental managers in government. Look, the UN just put out a huge report about global warming and there are predictions that Sydney’s going to cop it bad. We should be working on every element of the city to see to it that we’re better off, all of us, not just the property developers and the cabin cruiser set. There’s an election in March, and normally I’d be glad of the current Premier’s commanding lead in the polls, but right now, my vote is tending elsewhere.

Climatological Notes
I was wrong about the Parramatta River fish ladder project. It seems what they’re doing is letting the river “fill” overnight, then letting it drain again during the day, as seen in these two photos, the first from this morning, the second from yesterday afternoon.

This must be a relief for the carp (some large ones are visible from overhead when the water’s low, and can be seen to struggle over ridges and weed clumps, looking for deeper pools), although the water fowl appear to benefit both ways. Of course, the benefits of the work may only prove effective for now.

Cleaned Water
When I started back to work after our holiday on the Central Coast, I immediately made a note to bring my digital camera along the next day, after seeing the Parramatta River from the Church Street bridge. I’d seen the river over its banks many times since starting this job, but that Tuesday, there suddenly wasn’t much water, the flood-control embankments visible, the weeds drying in the sun, and fish visible in the center, circling in remaining pools where there remained some depth. Also, unretrieved shopping trolleys, a bit weedier than this one. It took a couple of days before I found out that the upper reaches had been drained to allow new fish ladders to be built, since there was no sign of construction. Too late, as it turns out, because today, the water’s back, even though the ladders aren’t due for completion for two more months yet. It’s just as well, though; the fish didn’t seem happy. I’m not certain if the clean-up mentioned in the Council’s website was particularly complete, but I’ll assume they pulled the trash they could reach.