Archive for July, 2010
In the lead up to the election, the Climate Institute has relaunched the Pollute-O-Meter, a neat little site that tracks the climate policies of each of the major parties. As well as providing an indication of the effectiveness of each party’s approach to reducing emissions, it also includes a simple comparison of how each party is supporting emissions reduction in three key areas: limiting and reducing pollution, making companies responsible for pollution they cause and reducing the cost of clean energy.
And the winner is? Well, not the environment if the Pollute-O-Meter is to be believed. Whilst the Greens provide some hope, the policies offered up by the Libs and Labor still see us increasing our national emissions significantly by 2020. Given the recent preference deal brokered between Labor and the Greens though, if Labor were to hang on to power on August 21 it does raise the fascinating prospect of having to reconcile the best and the worst of our national climate policy.
At Greensense we love hearing about innovative ideas that reduce our environmental impact and improve the sustainability of our cities. For a while we have been following the Bike Share schemes — particularly in Paris and Montreal — and were pleased to hear that recently the scheme has arrived in Australia.
Melbourne has just launched their scheme with 10 stations and 100 bikes, with a plan to scale to 50 stations and 600 bikes later in the year. We’ll be watching closely to see if this simple behavioural change can make a difference to CBD travel.
Today the Department of Climate Change has released guidelines for organisations seeking to have their operations or products certified as carbon neutral.
The guidelines provide organisations with information on measuring their carbon footprint, monitoring and reducing emissions and purchasing and cancelling eligible carbon offsets.
The program will be administered by the Australian Carbon Trust and organisations will need to have their certification applications to the Trust independently verified.
Certified organisations will be required to pay an annual certification fee and must submit an annual report and public disclosure summary to the Trust. They must also obtain independent verification of these documents every two years.
Here is more information on the guidelines.
A new report issued today by the WA Auditor General reveals that a program to reduce energy use in WA Government agencies by 12% has only achieved a 0.1% reduction.
For those of you that prefer to think it terms of dollars and cents, that represents over $50 million in wasted energy over the last 7 years, or for the carbon-minded, 350,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Energy Smart Program was a brain child of the Gallop government. Introduced in 2002, its goal was to reduce energy consumption by 12% below 2001-02 levels by 2006-07 in agencies with 25 or more full time staff. The report states that whilst some agencies achieved the 12% target, these achievements were “offset by a lack of progress among the larger energy consuming agencies”.
The Auditor General lists a number of reasons for the failure of the scheme. In particular the report singles out the Sustainable Energy Development Office (SEDO), concluding that it was “not sufficiently strategic” in managing the program and using incentives and penalties to encourage agencies to reduce energy consumption.
“There were no consequences for failing to achieve expected results.”
For me this highlights a challenge we see every day at Greensense. Conservation of our resources, whether that’s energy or water, is a pretty abstract concept for most people and for many businesses. Traditionally our consumption of energy is not well understood — I challenge anyone to walk into their office and ask their colleagues how much energy their building consumes during a working day. The silence will be deafening — and, as we all know, its hard to manage a problem if it’s not well understood and good quality data isn’t available. If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself how successful you’d be with a diet if you didn’t weigh yourself regularly.
At Greensense we’re focussed on educating people in the language of energy conservation. Greensense View is all about increasing awareness of how the buildings we use every day are consuming energy and water, and what we can do to ensure they perform at their very best.