West Australian
11 January 2011, Page: 10
The great Aussie lifestyle isn't so great when you think about what it does to our planet.
If you're the archetypal West Australian you regularly fly to work at a mine site, perhaps, or have a job in the CBD Energy with a one-hour daily commute along the freeway; live in a pretty big house in the 'burbs with air-conditioning; run two cars for a family of four; and holiday interstate or jet off to Bali a couple of times a year your lifestyle is among the least environmentally sustainable in the world.
What's more, over the next years it is going to get increasingly costly to do the things you have done all your adult life, such as filling up the car, paying electricity bills and flying to a tropical resort. "If you exclude the ridiculous cities like Dubai, which is basically money built on sand, you can argue that WA is the most unsustainable developed economy in the world", Peter McMahon, a lecturer at Murdoch University's School of Sustainability, said.
Dr McMahon is director of its WA2020 Project, a research program that aims to address what he and his colleagues say is a "policymaking vacuum" in WA on sustainability issues. In the Australian Conservation Foundation's 2010 Sustainable Cities Index, which ranked Australia's 20 largest cities on criteria such as environmental performance, quality of life, and resilience to environmental changes, Perth came dead last.
According to the rankings, Perth has the worst over-reliance on cars, the highest water use relative to rainfall and the biggest ecological footprint per person in Australia. Perhaps the most alarming statistic is the ecological footprint an admittedly rough-and-ready calculation of the number of hectares of productive land (and sea) required to support one person with a given lifestyle.
The world has an estimated 1.8ha for every person alive. The Australian average ecological footprint is 8ha, which means if everyone in the world lived like an Aussie, we would need 3.8 Earths. Perth's average footprint is even bigger: it would take 4¼ globes to allow everyone to live life Perth-style. Dr McMahon said the "tyranny of distance" WA people lived thousands of miles from anywhere else had forced us to rely on planes and cars to get around.
Life is harsh in WA, and huge resources are needed for growing food or mining minerals. Perth came of age as a major city at a time when the car was king with predictably short-sighted planning decisions that are now locked into our urban fabric and it's no wonder our habits are among the dirtiest in the world. After all, most of us live in a sprawling city where cars and air-conditioning are widely seen as necessities, not luxuries. "We should question the whole premise that our growth is going to just continue", Dr McMahon said.
It might be surprising to learn, then, that according to many expert predictions, both household energy bills and motoring costs are set to plummet by 2020. "By the end of the decade, a lot of homes will have their own renewable energy" Ray Wills, chief executive of the Sustainable Energy Association of WA, said. "A lot of homes will have changed their building designs and, this will be surprising for most people, but I imagine by 2020 a lot of people will see a reversal in their energy bills and they will start to get cheaper".
Aided by government rebates, household solar power use has rocketed soaring from 500 homes with solar panels in mid-2008 to almost 20,000 today, In a decade, that figure is likely to be between 300,000 and 400,000, and the cost of domestic solar power could reach parity with grid power by 2015.
Solar power has been the first cab off the rank for powering city homes, but other technologies are following in its wake. Last December saw the launch of the WA Geothermal Centre of Excellence, which aims to harness the heating and cooling power of a geological formation called the Perth Basin.
Sitting hundreds of metres below the city is a reservoir of water naturally heated to 300C, which could provide electricity-free air-conditioning for large building complexes or even entire suburbs. Housing density is another area where Perth is poised to make big improvements. Unlike Melbourne or Sydney, where many homes are in strata developments, two-thirds of newly approved Perth homes are free-standing houses on individual blocks. Professor Wills predicts that will change as the city sprawl becomes unmanageable and as a new generation of homeowners looks for a home that isn't miles away from the metropolitan area.
But what about our love affair with the car, and our love-hate relationship with driving to work? "The outstandingly stupid thing about Perth is the peak hour", Dr McMahon said. "We shouldn't have it that everyone goes into the CBD Energy together". Dr McMahon predicts information technology will give us more flexibility in how we work and could eliminate that freeway slog.
When we do drive in 2020, however, it will hopefully do less environmental damage than it does now. A pilot network of 12 electric car charging stations around Perth was launched last November, as well as a fleet of 11 modified Ford Focus electric cars, including one owned by The West Australian.
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