The Australian Context for Transition

Australia’s population is heavily urbanised with the great majority of its inhabitants living in coastal cities and regional centres. Cities are large consumers of energy and water, and large producers of waste, chemical pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result the Australian population’s ecological footprint is nothing to be proud of on the global scene. Moreover, we are not immune from the economic impacts of Peak Oil on a global basis. Some of the things to consider regarding Australia's situation are:

Climate and Geology

Australia is an old continent and a big one and a dry one. Its climates range from tropical/monsoonal in the far north and cool temperate in its southern regions. With such a large land mass, vast areas of the inland are arid and marginal for agricultural production. They are also subject to extreme summer heat and cold dry winters. Australia is subject to long periods of drought and the outlook is for drought conditions to become more severe as a result of global warming.

With only very small areas at elevations that attract snowfall, Australia's water systems are mainly dependent on rainfall replenishing aquifers and river systems. Most of Australia's major river systems have been over stressed by large scale irrigation and this irrigation has had knock-on effects of salination which has rendered large areas of formerly productive land land barren. management of water and river systems is a huge challenge for Australia in the future.

As an old continent,  much of Australia's soils are also old and lacking the mineral structure and microorganic activity needed for fertility. There are some areas of rich alluvial or volcanic soild which remain highly productive, but even some of these are threatened with exhaustion after many decades of  being overworked and over-treated with fossil fuel chemicals and super-phosphate.

Electricity

Australian's rely heavily on baseload electricity generated by coal-fired power stations. Relatively small amounts of our electricity is generated by large scale hydro or gas-fired generation. Successive governments have underfunded the development of infrastructure for electricity generation from clean and renewal sources such as wind, tidal, solar and geothermal despite the fact that Australia is well-endowed with all these natural renewable resources.

Coal

Queensland, NSW and Victoria have major coal reserves and coal extraction for export and local energy generation is likely to continue for many years to come. “Peak Coal” for Australia has been recently estimated to occur between 2052 and 2066 based on the three different projection models. This is the second longest peak forecast in the world behind the Former Soviet Union which is estimated to reach its coal peak in 2103. [Mohr, S.H., and Evans, G. M., (2008) Forecasting coal production until 2100, Newcastle. University of Newcastle: see http://www.theoildrum.com/files/coalmodel.pdf ]. With many regions of the world set to peak well before Australia, demand for Australian coal is likely to increase before its own forecast peak and responding to this export demand may bring forward the peaking date as well as making coal-generated power and flow on goods more expensive for Australians.

“Clean Coal” has been touted as an answer to the GHG problem of coal by the former coalition government and the coal industry, and billions of dollars have been earmarked for investment in clean coal technological. Critics are sceptical that this is a viable solution and believe that time and money will be totally wasted on this pursuit.

Natural Gas

Natural Gas is just another form of fossil fuel, but has the benefit of producing around hald the GHG emissions of Coal when it is burned. It is 'cleaner' than coal but not 100% clean and not renewable.

Australia also has large reserves of natural gas in Bass Strait (off the southern coast of Victoria),  the Perth, Carnarvon, and Browse Basins off the west and north-west coastline of Western Australia, the vast inland Cooper Basin in the northern part of south-east Australia (covering parts of four States, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Northern Territory) and between the Northern Territory and East Timor (the Bonaparte Basin).

Globally it has been suggested that natural gas will peak about 30 years after oil. Australia's reserves appear to have more life in them that that, but again, global demand for natural gas (in the exportable form of liquid natural gas (LNG)) is expected to grow. So while Australia is advantaged in having  access to large natural gas fields the cost of building and maintaining the massively long pipelines to pipe the gas from the fields to the populated areas of the continent are a big impediment and the domestic  price is likely to rise in line with global demand for Australian LNG.

For an excellent examination of Australia's natural gas resources and interesting commentary from a number of online readers click here http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2008/06/no-post-tonight.html

Nuclear Generation of Electricity?

Australia is also rich in Uranium ore and mines and exports this commodity to a number of countries already employing nuclear power generation.

Australia's position of developing a nuclear power generation as an alternative to current methods has been a source of considerable debate and dispute in the community and in politics for many years. It has its supporters in both arenas. The jury is still out on whether Australian's would ever allow the development of nuclear power generation.

Oil

With relatively small and diminishing oil fields of its own, Australia is an importer of oil and oil products and is subject to global pricing movements over which it has no control.

With a very large continental land area and vast distances between many major population centres Australia is heavily dependent on road travel and transport. Capital cities have mostly been allowed to sprawl into very large areas of the surrounding landscape, creating distant, car-dependent suburbs which are poorly serviced by rail or other public transport services.

Australia also generates a good deal of its national wealth from agriculture, producing grain, wool, cotton and meat on very large scale rural properties that require and use high levels of mechanisation and heavy inputs of oil based fertilisers and pesticides

In other words, Australia is as addicted to oil as the other most developed counties. It is therefore as threatened as any nation by the depletion of oil, perhaps more than many.

Urbanisation

As mentioned earlier, Australia's population is heavily urbanised, with the bulk of the population living in capital cities and secondary cities mainly located along the continent's east coast. This fact places Australia's population high on the scale of vulnerability to peak oil and global warming for most of  the reasons that make cities the most vulnerable places - their coastal location, their reliance on power generated a long distance away, their reliance on cars to get around to work and play particularly from outlying dormitory and corridoor suburbs, their reliance on food needing to be grown far away and transported thousands of kilometers, their spawl covering valuable peri-urban arable land with roads and houses.

Large urban areas have significant climate impacts in various ways. These are just some of them:

• The replacement of land covered by vegetation with roads, paving and rooftops means not only that land that otherwise might be involved in sequestering carbon through vegetation is lost but that greater amounts of the sun's radiation is reflected back into the atmosphere increasing atmospheric warming (the heat island effect)
• The GHG emissions from airconditioned buildings, factories, and motor vehicles crawling along congested urban road systems are maximised, both as a factor of higher population densities and of unsustainable urban design
• Large population centres produce masses of waste which needs first to be transported by road to large dumps and transfer stations far from the urban centre, then generates large emounts of GHG emissions as it decomposes in open landfill sites or is incinerated.
• Bringing food to large populations in densely settled urban areas is complex and involves the use of large distrbution centres, multiple handling, a great deal of refrigeration and significant overpackaging.
• Recycling of organic waste is problematic, particularly for those living in multi-dwelling settlements such as apartment blocks or town house complexes. As a result vast amounts of organic waste that could be recycled by composting are not.
• Water is wasted. Useful rainfall (usually quite adequate in coastal areas) runs off roofs, pavements and roads straight into stormwater drains. It is also wasted in large apartment complexes that do not have individual water metering as nobody is given the feedback necessary to take responsibility for reducing their water usage.

In short, our large cities, which have grown over many decades with no adequate consideration of sustainability and resilience are generally very poorly set up to deal with climate change and peak oil, and redesigning them to be more sustainable is a large scale and complex problem. Addressing the sustainability of our cities will challenge all levels of government as well as communities and businesses in the years ahead.

Industrialised Agriculture

Australia's agricultural sector is recognised as one of the world's most efficient. It is mainly large scale and the efficiency has been achieved through deforestation, irrigation, heavy mechanisation and the use of chemicals made from fossil fuels. All of these elements in our highly industrialised agricultural systems add to its GHG emissions output and to the degradation of soil and destruction of our fragile inland river systems. because Australia depends so much for export earnings from industrialised agriculture there will be difficult decisions ahead about how to reduce the impact of industrialised agriculture and to reverse some of its past environmental damage.

On the positive side, Australia has a high amount of acreage devoted to organic agriculture compared to other countries, and organisations promoting and certifying organic food and agriculture. The economics of organic agricullture provides challenges however. It is more labour intensive and may involve lower yields of saleable produce. It is also difficult to bring the produce into the mainstream distribution system (i.e. supermarkets) at a cost that makes it viable for the producer and that the consumer is prepared to pay. The solutions to this problem seems to lie in the area of farmers markets, organic buyers groups, food cooperatives and subscription based schemes such as community supported agriculture schemes (CSA's). Essentially these are all community solutions and are very much the concern of transition initiatives.

Summary

Some aspects of Australia's situation are favourable, but many are not when considering the sustainability of our current qway of life and the ecosystems that support its population. As a developed, 'western' nation we have built our economy on the same unsustainable ideology as the rest of the industrialised world  - that of endless growth and lack of consideration of environmental costs and consequences.

The need for change in Australia is as great as it is in many other parts of the world. In some areas of economic and civic life it is greater.