The thing that must never be said – it overlooks the issue

Today, Mummy and I went on a train ride to pick up the new Peugeot, which had a major fault in its brake control that had to be repaired at a workshop near the bend of Hawthorn Road into Camberwell Road. In earlier years, this area was familiar, but since COVID we have never been there.

On the whole, I enjoyed the return trip with my mother to pick up the car — a 2018 Peugeot 208 which was bought in Balwyn last summer. I was really very reactive to any complaint about the standard of Melbourne’s public transport, which by global standards is exceedingly bad. There remains the problem of loud, one-way “mantras” about the need to end all spending on roads and to transfer it to public transport. Nevertheless, so early as 1990, Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated the potential benefits to the immense majority of such a policy, while much more recently Richard Smith had demonstrated the urgent necessity of radically reducing car production and banning the manufacture of all but the smallest road vehicles.

Given what Smith reveals about the energy costs of car production, one must never say that cars are a necessary benefit when criticising Australia’s woeful public transport. Cars’ environmental cost is far too great to, even given the standard of public transport in Australia, excuse their use.

The fact is — as known for over three decades — that a rational plan could with 100 percent public transport modal share and resultant vastly reduced greenhouse emissions and pollution nevertheless produce the same (or greater) mobility cars provide, and at far less financial cost than the sum currently wasted on roads. Plainly put, such a plan is in every way except reduction in profit to wealthy corporations much fairer, cheaper and more rational than the present transport system. There should be no tolerance (personally or politically) for any policy other than 100 percent of spending on public transport, and not a solitary cent on roads.

Serious, yet trivial in the big picture

A few days ago, I noticed discussion of how car companies have been trying to slow the shift towards electric vehicles, as has been discussed by Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of days ago as I type this.

Especially since car manufacturing in Australia has been closed down after three decades of trying to stop it, car companies attract relatively little attention in the mind of the Australian public. Even in countries that still manufacture cars, car companies are rarely major newsmakers, despite their immense wealth and vast output. The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, even without any local car manufacturing, is nonetheless an immensely powerful lobby group inside Australia, representing thirty-nine makes of car. Despite the undoubted influence, even control, of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries upon Australian transport and energy policy, the organisation’s name is not known to most Australians.

Despite being viewed by my relatives as propaganda, some quotes from Environment, Capitalism and Socialism continue to influence my thinking

Ever since I read the pamphlets of the Public Transport Users Association, and much more so again after reading the now-defunct Democratic Socialist Party’s 1990 (updated 1999) book Environment, Capitalism and Socialism, I have come to believe that the production of private cars is ipso facto unsustainable and unnecessary. That is to say, if every last dollar of public and private money devoted to road building and car production were redirected to mass transit, there would be large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions accompanied by zero loss of mobility for the majority of the population. The Public Transport Users Association — whom I came after reading the Trotskyists to regard as too lenient and compromising — nonetheless demonstrated in the early 1990s that a public transit system for Melbourne equal to the best in Europe and Japan would cost one-twelfth the amount actually wasted by the Kennett and other governments on the Scoresby, Mornington Peninsula, and Dingley Freeways, CityLink and the Western Ring Road. The evidence of the PTUA amply proved to me that the influence of the car industry must dictate transport policy in Australia, and that the most rational and logical policy would:

• put an end to all trunk road building whatsoever
• transfer all money spent on roads — excluding that spent upon their demolition and revegetation — to improvements in rail and other public transport
• have as its ultimate goal a transport system based upon 100 percent public transit modal share — initially in urban areas and subsequently elsewhere
• aim to develop communities without local roads for private cars
• homes would be instead connected by single-lane roads for special uses or better still exclusively by footpaths or tramways

After I heard that cars were not the major single source of greenhouse gases during a holiday in the Otways in 2001, I slightly lessened insistence on the phase-out of private transport until reading Richard Smith’s ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’ last September.

Smith’s article was published in Volume 3 Supplement B of the 2020 Ecological Citizen, and it suffices to say here that Smith demonstrated that to avoid catastrophic global warming:

1. the entire modern car industry must be shut down
2. vehicle production must be dramatically cut (by 99 percent or more) and all but the smallest vehicles banned from production entirely
3. there must be a complete transformation of the transport system to one based upon mass public transit for every journey

What Smith, alongside the Democratic Socialist Party and Public Transport Users Association, does demonstrate is that road lobby groups like the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries are a major factor in preventing urgently needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and that a strictly rational and logical transport system would have no place whatsoever for private motoring. Unless the car companies who support groups like the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries are completely nationalised and expropriated — and the resources and wealth they hold wholly redirected to the building of decades-overdue mass transit systems capable of surpassing the car in mobility — there can never be any reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The best hope from this news is that people recognise the car companies and their front groups for what they are — ecological criminals for whom justice means expropriation of their entire wealth and assets and complete dismantling of the industries upon which this wealth is built. The public have undoubtedly been naïve about the car companies for far too long and a change in image is many decades overdue. The requisite image of the car companies is one of corporate polluters as bad as (possibly worse than) the less low-profile fossil fuel corporations.

A circuitous trip and a famous joke from time past

In the late 1990s — the same time I first studied Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly and was startled at how they demonstrated political reality as completely different from what I learned in school — I briefly collected bus timetables in Melbourne. I was quietly appalled by the quality of service vis-à-vis what books like Environment, Capitalism and Socialism or even the more moderate Public Transport Users’ Association demonstrated as requisite for sustainable transport in Melbourne.

At the same time, my brother was critical of my interest in travelling on buses — an interest that has continued to this day. I often joke that

“if you want to understand global warming, ride on Melbourne’s bus services”

because it is clear to me that the woeful quality of bus and other public transport serves is a critical reason why Australia is rated the worst-performing nation in the world re greenhouse gas emissions. (At the same time, ecology increasing demonstrates Australia is required to be by far the best performed nation, as far ahead of the pack as Port Adelaide in the 1914 SAFL or Yorkshire in the 1901 County Championship).

Yesterday, after a brief conversation with my mother, I was allowed to spend my first day riding buses since the COVID pandemic. Before COVID, I would often spend days riding buses around Melbourne, and enjoyed it even though there often is not much to see from inside a bus.

I had had a plan to go on a bus route that I recall laughing about with my brother a great deal during the late 1990s — the bus from Moonee Ponds to Niddrie via Strathmore. My brother called that route, then numbered 501,

“a classically circuitous route”

at the same time as he complained a great deal about how circuitous almost all bus routes were vis-à-vis trains or trams. When I took this “classically circuitous route”, I was taken by what I thought was a joke saying (as I strongly recall it):

WHY IS THIS BUS
THE 501?
BECAUSE THAT IS THE PROBABILITY THAT IT WILL
BE EARLY OR LATE:
5/1

When I first read that, I presumed that meant the odds of it being early or late were 5 to 1 — which means it was on time five times out of six. My brother, however, said that it is much more likely that the old writing I had seen — if I recall correctly near Strathmore shops — was not a joke but an angry response to a user’s experience. That is, it was either early or late five times out of six, and on time only one time out of six. Actual experience does not tell me which is right, although I have ridden on buses many times, and they are often late though rarely outright cancelled as trains sometimes are.

At the same time, of course, the 501 could not plausibly have actually received its route number from being early or late five times out of six!

Yesterday, my first plan was to ride on the “classically circuitous” route, now part of the 469 alongside a modified Niddrie to East Keilor section from the old route 475. When I did this, I scanned reasonably carefully but could not see the old 501 writing noted above — it may well have been removed long before the route was modified — but I did find the long circuitous trip and the beef burger at Milleara Mall quite interesting. The terrain around Strathmore Heights is quite steep, even scenic, as is the lake area to the south of the Calder Freeway. 

“None Is Too Many” cars confirmed once and for all

For year, I have said following on from the Public Transport Users’Association and the Democratic Socialist Party’s 1990 Environment, Capitalism and Socialism that it is ecologically unacceptable for one cent of public or private money to be spent on building new freeways and that if Australia not be a rogue state it cannot build one new road and must invest every cent of transport money to achieve a mass public transit system that minimally achieves equal freedom of mobility as our present car-dominated system.

Ever since a temper outburst during my first overseas tour during the 2006/2007 southern summer, my mother has said that whenever I discuss global warming I am too focused upon three things:

1. Australia as a source of greenhouse gas emissions
   
2. cars and transport as a source of greenhouse gas emissions
   
3. per capita emissions, as opposed to aggregate emissions
   

 (1) and (3) I have always denied and now are definitively refuted by Dimitri Lafleur’s 2018 thesis ‘Aspects of Australia’s fugitive and overseas emissions from fossil fuel exports’, which shows that Australia is one of the six largest total emitters using an extraction-based count rather than the standard territorial-based count. The problem with the territorial-based count is that it fails to recognise that the countries to whom these emissions are debited are quite likely to have not gained economically from them if they purchased the fuel from somewhere else. By re-debiting emissions to the original energy source and likely location of (largest) net financial profit. Saudi Arabia, which would be a rogue state merely for its place as the leading supporter of international terrorism, becomes the third-highest aggregate emitter with 4.9 percent of total global emissions. Australia is the sixth-highest with over 3 percent, behind China, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India.

In the past two or three years, after a nasty meltdown in October 2018 — during which I ruined several coffee-brewing machines — I have come to accept to a considerable degree that cars versus public transport is not the primary cause of runaway climate change.

 

However, in his ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’, author Richard Smith has confirmed that there is no possible solution to global emissions besides:

“drastically reduce[ing] vehicle production, ban[ning] the production of needlessly large vehicles, vastly expand[ing] many modes of public transit and biking, discourage[ing] private ownership of cars and encourage the use of shared vehicles”

Smith is the founder of System Change Not Climate Change, which brands itself as the leading ecosocialist network in the US, and author of Green Capitalism: The God that Failed and China’s Engine of Ecological Apocalypse. His article demonstrates conclusively that the car industry must be entirely shut down (at least in its present form) because it is geared towards an extraordinary amount of waste through planned obsolescence in order to maximise profits. In the process Smith demonstrates as Environment, Capitalism and Socialism did so far back as 1990 that only a completely new social system can adequately reduce greenhouse gas emissions — one based upon social need rather than corporate profit. :

“In short, the entire auto [car] industry — electric and gas-powered — is completely unsustainable. We don’t need an auto [car] industry that produces tens of millions of new cars every year. What we need is a different transportation system. The actual solution to minimizing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector — as for the economy as a whole — is not technological innovation, but social and economic transformation [author’s italics]”

Smith fails to quantify the reduction in vehicle production that would be needed to achieve zero emissions by 2050. Nor does he quantify what a “needlessly large vehicle” is. However, the figures he provides about the importance of road transport to greenhouse gas emissions do suggest that the requisite reduction is to the point of a total ban on production of road vehicles outside of vehicles built (or, possibly, modified) specifically and exclusively for specialised uses such as:

1. emergency vehicles including fire engines and ambulances
2. delivery of items impossible to carry on public transit direct to homes or workplaces
   
3. vehicles for the work of tradespeople on jobs like home maintenance
   

Although the radical left have never explicitly argued for a total ban on private road transport, the evidence of Richard Smith that “none is too many” cars appears much stronger than I had thought beforehand, and much firmer than what the radical left has said in the past.

40 years of unnecessary wastage must end at a stroke

As I have noted, there is little public confidence about using Victoria’s ecologically critical public transport network.

Today, my mother confirmed that a mere thirteen percent of the state’s residents are confident about using public transport due to the risk of COVID spread. My mother says that when COVID ebbs this will improve, but I am neither:

1. certain of this
1. COVID-19 is so much more severe than previous pandemics that people will not forget it even when and if improved treatments are developed.
2. More likely the public will come to fear public transport as an incubator for viruses on a permanent basis
3. Victorians in the future will be thus even more willing to accept road traffic congestion and its ecologically deadly consequences
2. accepting of the situation, give Australia’s execrable environmental performance outlined for may years by the New Climate Institute in its annual Climate Change Performance Index
3. accepting that there is no better alternative to a car-based transport system and drastic cuts to already inadequate services

Both the Public Transport Users’ Association and the Democratic Socialist Party conclusively demonstrated in the 1990s that a public transport system providing equal mobility to Melbourne’s current car- and freeway-based transport system would cost about ⅒ as much as freeway projects planned and built since 1990.

Earth’s ecology has been demanding from Australia a rigid zero roads budget policy throughout forty years of uncalled-for wastage on freeways that benefit only the car companies, the oil companies, and businesses supplying them with raw materials and components.

If all money earmarked for unbuilt proposed roads were transferred to the critical issue of making ecologically essential public transport perfectly safe through all pandemics, there would no doubt – although I have not made calculations – exist ample money to sanitise every public transport vehicle and to ensure all passengers are given hand sanitiser, masks and gloves. Such a transfer of funding would have the following advantages:

1. prevention of huge losses for Victoria’s public transport system
2. prevention of drastic cuts to services after the COVID-19 pandemic ends
3. prevention of massive increases in traffic congestion – which more roads exacerbates – as more cars are on the road
4. reduction Australia’s lamentable level of greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the impacts on the global climate
5. preparing for a complete transfer of all public and private transport funding to rail and buses – forty or more years overdue as I write this
6. following from (5), major public savings from not subsidising the car and fossil fuel industries who benefit from public and private wasting of money on ecologically damaging transport systems

A disastrous mistake for the planet

Today, in the chemist getting medicine for Mummy’s dog Lotte, I discovered that Premier Daniel Andrews has made a disastrous mistake of political expediency.

The State Government has frozen vehicle licence and registration fees in an effort to relieve poor people whose employment is affected by the worsening coronavirus pandemic. Whilst I presume this is a temporary measure and will end when and if the COVID-19 pandemic is controlled by a new drug or drugs, I fear that it will be permanent. If the freeze is permanent, it will further add to Australia’s uniquely bad environmental and climate change performance, by making ecologically unaffordable car use – which in Australia means any car use – still cheaper. This is aided by petrol prices plummeting to less than ⅒ Australia’s ecological parity price.

Under this scenario, what will happen once businesses return? Most likely, we will see the kind of traffic congestion and pollution feared by organisations like the Public Transport Users’ Association. With petrol prices stuck at basement level ever since the indexation of excise ended in 2002, without which change petrol would be over 40¢ per litre less cheap today, if businesses reopen then there will be no incentive to not use cars.

What the government needs to do – politically unpalatable as it is – is to do something to make public transport safer during the pandemic. Providing free masks and gloves not only to drivers, but also for all passengers, would no doubt alleviate fears amongst the public of using public transport. The cost of doing this I have not calculated, but a moratorium on spending on new roads and postponement of planned road-only maintenance projects – already three whole decades and counting overdue – would certainly provide enough money to protect a critical service to Australia’s ecology from long-term decimation beyond the damage of the Lonie Report, CityLink, EastLink and other unnecessary wastes of public and private money.

The end of public transport in Melbourne?

The reality noted in my previous post that Victoria is faced with an explosion of new COVID-19 cases and a much more restrictive lockdown that will last most likely many years – Premier Daniel Andrews admitted this even when cases looked like they would fall to zero – hides something much deeper and darker.

The World Socialist Web Site – which I have known for almost two decades since its exposé on the death of gridiron lineman Korey Stringer back in 2001 – has pointed out that even in less car-dependent Britain and Ireland, bus drivers have worked without personal protective equipment, arguing that this is untenable given that twenty-nine have died in the UK. Although I have not been allowed to ride a bus since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I have zero evidence that any protective equipment has been made available to drivers, let alone to passengers, for whom it would minimise or eliminate the risk of public transport travel during a pandemic if all vehicles were sanitised. Un-sanitised public transport vehicles are a highly plausible source of the new wave of COVID-19 infections beginning to his Victoria and certain to dwarf the state’s peak in late March and early April. This is further argument that some government funds must be redirected to sanitise public transport vehicles and provide protective equipment free of extra charge for passengers as well as drivers. In the case of trains this would be difficult with so many stations un-staffed, but it would be easy with trams if entry were limited only to the front door – highly feasible with patronage as low as it is now.

From the other side of politics, the rural Weekly Times argued last Wednesday (I actually discovered the article in the Coles at Caulfield Plaza) that public transport services should be at least temporarily cut to offset the heavy losses it is incurring with patronage down by 78 percent. The Times noted public transport was already making losses before COVID-19 hit.

With COVID-19 infections in Victoria certain to grow much faster in the next weeks and months than at the first peak in late March and early April, the public is bound to perceive public transport as unsafe to a much greater degree than even then. Patronage could well decline to not 22 percent, but 2.2 percent, of pre-pandemic levels. Under such conditions, calls for “temporary” service cuts would become much louder and extent more widely amongst the ruling class and small business owners who wish to be relieved of paying taxes for services they do not use. However, there is real danger, as the WSWS have noted and experience from the previous economic downturn in the early 1990s reveals, that these services cuts will be permanent or at the very least long-term.

The demands for service cuts from rural and suburban small business owners, from wealthy businessmen and from the frustrated lower middle class is in fact likely to be so great that Melbourne’s public transport as I have known it – and deplored it as an example of what is causing global warming even as it serves as an outlet for my own recreation and exploration – is almost certain to become a true “thing of the past”. The plain facts are that:

1. politically influential groups are unlikely to accept paying for public transport under the long-term economic crisis caused by escalating COVID-19
2. road capacity is far too large for public transport to pay its way even with the cheapest and most bare-bones service (at least outside of the most “captive” patronage of all, schoolchildren who are too young to drive) possible
3. people who have given up on public transport due to COVID-19 are not likely to return to it even if restrictions are completely eliminated – a situation that even Premier Andrews admits is  many years away as I write this

Given these things, public transport trips are certain to be a permanent casualty of COVID-19, even if it is not easy to see where Victoria really went so wrong, with the only possibilities being inadequate early testing and purchase of protective equipment to operate such essential services.

Australia’s grave failure

With the whole of life in Australia likely to be altered for up to eighteen months by the COVID-19 – originally known as “novel coronavirus” – pandemic and being extremely angry at the risks of travelling on public transport as I like to do, it stands remarkable that some of the resource-poorest nations in the world have been the few able to properly respond, as Time demonstrated four days ago.

As resource-impoverished Taiwan demonstrated, Australia could have dealt with this pandemic by:

1. pre-emptively ensuring complete isolation from known sources by immediately grounding passenger planes and ships, preferably without costly mitigation to airlines
2. ensuring as many people as possible are tested and isolated if positive
3. immediately sanitising and sterilising all large indoor meeting places and public transit vehicles
4. aiming to raise as much money as possible for these purposes
• A temporary $1 or even $2 per litre levy on all motor fuels would I feel be highly suitable for this purpose
• even an $2 levy at the maximum price in the weekly cycle would leave petrol at $3.60 per litre
• given Australia’s lamentable greenhouse emissions record such a price in no way stands unjust

The problem was the power of vested interest lobby groups, a worse problem in Australia than just about anywhere in the world. Air transport, for instance, would have vehemently opposed an immediate shutdown of operations without mitigation. Given the power these corporations hold globally – as seen in debates over greenhouse gas emissions, where corporations who should be paying the full costs of climate change globally can increase their emissions – they possess great responsibility in times of crisis.

1946 Wisden similar to one of mine held at a bookbinder

These have not been fulfilled at all: the Liberal Party government is clearly more concerned to protect the mining magnates’ wealth than to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at minimal cost to ordinary Australians.

In recent discussions with my mother, she has noticed how Australia has not even been spraying its public transport to reduce the risk of transmission in the most ecologically necessary of all social services. In contrast, East Asian nations are spraying even external areas of their cities, as I watched on a video yesterday. Australia with its immense natural resources ought certainly to have enough money to do this so that public transport and other businesses can have their risk minimised.

As things stand, there exists a risk of a complete shutdown of public transport in Melbourne, and even of important services that hold some of my own property including a 1946 Wisden – although I have accepted my mother driving me there if the shop be still open. There is also the risk that there could be permanent changes to Australia’s economy and the shutdown of many small businesses. All of this would have been averted if Australia had responded promptly. So would (Australian rules) football and rugby games behind closed doors – a not improbably permanent move even beyond when and if the pandemic does subside.

The problem of knowledge and culture, revisited

“Users, and the general public, generally have a low opinion of Melbourne’s trains and trams (note: buses are not even mentioned).”

Public Transport Users’ Association

“What will I do for public transport? I will improve the economy so you can find good enough work to be able to afford a car.”

(Quote from George Walker Bush during his presidential campaign)

“Public transport, that’s something they use in socialist countries”

As I noted in my previous post, knowledge of how bad Melbourne’s bus services are is essentially zero among non-users. It has occurred to me that knowledge of how bad Melbourne’s bus services are is equally negligible among the users themselves.

On old print bus timetables there were numerous times marked with “S” for “school days only” and whenever I rode a bus that was not substantially empty, it was invariably filled with school children. It took no intellectual foresight to recognise that the majority of users of Melbourne’s buses were school children, who weren’t yet old enough to have a driver’s licence. It’s obvious that with their workloads, these school kids had no time to comment upon the services they were using whether they were dissatisfied or not. Although school courses as I experienced them did demonstrate benefits of using public transport instead of cars, they were exceedingly superficial, ignoring that:

1. Australian cities have a public transport use share about one-seventh to one-eighth those of cities in East Asia and one-fifth those of cities in Europe
2. Less than ten percent of government and private sector transport investment in Australia since 1968 has been in public transport
3. Metabolic ecology demonstrates that Australian residents are bound to a sustainable per capita energy consumption no more than one-third that of residents of Europe, East Asia or the Americas
4. No attempt is made to compare bus timetables in Australia with those in Enriched and Tropical World cities
• Bus timetables are of course much easier to explain that complex ecology based on understanding of large amounts of data on chemical differences between soils and oceans

Without those explanations, bus users in Melbourne grow up exactly according to the PTUA’s George Bush junior quote. They have no desire but to own a car, and almost all do when they become old enough. Outer suburbs and rural areas where most families form and live have no desire to live the atomised lives led by public transport users in Enriched and Tropical World cities. These suburban and rural residents have cannot tolerate paying taxes for the inner cities, instead believing that environmental and social services should be provided by private communities.

Public transit is, no doubt, one of the services suburban and rural taxpayers most loathe to pay. As most work near home, these taxpayers require nothing bar a few school peak services, possess strong family ties to provide the services inner-city students need government to provide. and believe that their money is not to be spent on other people because that money is private property. In effect, Australian transport policy is dictated by an unofficial alliance between outer metropolitan and rural taxpayers and mining companies, who would lose severely if car sales were dramatically reduced. Discussing or proposing public transport services of comparable quality to European or East Asian cities is utterly taboo even within public schools, although Australian ecology dictates its public transport should be by far the best, fastest and most efficient in the world.

This is a taboo that has to end: school curricula must illustrate Australia’s unique low-energy ecology that dictate its people consume by far the least energy per capita the world, and that if road building were ended plentiful money would be available to pay for it.

A severe indictment of Melburnians’ knowledge

Over the past two days, searching for a bookshelf for my brother’s new home and even for my mother’s birthday, I have undergone some quite substantial travels around Melbourne – to Ringwood, Watsonia, and Williamstown.

In comparison to the “galloping round the countryside” of twenty years ago, these trips have been rather less undisciplined and I have come home to actually eat dinner with my mother – something exceptionally rare even in the days before the Queen’s Birthday.

“Lack of public transport that can compete with the car leads to heavy car traffic” (Public Transport Users’ Association; ‘Driven around the bend Melbourne’s meandering bus routes’, May 2012)

Even if I have not been randomly “galloping round the countryside”, the desire in me to travel on as many bus routes as possible has never really been lost. With increasing runaway climate change observed everywhere, I have often joked that riding Melbourne’s awful bus services can show where global warming is coming from. Although it is true that all one-occupant car journeys being replaced by public transport would save a lot of energy, with age I have come to realise that almost exclusive focus on roads at the expense of rail is not the cause of Australia’s almost uniquely dreadful record when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, cars account for only about one-fifth of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, and both coal power and land clearing stand as equal culprits in giving the country the worst emissions record in the world, especially considering its uniquely low-energy ecology amongst extant continents.

What really struck me hard about these trips to inspect bookcases was that none of the sellers knew even the local bus routes whose stops they must have seen when driving! This ignorance is rendered easier by the extremely low frequencies (never more than every forty minutes) of many if not most buses in Melbourne, so that casual drivers may never see a bus when not looking. This gives the illusion that there is no public transport whatsoever away from rail lines and the old inner suburbs.

In fact, public transport more often than not does exist, but is of such abysmal quality that nobody with a car would dream of using it even if concerned about the effect of cars on out climate. Nonetheless, having to use such extremely bad public transport is something people from countries where road lobbies are less politically dominant needs to experience. It will show them how vested interests can ruin the environment and create traffic congestion, and how fortunate most of the Enriched World is regarding its public transport, and how I have had to sacrifice proposed library trips today to do shopping to pay for my brother’s new bookcase because of the slow and very infrequent public transport in Melbourne.

Hot, dry northerly winds in Melbourne

Last Thursday, as I had a now-fortnightly day of “galloping” around on buses (something everybody concerned about global warming should do to see a key cause in Australia’s dreadful pro-freeway transport policies) I was always expecting heavy rain from the seemingly dense grey clouds as I rode the 901 bus from Dandenong to Greensborough. However, very little rain fell – most of it on a return-home 250 bus trip. Then, Saturday saw warnings from high winds and showers – yet, again no rain fell.

Whilst the rapid poleward spread totalling about 800 kilometres (seven-and-a-but degrees of latitude) in the past fifty years of the winter Hadley cell is a key factor – and remember it is known that at Mesozoic and Paleegene CO₂ levels of around 2,000 ppm there was no winter Ferrel Cell and hence no winter “storms” whatsoever – most of Victoria this May and July has not been so dry as Melbourne.

March 2017 rainfall percentages

Here, for March 2017, is a pattern not far removed from some super-monsoon months in the past where storms interact with weak fronts to produce rain over South Australia and western Victoria. This was seen as early as 1903 after the driest calendar year in Australia’s history.

April 2017 rainfall percentages

Like March, this is not inconsistent with super-monsoon months with heavy rainfall in western Victoria. Vis-à-vis past wet Aprils like 1932, 1935 and 1974, there was fewer than half as many fewer actual rainy days – which should have been more of a warning about runaway, largely Australian-caused (both directly through actual emissions and indirectly through selling coal and hugely CO₂-intensive lithophile metals) global warming continuing.

May 2017 rainfall percentages

Here is something rather different. One can see that southeastern and central Victoria were very dry, yet the Wimmera, Western Plains and Tasmania (except the south and Derwent Valley) were wetter than average. So was the south coast of New South Wales, although the north and central coasts (not shown) were dry.

This is very different from May 2003 (below) whereby – although there were some similarities within Victoria – the north and central coasts of New South Wales were wet and northwestern Tassie much drier:

May 2003 rainfall percentages. Note the different patterns in Tasmania from last May.

May 2003, like May 2001, reflected depressions much further north than in last May, as reflected by wet conditions on the edge of the Western Australian Wheatbelt. In that sense it is quite similar to a month like June 1963, during a period when the Hadley cell ended at Carnarvon or more northerly (as in that winter which was one of the wettest rainy seasons on record in southwestern Australia) rather than nearer Bunbury:

June 1963 rainfall deciles (most precise figures to avoid the massive influence of Australian greenhouse gas emissions)

One can see the maximum all along the New South Wales coast rather than just on the south coast from one storm on 20 May this year. In June 1963 there was a long run of low pressure systems for the first ten days between Perth and Sydney, bringing essentially continuous rain. The diagrams below illustrate just how profound the shifts in pressure systems have been due to Australian freeway building and consequent greenhouse gas emissions:

Comparative synoptic positions for this year’s May and June vis-à-vis pre-AGW June 1 to 10 1963. Note how the subtropical ridge has shifted ten degrees poleward all through the southern hemisphere in the lower chart. Note also the Tasmanian block in June 1963 

Australian rainfall figures for June 2017 itself are a graphic illustration of the changes in climate due to the Lonie Report and other efforts to fund roads rather than constitutional amendments to ensure every solitary cent of Australian public and private money be spent on more greenhouse-efficient rail rather than on road or air transport:

June 2017 rainfall percentages

In accordance with theories making Australian transport and energy policies the primary and most essential culprit for observed climate changes, the extreme dryness over so wide an area as shown on the June 2017 composite chart is quite unrivalled. Perth, Canberra and Hobart were especially dry, but only the coast of New South Wales directly in the Trade Winds received substantial rain.

The daytime weather in Melbourne was a delightful 15˚C for the opening two weeks of June before we left for hot and humid Taipei – which I did not enjoy at all – but the nights were so cold as to virtually freeze my right hand in our poorly insulated plasterboard home when I sat at the computer until 01:00.

July 2017 rainfall percentages

The map above is apart from the eastern coast of Tasmania and the southern coast of New South wales very like May. It’s striking how dry those areas with a southerly aspect are vis-à-vis the Wimmera and even those areas on the opposite side of the Divide from Melbourne – which are by no means so wet as they would be if such obscene projects as CityLink, EastLink and other freeways and highways had had their funding redirected wholesale in 1980 to mass public transit.

The map is very much drier than remotely similar maps from before the Lonie Report. The famously windy September 1941 – probably the windiest month ever in most of southeastern Australia – is a good illustration:

September 1941 rainfall deciles. These are a bit like last month shifted 800 to 900 kilometres (by removing Australian greenhouse gas emissions) equatorward

Notice that the basic pattern is not that different if one realises that vis-à-vis today’s climate largely controlled from the headquarters of Australia’s largest coal and mining companies – and their allies in VicRoads – the Hadley Cell’s limit lay about eight degrees closer to the equator. That is roughly the distance from Melbourne to Walgett, or from Northcliffe to Shark Bay, or from Adelaide to Coober Pedy!

So, if we place Melbourne near Bourke, one can almost imagine the dry, hot westerly winds New South Wales had in September 1941. These dry winds seen here in Melbourne would still be around Bourke if Australia had had a sane transport and energy policy for the past four decades!

V-Line’s complaint shows why ZRB is forty years overdue

According to this post, twenty-two Victorian councils have written to Premier Daniel Andrews demanding that something be done to allow railways to operate at above 33˚C (91.4˚F).

These councils say Victoria has “far more freight than it can move”.

The issue of these regulations is that greenhouse-intensive road and air transport have, owing to the almost absolute power of the mining and road interests over transportation in Australia combined with lack of public pressure, received essentially all the government transportation budget. This is an unsustainable and untenable state of affairs on two grounds. The first is that road and air transportation are much more greenhouse- and energy-intensive than rail – in a nation whose exceptionally old soils dictate lower energy consumption by native animals than any other landmass! The second is that, for the mass freight which Australia’s uniquely flat terrain provides extreme comparative advantage, road and air are both severely inefficient vis-à-vis rail, and would be more so were fuel less cheap.

Thus, we have yet one more case that reveals the need to transfer all money earmarked for widening freeways and highways to improving Australia’s antiquated rail system. The question is how to do it given the silent, unchallenged power of the road lobby and the unwillingness of Australia’s suburban majority to sacrifice completely their rights to unrestricted private car usage – in fact, in ecological terms, their very right to own cars.

I have always believed rigid constitutional amendments to require an absolute end to new highways and the transfer of all money thus allocated to rail as the best way, because of its simplicity and lack of compromise with the severe low-energy-consumption dictates of Australia’s ecology. The problem is how to convey to the suburban masses why they must radically alter any lifestyle based on spacious roads, dirt-cheap fuel and unlimited private cars to avoid not only an ecological catastrophe, but major transportation problems too.

If closing one rail line causes unspeakable congestion, what would a complete freeway ban achieve?

Today, as I was going through RailPage archives in my email, I discovered just how close the Upfield rail line was to complete closure to be replaced by CityLink – the most obscene waste of public money in Australia’s history and one which shows just why a constitutional ban on new trunk roads is so desperately overdue.

Although I have not been that opposed to the light rail replacement for the Upfield Line proposed in the 1980s, excessive wastage upon roads (e.g. the South-Eastern Mulgrave link) even then prevented it being carried out. More than that, the freeways attracted so many off-peak rail users that they actually increased traffic congestion, especially with Australia’s very low fuel taxes.

In the RaiPage article, former transport minister Alan Brown says that the Liberal Government had planned to demolish the Upfield Line and put the destructive CityLink through Macaulay and Flemington Bridge stations. However, a delay in this plan meant that CityLink was revised and was placed above Macaulay and Flemington Bridge stations, and the Upfield Line was saved.

Twenty years later, in 2014, the importance if this very minor decision vis-à-vis the radical (and in Australia essential) planning changes advocated by Environment, Capitalism and Socialism four years beforehand had not been carried out was seen when a power failure on the Broadmeadows Line (since extended to Cragieburn) forced chaos on the Upfield Line as can be seen below at North Melbourne station.

Even Alan Brown admitted in his recent interview that:

“it was the poor relation of Melbourne’s rail network”

and

“a line that serviced electorates that the Labor Party held and would clearly continue to hold, but it was the right decision for Melbourne”

The question to be asked sincerely is what would happen if the road lobby could have been completely removed from the political influence it has had for the past six decades, so that road building could be officially and legally ended (apart perhaps from minor back streets) and all funds presently set aside for road building transferred entirely to railway improvements and to demolition of demonstrably unsustainable freeways (which means, certainly in Australia, every single freeway ever built). If Alan Brown is right, a rigid policy of ending and constitutionally banning wastage on unsustainable freeways and transferring all money set aside to rail transit could do much more to deal with traffic congestion than all the freeways ever built to feed the RACV, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, the mining companies, and such lobby groups as the Motor Trades Association. Possibly a complete ban on freeways could actually end traffic congestion if the money were used to fund railways and tramways to new developments or on major long-distance routes like from Geelong or Sydney to Melbourne – at least if the nineteenth-century alignments insufficient investment has left in place were updated to allow for higher speeds. People overlook how Australia’s flat terrain – were investment on roads eliminated rather than dictating policy – is ideally suited to high-speed rail, which has instead been created on much less suitable terrain in Europe and Japan due to the absence of powerful road lobbies.

Such a policy would also significantly cut into Australia’s dreadful record on greenhouse gas emissions – even using diesel fuel rail is four times more fuel-efficient than road transport.

Brown‘s speech – modest as it is – and the lesson that mass protest can prevent such a catastrophe as closing the Upfield Line would have produced, constitutes a clear demonstration of why the most radical change to transport policies in Australia, involving an outright ban on new freeways and highways and a transfer of all allocated funds to rail transit, is over half a century overdue.

Changed policies, changed system, same power centre

A year ago today – though I forgot – I read an article from the West Australian dating back to 1980, the year of the appalling Lonie Report whose effects will be seen this week in record hot October temperatures.

In my early 2000s university classes, it was taught that Australia only became a dreadful laggard on environmental issues with the demise of the Hawke Government following swings against Labor in Victoria with the 1990 Federal election. This has been outlined much more recently by the magazine Chain Reaction in Maria Taylor’s Global warming and climate change: What Australians knew and buried ... then framed a new reality for the public (available for free download here).

In some respects Australia’s environmental policies during the 1980s did not stand out so badly as they did in the 1990s and beyond – for instance we possessed much tougher pollution legislations than the UK and New Zealand.

Australia’s lesser laggardness in the 1980s is enhanced by the fact that many seminal environmental papers showing the continent’s unique ecology had not yet been published. None of The Future Eaters, Tom McMahon’s studies of global runoff (Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges) plus Barry Lovegrove’s study ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’, which reveals the exceptionally slow metabolism of Australia’s largest native mammals compared to large mammals elsewhere (though a search failed to find the supplementary material I was looking for), were published before 1990.

However, this article by later Age journalist Tim Colebatch, titled ‘Japan Cleans Air, Cleans Up Myths’, suggests – as the incidence of unnecessary road projects even before the Lonie Report made me suspect – that there was an extremely powerful lobby eliminating the ability of Australia to be anything but a laggard in environmental policy.

Colebatch shows that in 1980 Australia’s car industry was rigidly opposed to legislation to move Australia’s pollution standards closer to the strictest standards of Japan and California, despite the fact that motor cars were clearly the cause not only of a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions but also of toxic pollutants like nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. Given that Australian environments are much lower in volatile elements than the Enriched World, Australian native species likely have smaller tolerance for these toxic pollutants, and it thus stands logical that Australian environments required much cleaner air than those of Europe or Japan.

It is true that Colebatch ignore Australia’s lack of engineering skill compared to Japan or Germany – undoubtedly a direct result of Australia’s superabundant land and lithophile minerals which allow it to be very wealthy without these skills – and the potential influence of unions to slow adoption of new technologies. Nonetheless, Australia most likely had the skill to develop the technology to radically reduce both emissions and fuel consumption to a quarter of the long-term standard of approximately 11.5 litres per 100 kilometres (20.5 miles per US gallon). Greater fuel tax revenues and even the 57.5 percent import tariff then in use could have been used to permit the vast investment in rail transit that was overdue even in 1980, and import quotas could have been used to restrict car availability with improved public transport.

However, lobbying from car manufacturers and mortgage belt voters – who would struggle financially if petrol in Australia cost the environmental price of its use, which modern ecological knowledge suggests as minimally ten times present Australian fuel prices – would undoubtedly have made these radical changes politically suicidal.

The essential conclusion from ‘Japan Cleans Air, Cleans Up Myths’ is that Australia’s status as an embarrassing environmental laggard is much older than Maria Taylor presumes. In fact, Australia’s descent to such a woeful laggard became inevitable with demands for lower taxes and reduced regulation from the late 1980s. By 1987, it was clear our massively protected local car industry (protection in 1984 was equivalent to a 135 percent tariff) was economically unprofitable even with that protection. The powerful mining industries no doubt sensed potential increased profits with no import quotas and much lower car taxes. With the support of car-dependent and family-oriented mortgage belt voters on a uniquely abundant land supply, there was no way Australia’s politicians were clearly incapable of achieving even the very modest 20 percent reduction planned in 1990 – although that would have threatened the powers-that-be in the mineral, coal and road industries enough.

Vigilantes – or a world not knowing its enemy?

According to those in power in Australia, laws to prevent rape of Australia’s fragile environment constitute “vigilante litigation”:

Attorney General George Brandis has branded the case against Carmichael “vigilante litigation”. So the government is proposing to water down community groups’ rights to challenge these projects under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBCA).

If one judges by experience of the Enriched World and reading as a student journals like Socialist Worker, Socialist Alternative and Green Left Weekly, it’s easy to understand Brandis’ stance. There is no doubt that modern Enriched World politics and culture has its roots in class war that could be described as “vigilante”: workers came to believe they produced bosses’ wealth and should own it themselves, producing continual demands for increased redistribution and absolute equality of condition. Except at its theoretical beginnings the switch from limited traditionally religious monarchy to big-government, atheist democracy has been continuously driven by lower classes’ demands for equality of outcome. This tendency has by no means disappeared from the Enriched World: we still see workers demand redistribution and regulation when their security is threatened. Land-surfeited Australia has been substantially immune to this, probably because the majority are too physically distant from the super-rich to produce envy. Vigilante politics, radical egalitarianism and envy-based cultures are – as one can see on an ecological level – incompatible with civilisation. The failure of the most fertile regions of the Western Hemisphere – the North American prairies and the whole Southern Cone of South America – to develop any sort of indigenous civilisation is a dramatic expression thereof. Their “ecology” does not allow for any sort of cooperation because phosphate and chalcophile nutrients are exceptionally abundant, favouring those species that can reproduce most rapidly and/or simply evade predators best. Both traits – especially the latter – exclude the cooperation essential for complex societies.

According to one 2009 Sydney Morning Herald article Australia may directly and indirectly total 16 percent of global greenhouse emissions – or fifty times the per capita average. Self-interest rather than local community interest dictates protest, just as it does in the Enriched World. The crucial difference is that, unlike the Enriched World, more jobs in Australia are produced from coal production that preservation of unique, localised and rare species.

At the same time, the costs to Australia’s economy from global warming are unpaid by the present political powers in the mining industry. The most terrifying problem is how those who suffer most from Australian greenhouse gas emissions – West Australian farmers losing their former winter rainfall – are the people most dependent for current livelihoods upon Australian greenhouse emissions not being cut to zero, as doing so would multiply energy costs of transportation. Australian farmland is sufficiently cheap that private owners’ incentive is not to maintain its limited value but to extract it as a non-renewable resource. Because little soil formation has occurred in Australia since the Carbo-Permian glaciation around three hundred million years ago, lost soil stands irreplaceable and Australian soils are strictly non-renewable, unlike the Enriched World where active volcanoes or glaciers continuously supply new soil

The question is whether the problem of Australian greenhouse emissions and species extinctions will become so severe in the long term that the rest of the world – uncompetitive against a nation with per person incomparably more flat land and undiscovered minerals than the global average – will recognise Australia as the keystone in all environmental treaties from endangered species to pollution to greenhouse warming. Should this occur, Enriched and Tropical World governments and people would understand they possess every right to demand Australia’s polluting industries pay all global costs, both of direct overseas losses from Australian greenhouse pollution and by wholly remedying the cause. This complete remedy would require an uncompromising zero-emissions Australian economy be created via:

1. Complete demolition of Australia’s trunk road system
2. Ensuring all transport investment is constitutionally mandated to be on rail – both the most energy-efficient land transport system and ideally suited to Australia’s flat terrain
3. If private motoring does continue, mandating all vehicles on Australian roads consume no more than 3 litres per 100 km of fuel (minimum fuel economy of 80 miles per US gallon)
• this is ¼ the current average, but technologically achievable as early as the middle 1980s
4. Complete demolition of coal-fired power stations in favour of renewable energy and shifting energy-intensive production to nations with reliable hydropower
5. Complete bans on land clearing and large-scale revegetation programs on farms likely to be or already being rendered unviable by Australia’s own greenhouse gas emissions
6. Large-scale investment in a national park system to protect Australia’s numerous paleoendemic species and ecosystems essentially unchanged from before the Antarctic Ice Sheet formed 38,000,000 years ago

Making these demands without compromise is recognising who the global environment’s enemy is – Australian mining companies who export their pollution scot free.

Egalitarianism versus global warming inaction

I have been of recent weeks investigating whether Australia’s dreadful record on greenhouse gas emissions may be related to absence of egalitarianism inherent in its unpredictable and low-productivity environments. I do not believe Australia’s dreadful per-capita emissions should ever be explained away in terms of distances. After all Australia’s extremely flat terrain is perfectly suited to high-speed rail transport that could eliminate most direct and indirect emissions from cars and air transport, yet Australia lags fifty to seventy years behind most of the Enriched World in developing fast rail!

The notion that Australia’s extremely low secondary productivity and variable runoff – or superabundant flat land in a hot climate – compared to the young Enriched World inherently produces different cultures from the same initial settling population is one I have come to accept as potentially very true. This month, the CSIRO’s Jennifer Price and Zoe Leviston have provided a study that does show:

1. the conflict between egalitarianism and global warming inaction
2. how the extreme isolation of outer suburbs from a global culture contributes to greenhouse scepticism being entirely mainstream there

Titled ‘My country or my planet? Exploring the influence of multiple place attachments and ideological beliefs upon climate change attitudes and opinions’, Price’s and Lewiston’s article shows how a strong “nationalist” perspective and acceptance of hierarchies as mandated by traditional Christianity – especially Catholicism and Orthodoxy – among residents of “remote” suburbs contributes to denial of global warming.

The study pitifully failed to separate inhabitants of fringe suburbs, who because they are less dependent upon natural bounty for their livelihood are probably even more likely to be greenhouse-sceptic than rural people, from residents of inner cities. This would be particularly useful in the table asking “What do you think would be the economic impact on Australia of making significant reductioons in greenhouse gas emissions, as part of global action involving all major countries?” (though as Jan-Erik Lane shows, this action really should be confined to energy-producing Indian Rim nations, that is Australia, the Gulf States and South Africa), where it would certainly reveal whether climate-dependent rural communities really do understand man-made global warming or confirm to John Snarey’s prediction that highly variable hydrology is the prime producer of strong religious faith and potential belief that God will always provide rain regardless of how much greenhouse gases we emit.

The results do confirm stereotyped viewpoints that atheist and globally-oriented people are most concerned about global warming. This, of course, reflects the extremely developed sectors they participate in, which my previous posts emphasise as unable to build a stable civilisation, because economic change is too rapid to raise children and political demands too extreme.

Australia’s uniqueness compared to nations of the Enriched World – who share essentially the same soils, flora and fauna – undoubtedly should encourage nationalism, even if not warlike as in the fascism. Radical internationalism is unlikely to cover the core population of a nation specialising in primary production and which possesses large and mostly undiscovered quantities of resources glaciated or “collided” (plate tectonic activity) out of existence elsewhere.

The problems noted in Two Nations when Pauline Hanson emerged almost two decades ago have not diminished, and cannot whilst the suburbs and rural areas remain culturally and economically isolated from the rest of the world without being in any way self-sufficient (after all, low-input agriculture in Australia has been a known impossibility since the Austronesians saw our north coast). They will always seek to work with people of similar interests, and Price and Leviston have only confirmed what we know.

Australia’s debt for the pollution it exports

Today The Guardian has shown a list of wanted environmental fugitives, all connected either with rhinoceros poaching or illegal logging. Whilst the rhinoceros poaching epidemic which claims up to six percent of the global rhinoceros population each year is deplorable, and illegal logging of tropical forests can have major consequences in terms of erosion and loss of species, Interpol’s list cannot by any means be complete. Whilst killing of endangered species is a grave offence, the much more delicate, but potentially more destructive in the long-term, issue of the “export” of large quantities of pollution from Australia needs to be discussed as well.

Export of greenhouse pollution from Australia is a global concern, and there is no doubt that corporations who profit from unlimited greenhouse gas emissions have major direct and indirect influence on Australian politics. Being completely legal, these polluting corporations’ influence is likely larger than rhinoceros poaching and logging corporations of the humid tropics, but no doubt exists they should pay the global costs of the pollution they produce.

Australia’s politics – which the last few years plainly show as diverging rapidly from Europe, East Asia and the Americas especially regarding issues like greenhouse emissions and freeway building – is generally ignored by ecologists, even whilst admitting Australia possesses unique problems with  ancient soils, warm oligotrophic seas, low biological productivity and high rate of postindustrial species extinctions. The notion that Australia be naturally ultraconservative and community-oriented (contrasting with individual-oriented Eurasia and the Americas) precisely owing to the low and variable productivity of its ecosystems is seldom asked by ecologists but firmly supported by ecological anthropology. John Snarey’s ‘The Natural Environment’s Impact upon Religious Ethics: A Cross-Cultural Study’ (from the June 1996 Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion) shows a powerful relationship between scarcity of water and belief in the type of deity found in Abrahamic religions. Snarey’s model suggests in the long term that Australia, with even in humid regions half the ratio of runoff to precipitation and three to five times the variability in runoff of Europe, East Asia, the Americas and New Zealand, would maintain traditional Christianity whilst those nations become uniformly atheist.

Global distribution of coefficient of variation of annual runoff taken from ‘Global streamflows – Part 3: Country and climate zone characteristics’ in Journal of Hydrology (2007) 347, pages 272 to 291.

The failure of Australia to even equal reduction targets of incomparably smaller per-capita polluters, together with a change from lip service to outright opposition regarding emissions-cutting investments (public transit, renewable energy, abandonment of proposed roads) suggests Australian culture today is fundamentally different from other OECD nations and that these differences are rapidly intensifying.

If Australians be unwilling to accept the sacrifices (higher taxes, short-term loss of the freedom from cars, less personal space) needed to reverse transport and energy policies toward public transit, then international organisations possess no choice but to step in and state bluntly that Australia has a basic duty to pay for (present and future) disasters abroad that are substantially its making.

The hard truth about fuel excise

Although it is news to me that proposals to re-index fuel excise in Australia have been made and – remarkably due to the dilly-dallying of the Greens – failed, my discovery that evening has made me wish to look at how absurd in ecological terms Australia’s extremely low and declining (in real value) fuel excise is.

Although in the real world fuel excise pays for road upkeep and not environmental services, my opinion is that fuel excise is legitimate if and only if it pays for ecological services that a free market cannot, whether conservation reserves or mass transit projects. Thus a country’s legitimate level and quantity of fuel excise can be determined by the amount of land it needs conserved, but which a free market cannot protect from ecologically destructive development.

To determine the area of land requiring conservation, but un-conservable under a free market, one needs to subtract successively from a country’s land area:

1. land whose flora and fauna is younger than 15,000 years due to glaciation and hence completely lacks unique species or refuges therefor
2. land over the slope limit for efficient arable farming of 11 degrees
3. land which can support low-input agriculture – defined as agriculture without phosphatic and chalcophile element fertilisers or artificial river impoundments

(It is important that if a point of land meets more than one of those categories, it be counted only once).

If we follow those criteria, we find that Australia’s land almost never meets any of the three criteria that deem conservation unnecessary. The only soils in Australia capable of anything approaching “low-input” agriculture – the cracking clays of the Darling and Cooper basins within a crescent approximately from Singleton to Birdsville – are too heavy to plow without advanced machinery. Except its far southeast, this region also has much too erratic a rainfall for rainfed farming. Moreover, unlike other areas with similarly erratic rainfall in Central Chile or northwest India or California or the Brazilian sertão, it has no truly permanent water sources due to extremely high evaporation.

The proportion of Australia’s land under 11˚ slope, as can be seen here, is easily the highest of the world’s larger nations – in fact the proportion of land of very low slope that Australia has is exceptionally high and not exceeded even by small nation-states.

Thirdly, no more than 500 square kilometres of Australia (less than 0.001 percent) was glaciated during the Quaternary, whereas Canada and many European nations (approximately those north of a line from the Severn to the Rhine to the southern border of Poland to the Gulf of Anabar) were entirely glaciated for most of the Quaternary and have been habitable for only brief periods.

If we combine these three, we see that Australia has over seven million square kilometres (well over 90 percent of its land surface) needing conservation but not conservable in a free market. In contrast, all the other OECD nations combined possess only very small areas that fail all three tests above – highly leached land in the American South and a few sandplains in California, France and Portugal. These probably total not more than about ten thousand square kilometres or 0.1 percent the total area of “valuable but economically unconservable” land in Australia.

From this simple if unrefined and imperfectly measured logic, Australian fuel excise should by ecological criteria total well over ninety-nine percent the total fuel excise of all OECD nations, measured as a percent of the total fuel excise paid buying one litre of fuel in each OECD nation. This is especially true if one factors high conservation costs for example in controlling pests like the cane toad and rubber vine in remote areas. The fact that actual Australian fuel excise is not 99%, but nearer 1% of the OECD total says much about the influence of the car and energy industries in Australia, as well as our family- and community-oriented “car culture”.

This does not in any way diminish the fact that a situation where Australia pays a fraction the fuel excise of many entirely-glaciated nations with no land requiring uneconomic conservation stands untenable, nor that improvements as inadequate as increasing Australian excise from 25 percent to 50 percent the OECD mean would change nothing. History shows that even modestly and inadequately less cheap petrol (say down from 800 millilitres/$ to 600 millilitres/$) produces major effects on motoring habits – so what would a realistic cheapness of under 60 millilitres/$ achieve?? Fuel efficiency would increase spectacularly but resources to pay for the global costs of the vast quantity of greenhouse pollution Australia and its minerals produce would nonetheless become much greater. Moreover, Australia’s land supply is so abundant that such fuel taxes would not affect – especially if development regulations were simplified – family formation so much as lower taxes in the Enriched World do.

Is parking the problem for traffic and transit?

The problem that car parking on narrow streets poses is something I have known for a long time. It is particularly problematic for trams and buses in Melbourne. As things stand, these vehicles cannot generally get to where they want to go quickly enough to compete with more greenhouse-intensive private cars, especially on such narrow roads as Sydney Road (tram 19), Glenhuntly Road (tram 67) and Burke Road (tram 72). The PTUA has long advocated speed limit restrictions to make sure that private cars cannot outspeed trams, so that trams become able to move with a steady flow rather than in a slow stop-start manner.

I have long thought that parking bans on such narrow roads as Glenhuntly Road, which would force all motorists to park in back streets or off-street, would be a better means of dealing with slow tram movement. Speeding up tram movements would reduce Australia’s dreadful greenhouse gas emissions, and car movements through these narrow roads would also be increased if car traffic could flow near the kerb rather than only upon the tramway.

Amy H. Auchincloss, Rachel Weinberger, Semra Aytur, Alexa Namba and Andrew Ricchezza have looked not at the relationship between parking restrictions and public transit use, but at that between parking fines and public transit use in the United States. The article, titled ‘Public Parking Fees and Fines: A Survey of U.S. Cities’, argues that higher parking fines, plus higher on- and off-street parking fees, do correlate with greater public transit use even in low-density cities like those of land-surfeited Australia – although this correlation is greater in high-density cities.

The study groups argues, however, that there are many variables that can influence public transit use which are not related to the availability of parking, which are only briefly discussed by comparing low- (land-rich) and high- (land-poor) density cities. There is also the argument that planning is very poor across cities, and especially critical in Australia is community opposition to restricted parking.

It is also true that ‘Public Parking Fees and Fines: A Survey of U.S. Cities’ does not discuss the low-density suburbs and exurbs that constitute the major problem for solving global warming with their car-dependent transport systems and frequent absence of any public transport apart from school buses that the public are permitted to use. As I can testify from riding these limited low frequency part-time bus services (the route 802 shown runs hourly with no service on weekends whatsoever) between shopping centres, even during the midday hour, occupancy in the suburbs of Melbourne is never such as to make the driver search for a parking spot. My observations of the big shopping centres like Chadstone, Northland, Westfield Doncaster and Eastland, although they do suggest quite high occupancy rates that could reach 70 or 75 percent, never suggest any parking shortage even with absolutely free parking. This is even more true of on-street parking in smaller shopping centres – land is so abundant that I have never observed “cruising” to find a parking spot.

If this general abundance of space extends to the United States, it may explain why Auchincloss, Weinberger, Aytur, Namba and Richezza did not look at suburban and exurban parking availability. It might seem logical to introduce parking fees there as a means of paying for improved public transport; however history shows to my intense frustration that the people of Melbourne’s exurbs have too little desire for better public transport – and absolutely no ability to accept that ownership of one car over the entire region, let alone the typical three per house, is inherently ecologically unsustainable! Moreover, exurbanites would feel frustrated paying anything for parking in areas of such abundant land.

The potential for increased car use on roads from restricted parking – as seen on freeways – is another reason to doubt that changes to parking laws by themselves can increase public transit use in Australia from under ten percent to the requisite value near one hundred percent. Nonetheless, the present system, which has made for very expensive housing in the inner city and done nothing to improve globally critical exurban public transport, is one that needs change much more than politically practicable within Australia.

Australian car phase-out 40 years overdue: revealed beyond doubt

That climate change in southwestern Australia reveals a need for Australia to phase out all private motorised travel (and of course much more than that – fossil fuel-based power and land clearing need to go too) has long been known to me. Of course, absolutely no pressure has been put to demand the radical (and for most of Australia’s population disturbing and costly in every respect) changes that would need to be made to every aspect of how Australia is run to produce a carbon-free economy that would directly and indirectly reverse these changes.

More than that, the details of what has happened to the climate of southwestern Australia are simply not taught in schools in the Enriched or Tropical World, although the possess infinitely more relevance, utility and potential economic costs (farming and urban water supply) than the fate of ice caps lying in regions without cities, with no frost-free season to permit viable agriculture, and lacking Australia’s vast natural mineral resources.

Despite political (and scientific) dithering between 1980 and 2005 over what has caused a reduction of about five-sixths in runoff to Perth’s dams, the extremely insular scientific community has never been able to persuade even local people, that radical, uncompromising changes in planning in Australia are essential to reverse the decline.

In this context, it is revealing that Thomas Delworth and Fanrong Zeng of Nature have once and for all confirmed that the decline in rainfall over southwestern Australia is completely anthropogenic, and that natural cycles could never produce the observed rainfall declines. Delworth and Zeng demonstrate with good models that rainfalls are likely by 2090 to fall to between a quarter and three-tenths the virgin mean if Australian carbon emissions are not cut back. Such a value would leave Perth with a mean annual rainfall of around 300 millimetres – enough with hotter temperatures to qualify as a fully arid BWh climate under the Köppen system.

Delworth and Zeng are revealingly from Princeton Unversity in New Jersey rather than Australia’s depoliticised science bodies who should be urging the government to transfer 100 percent of private- and public-sector transport monies to a high-speed rail network and demolition of all (inherently unsustainable) freeways, and to ensure that road projects can be constitutionally challenged and wiped out: fuel inefficiency of single-occupant cars stands too low for any road to be viewed sustainable.

Whilst the idea of making road building illegal is radical, Australian ecology is so sensitive to climate change and land degradation compared to the exceptionally young land surfaces of Eurasia and most of the Americas. Australia is the thirteenth highest emitter in the world, yet its ecosystems have been adapted for tens of millions of years to similar (if wetter) climatic conditions as the continent’s pace of drift matched global cooling. This produced steady-state temperatures and soils throughout Australia. Contrariwise, Eurasia’s and the Americas’ soils have been completely transformed in merely two to four million years – from similar to Australia’s into soils averaging five times as much available phosphorus, with similar increases in critical nutrients sulfur, copper and zinc. Over a mere blip in geological time, Eurasia and the Americas change from ice-covered to uniquely hospitable for high-density agriculture. Thus, incomparably more rigid laws are required to achieve any kind of sustainability in Australia.

Delworth and Zeng have confirmed that global warming is likely to ensure the Avon becomes a dry stream even during the former rainy season of southwestern Australia, as the rain-bearing fronts gradually disappear from the region.

Lack of understanding of how Australian soils are (relative to other present-day continents’) enriched in lithophile elements and severely depleted in biologically important chalcophile elements has led to major ecological damage in the West Australian Wheatbelt – which will be compounded if likely rainfall declines cause a shift to livestock grazing.

In the early 1990s the Democratic Socialist Party in Environment, Capitalism and Socialism and the truly independent Russell Report and Public Transport Users’ Association demonstrated that with all freeway spending redirected into public transport, Australians could vis-à-vis the present car-based transport system have equal mobility at less public and private cost with huge gains in pollution and greenhouse emissions! It is clear that the disruption to family life is a cost suburbanites simply will not pay even temporarily! What Delworth and Zeng have conformed is that a radical phase-out of all private motorised transport in Australia is four full decades overdue (and becoming more and more remote in possibility).