Climate Matters: Hills Shire

  We believe that council has signed on to a 100% renewable power purchase agreement (PPA) and that they probably did so several months ago.   We emphasise that we have no inside information - we have simply joined some publicly available dots and we may have it completely wrong - and, if so, we’ll humbly wipe the egg from our face. But if we are right, council has been inexplicably silent about it.  Why might that be? Background Several clues lead us to our belief: At an extraordinary meeting convened at short notice on January 11, council perversely voted to rescind a decision by the previous council to develop a renewable energy strategy. At the first ordinary meeting of council on February 8, item 24 on the agenda - described as a contract renewal matter - was discussed in closed meeting. Subsequently, the publicly available meeting minutes disclosed this about the resolution that was carried in closed meeting: Note the reference to a seven year contract ....

  At their meeting on Tuesday, June 14, council adopted their zero-climate-action annual “plan”. We have said before and say again - in many ways this may be a very fine plan, absent the little issue of emerging climate and ecological catastrophe.  But very, very regretfully we cannot put that little issue aside. And so, frankly, in the face of the very real climate crisis and in the absence of any plan to address it, the works and programs in council’s plan are about as interesting and significant as the first class dinner menu for April 15, 1912 was to the passengers of the Titanic as they were embraced by the icy waters of the North Atlantic. The Hills Shire Council must show us that it is able to chew gum and walk at the same time.  Acting on climate does not rule out other fine aspects of their plans.  When they attend to the former we will be glad to congratulate them on the latter. So we offer this quick (non-chronological) note of how the “debate” proceeded b...

Fun fact 1 : The Hills Shire’s municipal carbon emissions in 2019/20 were sufficient to cover the entire land area of the shire to a depth of: 2.73 metres Fun fact 2 : The weight of The Hills Shire Council’s climate action plan, when printed on 80gsm A4 paper is: 0.00 grams Our calculation Tony Abbott famously described CO2 as a colourless, odourless and weightless gas.  He was only correct about the first two.  Here’s how we calculated the depth of our shire’s CO2e emissions: Weight of 1 cubic metre of CO2 (at sea level): 1.84kg [1] The Hills Shire emissions 2019/20 (weight): 1,942,000 tonnes CO2e [2] 1,942,000,000 kg CO2e The Hills Shire emissions 2019/20 (volume): 1,055,434,783 m 3 The Hills Shire land area  386 km 2 [2] 386,000,000 m 2 Cubic metres of CO2e per m 2 2.73 References [1] Volume to weight conversions for common substances and materials [2] The Hills Shire 2019/20 municipal emissions snapshot