South Wind

Wouldn’t live anywhere else, said the survivor of Cyclone Tracy to a television reporter in Darwin last week. Having lived through the terror of the storm that shredded the frontier city half a century ago, she’s going nowhere.

Darwin has endured many cyclones and its people are prepared to live with that risk. That’s despite its chequered history of frontier politics, stark social and racial divisions and heavy dependence on federal spending, raising questions about the city’s viability.

Fiercely defending its reputation, Darwin’s civic leaders are putting heart and soul into keeping it viable long into the future. In 2019, after Cyclone Marcus destroyed an estimated 10,000 trees that had been planted for shade, the city declared a climate emergency and embarked on an action plan.

Marcus wasn’t the only driver of that emergency declaration. As a tropical city Darwin is used to warm winters and hot summers, but the heat is starting to bite. In 2019 the city endured a record heatwave, and its council instigated an action plan to address the city’s rising temperatures.

Research by the Northern Territory-based Charles Darwin University has found that heat has joined remoteness and a high cost of living as a key factor driving people from the tropics to cooler southern states, with older people rating it as the main reason to leave the Territory. By 2030, average temperatures for the Top End along with Western Australia’s Kimberley and Pilbara regions are predicted to be between 1.5C and 2.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Projections are especially confronting for Darwin. Today the city gets on average around 12 days a year above the critical heat mark of 35C; by 2030 it can expect those days to number 43. Without drastic cuts in emissions globally, that figure is projected to rise to over 300 days a year by 2090. At which point Darwin will have become uninhabitable.

Darwin’s built-up commercial centre is a classic “heat island”, with the air next to hard, reflective surfaces warming to temperatures near 60C on hot days. The city has been warned that it will face a double economic and public health crisis if it is unable to mitigate the impact of extreme heat.

The city’s council is not sitting on its hands. It has had a shade structure built and nearly 20,000 trees planted in the city centre, double the number destroyed by Cyclone Marcus. Other mitigatory measures include pavements that don’t absorb heat, green roofs that make a measurable difference to buildings’ temperatures, and water fountains in the city mall.

Like many northern cities – and centres around Australia including Tasmania – Darwin has a climate action plan for net-zero council-controlled emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions across the whole community by 2040. But with the impact of global warming now starting to bite, it’s obvious that local action will not be enough.

The focus of local action tends to be on midday heat, but hardest to deal with will be night-time temperatures which normally allow bodies to recover from hot days. Darwin is now facing the prospect of minimum temperatures in the high 20s or even above 30C for long periods each summer. Eventually, that becomes deadly.

This is the bleak context of support by federal and state governments, along with respective Oppositions, for the massive corporate effort to extract from under our lands and seas every last skerrick of methane, a leading global warming agent, and sell it here and abroad. Ironically, most of this is happening in the tropics, mainly in waters off the Top End and northern WA.

Among those currently standing in the way of this government-supported smash-and-grab are a dozen marine scientists, artists and campaigners who are spending their New Year on a boat 300 km north of Broome. At Scott Reef, believed by marine scientists to be Australia’s last undamaged clear-water coral reef, they will investigate its exceptional biodiversity and Woodside’s gas activities there.

One of their number is acclaimed writer Tim Winton, whose most recent novel, Juice, imagines a future on a continent where “living” – if that’s the word for it – involves spending summers tending food plants underground and bringing them out in winter for some natural light. Increasingly Winton and visionaries like him, in close concert with scientists documenting climate, will be our guides in this very uncertain future.

It’s a New Year tradition to think hard about past, present and future. Maybe tonight, maybe just in the last minutes or seconds of this disappearing year, we’ll find it in us to abandon pretence, seize the moment and resolve to focus on what’s really important. Hold that thought.

Here we go again. As we begin the countdown to a new year, Christmas is upon us, complete with reminders from Christian elders as to its true meaning.

I was taught from an early age to take such reminders seriously. Every Sunday, us kids would be dressed up and carted off to church to pray and sing and hear the rector’s latest take on sin and redemption. I don’t remember how this happened, but for a few years I was in the church choir, and Christmas was our star performing gig.

I took on board the foundational Christian story – a baby born of a virgin, grown into a miracle-worker, crucified as a trouble-maker and resurrected as the Son of God. I tried to believe it but as I left childhood it fell away, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Let’s face it: the story of Jesus is so crazy it makes more ancient myths seem remarkably sensible.

And yet the annual event we call Christmas survives and thrives. That may partly be because messages from Jesus of humility, openness, kindness and humanity have universal appeal. But the main reason isn’t Christian at all. It’s because we’re social animals who enjoy getting together, and the end of each year is as good a time as any for a rip-roaring party.

Around 1500 years ago, not having a clue when Jesus was actually born, the Roman church sensibly decided his birthday party should coincide with the pagan winter solstice, celebrating the shortest day and returning light with hot winter food. Ever since, Christmas and Midwinter have been one and the same.

Except here in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas is a feast of cold food on sunny days, often outdoors and extending late into balmy evenings. Unlike my much-loved daughter-in-law, English by birth and now Australian by choice, I have never found that disconcerting.

The Christmas of my childhood with numerous siblings and cousins was unalloyed delight. Less so after it became my lot, not being a natural gift-giver, to buy for all these people – especially on one occasion when mice found their way into my secret pile of chocolaty gifts. But on the whole I recall it with pleasure.

Over the years that pleasure has worn thin. Christmas today is crowded streets, crowded shops and crowded schedules. The grandchildren are no longer children, so unwrapping gifts has lost its buzz. We spend up largely because commerce encourages us to, but – a big “but” that we don’t like to talk about – economic growth is smothering our planet’s life systems. We’re choking on excess and waste.

The biggest contributor to waste is consumption, by me, you and everyone in the developed world. We remember the discarded wrapping paper but what about the gift that was in it, needed or (more likely) not? Not to mention excess food and travel. In the run-up to this Christmas we’ve spent massively – $70 billion according to The Australian Business Review.

Most responsibility for this rests with the rich among us. A 2019 Oxfam study found that the wealthiest 10 per cent of the world’s people are responsible for half of carbon emissions from consumption globally, and the richer half of the global population is responsible for over 90 per cent of those emissions.

In this age of mass travel we’re now more scattered than ever, but we don’t have to fly to the other end of the country or the planet just to be with someone on that particular day. We can do that any time. We don’t have to buy stuff people clearly don’t need, or to over-indulge in food that could have gone to those who do need it – good reasons for getting family agreement on a vastly more modest Christmas.

If Christmas means looking after ourselves, our families, our social circle and others, we should absolutely make that phone call, write that message, give to charity, and give time to people who matter – and let them know they matter. Kindness is good for the soul, and it’s infectious, and Christmas is said to be about peace and goodwill. But don’t we need that all the time?

I wouldn’t want the Christmas celebrating to stop altogether. There’s an aspect of it that I really, really like. When, as happens, others are diverted and busy with stuff, I can switch off and take a walk, mentally or physically, on a path less travelled. The point is, we can choose to engage or disengage as necessary. Christmas can be whatever we want it to be.

The development application for Tasmania’s first large-scale solar farm at a Northern Midlands grazing property, Connorville, got a unanimous nod from local government authorities last week. The only question to ask is, why has it taken so long?

As noted by Evan Franklin, an energy and power systems expert at the University of Tasmania, Tasmania’s solar potential is similar to that of southern Germany and many other parts of the world where solar is established as a key energy source. On a sunny day the Connorville solar farm will generate 288 megawatts, which would make it one of the state’s largest generators.

Late last week came another potential game-changer for Tasmania. Starting 30 km off the central north coast and covering 7100 square kilometres of Bass Strait, a new offshore wind zone announced by energy minister Chris Bowen has the capacity to deliver 20 gigawatts of power, more than double the output of Tasmania’s entire hydro system.

With sustained wind speeds of over eight metres a second, the wind here is as good as it gets. Giant turbines will deliver in a single rotation as much power as a whole day of a rooftop solar installation. Proponents have already signalled their intention to build Bass Strait wind farms, supporting thousands of jobs in construction and thousands more in operation.

Established hydro power makes rollout of wind and solar here a no-brainer. To store power for when wind or sun are absent, most other parts of Australia must rely on growing but still-limited battery capacity. Tasmania already has a large bank of energy in the form of water held back by dams. When solar and wind are generating, hydro can be cut back and water saved.

But Tasmania is not a clean energy state as long as it relies on coal power imported from Victoria and gas generation at its own plant in the Tamar valley. Whatever its promotors say, natural gas – essentially methane – is dirty energy, and the Tamar facility should not be used until clean hydrogen becomes a viable option.

The annual GenCost report released last week by CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) reveals that renewable generation is getting cheaper. For the seventh year in a row, renewables had the lowest cost range of any new-build energy generating technology.

The eight per cent fall in the cost of ultra-cheap solar this year matched last year’s fall. Moderate rises in equipment and installation costs put up the price of onshore wind generation by two per cent over the year, but at the same time the cost of gas generation rose by 11 per cent.

As for nuclear, its unique safety and waste issues are not to be taken lightly, but they are small compared with the huge risk attached to continuing fossil fuel generation, which happens to be required by the Coalition policy. That, plus the financial cost and time delays involved, are what make Peter Dutton’s nuclear dream a potential nightmare.

The cost of nuclear has dominated public debate. Cost overruns in new installations are legion – as much as $20 billion in the case of the West’s latest nuclear project, Flamanville in France, a country with over 60 years of nuclear experience. The reactor was to be up and running by 2012, but another 12 years passed (17 years in total) before it began operating three months ago.

The nuclear industry says that the new United Arab Emirates reactor – 13 years from scratch to full operation – is a better case to use for comparison, but the Coalition’s figure of 10 years still looks highly optimistic. Even more far-fetched are the small modular reactors (SMRs) the Coalition has often touted. There are no SMR reactors, not even prototypes, anywhere in the world.

Above all – and far too little has been made of this – there is global warming. The world’s best climate science brains were shocked at the hottest-ever temperature anomaly for 2023. The gap in their knowledge revealed by this surprise, and by the all-but-certain new temperature record for 2024, has them reeling.

What they do know is that we must stop burning fossil fuels, and that time is of the essence. The Coalition’s policy to restrict renewable rollout, including cancelling some wind and solar projects, while using coal and gas to fill the generation gap and starting from scratch on nuclear is sheer madness – a trip down a rabbit-hole that can only end in tears.

On the other hand, South Australia now challenges Tasmania’s long-standing record as Australia’s leading renewable energy state. Solar farms and offshore wind, with hydro, can restore that prized status.