Canberra's biggest polluters

Like some statistical report about where all the single guys and single girls are in Canberra, a few weeks back. They reckoned Deakin was teeming with single girls. Well, duh! There’s a girls school boarding house! I don’t know what age group they startd their ‘single girls’ count at, but that had to be it. I bet Red Hill was teeming with single guys.

Hardly anyone lives in Barton, Acton and Parkes! There is, however, a university and a Parliament house in those suburbs! By George, I think that might have skewed the stats.

i dont think bose make tv’s jemmy

I cranked up the wood heater last night and emitted a shitload of CO2. It made me warm.

Trees don’t mind CO2. It helps them grow. Which is good – for them and me. The more trees, the more wood I have to burn.

It’s win/win.

Thanks for the link, Eyes.

One needs to be very very careful when data mining averages and summary statistics and then applying it to small groups such as Canberra suburbs.

Two things come to mind straight away (there could be others):
*higher incomes will always consume more, almost by definition, so their GHG emmissions will always be more than the average. But that is what an average means, the highs and lows averaged out. If Canberrans have higher-than-average income, they will produce more GHG.
* higher incomes tend to spend more on big ticket items. If a person buys a $10,000 Bose TV versus a $300 Chinese TV, they haven’t produced (10000/300=33) 3,300% more GHG, it’s still just *one* TV so they have produced 0% more GHG. (In fact, you could argue the Chinese TV produces more GHG since pollution controls in China are less stringent than Germany.) Yet, the household expenditure numbers for electrical goods would imply that the person has produced more GHG.

I’m always deeply suspicious of perhaps-dodgy data mining, esp for organisations with an agenda. I don’t know if the study is flawed or not, but I can’t see how they could have controlled for the effects I mention above, so my inclination is to say that it is flawed.

Check out and compare the environment impact figures for all of Canberra’s suburbs here: http://www.acfonline.org.au/consumptionatlas
Sydney Uni’s Integrated Sustainability Analysis team has cleverly used household expenditure data to calculate the impact figures for each suburb.
Richer is nastier it seems.

I agree that many of the reasons behind an event like that are on the nose – I didn’t watch it, not excited by the bands and yeah, it had a propaganda kind of slickness to it.

Given the amount of emissions from the corporate sector, it’s not surprising that they would try to milk the greenwash factor for all it’s worth.

I agree that people and governments both need to act rather than simply applying pressure on politicians – it’s everyone’s problem and the market can’t be relied upon to fix it fairly so regulation is required.

Barton being one of the naughtiest suburbs, well, there’s about 50 people living there, and umpteen gov’t buildings and non-gov’t buildings also. They are heated to 23 C in winter! And cooled to that in summer. There’s your consumer of energy/emitter of greenhouse gas. And yeah, the Dep’t of the Environment is in Barton, funnily enough.

For a chuckle, go to the SMH and find the article about how shithouse the Live Earth gig in Sydney was, and read all the screeching by aggreived Sydneyites who couldn’t buy beer, food, go to the bog or even get out without joining a monster queue.

The Secretary of the Department of the Environment mentions regularly that his Department has saved so many cars worth of greenhouse gas he’s surprised to see any on the road.

I believe the current guesstimate is 30,000 tonnes for the combined live earth footprint. However the amount reduced as a result of the concerts is likely to be millions of tonnes.

That said Im not support of the concerts. I find it interesting that a significant goal of the concerts is to get attendee’s to blame politicians, rather than take action themselves. In addition I listened (on 104.7) to the concert and the only thing I heard people asked to do was switch to CFL’s (Phillips CFL’s was a major sponsor), why no mention of switching to more efficient cars (DaimlerChrysler is also a sponsor, coincidence?), cars running on alternate fuels, houses powered by solar pv or solar water heating, etc..? You know, the non token efforts. The whole thing smells of feel-good environmentalism if you ask me.
Saying Canberra emits more GHC because solely because it is cold is silly, last I checked Tasmania has colder average temperatures, and many other parts of Australia have vastly hotter summers which last longer. The reason is the same as why we produce the most household waste, we earn more, and are in general, arrogant.

Funny really given we have the climate research powerhouse at ANU, and a government committed to high energy ratings in new homes.

Can you still install wood heaters?