Podcast review: Hot Mess, Radio National, ABC (2020)

I found this program on the Apple Podcast app while searching randomly for something to listen to while driving. I didn’t specifically go out of my way to find a program about the environment.

It goes a bit fast at times but is otherwise adequately researched. It’s just that because of the faulty editing – you struggle to keep up with the narrative as your concentration wanders due to a sudden, urgent events happening on the road while you’re driving – some important things get lost in the transmission.

Especially at the beginning, before the basic premise – which is, on the face of it, sound – is cemented in your imagination. We do need to have more informed viewpoints on the subject of climate change so that we can – hopefully, with patience exercised on both sides – get away from the trolling and the flame wars. By focusing on why it’s so hard to get through to people this podcast tries to list the reasons why we seem to keep on having the same debates?

‘Hot Mess’ is a suitable place to start to find the answers to this question but it doesn’t go very deep until the final episode, and it also wears its heart on its sleeve. The bit about psychology that opens the show should’ve been placed closer to the end, because the filler – all the stuff about the IPA and the Minerals Council – is so well known as hardly to warrant inclusion. 

In fact, there’s not much in this program that is new until episode four. Most of the show is a slightly reheated dollop of quickly assembled interviews but, then again, you get what you pay for. 

There is plenty of stuff happening in the environment space, especially in research institutions such as universities and in the private sector, and that’s where the makers of this show head in the final ep. But Richard Aedy – who made this program – doesn’t know much about such initiatives, products, systems, or software. Lots of advances are being made all that time, and implemented quietly by people who want to improve the operation and efficiency of the properties they run, but the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is not privy to most of such activity because it routinely only concerns itself with politics. So it thinks that the shitshow that flourishes on Twitter every week when ‘Q and A’ airs is the whole story. It’s not and ‘Hot Mess’ ignores much fascinating detail.

Movie review: Okja, dir Bong Joon-ho (2017)

If you are vegan, this movie will press all the right buttons. If, like me, you eat meat, it can still be rewarding as the filmmakers are wise to the dynamics of an often acrimonious debate being carried out in the public sphere. This London-based individual liked the film:

For some, this kind of product speaks to who they are. In an ongoing discussion about what kind of food people should eat, many argue that eating meat is ethically questionable (some would put the proposition more forcefully than that, and say it is criminal). The term “factory farming” is used a lot by different people, and ‘Okja’ certainly exploits this notion with a degree of vigour.

Whatever your views, the movie is worth spending time with, if for no other reason than because it gives you the opportunity to see some fine special effects. Okja is a sentient, giant pig-like creature living in the Korean forest with Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), the granddaughter of a man (Byun Hee-bong) ostensibly chosen by the fictional Mirando Corporation to raise the beast. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a flamboyant TV personality and naturalist named Johnny Wilcox who comes to Mija’s house, when she’s a teenager, with a video team and handlers – including, of course, a translator. When Okja is taken away, Mija is devastated, and so begins her journey.

Apart from Gyllenhaal, who helps develop that part of the movie that is about the difference between East and West, Tilda Swinton is fine as Lucy Mirando, the head of the eponymous company, and Giancarlo Esposito is very fine as an employee named Frank Dawson. These three characters are matched in their Swiftian cast by Paul Dano as Jay, the leader of a shadowy group of vigilantes – or, if you prefer, troublemakers – named the Animal Liberation Front. Jay and his team are ethically minded, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, so the laughs fall seemingly at random.

The way that Johnny Wilcox comes across – loud, superficial, brash, and weak – comically plays with Asian stereotypes of Westerners and how Mija and her grandfather are imagined by the filmmakers is emblematic of a mostly forgotten idea that modernity is alien and inauthentic in an Asian context. Bong also wrote much of the screenplay so his vision is behind the filmmakers’ archaeological effort to celebrate an antique notion of the holiness of the ordinary, harking back to a kind of animism – used even today in a Japanese religion called Shinto – that appears to have been abandoned (but that, in fact, lives on in subtle ways; living in Tokyo today is not the same as living, say, in Sydney). The remote fastness, at the top of a mountain, as a site for the getting of wisdom, is ancient in such countries as China. In fact, ‘Okja’ would’ve appealed to many people living in a country like China or Japan in the first half of the 20th century. But this toying with stale tropes, ideas that embody such feelings as intolerance and shame, is made reasonable because of the humour used in the conveyance. Nevertheless, Bong is saying, we can learn something valuable about the past if we take seriously our own search for authenticity, and don’t just use it – as Mirando and Dawson do – as a mere marketing gimmick. Mija is different not just because she doesn’t speak English very well; her character is also expressed in how she uses objects.

Swinton and Gyllenhall and Dano might be mere foils for her authenticity, but though Bong laughs, at the same time, at himself, he takes his method to an extreme by inaccurately depicting genetic modification (GM). His vision is much the same as what Margaret Atwood used for ‘Oryx and Crake’ (2003). Atwood’s vision of the future includes a type of animal called a “pigoon” – a cross between a pig and a raccoon – that has, unlike Okja, a mean streak. In reality, GM is nothing like this and nowadays is used to develop new varieties of plants. In any case, a scientific form of animal husbandry is older than history; humans have been engineering animal forms for as long as agriculture (which some say started 12,000 years ago) has existed.

Bong needs his ideas to work in harmony within the confines of the artwork, so in the context of this review these are quibbles. But the problem of food bullying is real, as Michele Payne, an Indiana resident who writes about food, showed on 20 May at 5.01am Australian Eastern Standard Time, tweeting: “Is it OK to shame people about their eating choices if it's not socially acceptable to shame people on race, religion or sexual orientation?” Payne is vocal in this regard, and others on Twitter are equally vocal in their support of lifestyles that eschew the eating of meat. The debate continues and Bong’s movie is unmistakeably part of it. The movie didn’t have the same effect on me as it did on Tahsin Upa – whose tweet sits at the top of this review – as it felt like I was being manipulated by filmmakers wanting to make a political point. 

Movie review: Tuna Girl, dir Mana Yasuda (2019)

This curious and lovely film has a simple goal (and it fully attains it): to show how a dedication to craft warrants respect. It seemed to me to be a distinctively Japanese film, so viewers from other countries might be puzzled by the beginning, but stick with it and it delivers in spades.

Minami Takayama (Fuka Koshiba) is a student who arrives at a private research institute to learn about the cultivation of tuna. She’s accident-prone but well-intentioned and piques the interest of the organisation’s leader (Hidetoshi Hoshida) who asks her to help promote it so that he can attract more funding. Minami comes up with some ideas but (naturally) things don’t go according to plan.

Possibly, only a woman could have made this film but Yasuda also runs commentary on Japanese celebrity culture. The often vapid, sometimes sneering tone of Japanese commercial TV is taken to task; it is something that any foreigner who has lived for a period of time in Japan can understand. The film also includes a critique of social media that can’t go astray. Fourthly, the movie underscores a related subject, something that comes up from time to time in online debates: the necessary contingency of knowledge. All that science can do is use evidence to reveal new truths and, in this process, there is no limit. There are no tablets of stone, and new ideas must be tested before being rejected out of hand.

What most impressed me in this film is the way that the different characters pull their weight. I couldn’t find the names of some of the actors on IMDB – I’m not sure what the site’s policy is with regard to listing film credits – but even the people playing minor roles did solid work so the economy of the film is remarkable. Ryosuke Yusa plays Shun Hosono, who breeds parasites for use in the institute's research. Syuri Tanaka plays Akira Kuroda, a serious young woman who is a classmate of Hosono and Takayama. The writing is also excellent.

I wrote a number of journalistic stories on tuna back in the day so I was prepared for some of what this film offers. Japan’s appetite for the fish is legendary. It might not be common knowledge that wild stocks are depleted but many people already know that tuna fetch a high price in Tokyo’s fish market. It is also commonly known that Japanese cuisine relies on fish for a considerable part of the protein it uses, although beef and other types of meat (though not, for some reason, lamb) get yearly more popular. So this film is topical, addressing, as it does, the issue of the sustainability of a natural resource.

Carbon capture and storage: Realities and myths

In the same year my father died, when I was still living in southeast Queensland, I was asked to attend a conference to write stories for use in a company’s in-house communications. I still have a friend who works for this company, which makes instruments, systems and software used by many different industries, including construction, refining, petrochemicals, and mining. I haven’t seen him for many years.

Meetings such as the one I travelled to give people who work in companies that use the technology provider’s products an opportunity to learn about new product offerings, to talk with peers, to learn about government initiatives, and to learn about new research. People also go to them to have fun and, on the final night, there was a fancy-dress party. I didn’t go to the shindig and spent most of the time outside work hours in my room in the hotel transcribing recordings and writing up the stories I had been commissioned to produce. I was reimbursed money for the plane fare, and for other travel expenses, and was paid for the story drafts I submitted but I don’t know if all of them were used.

I started this blog in 2006 and so, for many years, had been vocal in favour of causes I took an interest in. At the time I was also taking commissions for stories from magazines including Australian Anthill (which focuses on entrepreneurs) and Ethical Investor (which had been founded by Australian journalist Paddy Manning and which ran stories about innovations allowing companies to do business and at the same time minimise their impact on the environment). The woman in the technology company’s comms role, who asked me to go to the confab, doesn’t work there anymore. I was never asked to cover another conference held by the company.

In what follows I will anonymise people’s identities. Note that it describes the state of the art almost a decade ago. However if, in the intervening years, someone had discovered an affordable method of capturing and removing the carbon that exists in the emissions of industrial plants, we would surely have heard about it by now. Constant reminders in the media from some sectors of the community about the potential of CCS indicates that it still remains a hope for many. But the problem with CCS is that it is not feasible and I will show why that is so.

One man who spoke at the confab worked at the time for a Commonwealth research agency that had been established under Tony Abbott’s leadership and that is still operating. I shall call him Mark although that is not his real name. He had worked for an Australian petroleum company and is now associated with a privately-funded research centre that helps gas producers.

“The first part of the chain is to capture the carbon,” Mark told seminar attendees, who were seated in a room in the hotel the event was held in. “We’re talking about the capture from anthropogenic sources, man-made sources. The most common examples we have tend to be emissions from power stations, iron and steel plants, fertiliser plants, natural gas processing plants.”

There existed, at the time the conference was held, examples of carbon capture installations at gas processing plants in the United States and offshore Norway, and at fertiliser plants in the US and Canada. Offshore of Western Australia there were plans afoot, Mark went on, to realise an installation at the Gorgon gas project located off the coast of Western Australia (construction of this plant was completed in 2017, so well after the confab had finished).

“Where we do have an issue in terms of technological development, is the application of CO2 capture at scale to industries like power generation, iron and steel, cement, pulp and paper,” Mark said. “It’s been worked out at lower scales, smaller scales. Not at large scale.” The requirement is to take the application from where it is mature into industries where it is still to be proved, Mark said.

He asked, rhetorically and to make a point, why CCS is important for businesses. “One scenario that has been painted by the International Energy Association takes the storyline, ‘If we don’t do anything from this point on and we live in an as-is world, by the time we get to 2050 annual emissions will have doubled, roughly.’”

Global annual CO2 emissions were expected (at the time of the conference) to increase from 28 gigatonnes to 56 gigatonnes. To keep current CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere constant up to 2050, it would be necessary to halve emissions, Mark said. “We’re talking about, in this particular scenario, it’s almost like a new industrial revolution in the way we use energy.”

Around one-fifth of the reduction would be due to the implementation of CCS. “It is part of a suite of measures on climate change,” said Mark. “Just being smarter with what we do now, which actually is the major contributor.”

In August 2007, the House Standing Committee on Science and Innovation had tabled a report on an inquiry into geosequestration technology. The report says there are three ways to capture carbon: post-combustion, oxyfuel combustion, and pre-combustion. It goes on:

There are a range of views on the suitability of each of these technologies, particularly in the Australian context. There is some agreement that post-combustion capture is the process most applicable to Australia’s current stock of power stations. There is also general agreement that the focus of research and development should be on the technologies that can be applied to the existing power stations.

On the day before Mark made his address at the conference, I spoke with Karush (not his real name), a migrant from the Middle East who graduated from one Group of Eight university and now works for another. Karush had won a competition, run by the company that held the confab, for research into carbon capture in power plants. He did this by simulating plant operations on a computer.

The academic who supervised Karush’s work, who I will name Omar, said to me, “The project is about improving the efficiency of power plants once they are integrated with carbon capture processes.”

“The carbon capture process is introduced to remove the CO2 from the power plant and purify it, separate it, and compress it downstream and into the geosequestration,” Omar went on. “There are many issues with this implementation.” (Geosequestration is the process of burying CO2 in geological formations in a liquid form as a dense supercritical fluid.)

The power industry, Karush told me, had been focusing its efforts to prove a carbon capture technology using absorption technology, although this is only one of the available methods of removing CO2 from emissions. Absorption had been used in the oil and gas industry for decades, said Karush, but at a larger scale it is still an emerging technology.

“In small scale this technology has been developing over maybe three decades. When we go for PCC [post-combustion capture] we have something, it’s not fully available, but it is the best one and industry can at least say, ‘I will take this one and go to the next stage of making it large-scale,’” said Karush.

In power plants, flue gas is channelled to an absorption system where solvent is added to the stream and binds to the CO2. The solvent is then taken to a regenerator where the CO2 is separated from it, so that the solvent can be reused. The energy required to separate the solvent from the CO2 is, currently, “huge”, said Karush.

“I always use the analogy to make it quite simple,” said Omar. “It’s like a pregnant woman. The power plant is the woman, now pregnant with the baby that is the capture plant. It’s a burden. The case here is that the baby is estimated to be the same size as the mother. The capture plant is estimated to be the same size as the power plant.”

Heat must be taken from the steam cycle to feed the regeneration system where the solvent is separated from the CO2. “We need to extract steam, which we are using to generate power,” said Karush. “[And] we need to bring that steam just to add heat to this reaction. Overall the efficiency of the power plant and the power output decreases notably.”

Karush’s simulation had shown that an 18 percent overall improvement in efficiency could be achieved in such a plant. Keep in mind that this was just achieved through computer modelling and hadn’t been reached by studying an implementation of technology installed in a working plant. And even an 18 percent reduction in energy used by emissions scrubbing equipment is not enough to make CCS feasible.

But as the conference progressed it occurred to me that people in these industries, listening in the scheduled information sessions and chatting with engineers stationed around the product display room, would see Karush’s research as a promising sign. Still “early days”. The work would go on. Given the nature of the influence working on many industries to comply with community expectations that they will operate in a way that minimises impacts on the environment, it is no wonder that there is so much work being put into CCS. But the challenges facing researchers and managers are enormous.

Some climate strike placards people were carrying in Australia

Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people turned out in parks and on streets in 112 Australian towns and cities to protest against government inaction on climate change. In the evening, an estimate published by the Sydney Morning Herald, the nation’s leading newspaper, said 300,000 people, or about 1.2 percent of the country’s population.

The figurehead of the action was Swedish student Greta Thunberg but the turnout on the day showed the community that there are many people who are concerned about global warming and the other phenomena associated with climate change. Next Friday, New Zealand is going to hold similar protests.

I started to grab images of placards and other signs in the early afternoon and I finished up at about 4.20pm with 46 files saved to disc. Most of these were found after tuning into the #climatestrike hashtag. They are just the placards that caught my attention: the more amusing or unusual creations. There were many other signs that I left untouched in the hours during which I undertook the survey. I have categorised the selected images in the following way:

1. The prime minister and other politicians
2. Variations on the word “hot”
3. Relating to school
4. On children
5. On old age
6. On introverts
7. Popular culture references
8. Internet culture inventions
9. Some dogs
10. Plays on the name of the planet Uranus
11. The rest

One: The prime minister and other politicians

Above: “Prime minister’s to do list.” 

Above: “Scomo likes it hot.” “Scomo” is the nickname of Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister.

Above: “I’ve seen smarter cabinets at Ikea.” 

Above: “Scomo rhymes with ohno for a reason.”

Above: “We actually do have the power to force politicians to take action.”

Above: “Hey man you got a climate policy? We’d be a lot cooler if you did.”

Above: “Make earth great again.” Refers to Donald Trump.

Above: “Fossil fools.” Shows the Australian prime minister and the American president. On the day of the protest the two men met in Washington, DC.

Two: Variations on the word “hot”

Above: “Hot girl summer.”

Above: “The planet is getting hotter than my imaginary boyfriend.”

Above: “We can’t afford to get any hotter.”

Three: Relating to school

Above: “I just took a climate change test. Turns out we’re 100% killing the planet.”

Above: “School bus 2050.”

Above: “the world is our classroom.”

Above: “We’ll go to school when the earth is cool.”

Above: “Well do our maths when you do your job.”

Four: On children

Above: “The sea is getting higher than me.”

Above: “Stop burning our babies’ futures.” These pregnant women were wearing T-shirts saying, “It’s getting hot in here.”

Five: On old age

Above: “Grumpy old man who supports smart students.”

Above: “You will die of old age we will die from climate change.”

Six: On introverts

Above: “It’s so bad even introverts are here.”

Above: “It’s so bad the introverts are here.”

Seven: Popular culture references

Above: “This planet is hotter than Shawn Mendes.” This man is, I learned after doing a Google search, a Canadian singer, songwriter and model.

Above: “At the start of every disaster movie there’s a scientist being ignored.”

Above: “Climate change is worst [sic] than Voldemort.” Harry Potter’s nemesis in the novels by JK Rowling. 

Above: “Death for my metal not my planet.”

Above: “Too hot for bananas.” Reference to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’ children’s show.

Above: “Nemo no more.” The protagonist, a fish, in the 2003 Pixar Animation Studios movie ‘Finding Nemo’, which is set in the waters off the Australian coast.

Above: “It’s so bad I skipped the Area 51 raid.” Refers to a legendary and secret US military site located in the state of Nevada. The "raid" was "a Facebook joke that quickly attracted millions of followers", according to a story on the BuzzFeed website.

Above: “There’s no Creative Mode to save our planet.” Creative Mode is a part of the computer game ‘Minecraft’. According to the game’s wiki, in this mode, “players have an infinite amount of resources to build with, with no health or hunger to hamper their building and the ability to destroy all blocks instantly.” I had to look this up as I don’t play computer games.

Eight: Internet culture inventions

Above: “RIP earth we are gonna miss you boo xox.”

Above: “What if we saved the planet haha jk …”

Above: “Nooo don’t kill the earth it’s so sexy haha.”

Above: “The apocalypse is not accessible.”

Nine: Some dogs

Above: “K9 for planet earth.”

Above: “I have better climate pawlicies.”

Ten: Plays on the name of the planet Uranus

Above: “Keep the earth clean it’s not Uranus.”

Above: “Act now Scomo B4 earth looks like Uranus.”

Eleven: The rest

Above: “Get your head out of the sand.”

Above: “I recycled some trash for my sign.”

Above: “If you’re not worried you’re not paying attention.”

Above: “I’m sure the dinosaurs thought they had time too.”

Above: “Pig powered by clean coal.”

Above: “Save the bees, avoid the sting. UR extinction.” This is the popular activist Danny Lim with one of his famous sandwich boards.

Above: “There is no planet B.”

Above: “We are nature’s immune system.”

I apologise to the people who took these photos for not crediting them, but it wasn’t always possible to know who took the photos. Further, making a decision to capture such information would have significantly increased the complexity of the process. If you see a photo you took and you want me to either add your name to the caption or take the photo off this post, get in touch. 

Environmental water flows in the Murray-Darling river system

On 5 September the Weekly Times, an august rural newspaper now owned by News Corp, ran a story on its website about farmers in southern NSW throwing into a river an effigy of Minister for Water Resources David Littleproud, a conservative. It’s not what you’d normally expect from farmers, but the drought is cutting deep in the bush.

This post ultimately has its roots in expressions of outrage on Twitter in April that I discussed in a 24 April blog post titled ‘Water buybacks and pressure from social media’. Following up from what happened at that time, on 8 July the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) ‘4 Corners’ program aired its ‘Cash Splash’ episode, which elaborated on concerns raised by people on social media. As a result of this program the level of outrage visible online again spiked.

This episode of the program was criticised by the ABC's ‘Media Watch’ program not long afterward, and I took note when that happened. The main reservation the host of ‘Media Watch’ voiced was that ‘4 Corners’ hadn’t consulted widely enough. They hadn’t, for example, talked with the National Farmers’ Federation to produce material for the show. ‘Media Watch’ found, as a result, that the show had been tendentious and biased because it was unrepresentative of the broader community affected by the drought, which started in 2017.

In the middle of July I saw a tweet from a farmer from Wentworth, a town in southern NSW near Mildura, that was a retweet from a farmer named Jeremy Morton, who lives not far from there but to the east. Morton grows rice and other grains, and raises cattle and sheep, and his tweet contained an image from the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office that had been used in a presentation one of its officers had made at a community meeting in Deniliquin.

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder was set up, as a result of the Water Act (2007), “to manage water acquired by the Australian Government as part of a suite of national water reforms, including the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.” This description comes from the CEWO’s website.

Here is the image that went up on that July day and that appeared on Twitter because Morton snapped a photo of it with his phone. This table doesn’t make much sense unless you know what you’re looking at, so I’ll give an explanation of it in what follows.

The table in the photo is split into two sections and it shows the total amount of water available for environmental flows that is held by different institutions in two areas. One area (the top three lines) is the NSW and Victorian Murray River. The Murray, as everyone knows, forms much of the border between the two states. 

The first line in this group of three lines shows the CEWO’s holdings of environmental water, or water that is not to be allocated for irrigation but that is to be allowed to flow down the Murray to South Australia and, after there, to the sea. The second line shows the environmental water that is held by other institutions: those controlled by state governments. The final line in the group of three is the total for the two categories of environmental water. This is water that is currently held by these organisations. 

The second group of three lines shows the same information but, this time, for the Southern Connected Basin, which is a larger area that comprises the first area (the NSW and Vic Murray area) as well as other rivers such as the Murrumbidgee and the Goulburn. The following image, from the website of the Murray Darling basin Authority, shows the extent of the Southern Connected Basin.

The total amount of environmental flows available for the southern reaches of the Murray-Darling river system is, according to the CEWO, 750 gigalitres or 750 billion litres. This is an amount equal to the amount of water that can fill 300,000 Olympic-size swimming pools and it is half again as much as fits in Sydney Harbour. When I spoke to Morton, he said that 15 years ago this amount of water would not have been set aside for environmental flows but would have been available to be used for irrigation. 

What is striking in this table is that, even though there is a severe drought, water is being added for environmental flows due to purchases funded under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Another thing Morton told me is that when the Commonwealth buys water from farmers the money has to be used to build infrastructure to improve the efficiency of water used on farms, so the money farmers get from the government is not just going into their bank accounts to be used on irrelevancies.

A total of 2750GL in water entitlements was committed under the whole of the federal Basin Plan toward environmental flows. This is made up of 2100GL that the federal government owns as entitlements bought from farmers, as well as 650GL contributed as a result of allocating money to the states to implement different ways of managing water and to build infrastructure. For example, work currently being undertaken at the Menindee Lakes will add 100GL to environmental flows.

A water entitlement is like a piece of property and the allocation is like the rent that derives from leasing it out to a tenant. Even if you have an entitlement, if it doesn’t rain you might not get any allocation in a given year. Just in the same way as, even if you own a property, you won’t get rent if it’s not leased to a tenant.

Water for irrigation was capped in 1995 at the level of development that applied in 1993-94. To ensure irrigation water use was at or below the cap the state governments instigated rules to limit water use such as capping announced allocations to 100 percent of entitlements (not more) and setting volumetric limits for accessing unregulated river flows which were previously unconstrained.

The following chart, which is from the Murray Darling Basin Authority's 2010-11 Annual Report, shows the cap targets for (x-axis) the years from 1997 to 2009. It shows the quantity of water for the cap targets (green line) and the actual diversions farmers made for their irrigation operations (yellow line). The y-axis scale shows volumes measured in gigalitres. You can see that, over the period in question, the amount of water diverted for agriculture has halved to comply with cap targets. The other thing that is noticeable in this chart is that diversions have equalled cap targets or have even come in under them.

Morton wrote in an email that the states erred on the side of caution when setting the rules and between 1997 and 2018 cap credits, or under-use, accrued to the tune of 19,000GL. A drier climate during this period contributed to this level of credit owing to farmers. But on 1 July this year the 19,000GL of cap credits were extinguished as the new Basin Plan water sharing rules came into force. Many of the rules that underpinned the accumulation of the 19,000GL cap credits have been carried over, Morton went on, and irrigators think that new rules are too restrictive. 

A peak body for irrigators in the region, the NSW Irrigators’ Council, released a press release on Thursday 12 September about a request it had made of Littleproud not to take what it said was an additional 2000 gigalitres of water to use for environmental flows. This is in the form of limiting access to water, not the purchase of entitlements, and is viewed as a diminishing of the rights of irrigators without compensation.

The reason irrigators asked this is because the council said the federal government’s actions would harm regional communities not merely by removing water from its use on crops, but also from towns that need water for residential and other purposes. Letters about this matter have been sent to Littleproud and the relevant NSW government minister in recent weeks. 

“This is extremely complex policy,” Morton wrote in an email. “It’s only now as the water sharing plans (the rule book for managing water in each river valley) are being finalised that irrigators are certain that the rules will limit water extracted for irrigation to a far greater extent than the Basin Plan intended.”

He went on: “The way the water sharing plans are written the cap credits are being claimed as planned environmental water (PEW). The plans explicitly state that PEW cannot be extracted for irrigation thus locking in the cap credits as PEW.” The problem as Morton sees it is not what happens when, as currently, there is no rain, but rather what happens when it does rain and there is abundant water in the Murray-Darling basin.