I have previously written about the Victorian Government's push to make us more sustainable including by only washing our hair once a week, click here for more information and my earlier blog piece is here.
Now, according to ABC Online, the Victorian Government is not practising what it preaches, when it comes to saving water and electricity. Apparently:
New figures show the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) used 13 per cent more water and six and a half per cent more electricity over the past year.
The Nationals says the DSE's annual report also shows it has overspent its budget by $500,000 a day over the past three years.
The Nationals Leader, Peter Ryan, says the Government should be leading by example.
"There is no justification for this, the Government talks the talk about saving water, saving energy, and I think it's got to walk the walk, it's got to comply with what it's urging other Victorians to do," he said.
"And as for over spending the budget, well, like the rest of us, they have got to live within their budgets."
I wonder how other state governments compare?
your all wankas
Hi Richard,
You may suggest, but I don't move stuff around at the blog - that is I don't move comments on a thread. cheers,
May I suggest that some of these posts are placed under the water heading its getting difficult to folow this thread
A further post on the issue of trees in catchments, I was talking with someone from Sydney water board and they said the the former grassed areas around Sydney dams (old grazing land I guess) are now filling up with woody vegetation, perhaps this is lowering the catchement efficiency.
For Perth fire scars on grasstrees indicate a decline of fires from 1.6/decade to 0.6/decade in the last 100-150 years from memory, so increasing forest density is an issue along with declining rainfall. There is possibly an interaction here to really reduce inflow.
Ian, I would suggest that we kill most large trees by stem injection and leave the young stuff, this way one could increase the carbon stock if regrowth is faster than decay of standing dead (which is pretty slow), so a bit more water and a probable increase in carbon stocks a win-win. Re rate of regrowth as you say depends where you are could be 8 years in dryer areas but still a big area to cover & largely in hills where machinery may not be useful/wanted because of erosion, and no orderly plantation rows. I rember my father thinning on a cyprus pine block for better timber production and this seemed to take a lot of effort just for a amall area due to density of small trees.
The Government and or Sunwater should be better placed to analyse scenarios such as you propose. Naturally Sunwater etc probably spend more on advertising than on monitoring (trees, grass, rainfall, runoff, evapotranspiration) so therefore the hydrological inpacts over time of say a 50% thinning (of leaf cover) remain uncertain despite CRC hydrology, its little better then guesses based on largely empirical equations.
The question of thinning and regrowth rates on hydrology needs further investigation. I think I remember a conference paper where someone up in QDPI forestry(?) at Gympie(?) was doing some work on pine plantations and hydrology (measurement not modelling) but do not know if they had a thinning event.