ENDING PUBLIC NATIVE FOREST LOGGING IN NSW - Petition to be discussed by Legislative Assembly

An ePetition to the NSW Legislative Assembly calling for the ending of public native forest logging will be discussed by the Assembly on September 15 at 4 p.m.  (To be eligible the petition required 20,000 signatures by the end of the petition period.  21,046 NSW residents signed this online petition.)

The Petition Text in Full:

To the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly,

Public native forest logging is pushing iconic species like the koala, swift parrot and greater glider towards extinction.

The 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires burnt over 5 million hectares of forest and have left them more vulnerable to the impacts of logging. The Natural Resources Commission (NRC) and the Environmental Protection Agency have recommended that in bushfire affected areas logging should cease entirely or face tighter restrictions, as current logging practices may cause irreversible damage to ecosystems and wildlife.

Logging of public native forests is tax-payer subsidised. Forestry Corporation’s Hardwood Division has been operating at a significant loss for the past decade. In 2020/21 it ran at a loss of $20 million, with predictions that it will face losses of $15 million until 2024.

Reports also show our state forests can generate far more income through their protection than from logging, through recreation, tourism and carbon abatement.

The Western Australian and Victorian Governments have already committed to ending this industry and have developed transition plans to support affected workers and businesses.

The petitioners ask the Legislative Assembly to:

1. Develop a plan to transition the native forestry industry to 100% sustainable plantations by 2024.

2. In the interim, place a moratorium on public native forest logging until the regulatory framework reflects the recommendations of the leaked NRC report.

3. Immediately protect high-conservation value forests through gazettal in the National Parks estate.

4. Ban use of native forest materials as biomass fuel.

You can watch the debate on the webcast at https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/pages/la-webcast-page.aspx

 

AN ALTERNATIVE TO WARMING HOMES IN WINTER

While we move away from fossil fuels, it does not make sense to turn to lithium-ion batteries and another mined resource. It is exciting that a simpler method is keeping people comfortable in our high-tech age.

With the gas and electricity disruption to Europe, Finland has designed a heat storage unit that warms peoples’ homes by little more than a steel container filled with sand.

That 'little more' includes solar energy. The sand battery is connected to the grid, turned on in summer and hot air piped through the sand heats it to 500^o-600^oC, which keeps people warm through the long European winter. This way people in Kankaanpää, a town near Helsinki, warmed their homes, office buildings and public swimming pool by a 7 metre insulated silo and 100 tonnes of  sand.

Finland’s Polar Night thermal energy also delivers high temperature heat for industries, and is a useful replacement for gas, removing up to 16% of emissions. Chief executive officer Markku Ylönen says a bigger battery 20 metres in diameter and 10 metres high can be quickly built in any steel workshop, and on the economics scale 100 times bigger equates to only a 20 to 30 times in cost.

Thermal energy is not new, but until recently burning gas has been cheaper to generate the higher temperatures needed for industry. Australia's ANU Sustainable Energy Systems (SES) Centre is focused on replacing old gas heat pumps with thermal, to deliver greater than 1,000ºC temperatures to factories.

"Stored thermal can be used in food processing, the aluminium industry, cement manufacture, iron and steel, ceramics and plastics," says ANU director Professor Andrew Blakers.

"A few thousand cubic metres of storage will keep a factory running but as thermal storage can't be piped in like gas, factories will need to install their own rooftop systems and build their own storage silos, for heat using cheap daytime solar electricity.”

SES has already patented thermal storage similar to Finland’s using molten silicon instead of sand, and is looking to trial crushed rock and molten salt.

-        Pat Edwards

 

Published in the "Voices for the Earth" column in The Clarence Valley Independent ,July 27, 2022.   

 

PROTEST IS FUNDAMENTAL TO DEMOCRACY

One of the greatest benefits of our democracy is the right to peaceful protest, which has been beneficial for the environment, and society as a whole.

Without protest action by people going outside their comfort zone to take a principled stand, local wilderness areas like the World Heritage listed Gondwanan rainforests of the Washpool and Nightcap would have been destroyed. It was also peaceful protest, and a passionate display of ‘people-power’, that prevented gas fields from proliferating across the Northern Rivers.

However, the NSW government recently succumbed to corporate pressure, and introduced what can only be described as draconian legislation that can see protesters jailed for exercising their democratic right to protest.

This legislation has been strongly criticised by eminent organisations including the Civil Liberties Council, the Environmental Defenders Office, and the Human Rights Law Society, but the government has pushed it through regardless.

In an impassioned speech to parliament, newly elected Greens MP, Sue Higginson, explained that “protest is fundamental to democracy”, and the fact that the opinions and advice of those organisations can be ignored by the government, indicates that “something is going incredibly wrong”. Ms Higginson who, as the former principal solicitor with the Environmental Defenders Office, described protesters she has known, and defended in court, as “incredibly brave” individuals who have participated in civil disobedience “at significant detriment and compromise to their own lives”.

It seems that some in the legal fraternity agree, as indicated by all charges being dismissed for forest ‘protectors’, known as the Cherry Tree Four, for blocking access to the Cherry Tree state forest against loggers late last year.

The group’s lawyer said, “the Magistrate accepted that we were living in a climate crisis and agreed that these climate change warriors were just trying to protect endangered and threatened species from death by Forestry Corp logging in Cherry Tree State Forest”. Summing up, he said, "These warriors of the forest, who are held in high regard and seen as leaders in our community, should never have been dragged to court”.

 

-        John Edwards

 

Published in the "Voices for the Earth" column in The Clarence Valley Independent ,July 13, 2022.