As the flow of free government cash dries up, “Ship of Fools” University of New South Wales is urging businesses to invest billions creating jobs and building unreliable renewable electricity infrastructure, to replace the reliable dispatchable electricity infrastructure which already supplies what business needs.
The case for sustainable communities: three big ideas to future-proof Australia
So how can business contribute to sustainable communities? This question was posed to a panel of experts as part of the Future-Proofing Business Series recently hosted by UNSW Business School’s Responsible Business Program. Panelists discussed how businesses could take the lead in managing climate risk in the short and long term, what a sustainable community looks like, and the role of business in achieving this.
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1. Support community-led initiatives
Kicking off the panel discussion, Dr Kent said businesses need to be looking at how we can flatten the ‘unsustainability curve’ – the acceleration of unsustainable practices around the world, and the existential challenges that we’re facing as a result.
She also said COVID-19 offered some examples of what is possible. “People went to some interesting partices such as bread making and [planting] vegetable gardens,” Dr Kent explained. “These localised practices are characteristic of sustainability movements around the world.”
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2. Create employment by modernising infrastructure
So, job creation plays a vital role in sustainable communities, but to what extent should businesses take part? There is an opportunity for businesses to advance the discussion, creating sustainable communities and sustainable job creation, according to Prof. Peter Sheldon.
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The shutting down of these power plants could be utilised as an opportunity for job creation and reskilling the current workforce. “Every time you decommission a coal-fired power station or a coal mine there is work for 10-15 years just in the remediation and potential rehabilitation of the site,” explained Prof. Sheldon.
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3. Business must back a reduction in carbon emissions
In Australia, the major obstacles to building more sustainable communities are the policies of the Federal Government, Sheldon explained. However, to some extent, business is also responsible.
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“There is a huge ecosystem of businesses desperate to get a level of support and consistent messaging because they are completely committed to becoming a part of the new wave,” he said.
I can’t help wondering whether there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between business and government at UNSW.
Government is where you have to go if you want someone to waste cash on your random feel good schemes. Businesses tend to expect a return on their investments.
If politicians are not returning your phone calls, it is probably time to move on.
Organic pesticides, and other organic chemicals, are more dangerous to bees … and people
Paul Driessen
The honeybees, bumblebees and other little pollinators swarming over my flowers remind me what important roles they play – and how some misguided folks could inadvertently hurt them.
Montgomery County, Maryland now prohibits “weed-and-feed” lawn fertilizer and most “synthetic pesticides.” But it allows homeowners, farmers and orchardists to use “organic” products that are often more dangerous to bees, other wildlife and even humans. New York is considering a five-year statewide ban on neonicotinoid insecticides; this action too would likely result in the use of chemicals that may actually be much more toxic to the birds and bees it seeks to protect.
US Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) is still promoting a bill to reinstate an Obama era ban on using neonics in the nation’s wildlife refuges. She mistakenly believes these pesticides threaten biodiversity, bees and other wildlife in these important habitats – whereas alternatives would be safe and harmless.
Other jurisdictions are pondering comparable actions that could pose similar problems.
Neonicotinoids were introduced in the 1990s to replace less targeted, more toxic pest control chemicals. Primarily used to coat seeds, “neonics” significantly reduce the need for aerial and ground-level spraying with other chemicals that actually do harm bees and other pollinators. They become part of the plant tissue and target only pests that actually feed on the crops, particularly during early growth stages.
This advance has helped boost crop yields while protecting the environment. Losing neonics would put many states’ farming economies at risk. Support for neonic use comes from all over the world.
Up in Canada, the same misinformation that’s motivating US legislative and regulatory actions persuaded Ontario lawmakers to pass a neonic ban in 2015. Farmers have since reported paying four times more for an alternative pesticide that is less effective, cannot be used on some crops and can harm bees.
Activists persuaded Europe to ban neonics in 2013. But subsequent studies found the ban disastrously counterproductive.
For instance, after the ban, British farmers had to spray four times more often than before, using older pesticides like pyrethroids and organophosphates that are less effective, must be sprayed several times during the growing season, and often harm bees, other non-target insects and even birds. Insect pests increased dramatically, and across Europe the canola (oilseed rape) industry suffered revenue losses of over $430 million in just a few years.
As was the case in Europe, proposed prohibitions are often the result of environmentalist pressure campaigns and false claims that bees are threatened by neonics. Actual data show the opposite is true.
Despite warnings of a “bee-pocalypse,” except during the latest “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), honeybee colonies have been rising worldwide since the 1990s, when neonics first came on the market. US Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveys show that U.S. honeybee hive numbers have increased seven out of the last ten years, and there are now over 150,000 more beehives than in 1995.
A closer look at New York’s crop yields also confirms that honeybee colonies are healthy. Apple yields are almost exactly the same as they were ten years ago, indicating that pollinators are thriving and busy doing their job. Similar lessons apply elsewhere.
There’s no doubt that honeybees have recurring problems. Overwinter losses are still high some years and, while bees reproduce rapidly and beekeepers can quickly replenish their hives, these losses can significantly strain this small but important industry.
Most experts agree, however, that the worldwide spread of the deadly Varroa destructor mite was a primary factor in the recent mass die-offs, and a recurrent problem over the centuries. They arrived in the United States in the late 1980s and spread widely over the next decade. The parasites attach to bees, suppressing their immune systems, carrying deadly diseases and creating pathways for other diseases to enter bee bodies. The triple whammy can have disastrous impacts on bee colonies.
Thankfully, the USDA has made progress in efforts to breed more Varroa-resistant or Varroa-tolerant honey bees, which somehow have better hygienic habits: they remove mites from one other. That’s important, because many available Varroa treatments no longer work as well, due to the mite’s uncanny ability to develop resistance to treatments.
Other USDA research has identified a promising new approach of using RNA interference to disrupt the reproduction of Nosema ceranae – another bee parasite that is the honeybee’s second-worst scourge.
Unfortunately, crusading activists, journalists, legislators and regulators spent years ignoring these microscopic predators and parasites. Instead, they blamed pesticides, especially neonics.
How wrongheaded and counterproductive that was is further illustrated by the vast canola fields in western Canada. The canola is 100% grown with neonic-coated seeds, and successful professional beekeepers actually cart their hives into the middle of the canola fields because they produce such delicious honey.
Not surprisingly, as domesticated bees recovered, anti-pesticide activists began talking about wild bees, which can also be important for pollination. The activists get their facts wrong here, too.
There are thousands of wild bee species. According to a 2015 study published in Nature – probably the most extensive survey of wild bees ever done – 98% of wild bees don’t even pollinate agricultural crops. Moreover, the few species that do, and thus would come into greatest contact with neonics, are thriving.
Ironically, bees may be more at risk from insecticides that people have been falsely led to believe are safe. Organic farmers don’t use neonics or other modern chemicals, but they do employ a number of crop protecting pesticides. These “organic” products may be “natural,” but some are highly toxic to bees – rotenone, copper sulfate, spinosad, hydrogen peroxide, azidirachtin, citronella oil, and even garlic extract and acetic acid, for instance – chemical risk analyst Dr. David Zaruk points out.
Montgomery County’s guidelines specify that products bearing EPA registration numbers are prohibited and say gardeners should rely on a 113-page, tiny-type list of chemicals certified by the Organic Materials Review Institute, an organic industry support and advocacy group. However, OMRI doesn’t mention that some of its “approved” products harm bees or pose other serious risks – to wildlife and humans.
For example, OMRI (and thus Montgomery County, among others) approves rotenone, but neglects to mention that this nasty chemical kills bees, is highly toxic, especially when combined with pyrethrins, and can enhance the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Zaruk and other experts note. Pyrethrin pesticides themselves are powerful neurotoxins that can cause leukemia and other health problems.
Copper sulfate can damage human brains, livers, kidneys and stomach linings. Prolonged exposure to boron fertilizer can affect people’s brains, livers and hearts. Lime sulfur mildew and insect killer causes irreversible eye damage, and can be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Nicotine sulfate is a neurotoxin that interferes with nerve-muscle transmissions, causes abnormalities in lab animal offspring, and can lead to irregular heart-rates and even death. All are approved “organic” chemicals.
Journalists, legislators, regulators, homeowners and gardeners need to do their homework more carefully. They should read reputable scientific studies, rely less on anti-pesticide press releases and apocalyptic news stories, read product labels carefully, wash up afterward, and view with extreme skepticism any claims that the word “organic” means pesticide-free or a chemical is safe (or not even a chemical).
Above all, everyone should use all chemicals carefully and appropriately, under the assumption that any chemical (synthetic or organic) we are handling or applying may be toxic and dangerous – to bees, other insects and wildlife, or even ourselves.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many articles on the environment. He has degrees in geology, ecology and environmental law.
Lionel Shriver provides guidance on what’s going on in our social spaces lately, writing at the Spectator The vanity of ‘white guilt’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
We’re making a spectacle of shame
Though the concept of collective ‘white guilt’ has been with us since at least the 1960s, it’s seen quite the fashionable resurgence in the wake of the George Floyd protests last month. As universities, businesses and celebrities fall all over themselves to banner their racial blameworthiness, pale-faced mea culpas gather into a deafening chorus.
The issues are two. First, one of this column’s running themes: emotional fraudulence.
Clarion declarations of moral dereliction do not have the texture of guilt. They are prideful. They have the texture of preening. Elaborate racial apologies are a form of showing off. When last month the actress Jenny Slate resigned from the animated Netflix show Big Mouth because voicing a half-black character was ‘an example of white privilege’ and ‘an act of erasure of black people’ within ‘a system of societal white supremacy’, she wasn’t making a career sacrifice, but bidding for elevated status.
Bet it works, too. Bet the lady isn’t short of work for long. FYI, a backhanded boast of my own: my latest novel anticipates white audiobook readers and voice-over artists being forbidden the ‘mimicry’ of speaking as non-white characters. The prescience is depressing.
We’re witnessing the spectacle of white people frantically competing with other white people over who can appear more self-excoriating, more self-loathing. But these people don’t hate themselves. They hate other people — mythical other people, for the most part, all those terrible racist white folks to whom they can feel vastly superior. Now that ‘white silence = violence’, they can also feel superior to regular going-about-their-business white people who haven’t managed to get prostrate pronouncements of self-disgust on Buzzfeed.
These confessions are also defensive. They’re diversionary, and an attempt to opt out. They translate as: ‘You don’t want to come for us! We’re on your side! We’re allies! We’re the nice white people, and because there’s no such thing as nice white people, that means we’re not really white after all! So you don’t want to burn down our premises, right? You want to go for those horrible white people, over there! Here, take some petrol and matches, on us! And we won’t call the cops, honest!’
Yet ask Adam Rapoport, forced to resign as editor of Bon Appétit over an ancient ‘brown face’. The opt-out doesn’t work. You get cancelled anyway, when your unseemly Black Lives Matter grovelling is deemed insufficiently pious.
Proper guilt feels bad. Its emotional cousin, shame, feels even worse. Whenever I leaked a bit because I didn’t want to come in from playing outside, my mother forced me to wash out my panties by hand in the sink, in front of my brothers. Behold: shame. Adult examples of shame in my life I’d be reluctant to share here. Shame is soul-destroying, the stuff of suicide. You don’t parade shame in public; you’re unlikely to leave the house. So none of last month’s white protestors was ashamed.
Issue two: We’re in danger of installing heritable guilt as morally valid.
Now that we’re to embrace the concept of an ineradicable ‘systemic racism’ while employees take mandatory courses on ‘unconscious bias’, bigotry is no longer a sin we choose or refuse to perpetuate, but a stain handed down through the generations that’s just as indelible as the peach juice on my pink dress. Is this what we want? Really? Will we stick modern Mongolians with the rampages of Genghis Khan? Hold some 19-year-old Muscovite today responsible for Stalin’s gulags? Force Germans to keep expiating their little hearts out over the second world war in the year 3000?
Maybe we should enlarge the lens. Frankly, I’m weary of the whole category ‘white people’, which throws folks of wildly different backgrounds, from Russians to Jews to Scots, into one big indiscriminate pot. So let’s talk about people, full stop. As a species, we’ve been treating each other like shit from the year dot. The horrors to which we’ve subjected one another, including slavery but a great deal else, are so incomprehensibly dreadful that no one, as an individual, could conceivably bear the crushing weight of all that torture, mass murder and sadism. If guilt is inherited, then every last one of us should be condemned to Dante’s nine circles of hell.
None of us chose the world in which we emerged. We didn’t pick our race, sex or natal nationality; any inbuilt leg-up or disadvantage these traits conferred at birth was not of our making. We didn’t select which awful history soaks the ground at our feet. It’s insensible to feel ‘guilty’ or ‘ashamed’ about something you didn’t do. It’s entirely sensible to feel regret, sorrow and abhorrence about the likes of slavery. It’s commendable to be informed about the past and to try to understand the nature of its wretchedness, as it’s also commendable to strain to leave the world a little better than you found it.
But claiming that what happened before you were born is all your fault is not only ridiculous. It’s vain.
Issue two: We’re in danger of installing heritable guilt as morally valid. 
Iowa Climate Science Education 