Wildfire

Wildfire scarcely seems an adequate term for what happened over the weekend in Victoria.  To give a sense of the intensity, many cars are unidentifiable, because the numbers on the engine blocks have melted. This article compares the temperature in the worst of the fires to the Dresden firestorms.
John Quiggin has done his usual wonderful [...]

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Heritage insides

There are some spectacular buildings in Sydney’s CBD – many of them heritage listed. My favourites are the sandstone public service buildings along Bridge St, but there some other pretty good ones scattered about the city. I was in one of them, today, and it struck me, again, how intrusive a heritage listing can be. This [...]

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Cycle Lanes

In a front page story in the SMH today, the NRMA (NSW’s peak motorist lobby group) accused the government of wasting money on cycle lanes.
“The Iemma Government is building a cycleway alongside choked Epping Road, despite as few as 25 cyclists using that corridor each day. At $7.6 million for the Epping Road cycleway, the [...]

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Sydney – Public Spaces Public Life

The City of Sydney recently engaged “international urban design expert Jan Gehl” to perform a “public spaces public life” study on Sydney with the aim of reviewing how people use the city of Sydney, living, working, playing, and make some recommendations as to how to improve it. He reported to Council this week.
Much of the [...]

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Actuaries as ostriches

The Institute of Actuaries of Australia does a quick (36 seconds is the promise) survey of its members once a month, reported in its imaginatively titled magazine Actuary Australia. Of the 345 respondents (self selected, but a good proportion of all the actuaries in Australia) 35% don’t believe that global warming is happening at all.
I [...]

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Book Review: the Death and Life of Great American Cities

Today’s review is The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is a book I never would have read without my blogging habit. When she died last year, several of my favourite bloggers wrote about her.
The book is an indictment of pretty much everything about American cities (particularly New York) in [...]

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Celebrity

Tonight, I got the chance to see Al Gore speak live. He was spruiking his investment company, Generation _, which is being launched (via a platform) to retail investors in Australia. I’m not usually seduced by celebrity, but this felt like an opportunity you don’t get every day.
I read on the smoking gun that this [...]

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The Last Gasp

Michael Duffy had a column in the Sydney Morning Herald today with some (I hope) last gasp global warming denial. Before I got into blogging, I suspect I would have read it as making some valid points. Unfortunately, for Michael Duffy, I had already read the comprehensive demolition from the realclimate blog, and the analysis [...]

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Access all areas

This week I renewed my annual Sydney public transport ticket. Because of where I live, I catch all three possible forms of government owned public transport – trains, buses and ferries (and the two private ones too – monorail and light rail, but that’s a story for another post).
Because Sydney’s public transport ticketing is very [...]

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Water politics

Last week, after a week of sustained rain (and fortunately not too much more flooding), Sydney’s dam levels got to 50%. The last time they were that high was May 2004*. For the past three years, Sydney has had ever increasing levels of worry about our water crisis. People have bought water tanks, low flow [...]

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