Terry, Terry, quite contrerry

"How does your garden grow?"

Well, my tomatoes are flowering like mad and starting to set some fruit:



Plus, a few weeks back we used a couple of capsicums to make dinner - one red, one green. Rather than tossing the cores straight into the compost Michelle suggested that we could try putting the seeds into the pot which had failed to grow any strawberries.

With nothing to lose the kids and I loosened the top centimetre or so of soil and scattered dozens of seeds. Seeds from the red fruit went at one end and seeds from the green one at the other. I turned the soil over a little so that some seeds were buried and others exposed on the surface. Then the pot was placed in the warmest, sunniest spot I could find and we let it go.

For quite a while absolutely nothing happened. There weren't even any weeds since Josh and I had carefully pulled all of them out of this pot when we tried our second batch of strawberry seeds. I figured that either the fruit had been sterilised by radiation treatment or it was a non-viable commercial breed. But a few days ago Michelle went out to hang some washing and noticed a fuzz of unfamiliar green shoots popping up:



They're only small things, I know, but they're a big boost for my morale. And hopefully an important learning experience for my children as they themselves grow up in a society so out of touch with the natural world.

And now for something completely different

Chris Rhodes has come across some alternative theories about the origin of oil and natural gas, which if correct would somewhat defuse the peak oil time bomb.

Check it out here.

Is it just me, or did the world change?

It's only been about three months since I committed myself to the cause of "sustainability". It was largely a response to the despair I found myself sinking into as I was bombarded with bad news about climate change, energy depletion and ecological disaster. Immediately I was stepping outside of my comfort zone and feeling somewhat exposed, a "tall poppy" as we say. In comparison to my regular circle of family, friends and colleagues I suspect I quickly became the most extreme greenie among them.

Such was the initial shock that my own dear wife soon started referring to me as an "eco nazi". It was at least partly deserved - hopefully I'm a little more gracious now about the occasional light left on or a plastic bottle accidentally placed in the landfill bin instead of the recycling - but it helped reinforce my feeling that I was forging new territory.

There months later it feels like nothing of the sort. I've discovered so many people, both online and in real life, who share similar concerns and values but who are doing a far better job of applying those values in their lives and promoting them throughout the community. SBS did their "Eco House Challenge" program, and the ABC has just started "Carbon Cops". Four Corners this week focused on how a very significant chunk of Australia's GHG emissions could be cut through improved energy-efficiency in homes, except that the government appears to be refusing and even blocking action in that direction. Brisbane City Council is set to at least acknowledge the majority of the points raised by a task force report into climate change and peak oil, even if they're watering down their commitment to action on the more politically-sensitive recommendations. There are independent groups and programs springing up all over the place all aimed at reducing GHG emissions, improving energy efficiency, decreasing energy dependence, and so on.

But it was a kind comment by Crazy Mumma this week in response to one of my earlier posts that finally led me to realise that I only thought I was going it alone because I was looking in the wrong direction. Instead of comparing myself to where I've come from I should be looking at where I'm headed, and it turns out there are a whole lot of people there already. Just check out the list of other Aussie bloggers on her site!

In the end I find myself reassured and remotivated. Yes, we're facing a crisis (or three), but it appears that people the world over are getting involved with their communities and actually being effective in bringing about positive change in individuals and entire societies.

That's gotta be a good sign for our prospects in 2050.

Getting tanked!

Working from home today, there was an unexpected knock at the door. Bloke with a truck and a surprise delivery:



That's ten thousand litres of rainwater storage capacity. We weren't expecting these for another month or two. But at least I know what I'm doing this weekend now.

Recovering oil from plastics... in the microwave

Just a quick post before I get started with work for the day.

New Scientist has an article online about a new technique for extracting hydrocarbons (ie, oil) from waste plastics and rubber and the like. Essentially, it just gets cooked in a special microwave which is tuned to the specific frequencies of the hydrocarbon molecules. They heat up, evaporate, and get sucked into a condenser which collects them back into liquid oil.

They don't give any information about how much energy is used in the process compared to how much energy we can extract from the oil (I'm guessing it runs at a loss) but in the long term this approach might have two benefits that I can see.

The first is related to energy. Oil is still an incredibly convenient fuel for transport and we have plenty of plastic and rubber waste which we may be able to "mine" at some stage in the future when naturally-occurring oil becomes too hard (expensive) to get at.

But much more interesting is the ability to cleanly strip plastic and rubber compounds away from other substances: such as removing the insulation from electrical wire and leaving the copper metal exposed. This solves a major problem that existing recycling industries are facing.

Urban multistorey greenhouses: the future of farming?

Here's a neat bit of visionary thinking for you. The BBC reports on a concept for large-scale food production right in the middle of densely urban areas. Like Manhattan. Or Sydney. Or even Brisbane.

For those not inclined to follow the link, the essential idea is to build a high-rise greenhouse and make it as efficient as possible: capturing solar energy on the roof, reclaiming more energy by burning "waste" material, recycling water throughout the complex and so on.

I'm puzzled about how they're going to provide sufficient light to all those plants to help them thrive. Maybe I'll find out on the project website... will let you know if I come across the answer there.

Save the world by burning trees

With everybody going nuts about greenhouse gas "offsets" through the planting of trees which will suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, this might sound a little weird. There's a growing interest in how much good we might be able to do by setting trees (and other plant material) on fire.

In the Global Warming context, the problem with using trees to soak up CO2 is that when the trees die they decompose and most of their captured carbon goes back into the atmosphere again, sometimes as methane (CH4) which is a far worse greenhouse gas than is CO2.

Researchers in South America studying the composition of some unnaturally fertile soils have discovered what appears to be large amounts of charcoal deliberately added by indigenous farmers over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. While initially most excited by the prospect of being able to improve soil productivity by adopting similar approaches elsewhere, people began to realise that this was also a surprisingly simple and effective form of carbon sequestration.

Instead of burning trees and other vegetation in big bonfires which leave just ash, if you reduce the amount of oxygen available to the fire you will convert much of the carbon into solid charcoal - as much as 50% of it. Then you can bury this charcoal in the soil where it appears to remain quite happily for many hundreds of years. Do that in the right kind of soil conditions and you can improve crop yields by up to 800%, or so it's said.

As an added bonus, burning things gives of energy which can be harnessed for other purposes, and even the gases from the fire contain useful compounds which can be captured and processed.

That's about as much detail as I want to go into here but I'll post some links from time to time with new info. If you want to Google, the South American soils are known as "Terra Preta" and the modern process of producing charcoal, energy and chemical compounds all in one hit is being called "BioChar". A local bloke I met on the weekend is doing research on that front and is setting up a website at www.biochar.net. (At the time of writing, that page only displays correctly in Internet Explorer - Safari and FireFox users will need to try again later.)

Brisbane City Council's Action Plan

A couple of months ago I read with great interest a report commissioned by Brisbane City Council and prepared by a special task force which included Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. The report was to focus on the risks and impacts of climate change and peak oil for Brisbane, and to provide recommendations on what the council should do about it. The task force should be very proud of what they came up with, in my opinion.

There was a bit of press soon after the release of the report when the council met to discuss its response. At the time it sounded like they were pretty much going to ignore the report and dismiss its key recommendations as "wacky". I got somewhat upset about that.

But... council has now released their Plan for Action on Climate Change and Energy and it quite substantially reflects the original report! There are some notable omissions -- ambitious stuff like revolutionary transportation systems and 0% greenhouse gas emissions target for 2050, and contentious stuff like mandatory rainwater tanks and restrictions on pools, air conditioning and car parking. Compared to a "business-as-usual" approach, though, it's a major step in the right direction.

Fortnightly stats

Average daily electricity and water consumption figures for the past two weeks:

320 litres of water (vs 319 the previous week and 423 last quarter);
7.1 kWh of electricity for general use (vs 6.7 the previous week and 8.7 last quarter);
7.1 kWh of electricity for heating water (vs 6.2 the previous week and 5.4 last quarter).

Would you pay an extra $3 per litre for fuel?

A little while ago I wrote about my very nice but fuel-thirsty car and the arrangement I've entered into which obliges me to drive at least 25,000 km per year in it for another two years. My real issue with that is not so much the CO2 emissions (which can be offset to some degree) but that it's consuming an excessive amount of non-renewable fuel.

As I promised to do in that post I've been looking into my options for switching to something more efficient. The car which has caught my attention is a small four-door with a continuously variable automatic transmission (aka CVT) and fuel economy rated at a very impressive 5.6L/100km. And to my surprise there's actually more headroom in that tiny car than in the one I have now. At about $23,000 on the road I think it'd be a good choice.

But there's a problem with the financial side of things when it comes to the car I have now. The lease company wants thirty grand as a payout, and the car's worth only twenty as a trade-in: so if I want to do this it's going to cost me ten thousand bucks.

What will $10K get me? Well, over the next two years it'll drop my fuel consumption by about three thousand litres, assuming I were to continue to drive the same distance. Divide the one by the other and you get $3.33 per litre as the amount I'd be paying for the sake of using less fuel. (That's ON TOP of the actual cost of fuel at the pump!)

Of course the new car would cost less to purchase and run, so there'd be some compensation along the way. I haven't done the sums yet to work that one out, but I can imagine it still being in the vicinity of $3/litre.

I'm not sure I'm willing - or able - to do that. And besides, there's still the issue of what happens with the old car. A huge amount of energy was consumed making the thing, and it still performs its intended function perfectly well. It probably wouldn't be helping the overall cause to prematurely dispose of it.

So I guess there are three things I can do for the next couple of years to minimise the overall impact of my use of the car I have now:

1. Drive as efficiently as I possibly can.
2. Purchase CO2 credits to offset the car's emissions.
3. Consider whether it's worth paying the tax penalties for not driving 25,000km a year.

That last one would also make the car more valuable at the end of its lease period. Hmmmm.

Some good news about water

Not only did my local area get a substantial soaking during the past week, but it seems that above-average rainfall during May over the Murray-Darling basin was enough to avert a zero-allocation scenario for irrigators which I mentioned in my early post about water concerns.

Having a lapse

The reduced frequency of blog posting is probably an easy giveaway. I'm "backsliding", to borrow a term from the Christian tradition.

Showers are getting slightly longer. Meters are being read maybe twice a week. Takeaway food has become more common. The little car's fuel economy is well over 10L/100km and the big car's pushing 12. Ice Break consumption has increased again.

I have two ideas about why this may be happening.

First, I'm a perfectionist. I get terribly frustrated if things can't be "right" and I tend to avoid or ignore such things. I'm feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge of transforming the modern world into a sustainable society -- just try to avoid producing any kind of plastic waste for a whole day and you'll get a feel for how big a job we have ahead of us -- and my personal efforts feel about as effective as an amoeba trying to stop a bulldozer.

And that leads into the second idea. In my work I tend to get de-motivated if I'm always going it alone - I always get more done when working as part of a team. In the context of this sustainability thing I haven't yet found anybody local to "team up" with and that's making it hard to sustain my own momentum.

Understanding Energy - Part 2 of 2

Yesterday's bottom line was this: all the Earth's energy comes from the Sun, it provides life with the ability to grow and to modify the materials of the Earth, and the majority of it eventually heads back out into space as waste heat.

The ancient civilisations of places like Egypt and South America seemed to understand this much better than we do today. Modern man knows clever words like "photosynthesis" but has lost the deep understanding that the Sun is ultimately what puts leaves on the trees and life in our bones.

My best guess at why this is comes down to the discovery of fire, and of "non-living" things which could be burned. Of course I'm referring to coal, oil and natural gas.

Fire is a chemical reaction in which energy that was previously holding atoms together to form molecules is released as heat. Because there's a high concentration of heat energy in one place it's possible for us to channel some of it into causing desirable changes (such as pushing a piston in an engine, melting metal in a furnace or cooking food on a BBQ) before it dissipates and becomes "lost".

For many thousands of years the primary source of chemical energy which humans could harness by setting it alight was wood. Trees spend years soaking up solar energy and converting it to chemical energy that holds together the atoms which form the molecules that comprise its living tissues. At this level the connection between the Sun and the energy available to us in a wood fire is still somewhat intuitive. It's fairly obvious that the trees have to grow before they can be burned.

But coal, oil and gas don't have that same obvious relationship to the Sun. Instead of waiting for a tree to grow you can just dig them up and burn them. And what's more, the amount of chemical energy they contain is far greater than in their equivalent weight of wood. The industrial revolution was unleashed upon the world when people started to figure out more sophisticated ways of using that stored chemical energy to cause changes in materials and motion. That revolution never stopped - we are still living it at full throttle today.

There's just one little problem. Do you remember the two rules of the energy game from yesterday's post?

1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
2. Whenever energy is used, some of it gets "lost" and can't be used again.

All that energy in oil didn't just magically appear. Scientists are pretty darn sure that coal and oil and natural gas were formed from the accumulation, over hundreds of millions of years, of solar energy converted by plants into chemical energy and then trapped underground in landslides, floods or similar events. That's why they're called "fossil fuels".

It's like the Earth has an internal rechargeable battery. It's capable of storing an unimaginable amount of energy, and it's in a form which is wonderfully convenient for us to use. It took hundreds of millions of years to charge it up, but in the span of a couple of hundred years we've managed to run the battery down to about 50% charge remaining and at this rate it'll be fully exhausted by about the end of this century.

Let me say that again. We've consumed hundreds of millions of years worth of stored solar energy in just a few centuries, and now we're starting to run out.

The discussion about how much fossil fuel energy remains to be dug up and burned is a complicated one and is made worse by the unfortunate side-effect that we call climate change. I'm going to side-step the whole question of exactly when fossil fuels will cease to be able to meet our energy needs for transport and electricity production - but it will inevitably happen. In many parts of the world energy supply is already struggling to keep pace with demand.

But what else is there?

Governments and corporations the world over are turning to "biofuels" to try and compensate for falling oil production. But the math just doesn't add up: the rate of conversion from sunlight to chemical energy is far too slow to allow it to meet the current demand for oil. Besides which, studies seem to show that in many cases you use about as much oil producing the crop (for powering farm machinery etc) as you get back from the crop in the final product, making the whole enterprise a waste of oil and food at this point in time. Technological advances may make the process more efficient in the future, though, so continued research is worthwhile.

Solar photovoltaic technology - which uses tricks of physics to convert sunlight falling on a substance directly into electricity - has a similar problem. The technology keeps getting better but there's a limited amount of the raw materials needed to make the panels and producing them consumes significant amounts of energy. We probably can't produce enough of them and they don't give back enough energy to make them a silver bullet solution to our electricity dependency, but again more research is needed.

Heating water with solar collectors is a no-brainer and I applaud moves from the Queensland government to phase out the old electric-powered type. Wish it would happen sooner.

Using wind to generate electricty (converting kinetic energy from the moving air into electrical energy in the turbine) is also a pretty smart idea. The wind moves because the Sun heats the air, so tapping into that energy flow is sustainable in the true sense of the word. There are some concerns about the amount of energy used in construction vs the amount of energy the turbine can harness over its lifetime, but those issues can probably be solved through engineering.

Hydro-electric systems are also driven by the Sun. It's the Sun which heats the water and causes it to evaporate. It's the Sun which drives the wind that carries the vapour up over the higher land, imbuing it with gravitational potential energy. As the water flows down again towards sea level we can extract some of that energy to turn a turbine and convert it to electricity.

Wave and/or tidal energy. Waves are caused by the wind, which in turn is powered by the Sun, and there's a colossal amount of kinetic energy in the movement of the water. Harnessing that's a great idea. The tides are due to the gravitational pull of the Moon on the water. Taking energy from that system will actually cause the Moon to orbit more slowly and crash into Earth... but that's going to happen eventually anyway and it's unlikely we'll make any significant impact. (No pun intended.)

Geothermal (hot rocks). Not, strictly speaking, a renewable resource but definitely a clean one. Worth looking at where the geology is appropriate.

Nuclear. Ah, had to get to this eventually. Ultimately, nuclear energy is a form of stored energy that was locked into atoms by long-dead stars. It's completely natural but - like molten lava or the Sydney funnelweb spider - not something you want to get too close to. It's interesting to note that some of the geothermal heat which people want to harness was actually released during the radioactive decay of unstable nuclei. There is a lot of nuclear energy available to us here on Earth but like fossil fuels there are undesirable side-effects and it's not a renewable resource.

And that, pretty much, is it. We need to stop using fossil fuels now due to global warming but we will simply run out of oil soon anyway. Nuclear technology will continue to play a role in the global energy mix for a very long time, and it's possible that new developments could greatly reduce the risks associated with radioactive waste and other concerns. The rest of them are all important because none of them can supply so much energy in such a convenient form as fossil fuels have done for the past couple of centuries.

There's a lot of work needed to secure energy supplies and maintain a habitable planet, even just for the rest of this century. I've started doing my bit and you can too.

Thanks so much for reading this far. Questions, comments, corrections all are welcome.

Weekly stats

Average daily electricity and water consumption figures for the past week:

319 litres of water (vs 267 last week and 423 last quarter);
6.7 kWh of electricity for general use (vs 7.5 last week and 8.7 last quarter);
6.2 kWh of electricity for heating water (vs 6.3 last week and 5.4 last quarter).

Understanding Energy - Part 1 of 2

As I talk with people and as I read what comes of the mainstream press and government departments, I frequently get the impression that there's a general lack of understanding about energy. There are plenty of other topics about which you could say exactly the same thing of course, but at this point in human history I believe that energy is something we really need to have a good grip on.

So I hope you'll permit me to go all explanatory for a bit. I promise it's really important and not very hard to understand. But it is too much for one post so I'm breaking it up into two. Today we'll look at what energy is and what it does. I'll follow that up with a post on how that's related to our modern world and the usual content of this site. So...

I'll start out with a really simple definition: Energy is what changes things.

Most of the obvious changes relate to how fast something is moving and in which direction: driving a car or hitting a tennis ball are intuitive examples of the way energy can be applied to change an object's motion. The energy that a moving object has is called kinetic energy.

But energy can take many forms (including the form of matter, as Einstein famously described in his "E equals m c squared" formula). Here are a few more:

Even the smallest objects, right down to atoms and molecules, move. As with large objects, the faster they're moving, the more kinetic energy they possess. But atoms have another kind of moving energy too. They can absorb energy in a form which makes them wriggle and bounce about in completely random ways. This atomic-level "Peter Garrett impersonation energy" is what we simply refer to as heat.

There's a very familiar and useful but extremely complex form of energy called electromagnetic radiation. This includes light, radio waves, x-rays, microwaves and so on.

And there are a number of kinds of fields in which energy can be stored and retrieved. One easy example is a gravitational field: you store energy in a gravitational field by raising an object to a higher position. That energy is released from the field as the object is allowed to fall. Other kinds of fields include electric and magnetic fields. Energy stored in fields is known as potential energy.

There are others but that'll do for now. Now that we've established that energy can take different forms, it mightn't surprise you to hear that energy can be converted from one form to another. Take the falling object as an example: at its highest point, before it starts to fall, it has a lot of gravitational potential energy but no kinetic energy (ie, it's not moving). When it's let go and allowed to start falling, the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. As it falls lower and lower more and more energy comes out of the field and becomes embodied in the increasing downward speed of the object.

It's the conversion of energy from one form to another which enables most of the interesting changes in the universe - including life itself. But there are two rules to the energy game which you have to know before you can play...

1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
2. Whenever energy is used, some of it gets "lost" and can't be used again.

(In case you're wondering... yes, that does mean that eventually all the energy in the universe will be "lost" and nothing will ever change again. But don't sweat it - that's not going to happen for an incredibly long time.)

Right. So now you've got a grip on the rules, let me give you a quick update on the state of play in the great game of life on Earth.

For almost five billion years, our little rock has been spinning through the cold empty vacuum of space in orbit around an enormous nuclear fusion reactor. As a result of that reactor converting large quantities of matter into electromagnetic energy which travels quite efficiently through space, the Earth has had a steady stream of energy available to convert into different forms and enable all sorts of change.

In the early days most of the conversion was directly into heat, but a combination of heat and some tricky light-powered chemical reactions gradually snowballed to produce a soup of carbon-based compounds. At some point, and through a mechanism not clearly understood, life began.

Life and energy are inseparable. Life, by definition, must grow and sustain and replicate itself. Growth is change and energy is what changes things. And for all practical purposes, all of the energy for all of the things which have ever lived on this planet has come from the Sun.

The essential flow of energy goes like this:

• Plants convert energy from sunlight into stored chemical energy, with some "lost" as heat in the conversion process.
  
• Things which eat plants use some of that stored chemical energy to create their own tissues (muscle, blood etc), with some energy retained in the new chemical bonds and some "lost" as heat.
• Plant eaters also convert some of the plants' stored energy into energy of motion (walking, chewing etc) which is ultimately all "lost" as heat.
• Meat eaters rely on the chemical energy they obtain from the tissues of the plant eaters to power their own growth and movement - and of course most of that is "lost" as heat during the lifetime of the animal.
• Eventually all things die, but the energy in their tissues is fought over by lifeforms ranging from the smallest bacteria to the largest carnivorous scavenger. Some of the energy may get recycled (dead thing -> fungus -> plant eater -> meat eater) but at each step of the way some of the Sun's original input gets "lost" as heat, never to power the changes of life again.
  

To wrap this up, here's what you need to remember from this post: all the Earth's energy comes from the Sun, it provides life with the ability to grow and to modify the materials of the Earth, and the majority of it eventually heads back out into space as waste heat.

Next time we'll look at why our modern abundance of energy is basically a once-off freak accident and why there is so much concern about what is going to happen to our civilisation as the Earth's energy flow returns to its four-billion-year-old business as usual.

Green Eye for the IT Guy

I do feel sometimes like I'm in the middle of a lifestyle makeover show. But this one's self-imposed and doesn't have a lot in the way of active input from experienced people who know what they're doing.

Now's not the time to be showing off my compost. There's certainly something very biologically active going on in the back corner of the yard and a large pile of stuff has shrunk down to almost a third its original size. But when I turned it all over the other day I found a seething mass of large, fat maggot-like things right at the bottom... no idea what they actually were but I took encouragement from the fact that there was life there and the lowest layers of the pile had been turned into a dark, moist substance that looked not unlike what I imagine compost should be. That experiment is ongoing.

But I do want to show off an obvious success. I knew when I started trying to grow stuff that I was going to do a very bad job at first. To avoid the disappointment of failure which results from taking on a challenge that's too big for me, I made sure to include something which had a good chance of working: tomatoes.

Yes I bought a plastic pot - about $20 from one of those ubermarket hardware chains - but I figure it's an acceptable use of resources since I don't have an established garden to work in, it's water-efficient and it's going to be usable and productive for quite a long time. I filled it with soil taken from the back yard where a previous owner had a vege patch.

Here's a pic of the pot, the roughly 8 week old plants, and my two older kids (5 and almost 3 years old, respectively).



One of the people at the sustainability fair yesterday commented that tomatoes are easier to grow than weeds. That may be true, but seeing as none of the strawberry seeds I planted even bothered to germinate, I'm really glad of it.

Notes from Caboolture Sustainable Living Fair

Well that was interesting. CREEC wasn't hard to find, and I was pleased to see it's quite close to the Burpengary train station. I might find myself heading that way for a bike/train outing every now and then to participate in some of their events. It was about 22km from my place by car.

I went along to this fair with a few priorities in mind:
1. Find out more about growing food in the back yard and/or community gardens
2. Ask about distribution schemes for locally-grown produce
3. Try to make contact with people who live nearby and are focused on sustainable living
4. Maybe clarify the Greens' position on alternative nuclear energy technologies (there are some which don't produce waste that lasts for thousands of years and are almost useless for making weapons... but you don't hear about them much)

Amazingly enough, I scored four out of four.

I met some very nice and enthusiastic people from Permaculture Caboolture (not sure whether they're technically a club, society or what) who have heaps of information to share about growing food and who know heaps of other people to link up with to promote food gardening at home or in community gardens or in school programs. I'll be following up on a number of the suggestions I received and will be sure to note them here online.

There's apparently a meeting somewhere in Brisbane this coming week regarding a program which teaches organic gardening and food preparation to primary school children as part of their routine curriculum. Will make an effort to get along and check that out.

Regarding local food distribution, there's an organic farm at Beerwah which sells "subscriptions": each week you give them $60 and they give you a big box of assorted veges. The Permaculture Caboolture people are hoping to start a monthly organic farmers market at CREEC starting on the 14th July. And another bloke is talking about establishing a community garden program at Petrie, which would also link up with the regular markets which are held out that way.

And I did enjoy a chat with a guy on the Australian Greens stand about the theoretical possibility of safe, clean nuclear energy production using technologies which are quite unlike the uranium fuel cycle that everybody associates with the term "nuclear". I was very pleased with the open-minded and sensible reaction - he'd even heard of thorium before I mentioned it.

A few other quick observations to wrap up:

• A lot of paper brochures being given away - how ironic.
  
• Good representation from Caboolture Shire Council, but with an unsurprising emphasis on economic considerations and "waste management" as opposed to true sustainability.
  
• I was surprised to see fast food and pre-packaged drinks on sale. (Thumbs up to the organic sausage sizzle though for good taste and the single paper napkin.)
• Local businessman pushing a carbon sink program: $40 for 17 trees, 100 year expected lifespan. It's probably a good thing.
• Greens guy reckons that ethanol being produced for fuel in Qld is derived from the waste material left over from sugar production as opposed to the sugarcane juice itself. I need to do some more research: that might tip the overall energy balance in favour of that particular scheme... but you can bet your Porsche that it's not scalable to the point where it replaces even a small fraction of the state's fuel requirements.