10 reasons the proposed Road User Tax is bad policy
Here are the 10 main reasons why the planned Road User Tax is flawed and counterproductive for Australia.
sustainability
SA Industry Climate Change Conference
Very much looking forward to this week’s South Australian Industry Climate Change Conference. Last year’s event was very influential in increasing industry ambition on effective climate action, with an emphasis on practical outcomes. It was very well attended and brilliantly organised. Highly recommended.
A new era for New Internationalist in Australia
January 2024 marked the end of a very long and noteworthy era for the New Internationalist magazine in Australia.
In charting how it unfolded, I want to thank those who made such a special contribution to extending the reach of the New Internationalist magazine into so many homes, schools and tertiary classes. The magazine reports on action for global justice. It promotes putting people before profit, climate justice, tax justice, equality, social responsibility and human rights for all.
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Music – Society – Planet
A guide to this website
Music
- Gig guide – My upcoming adventures on stage with my friends in folk music and trad jazz are detailed on my Gig Guide.
- WOMADelaide – This is my favourite weekend of the year, and you’ll find some WOMADelaide stories here.
Society
- Inspirational activists – I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interview some extraordinary people, activists who work tirelessly to be on the right side of history: people who know the inequity of the status quo simply isn’t good enough and must be challenged. You’ll find some activist stories here.
Planet
- Saving the planet – It’s a slightly silly phrase – “saving the planet” – because the planet is quite capable of looking after itself. In fact if humans disappeared off the face of the earth, the planet would doubtless do better without us. But what we urgently need to do is to preserve our fragile life-support systems for the sake of future generations. We have a lot of work to do in both climate activism and practical emissions reduction projects. There are some examples of climate action here.
- Urban Ecology Australia – For a couple decades I’ve been a member of Urban Ecology Australia, an organisation that invented a cohesive theory of ecological cities, defined Ecopolis Development Principles, and then set about building a living example of an inner-urban eco-village: Christie Walk. You’ll find posts about my most recent sustainable living adventures here.
Planet Talks at WOMADelaide 2023
WOMADelaide is best known as a glorious long weekend of music and dance from around the world. But Planet Talks also gives some special opportunities for sharing ideas with some of the world’s most inspiring thought leaders and activists who are working on key global environmental and justice issues.
Big ideas to share
For 2023 much of the focus will be on the First Nations Voice to Parliament, the Race to Netzero, Rights for Nature and Crimes Against Nature.
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Episode 9 – Battery storage – adding a second Tesla PowerWall
2021 – Battery options modelling
In September 2020 we installed our first battery at Sturt Apartments, Christie Walk. You can read the story of our modelling, battery choices and lessons learned in Episode 7 – Battery storage – Tesla PowerWall 2
Everything had gone to plan with the installation of the battery; performance was as expected. The savings generated by our PV upgrade and the battery were flowing into our Green Fund, enabling us to begin planning for the installation of our second battery.
Our modelling indicated that our 21kW PVs were generating enough power to usefully support up to about 55kWh of battery storage, corresponding to 4 x Tesla PowerWall 2 batteries. In cost-benefit terms, a sweet-spot would be with 2 batteries. In the depths of winter in July – on many days – we’d still generate enough spare power to fully charge the batteries for use after sundown.
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Episode 7 – Battery storage – Tesla Powerwall 2
2020 – Battery options modelling
In the middle of all that work on evacuated tubes, we learned that change was imminent in the SA Government Home Battery Scheme. To qualify for the maximum $6k subsidy, applications had to be lodged by 15th April.
Our modelling indicated that our 21kW PVs were generating enough power to usefully support up to about 55kWh of battery storage, corresponding to 4 x Tesla PowerWall 2 batteries. In cost-benefit terms, a sweet-spot would be with 2 batteries. In the depths of winter in July we’d still generate enough net power to fully charge the batteries for use overnight.
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Episode 6 – More evacuated tube solar hot water boosters
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community
2020
This was the crisis year for so many people – bushfires, COVID, job losses – and it also happened to be the year of our most adventurous emissions-reduction planning, carrying out 2 major projects a few months apart.
Stage 2 solar hot water boosters
The evacuated tube solar hot water boosters we had installed in 2018 were performing well, so it was time to build the second stage. We’d completed the design work in 2019 and had commenced the Development Application (DA) process with the City of Adelaide in September 2019. DA is required by Council if solar collectors are not mounted flat on the roof. After 9 weeks of back and forth, providing additional drawings and details, we finally received Planning Consent in mid-November.
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Episode 4 – Major PV upgrade
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community
2019
For years we’d been tossing around options for increasing our solar performance without losing our high feed-in tariff (56c/kWh) for the 4.8kW PVs that were installed when the Christie Walk community built the Sturt Apartments in 2006.
But by 2019 it became clear that preserving the high feed-in tariff was a false economy. We’d be better off financially and environmentally if we replaced the PVs and inverters with a high performance 21kW system.
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Episode 3 – Evacuated tube solar hot water boosters
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community
May 2018
We started investigating the retrofit option for our hot water system: installing solar collectors as boosters to our existing heat pump hot water. One company stood out as a solid option: RunOnSun, based in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. Their website wouldn’t win a Webby Award for design, but the content is comprehensive and very educational. MD Andrew Butterworth has spent more than a decade applying Sydney University research on evacuated tube solar hot water and finessing it for efficiency and robust performance. The fixings supplied by RunOnSun are robust too; more than adequate to secure the system in cyclone conditions.
We decided to split the retrofit project into two stages. Stage 1 – 60 evacuated solar collector tubes – would be evaluated before moving onto Stage 2 – an additional 48 evacuated tubes.
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BrianLoffler 