South Wind

There’s a story going around that a load of Tasmanian specialty timber shipped to Finland a year or two ago for the fit-out of the Spirit of Tasmania ferries had to be returned here (presumably aboard Spirit IV) along with the delivery supervisor, when for some reason the fit-out couldn’t be done.

The story came from a friend who’d heard it from his hairdresser who’d heard it from… well, it’s a rumour. However, over 6000 lineal metres of celery-top pine salvaged from under the waters of the Lake Pieman impoundment did get sent to Finland to be used as feature wall cladding on the new ships.

One explanation for the celery-top story is this: Tasmanian native forestry has failed multiple audits by the Forest Stewardship Council, a global non-profit promoting responsible forest management, and the timber was stopped at the border because it lacked the European standard of FSC certification.

Whatever actually happened, the timber will no doubt all end up in the two new ferries, and amid all the many Spirit mishaps and Tasmania’s unprecedented financial troubles this is a mere hiccup. It’s even less significant alongside the global-sized stuff-ups in play in the world of wood everywhere – including Finland.

Within three weeks the 30th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-30) begins in Belem, an old colonial city on the edge of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, wants this COP – 10 years on from Paris – to be another “landmark summit”, this time highlighting forests’ critical role in stopping global warming.

The Lula government recognises the parlous state of the Amazon rainforest in its COP-30 goals, including the utopian aim of “global mutirão”, or collective global action, which it says is based on Indigenous Amazonian values. It seeks to bring this spirit into “a global movement capable of delivering real-world results at the pace the climate crisis demands”.

Central to Brazil’s agenda is the “Tropical Forests Forever Facility” (TFFF), a performance-based fund supported by the UK, Norway and BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. TFFF aims to mobilise $4 billion a year to reward countries for conserving tropical forests at the annual rate of $4 per hectare – at least a fifth of it earmarked for Indigenous and local communities.

The good news ends there. Clearing Amazonian rainforest for livestock farming and cropping – one crop being bioenergy feedstock – is continuing apace. That includes removal of virgin forest on tens of thousands of hectares for construction of a four-lane highway to “modernise” Belem ahead of the arrival of the COP delegate horde.

Last week Brazil launched an initiative to win high-level support in COP-30 for bioenergy, including quadrupling by 2035 the production and use of what it (along with other governments) chooses to call “sustainable fuels”. Some sources are sustainable, like municipal and agricultural waste, but by far the greatest biomass volume comes from wood.

Bioenergy proponents talk of a new “bioeconomy” while calling for the use of a finite resource to serve huge, competing and ever-growing demands. We really have no idea what a bioeconomy would look like, but in most cases it will deplete natural forests, increase the biodiversity crisis, raise (not lower) carbon emissions and encourage avoidance of climate action.

Once again, the Belem bioenergy push exposes the huge, decades-old hole in UN carbon accounting allowing industry and government a rationale for arguing that burning ostensibly replaceable wood in huge volumes for energy is better than burning coal. In reality it’s at best no cleaner than coal and usually dirtier.

UNFCCC accounting rules allow governments to treat biomass energy as carbon-neutral. Under these rules, emissions from bioenergy are accounted for where the wood is harvested, in the land sector – the complete opposite of fossil fuel emissions which are measured where the fuel is burned.

Carbon accounting gets really tricky if you import a lot of your wood from another country. In the case of Europe, most of that wood comes from North America, where whole forests are disappearing to feed Europe’s bioenergy demands.

The International Energy Agency calculates that after the US, the world’s largest source of wood for bioenergy is Brazil, home of COP-30. The largest European user of biomass energy is Germany, while per person the continent’s top consumer is Finland, where the leading voice against bioenergy is a group called Ei Polteta Tulevaisuutta, translating to “Let’s not burn our future”.

Ship stories get forgotten after a while, but there’s no escaping responsibility for global warming.

In the fast-expanding world of renewable energy, an articulate and enterprising ideas man named Saul Griffith is a rock star, and he’s coming to Hobart.

Go-karts, oddball cars, all manner of tools and gadgetry, quirky engineering and nifty science are a big part of a life remarkable for its ceaseless energy and exploration. But beyond being a gadget man, Griffith cares about the world and the people he shares it with.

His life is marked by a deep love of nature informed by physical and life sciences, and strong family and community connections inspiring a passion for the arts. STEM education, he says, should be STEAM, including A for art (or the arts). I couldn’t agree more.

Griffith’s action-packed career has taken him from a University of Sydney engineering degree in 2000 to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering PhD (subject: self-replicating machines) before he co-founded a technology company called OtherLab. That set the scene for a dozen or so tech startups exploring the potential for various high-tech inventions.

At OtherLab he painstakingly put together a vast map of the hugely complex flow of energy through the US economy – a project that would inform his life-long response to climate change, or as he calls it, “the existential crisis that will define this century”. That campaign, first in the US and now in Australia, is marked by his belief that with the help of electricity humanity can thread the climate needle.

Griffith’s inspiration and learning, and his first book, Electrify, helped fire up Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar clean energy program, injecting federal funds into all manner of local and regional actions to use electrical energy to help wean the US off fossil fuels.

In 2022, when he and his family moved to Australia to live, he began to apply the same thinking to Australia’s response to climate change. Griffith’s electrification ideas have informed government programs to foster uptake of EVs and solar and wind energy and to radically upgrade the nation’s electricity grid. He’s had a similar influence in New Zealand.

You can dive deeper into Griffith’s thinking at his Substack site, Energy and Stuff (energyandstuff.substack.com). Or you can buy one of his books for general readers explaining among other things why he’s essentially an optimist about our future. The latest of these is Plug In! The Electrification Handbook, detailing how electricity can help us defang the climate tiger.

In the coming week you can hear from the man himself at a couple of events in southern Tasmania. From 3 pm next Sunday he’ll be at the Kingston Community Hub, and on Monday at 6pm he’ll deliver the 29th annual Richard Jones Memorial Lecture at the University of Tasmania’s Stanley Burbury Theatre, part of the university’s “Island of Ideas” series of public talks.

At Kingston he will join another rock star, gardening guru Hannah Moloney, to discuss actions to secure a better future. The event is being organised by Kettering-based Net Zero Channel, which has played a leading role across southern Tasmania in raising awareness of the need to transition to clean energy, the benefits of better-insulated homes, and possibilities offered by home and community renewable energy and sustainable living projects.

Transport, which costs Tasmanians over $1 billion a year for petrol and diesel, will be part of the Kingston discussion. Then on Tuesday next week from 7 pm the Australian Electric Vehicle Association (Tasmania) will host a Zoom meeting open to all.

On the subject of pure science, it was good to see an Australian, Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne, among the three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Chemistry last week for their blue-sky study of structures called metal organic frameworks – work that could have enormous ramifications for the containment of climate change.

MOFs are molecular structures capable of harvesting water from desert air, capturing carbon dioxide and storing toxic gases, among many other things. The prize recognises the trio’s groundbreaking research and its potential in addressing challenges arising in a changing climate.

The irony would be lost on the US president, but in the week of Donald Trump’s brazen but unsuccessful campaign to secure the Nobel Peace Prize, US institutions in his crosshairs to lose government funding, notably the University of California, figured prominently in Nobels for research in scientific fields.

Charting our future will demand high-quality (and therefore well-funded) education in STEM – science, technology, engineering and maths – as well as a grounding in the creative arts, as Griffith makes a point of reminding us. That is a lesson all leaders too easily ignore.

What is this pastiche we call Australia, this mixture of First Nations people and others from all over who turned up, usually uninvited, at various points along the way?

What motivates us? What gives meaning to our lives? What would stir us to action if a threat emerged, and what would that threat look like? In a fast-changing world, who are our friends and who are our enemies?

These questions came to me in the wake of a concert at Hobart’s Theatre Royal on Friday evening which my better half persuaded me was worth attending. It was the wonderful Van Diemen’s Band, augmented with three supremely talented Afghani players from Ensemble Kaboul.

The result was an unforgettable musical experience, a glorious blend of harmonies and rhythms from Persian and European musical traditions. It was also a startling reminder of the great good that comes from cultural mixing and of the open minds that inevitably emerge from that.

This in a time when open minds are in distressingly short supply. Those three Afghani musicians cannot play in their homeland because music is off-limits under the Taliban – just one of many such restrictions there and around the world where conformity to a narrow, limited set of beliefs is mandated by a dominant group.

While not under the thumb of a religious dictatorship, Australia has its own ingrained conformity, much of it stemming from colonial times when this land was ruled from London. One expression of it was the cultural cringe, whereby we devalued our own cultural achievements in favour of our colonial overlords.

In World War II the focus of that cringe shifted to the United States, and ever since then it’s seen its clearest expression in our 80-year-old defence pact with the superpower. Despite all the rhetoric about finding our own path in the world, when push comes to shove we have always fallen back on that alliance – in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It seemed possible to put that behind us after Australia pulled its troops out of Afghanistan in 2013 and withdrew completely in 2021. For a moment it seemed that the US alliance and its accompanying cultural cringe might become a thing of the past.

But no. China’s fast-paced military buildup persuaded then-PM Scott Morrison that we should ditch our stuttering French-driven submarine program and tap into US nuclear submarines, while also inviting our former colonial overlords, the United Kingdom, to join in. Thus was AUKUS born.

Eight months after that little surprise, a decisive election win by Anthony Albanese’s Labor party appeared to relegate the Morrison government’s agenda to history. But that rejection didn’t include the AUKUS agreement, as Albanese quickly made clear. The pact remains in place.

Joe Biden, the president who approved AUKUS, has gone and a new regime has replaced him. Last week Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, in charge of Trump’s rebadged War Department, gave the country’s 800 most senior military officers a new set of orders.

From Hegseth, the message was abandoning “ideological garbage” to focus on being physically and mentally prepared to beat the enemy. He didn’t identify that enemy but did say that “deterring China is another speech for another day coming soon.”

Trump’s even longer speech contained more than a hint of a growing role for the US military in defending against “invasion from within”. He barely mentioned external enemies.

Whatever else can be said about those two speeches – and the legality of Trump’s use of military force in Democrat-led cities is being furiously debated across the US – they signal a decisive shift in focus for the US military for as long as Trump is president.

“We’re going to have to get over our alliance addiction and learn to live without big and powerful friends,” said the veteran defence analyst Hugh White in his recent Quarterly Essay.

Everything points us in that direction. Whatever encouragement the PM and his defence minister, Richard Marles, read in the wind, and whatever is being done to prepare us for a future with nuclear submarines, there are too many imponderables in AUKUS to view it with any confidence. We need to get over it and move on.

Going back to those first questions, as Australians we’re allsorts from many different backgrounds in a world that’s not European but Asia-Pacific. We share it with Indonesia, East and South Asia, and numerous Pacific and Indian Ocean nations.

I’m with Hugh White. AUKUS is a chimera. Living outside an American umbrella will be tough and uncertain, but we need to break out of our security cringe. As those Theatre Royal players showed, making new connections outside one’s comfort zone can yield surprisingly good outcomes.