A nice
dollop of rhetoric from Malcolm Turnball without any alternative being offered
. It seems the first best is mumble, mumble ... recycling ... mumble mumble.
(more)
cam : Thanks.: The best I could find was the National Water Initiative. So the recommendations were education, report, labelling and research into decentralised technology. Again nothing concrete. I was hoping that he would have identified a \"first best\" way that could be looked at in some detail.
As I said, I am genuinely interested in what he has to offer, but without a concrete alternative to desalinisation, it just becomes a well crafted media troll.
cam
lesleym : Turnbull\'s big solution: Why? I don\'t believe we should be looking for a one-size-fits-all answer. What will work for northern Oz won\'t be the same as what is best for south and west , eg.
cam : He didnt have a big solution for the Sydney: region. Not that I could find anyway.
cam
lesleym : Turnbull\'s water solution: Sorry, I keep forgetting where the centre of the universe is<g>.
That said, I can\'t help feeling that plonking a desalination plant at Kurnell was the best way to kill it.
The recycling idea being proposed for Toowoomba surely could be a winner for the Sydney region - either the recycled water is put back into the dams in acceptably low concentrations, or else there is a dam/s set aside for such water for an appropriate length of time.
I do think, however, as with electricity, we ought to be considering a range of solutions, so that a) we don\'t put all our eggs into one basket and find ourselves stymied by an unfortunate uninteded consequence b) we minimise the unavoidable effects on the environment of whatever system is used.
That said, I can\'t help feeling that plonking a desalination plant at Kurnell was the best way to kill it.
The recycling idea being proposed for Toowoomba surely could be a winner for the Sydney region - either the recycled water is put back into the dams in acceptably low concentrations, or else there is a dam/s set aside for such water for an appropriate length of time.
I do think, however, as with electricity, we ought to be considering a range of solutions, so that a) we don\'t put all our eggs into one basket and find ourselves stymied by an unfortunate uninteded consequence b) we minimise the unavoidable effects on the environment of whatever system is used.
cam : I cant think of any easy answers either: Again which was why I was interested. I was out in Goulburn in October last year, and they were relying on rain to solve their problems.
The other problem with a heavily centralised system, apart from high capitalisation, is that it is vulnerable to systems disruption. Iraq has shown a new style of en-masse systems disruption of key centralised infrastructure. It has also shown up how vulnerable the infrastructure is to those kinds of attacks.
I suspect our electrical, water and sewerage systems are going to have to become more nodular, if not internet like in their ability to route around damage.
The only systems like response to water I know of in Australia was
PA Yeoman\'s
book; \"The City Forest\". Unfortunately I have never secured a copy of it. He advocated;
City effluent and waste are considered as valuable commodities. He proposed the creation of tropical, and sub tropical rain forests, within the city boundaries, as park lands , as sources of exotic timbers and as the means of economically utilising city effluent for the benefit of all. The City Forest has now become a textbook for landscape architects and urban designers.Basically at the centre of every development would be a dam which would accept the rain, water and sewerage run-off. The forest would cleanse the water so that by the time it got the dam it was water ready to be used again by the development. This wont help the major cities, but if water is to become scarce, it would be interesting if these types of developments sold water back to the likes of Sydney and Melbourne. It is also a decentralised solution. Government has a penchant for heavily capitalised engineering works, so I dont know if they will ever go for that style of town planning. Woah, looks like \"The City Forest\" is published online now. Cool. btw funniest comment about Sydney I have seen in a long time . cam
lesleym : Yeomans online!: Wow! I had never read this particular book, although there is another describing his keyline system which I read when we were farming. Just a pity our farm was a bit small to incorporate his ideas properly.
Many thanks.
Many thanks.
My working week took me to Philadelphia and Baltimore - two very historic cities that take a dominant place in American political history. Philadelphia was home to the Continental Congress when the Revolutionary War was going on. Baltimore is the location of Fort McHenry which was getting pounded by the British while Francis Scott Key paced the deck of a British ship in concern. The experience led Key to write the "Star Spangled Banner". They are large cities now, but back then they were much smaller.
Philadelphia in 1776, despite being one of the larger cities in colonial America, was a small regional town dominated by Quakers. When fevers hit the streets of Philadelphia the few main streets would empty as people fled to the countryside for fresher air. When I think of Revolutionary War Philadelphia, I think of it in the same exotic, mythical forms I see many of the Australian regional towns in the Southern Tablelands, Western Plains and along the Murray.
One of those towns, Goulburn, has a looming crisis. Philadelphia, and the brilliant minds of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton combined in post-revolutionary war Philadelphia to change how we think about political systems. Will Goulburn rise to the challenge and change how we view water? (more)
cam : A map of the Warragamba Catchment Area: With Goulburn\'s location in the area.
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cam
cam : Should add the orange area: ... is the Warragamba Catchment area. IIRC the darker tan area is the Shoalhaven catchment area, and the purple striped is the Woronora (??). I got the map from a PDF on the website on the Warragamba.
cam
Scrymarch : Leviathan knows best: Interesting post. Google turned up a disturbingly similar Age article from
two years ago
. It looks as though this has been a long slump towards failure.
Sydney Water told people to get rid of their water-tanks as they were now on the Sydney mains and the inexhaustible water supply from the Warragamba
This happened all over Australia, citizens were told to sit back and let nanny provide. I know why it happened but it now seems an infantile model of government.
The governments of democracies and republics exist at the behest of their citizens, and this is always reinforced by economics. Not only is it less efficient and more failure prone to have a centralised water supply, it ties citizens to the whim and competence of the government.
As these clumsy centralised systems fail, but also as people start to think about these problems a different way, distributed models become viable. A house that sells energy back to the grid, making a little money for itself, and making the power supplies of all more stable and reliable, is rather a good metaphor for democratic citizenship. But to underline how outdated our political terminology is, it\'s also a case of the workers owning the means of production.
avocadia : Citizen utilities:
This happened all over Australia, citizens were told to sit back and let nanny provide. I know why it happened but it now seems an infantile model of government.Why did it happen? Was it a reason beyond the maxim of You-aren\'t-going-to-need-it? Wired had a piece on people supplying their own electricity and using the main grid only as a backup. It interested me to know that it was actually illegal to transfer power into the grid in many US states until recently; I\'ve kept half an eye out for stories on the micro-, and nano-generator scenes for a couple of years but never cottoned onto that fact. Water and electricity are a little different - you can\'t just dump potentially unfiltered water into the mains - but it would be interesting to see how the idea of selling back to the utility would work for water. At the moment Sydney Water give a rebate when you buy a tank; if you could sell your excess back to Sydney Water it would make the tiniest of steps towards offsetting the rain shadow affecting Warrangamba.
Scrymarch : Basically you ain\'t gonna need it: Except it turns out we do.
Water tanks for houses were actually illegal in Brisbane (Queensland?) at one stage, with mosquitoes etc being the excuse.
I suspect selling water back to the city-grid would be uneconomic, but maybe you could have a street- or suburb-grid? The energy it would take to pump water to the storage place would be the killer I suspect. But it\'s pretty easy to survive on two tanks if you stop washing the car every weekend, use sprinkling systems for a garden suited to the climate, reuse grey water etc.
Most people don\'t do this however, and they won\'t until the price of water stops being held artificially low.
6 Water Recommendation 12 The committee recommends that COAG, as part of the National Water Initiative, fund an education campaign educating the public about the benefits, economics and safety of using recycled water. Recommendation 13 The committee recommends that the National Water Commission, in consultation with the States and Territories and the public, prepare an independent and transparent report on water options for each of the Australian capital cities and major regional centres. Recommendation 14 The committee recommends that the Department of the Environment and Heritage undertake a public education campaign to increase community awareness of the Water Efficiency Labelling and Standards Scheme. Recommendation 15 The committee recommends that the Australian Government ensure research and development regarding water resource management takes into account Water Sensitive Urban Design principles. Recommendation 16 The committee recommends that the Australian Government commission research, either as part of the National Water Initiative or separately, to consider the economic viability and environmental benefits of decentralised water management systems.
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Maybe he\'s been too busy in other areas to have actually got anything moving yet. \'