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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
WorldChanging Round-up, June 2007
David Zaks, WorldChanging
We come across a lot of interesting ideas and innovative solutions, but we choose only a few to discuss in detail. The best of the stories we don’t cover get selected and collated as headlines in News and Views. It’s like a little Worldchanging news service, and if you haven’t noticed, the daily News and Views stories are now being delivered via RSS feed either with the other posts, or as a feed by themselves.
(2 July 2007)
Practical Answers: Energy
Practical Action (formerly ITDG)
For rural communities there are a number of options to energy provision that can be managed on a small-scale by local communities using renewable energy technologies. These technologies include; micro hydro, solar energy, wind as well as more traditional biomass technologies.
(July 2007)
The original “Small is Beautiful” group is still alive. Much information available on the site, information which may be increasingly important to the “rich” countries as conditions change.
Is small still beautiful? We think it is. In an increasingly divided and fragile world, Practical Action aims to demonstrate and advocate the sustainable use of technology to reduce poverty in developing countries.
Practical Action was founded in 1966, as ITDG (the Intermediate Technology Development Group), by the radical economist Dr EF Schumacher to prove that his philosophy of ‘Small is Beautiful’ could bring real and sustainable improvements to people’s lives.
With our commitment to poverty reduction, environmental conservation and technology choice we think Practical Action is uniquely placed to contribute to a world free of poverty.
Practical Action has a unique approach to development – we don’t start with technology, but with people. The tools may be simple or sophisticated – but to provide long-term, appropriate and practical answers, they must be firmly in the hands of local people: people who shape technology and control it for themselves.
Think globally, manufacture locally
Josh Floyd, The Age
NOW that the Federal Government has resolved the question of tax versus cap-and-trade for Australia’s carbon cost-internalisation strategy in favour of the trading option, focus is shifting to the appropriate details for our emissions trading model.
…To start with, we should consider that our total energy use emissions include not just those associated with domestic stationary, transport and embodied energy: our emissions extend to energy use associated with imported goods, services and commodities before they reach the political boundary that differentiates “local” from “imported”.
A national carbon trading scheme directly addresses only the domestic emissions, but our growing trade imbalance points to the direction in which our “offshored” emissions are heading.
As our thirst for cheap imports grows, not only does our debt burden increase, but we simultaneously obscure the environmental burden of our consumption by placing it beyond the reach of domestic emission indicators and reduction instruments.
…Perhaps somewhat ironically, while our domestic carbon pricing system will not reduce our offshore emissions it may in fact contribute to an increase in them. By further decreasing the competitiveness of local manufacturing, increased energy costs may bring some businesses, and even industries, to the brink of non-viability.
By then increasing imports to address the needs and wants that are presently met locally, the national carbon ledger would move further into the red. Moreover, idled plant represents, in effect, annihilation of energy investments as well as of capital.
While it seems highly unlikely that industrial relocalisation will be driven directly by Government policy, there is a strong case on four fronts for Australia doing all that it can to address wealth disparity between more and less developed nations.
First, there is the potential for domestic socioeconomic benefit in the form of a diversified, localised economy more resilient to the emerging challenges of peak oil; second, there is potential for reducing the growth in national debt; third, there is potential for significantly reducing our contribution to global carbon emissions; and fourth (hardly the least important), there is potential for humanitarian benefits for workers in poor countries.
This “quadruple win” could be achieved by, for example, introducing fair trade standards for imports and supporting existing fair trade initiatives.
Relocalisation need not entail an eco-romantic “return to nature”. There is an important distinction between localisation and isolationism. Local production versus global trade does not need to be based on absolutes, and it need not disadvantage developing countries trying to grow their own economies.
This is really a call for a more rational approach to meeting our material and energetic needs, whether those needs arise in Australia or in Kenya, and involves three principles.
First, meeting our essential needs as locally as possible, where assessment of “as locally as possible” takes into account bio-regional strengths and weaknesses.
Second, minimising transport of higher-volume, lower-cost goods and commodities.
Third, focusing global trade on low-volume, high-cost specialist technology that facilitates local production of essential high-volume, low-cost goods and commodities.
Josh Floyd works with the strategic foresight program in the Faculty of Business and Enterprise and the National Centre for Sustainability at Swinburne University.
(2 July 2007)
