Sustainability

Bitten by the dispiriting dogma of sustainability

• NICK CATER
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• JANUARY 28, 2014 12:00AM

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Illustration: Sturt Krygsman Source: News Limited

WHAT a splendid start to the year it has been for Australia. First the Ashes, then the one-day trophy and finally the corporate sustainability prize awarded to our own Westpac Banking Corporation in Davos.

Sustainability is "a leading-edge issue", which means no one has a clue what it is, not even Wikipedia. The best it can manage is that sustainability is "a multi-faceted concept" and "a matter of ongoing argument". So much for the wisdom of crowds.

Even the judges of the Global 100 awards were forced to admit that "determining which companies are 'sustainable' and which are not is challenging enterprise".

It is not enough just to stay in business for 197 years, keep the capital-adequacy ratio respectable and return a stonking great profit. Westpac had to score against "a set of quantitative and clearly defined key performance indicators" determined by "a rules-based construction methodology". It couldn't be clearer than that.

For those who missed the live coverage of the green-collar Oscars, however, we will run through the main categories again.

Leadership diversity. It goes without saying that women run more sustainable corporations than men and, with chief executive Gail Kelly in the big chair, this one was Westpac's to lose.

Horizontally integrated remuneration framework. To achieve a perfect score in this category, the CEO's salary should match the company's average wage. Since Kelly took home $5.6 million last year, Westpac did not quite get 10 out of 10, but since all bankers get paid pretty handsomely, it was presumably good enough.

Percentage tax paid. It may be counterintuitive to suggest that sustainable corporations pay more tax but that's what the rules say. In the weird world of Davos, the percentage of profits paid as tax is regarded as a measure of corporate virtue rather than government vice.

Energy productivity. Westpac could teach BHP Billiton a thing or two here. The banker's profit was only a third of the miner's, but its carbon footprint was 250 times smaller. Clearly BHP needs to start thinking about recycling its printer cartridges.

The clean capitalist utopia as pictured by the economic romantics in Davos is, it turns out, unsustainable since it rewards those in comfortable offices who buy and sell money rather than those in fluoro who actually make it.

The fetish for paying taxes transfers money from the private to the public sector, and there is nothing remotely sustainable about that.

In these historically incurious times, it is worth reminding ourselves that business did not always operate this way.

As Adam Smith once noted, the baker, the butcher and the brewer used not to provide our dinner out of the goodness of their hearts "but from their regards to their own interest".

Nowadays, however, we like our businesses to be socially responsible, environmentally aware, ethically orientated, big-hearted Arthurs.

Thus the corporate sector has surrendered to the dispiriting dogma of sustainability, the heresy that took hold among the hippies in the late 1960s and mutated into a misanthropic, deep green movement in the 70s.

Today it wears a pinstriped suit and sits in the boardroom signing off on the most egregious muddle-headed nonsense in the name of corporate responsibility.

Sustainability may present itself as harmless mumbo-jumbo that helps build a brand, but

its underlying philosophy is antithetical to freedom and to enterprise.

"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow," Ayn Rand wrote in 1972. "They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other until one day they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology."

Four decades later, her prophecy has been fulfilled. Sustainability is one of the three priority themes in the new Australian curriculum, polluting everything from algebra to zoology.

"The sustainability priority is futures-oriented, focusing on protecting environments and creating a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action," the curriculum says.

Students are encouraged to consider "that unlimited growth is unsustainable; sustainability - that biological systems need to remain diverse and productive over time; and rights of nature - recognition that humans and their natural environment are closely interrelated".

Sustainability is Malthusianism for the 21st century: the fallacy that population is growing faster than the available resources and that ruination is just around the corner.

The world viewed through the prism of sustainability is a deeply depressing place in which dreams are discouraged, imagination is restricted and the spirit of progress frowned upon.

Sustainability means never having to say sorry. In 1990 the World Hunger Project calculated that the ecosystem could sustainably support six billion people, and then only if they lived on a vegetarian diet.

More than two decades later, with 7.1 billion people living on the planet, global beef production has increased by 5 per cent per capita, pork by 17 per cent and chicken by 82 per cent, and that's not counting the eggs.

The World Food Programme estimates that there are 170 million fewer malnourished people than there were in 1990.

The inconvenient prosperous truth is that the human beings have, since the dawn of time, created more than they used on average over the course of a lifetime.

The happy by-product of an expanding population ever more interconnected is that the sum total of human knowledge grows exponentially.

The energy crisis, the one that is supposed to lie just around the corner, has been creating anxiety since the 1600s when Britain began to run out of firewood. Scarcity spurred the development of coal. The great whale oil crisis of the 1840s stimulated the search for oil. Time after time the coming catastrophe is postponed through abundance, and the inherent dishonesty of sustainability is exposed.

Human ingenuity is an infinitely renewable resource. Prosperity comes from seizing the elements of nature and rearranging their form.

"Wealth does not exists as a fixed, static quantity," wrote Rand. "It is the creation of a dynamic, boundless mind. And it has no inherent limitation."

A Step in the Right Direction

Commonwealth Government Selling Water Allocations-A Step in the Right Direction

This week’s announcement that the Commonwealth Government is to sell some water allocations back to irrigators is a small step in the right direction.

From the time that the Howard Government, in an attempt to gather "green" votes, decided to throw $10bn at the Murray Darling Basin, the management of the Basin has been a political football. This vote chasing initiative arose as the great Millennium Drought was biting hard and water shortages, the natural consequences of drought, were being erroneously blamed on extractions for irrigation. The term "over-allocation" entered the national lexicon.

In the years preceding the drought there was extensive reform of water regulation throughout the Basin. "The cap" limiting extractions to the 1993/4 level was introduced and John Anderson's National Water Initiative was passed introducing property rights and market trading of water entitlements and water allocations. These were all positive moves and reinforced Australia's international reputation as a leader in effective water management.

It is fundamental to a proper understanding of water management to recognise the difference between entitlements and allocations. It is annual allocations that the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder is offering to sell not entitlements. The Government has expended over $3bn.in buying over 1700 gigalitres of entitlements from farmers.

Entitlements grant the holder an ongoing share of consumptive water when there is an allocation. An entitlement without an allocation is phantom water. For each of the Basin rivers there is a water sharing plan which guides the granting of allocations. These plans give priority to critical human and animal needs, followed by assessed environmental needs and then and only then, are allocations for irrigation extractions even considered.

These principles are applied in a regime of massive natural variability. Our rainfall and run-off is arguably the most variable in the world. Our major dams and the Snowy Scheme diversions have "flattened out" some of this variability and have provided additional water to the west, but compared with the severity of our droughts and the magnitude of our floods, we really only "fiddle at the edges". Additional dams would further assist and would only "hold back" a tiny percentage of our big flood events.

Our ecology is geared to this extraordinarily variable environment and there is no better example than recent years with the severity of the Millennium Drought and the big flood events that followed.

To gain the necessary authority over the States in the Australian federation the Commonwealth relied on international environmental agreements. As a consequence we have a Commonwealth Water Act which lacks proper balance between social, economic and environmental needs. We have tarnished our previous reputation to be world leaders in water management. The Act should be repealed. The required agreement with the States to implement the "Plan" has yet to be obtained, but one fears that eventually the Commonwealth's control of the mighty dollar will prevail.

Against this backdrop it can be seen that the Government’s massive purchase of entitlements ("phantom water") will do nothing for the environment in the lean years, when allocations will be limited or non-existent. But in better years, with the Commonwealth now being by far the biggest holder of entitlements and an active player in the allocation market, we are likely to see decisions made for political reasons at the expense of sound commercially driven decisions had the entitlements remained in private hands.

The most negative human induced environmental issue in the Millennium Drought was the management of the Lower Lakes in South Australia and the controversial Barrages which close-off the Murray River estuary from the sea.


With the piping of fresh water from upstream to the Lower Lakes environs there is now no reason for the South Australian obsession with keeping the Lakes always fresh to prevail. Failure to open the Barrages during the drought and allow salt water to enter, when there was simply no upstream fresh water available for any purpose, quite unnecessarily allowed the emergence of acid-sulphate soils. The huge evaporation of fresh water from the Lower Lakes is a wicked waste of a precious resource.

The commitment of additional water to the Lower Lakes in the latter part of the Plan negotiations and the target of keeping Lake Alexandrina open to the ocean 90% of the time, is a classic example of the political football approach at the expense of objective analysis, which has pervaded the whole Murray Darling Basin issue.

Sadly, the management of the Snowy Scheme has been expressly excluded from the MDB deliberations of recent years. There needs to be more focus on the original water storage/irrigation objectives. Improvements could be made without detracting from the all important hydro/electricity production objectives. If Snowy Hydro is to be privatised, a prerequisite should be a new operating agreement which gives greater weight to water storage for food and fibre production.


David Boyd
21.01.14

Focus

"Focus" is one of my favourite business words. I came across the following quote which is worth repeating and following-
QUOTE OF NOTE:  From Robert Glazer, a serial entrepreneur and customer acquisition specialist with an exceptional track record of growing revenue and profits for early to mid-stage consumer businesses. His firm, Acceleration Partners, is a go-to advisor for affiliate and performance marketing. (Extracted from an article on the Forbes website).
"The fewer things you do, the better you can do them. Identify 3-4 priorities each quarter that will advance your business and get them done and be okay with what falls off.
"That means you can’t let the million things vying for your attention on any given day take your focus away from things that REALLY MATTER.
"Also, it’s better to be really good at a few things, than average at many; so simplify your product and service offerings to what you do best. It’s hard; focus requires a lot of discipline."

Climate Change-The Party's Over-Maurice Newman

Mother Nature suggests the party's over for IPCC

• MAURICE NEWMAN
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• JANUARY 15, 2014 12:00AM

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GIVEN the low-grade attacks on me following my piece "Crowds go cold on climate cost" (The Australian, Dec 31) readers of Fairfax publications and The Guardian may be shocked to hear I believe in climate change. I also accept carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The trouble is, I cannot reconcile the claims of dangerous human CO2 emissions with the observed record.

I admit it. I am not a climate scientist. That said, I have closely followed this debate for more than two decades, having been seasoned originally by the global cooling certainty of the 1970s.

The climate consensus of the 70s, like the period since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, was dominated by politics, not science. I was reminded of how deeply political awareness has infected today's academies when I received an apology from a respected climate scientist who corrected his own public cheap shot at me. He said, "I attempt to be politically even-handed ... I try to steer a middle course as a scientist."

Really? Surely science is not about neutrality? It is about evidence and conclusions which fall where they will. So when an internationally acclaimed climatologist like Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama at Huntsville dispassionately analyses climate models covering 33 years and concludes that both the surface and satellite observations produce linear temperature trends that are below 87 of the 90 models used in the comparison, he does not politically neutralise his findings. They are empirical fact.

They eventually become political because the models he demonstrates to be seriously flawed are the bedrock on which the IPCC's global warming case is built. As Spencer said recently, "The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence of low climate sensitivity for many years ... The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new thing ... just one that is becoming more glaring over time."

Spencer is joined by celebrated Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen, who says: "I think that the latest (AR5) IPCC report has truly sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase." He is "willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now". Any takers?

The lengthening pause in global warming is influencing the political climate. The language has changed from the specific "global warming" to the more general "climate change" and now to the astrological "extreme weather events" where "I told you so" can be almost universally applied. For example, we are to believe the recent cold spell in the US and the heat wave in Australia are both examples of global warming. Yet 2013 was one of the "least extreme" weather years in US history.

Political will is also flagging. The Copenhagen summit was almost five years ago, yet there is still no global, legally binding international agreement on emission reduction targets. Only talk.

Canada's Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq last year discarded a proposal from her department to publicly state that the Harper government recognised scientific evidence that humans were "mostly responsible" for climate change and that it took this advice "seriously".

And now, no doubt in response to the political backlash from the economic cost of green schemes, the European Commission is to order Britain to end wind farm subsidies. According to Britain's The Telegraph: "The commission ... is about to argue that the onshore wind and solar power industries are 'mature' and should be allowed to operate without support from taxpayers." Germany's renewable energy industry virtually shut down for almost a week in December when nearly 23,000 wind turbines and one million solar panels ceased to generate. Faced with uncompetitive electricity prices and the fantasy of cheap, reliable renewable energy, Germany is building 10 coal-fired power stations over the next two years with 15 more planned. The green delusion is finally confronting economic reality.

What we now see is the unravelling of years of shoddy science and sloppy journalism. If it wasn't for independent Murdoch newspapers around the world, the mainstream media would be almost completely captured by the IPCC establishment. That is certainly true in Australia. For six or seven years we were bullied into accepting that the IPCC's assessment reports were the climate science bible. Its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, told us the IPCC relied solely on peer-reviewed literature. Then Murdoch papers alerted us to scientific scandals and Donna Laframboise, in her book The Delinquent Teenager, astonished us with her extraordinary revelation that of 18,000 references in the IPCC's AR4 report, one-third were not peer reviewed. Some were Greenpeace press releases, others student papers and working papers from a conference. In some chapters, the majority of references were not peer reviewed. Many lead authors were inexperienced, or linked to advocate groups like WWF and Greenpeace. Why are we not surprised?

The IPCC was bound to be captured by the green movement. After all, it is a political body. It is not a panel of scientists but a panel of governments driven by the UN. Its sole purpose is to assess the risks of human-induced climate change. It has spawned industries. One is scientists determined to find an anthropogenic cause. Another is climate remediation. And, naturally, an industry to redistribute taxes to sustain it all. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, this cartel will deny all contrary evidence. Its very survival depends on it. But the tide is turning and Mother Nature has signalled her intention not to co-operate.

In the meantime, childish personal attacks on those who point out flaws in IPCC reasoning and advice only increase scepticism. They are no substitute for empirical evidence and are well into diminishing returns. The party's over.

Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council.

Curriculum Beyond Saving-Nick Cater

Illustration: Sturt Krygsman Source: News Limited

"LANGUAGE," claim the authors of the Australian Curriculum, "enables people to interact effectively." They then proceed to demonstrate in 238,000 laboured words that this is not necessarily the case.

The curriculum is written in the private language of educationalism, which, like Latin in the hands of the medieval clergy, serves to keep the rest of us in our place. The implication is that parents, employers and general citizens don't know what they're talking about. Curriculum development is a job for the experts.

The first task of the government's curriculum review panel should be to translate this doorstop of a document into English, eliminate the verbiage and publish it for public discussion. Forget all the stuff about content descriptions, content elaborations and learning continua.

Don't bother telling us that the English language "provides rich and engaging contexts for developing students' abilities," or that "texts provide the means for communication".

In our own inexpert way, we had sort of gathered that.

Just tell us how you plan to teach literacy and numeracy, and what else you are planning to put into the kiddies' heads.

Then we can let the public decide whether "creating a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action" is a task for public schools.

Do we want educators or evangelists? Do we send children to school to "create texts that inform and persuade others to take action for sustainable futures"? Should a child under 10 be expected to produce "a persuasive audio-visual text to promote action on an environmental issue" or "promote awareness about how people can reduce their impact on the environment"?

By Year 9, they will be encouraged to ponder "Gaia - the interaction of Earth and its biosphere" and to think about the "limits of growth - that unlimited growth is unsustainable".

They will be asked to "interrogate" Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring and 1970 editions of Mother Earth News magazine, before considering the "rights of nature recognition - that humans and their natural environment are closely interrelated".

The words "sustainable" and "sustainability" appear 139 times in the Australian Curriculum; "business" crops up six times, "markets" twice and "free markets" not at all. "Prosperity" features three times and "economic growth" is mentioned just once (and not in a nice way), for history is not the tale of steady improvement but just one shameful act after another.

Year 3 students will be taught significant days and weeks in the Australian calendar: Australia Day, Anzac Day, Harmony Week, National Reconciliation Week, NAIDOC week and National Sorry Day and Mabo day.

Doubtless this is uncontroversial stuff in the sheltered common rooms of public schools, salaried and superannuated from the bottomless pockets of the state. To much of the rest of Australia, however, this romantic, closed-minded view of the world seems eccentric. Non-expert citizens - that is those without a PhD in critical pedagogy - might wonder how a child infused with such a narrow world view, who finishes Year 12 without any appreciation of wealth creation, could possibly emerge equipped for the challenges of the 21st century.

The history curriculum includes the Harvester Judgment, but says nothing about the Sunshine Harvester, Australia's most successful manufactured export, made in the factory where the work conditions test case was struck. In 699 pages, the curriculum mentions capitalism twice, but merely as one of the "competing ideologies" to communism.

At every turn, the curriculum appears intent on taking the most dismal brutal view of every episode in human history. The industrial revolution's contribution to the world is restricted to "the transatlantic slave trade and convict transportation". It led, we are told, to "longer working hours for low pay and the use of children as a cheap source of labour" and is best interpreted through reading the works of Charles Dickens.

The reforming instincts of 19th-century liberals that led to the end of transportation, slavery and child labour are whitewashed from history.

The measurable improvements to diet and health, made possible by agricultural innovation in sheep breeding, frozen meat transportation and broad-acre farming, form no part of the story.

They would have sounded a discordant note in the curriculum's miserablist narrative of Australian history.

Instead, Year 4 students will be taught "historical terms for example 'penal', 'transportation', 'navigation', 'frontier conflict', 'colonisation' ".

In Year 6 they will be introduced to "experiences of citizenship and democracy" with reference to "internment camps during World War II, assimilation policies, anti-discrimination legislation, mandatory detention, pay and working conditions" and "children who were placed in orphanages, homes and other institutions".

After all, the curriculum helpfully reminds us, democracy is an abstract noun expressing an intangible concept.

The leaden imposition of "cross-curriculum priorities" indigenous awareness, engagement with Asia and sustainability contaminate the curriculum writers' thinking.

In English, "the priority of sustainability provides rich and engaging contexts for developing students' abilities".

In geography, "the sustainability priority and concept afford rich and engaging learning opportunities and purposeful contexts".

In history, sustainability "provides content that supports the development of students' world views, particularly in relation to judgments about past social and economic systems, and access to and use of the Earth's resources".

In mathematics, "sustainability provides rich, engaging and authentic contexts for developing students' abilities in number and algebra, measurement and geometry, statistics and probability".

Sustainability in science develops "an appreciation for the interconnectedness of Earth's biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere".

Christopher Pyne has been condemned as a culture warrior for having the audacity to question this tosh.

The opposition has accused him of attempting to politicise the curriculum, and has labelled his chosen reviewers, Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire, as ideologues.

If the Education Minister is to be criticised, it is for imagining this irredeemable document can be tidied up and put back on the shelf when the only realistic course of action is to tear the damn thing up.